4. The maiden voyage project

I've thought for many years about teaching a course (like Calling Bull) or starting an institute (like the Institute for Media and Public Trust) on information literacy and critical thinking. I already incorporate these elements into all of the classes that I teach. Then, I came across a very opportune way for me to more visibly help people practice skepticism while improving their information literacy and critical thinking skills.

I'm teaching an undergraduate genetics class this term, as I often do. Last week, when I was at the grocery store waiting to check out, I saw a National Geographic publication called, "Your Genes: A User's Guide. 100 things you never knew." For $14.99 (plus tax), I took home a copy. After all, I figured, I should probably learn the 100 things before going back to class the following day.

I looked through the 100 facts, and made a not entirely surprising discovery: I was familiar with many, but there were some I didn't know. Most surprisingly to me, none of the facts were presented with citations to the original research. At the back of the issue, a page is devoted to all of the photo credits throughout the magazine, but there were no references to the facts! So, we have an issue (pun intended): a newsstand piece is offering facts about genetics, but it doesn't support information literacy because the reader has no easy way to independently verify the veracity of the claims!

My mind was immediately made up: I'd ask my genetics students to participate in an assignment to create a bibliography of credible scientific literature to support or refute each of the facts. I usually have students practice using mobile devices in the same way that scientists do (e.g. looking up genetic information online - using trusted sources, of course!), so this assignment supports one of my student learning outcomes, "Efficiently find and use quality information relevant to genetics." I should also mention that this project is feasible because I teach a class in which all of my students are supported by my university in having a mobile device for in-class use if they do not already own one: the DISCOVERe Mobile Technology Program. One goal of this program is for students to master digital literacy skills.

Before starting, I wanted to know if some facts would be really difficult for my students to fact-check. So, I did what I'm good at: I made another spreadsheet. I typed out the 100 facts, and then I categorized them:

• 81 of the facts relate to topics I teach about in my genetics course
• 42 of those 81 immediately fail fact-checking for a number of reasons. Here are an example or two from several categories:

Semantics

#33.  "The bacterium E. coli can replicate 1,000 nucleotides per second." The the real problem is the word "can." To the critical thinker, this could imply that in some trivial, artificial scenario, a bacterium is technically capable of such an act. If so, then would this be a fact? I suppose it would adhere to the technical definition of "fact," but would it be relevant to genetics in the sense of a valuable fact to know about biology and how cells work?

#5.  "All of us get three feet (1 m) of DNA from our father and three feet from our mother" At the outset, there are two potential problems with fact-checking this. First, one of the key warning flags for spotting untruths is the absolute, like "all of us." In biology, there is almost always an exception to every rule, so in this situation, it is almost certain that an exception to this purported fact could be found. Also, a finer point: DNA is a molecule, and its length, like a rope, depends in part on how much it is stretched. This number, as presented, probably assumes some common knowledge of the chemical structure of DNA, but without that assumption explicitly accompanying this fact, there is no clear way forward for fact-checking it.

Ambiguity: vague or imprecise wording

#8.  "More than 800 genes are involved in cell division." This fact seems likely true, but "more than 800" is vague. Additionally, "involved in cell division" is also imprecise. One could argue that DNA polymerase, the enzyme that replicates DNA, is involved in cell division because without it, cells wouldn't contain the 799 other genes otherwise involved in cell division. It is a slippery slope, and so the way this fact is worded makes it unable to fact-check, depending on who is defining what "involved in cell division" means.

#85.  "Although James Watson and Francis Crick used x-ray data to visualize DNA, the real proof came in 1982 when the B-form of the molecule – the right-handed side of the helix – was crystallized." The real proof of what? We can't fact-check what we don't know what we're trying to find evidence for

Opinion

#76.  "Rosalind Franklin’s x-ray photographs of crystallized DNA fibers are hailed as the 'most beautiful x-ray photographs of any substance every taken.'" We could probably find a source for who said this, and maybe it is a fact that this opinion was made, but that's irrelevant to genetics

#62.  "The most useful stem cells come from human embryos." Most useful to who and for what?

#31.  "Many scientists believe antisocial behavior is a function of genetics, as multiple genes work together." What "many scientists" (how many? a tiny minority?) have concluded is relatively difficult to fact-check, but more critically, a factual statement cannot contain the word "believe." What scientists believe (think) is not relevant to fact (what we know).

Definition (no real need to fact-check)

#53. "The entire genome of an organism is found in a donor, or somatic, cell." This isn't quite true, but (almost) every somatic cell does have a nucleus and so does contain the entire genome of the organism.

#39.  "Each of us has 22 nonsex chromosomes." This is true, by definition: humans have 22 nonsex chromosomes and then the 23rd (the X and Y, or sex, chromosomes). Whether a definition comprises a fact is debatable, I suppose?

Predictive or otherwise not-fact-checkable

#79.  "In less than 10 years, scientists will be able to sequence an entire genome in just a few hours." I guess we'll know in, at most, ten years! This also, as many of the facts, falls into multiple categories, like "Ambiguous." We can already sequence the entire genome of many species in just a few hours; presumably this fact is meant to be about sequencing a human-sized genome…

#13.  "About 1 percent of the total DNA carries instructions to make proteins; the rest is so-called junk DNA." The first clause might be true (but, like #79, "the total DNA" of what organism? Also the second clause is arguable. Some used to call the non-protein-coding part of our genome "junk DNA," but that term has fallen out of fashion. We now better appreciate that sections of our DNA that don't contain genes still can have important functions. So, on one hand, many scientists would disagree that this is a fact, but the existence of the few who might still refer to it as "junk DNA" means that, technically (the way it is written), this is an indisputable fact.

Unimportant facts or definitions to be aware of (granted, "unimportant" is my opinion)

#98. "Aboard the International Space Station is a digitized copy of Stephen Hawking’s genome, along with that of Stephen Colbert and others." It is called the Immortality Drive - look it up on Wikipedia

#45. "'Quaternary marriages' are when identical twins marry identical twins."

The remaining 39 of the 81 facts that are relevant to my genetics class are definitely in need of fact-checking, and my students and I will meet that challenge! Our findings will be shared here.

3. About the Author

Dr. Joseph Ross

As I'm espousing skepticism, I would be remiss not to point out that you should first be skeptical about who I am!

I am an extremely objective, evidence-based decision-maker. I am a scientist. I'm about as analytical as a person can get. You should marvel in wonder at the spreadsheets that I generate when I'm shopping for auto loans.

A formative time when I was a child was around my late elementary school years, when I got obsessed with categorizing things. I think this story might resonate with many scientists. First, it was fruits and vegetables. My father being a botanist, I knew from an early age the key difference between fruits and vegetables, but as I got older, I realized that there were so many fruits and vegetables! So I started making lists. First on paper, but then I wanted to alphabetize the lists so I could more easily tell if I had already read (usually in an encyclopedia) about that food before. So, I moved to a spreadsheet format. And then I realized that herbs and spices are also plant products, but not necessarily classified as fruits or vegetables, and that spawned another spreadsheet or two.

And then I moved on to geography and, in my case, seas. Mind you, this was all before Wikipedia, so, to my knowledge, I was the only person poring over atlases and maps of all kinds and trying to make a comprehensive list of all of the seas. The inland ones (like the Salton Sea), the big ones (Mediterranean), and the obscure ones (like the Moluccan Sea). A huge resource for this project were National Geographic maps. Every so often, an issue of National Geographic (which my parents had subscribed to for decades - there were piles of them all over the place) came with a separate foldable map of some part of the world - either a country or a region with a few countries. I kept these in a huge stack in a cupboard and regularly pored over them. And then, of course, I had to know how seas and bays and coves and oceans and other bodies of water are defined. And then I realized that the definitions of these were all relatively arbitrary, so I went on a permanent project hiatus.

So, in some ways, I think I ultimately became a practicing geneticist partly because I'm intrigued at least a little bit by definitions and also by the real impact on effective communication of developing and sharing precise definitions.

After that, I earned a B.A. in Biochemistry degree, then a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology, and since then have practiced genetics and molecular biology, running an academic research group with graduate and undergraduate students and teaching classes in, among other topics, genetics. My trainees and I have published in reputable scientific journals. Through these efforts, my objective-compulsive perspective has been even more finely honed as I've been increasingly tasked with helping others learn how to be productive scientists.

None of this means you should trust me or my opinions. But, at least now you know a little bit about me. And, in my opinion, that's one of the most important things we can do to battle misinformation, is to get to know people well. It is one thing to read things that somebody posts on social media, but if you've never met that person (if it is a person!) and gotten to understand them, their proclivities, habits, and motivations, then you might want to place less weight on what they say.

2. Objectives and Outcomes

On this blog, I have one clear objective and one associated outcome:

Objective
To improve information literacy and critical thinking skills (hopefully in an engaging way)

"Information literacy" and "critical thinking" are, and have been, educational buzzwords for years. With the expansion of the reach of the internet, though, efforts to improve these skills in as many people as possible have seemed even more important of late. There are many variations of the definitions of each of these terms.

In my vernacular, information literacy includes (but not exclusively) the ability of a person to identify how credible a source is, and thus also to know multiple ways that sources can come to be trusted. I trust an information literate person to have developed a rigorous threshold for themselves that they would be able to articulate. So, at least, if I wanted to have a productive conversation with that person about whether or not a piece of information was true, we could at least understand each other's standard of truth. Thus, perhaps, at least we could arrive at an "agree to disagree" conclusion instead of debating pointlessly for hours without real hope of convincing the other that one's own conclusion is more accurate.

For example, I think an information literate person would use a web search engine to research a particular fact, but they would prioritize efforts looking for peer-reviewed research articles published in scholarly journals instead of an unfamiliar news website (or social media post) that provides no references to the sources for the fact. Other aspects of the source might also be scrutinized, like how old (and potentially out-of-date) the source is, and the extent of independent agreement on the fact.

To me, a critical thinker is always dubious of a claim and performs further evaluations and fact-checking before reaching a conclusion. One aspect of critical thinking is the urge to ask, "does this fact make sense?" In some situations, a claim might seem reasonable at face value, but the skeptic will delve deeper. A potentially poor example, but a favorite of mine, involves foods that are labeled "99% Fat Free." Of course the manufacturer wanted to put the words "Fat Free" on the label, but is the product? Of course not. 99% fat free is the same as printing "1% fat," which might not sell as well.

Another facet of critical thinking, which can be difficult to develop, is the ability to initially reject a proposed hypothesis or explanation and to come up with an alternate explanation that you think explains an observation or fact just as well (or better).

Another potential aspect at the intersection of critical thinking and information literacy is considering the potential motivations of the source(s) of the information. In my domain, that can include inquiring about who funded a particular research project, to look for potential financial conflicts of interest.

So, as we explore facts, I will emphasize the warning signs to watch for that might signal innocent or deceptive information, as well as techniques and methods for supporting or refuting that initial skeptical stance.

Outcome
The main produce of each post here will be to publish a curated list of references that, together, either support or refute a published piece of information.

1. Don't believe everything you read

There are both innocuous and also nefarious reasons that you might encounter untruths on the internet and in other media outlets. Some lies might be nefarious; some are inadvertently misleading. The latter is often the case with science reporting.

Scientific topics are frequently in the news (ancestry testing, disease risk, global warming and climate change and their potential impacts on species extinctions, and so on). Yet, many journalists are not trained as scientists, and many scientists are not trained in effective communication to non-specialist audiences (i.e., the public).

These two parties involved in the assembly of public-facing reports of scientific discoveries also serve different stakeholders and have different motives. For publicity, career advancement, and self-esteem purposes (among others), a scientist and a journalist want their work to be as publicized and disseminated as possible. This pressure, called a conflict of interest, could provide temptation to oversimplify and/or overstate the conclusions, relevance, and potential future applications of even the most incremental of advances in science.

As a practicing scientist, I know, because I've been there. In fact, for full disclosure, I'm spending my personal time right now beginning this blog for selfish reasons. If I'm successful in attracting you to read more, that this effort might help me gain visibility among colleagues and peers whose opinions I value. Maybe I'll be asked to travel to hold workshops or present seminars on improving information literacy. Maybe I'll get a book deal, or be on TV! Ahh, the allure of the potential for fame.

More seriously, I'm investing my time in this project because I think that what I'm about to tell you is inherently interesting and important. I'm interested in helping develop an informed and skeptical populace because I think that society functions best when everybody is able to make decisions based on truths and not just on what the loudest voices in the room are saying. And this benefits us all.

Thus, while here, I encourage you to practice skepticism: don't believe anything you read unless you are convinced by factual statements supported by objective evidence. The goal here is to objectively analyze and either support or debunk information that has been presented (innocently or deceptively) as fact.