So now I'm wondering about #scicomm responsibilities. SJ Gould & Dawkins made masterful contributions to the public understanding of science, but they also separated everyone from the source material for their ideas, to the point everyone credits them completely for their evolutionary views.
You have to get down to the root to see the problems. Great communicators seem at their best explaining the twigs and leaves.
@Depsilor you forgot to cite his blog!
@pzmyers I wish *I* had a legion of uncritically adulatory fans who gave me credit for things other people did because I explained them cleverly.
@bstacey How do you know you don't? Maybe they're hanging on your every word, waiting for you to explain something cleverly.
(I know, that was just plain mean, I'm jus incapable of resisting an opening like that.)
@pzmyers If they were truly adulatory, they'd be proclaiming my cleverness already.
@pzmyers I disagree about "twigs and leaves." There are concepts and questions at the core of science that have made great fodder for high-profile #scicomm, like the quest for a theory of quantum gravity. Just like in conservation ecology, there are charismatic megafauna of #scicomm, subjects that are overrepresented due to the hold they have on the public imagination. But, to mix metaphors, I don't think those megafauna tend to be farther from the trunk of the tree of science.
@pzmyers We need great communicators. It should be up to us to try to find the sources. Gould was a pleasure to read and I learned a lot. Citing every source would have been a distraction.
My son is an Evo biologist graduating next month from Harvard. He and I talk about Gould but not so much about Dawkins. He has a blog (my son) and I like that anyone can read what he writes. Even children. Citing every sentence would take away the fun and the learning.