common

Nearly all politicized dispute and debate about science actually treats the boundary between common knowledge and esoteric knowledge. It isn't about what is or isn't so. In a democracy it is about the knowledge base of the voter, especially.

Take creationism versus evolution and aligned old-earth theories. If there were any factual plausibility -- even a small one -- to the creation and flood account, the mineral and oil industry would use it to price fields and predict valuable deposit locations. Nobody - not even a oil or mineral executive with a deep personal religious commitment to biblical inerrancy - will put real money on the flood account being true, or even on it being plausible. Contrast that with biblical references to ancient civilizations, towns, kings, battles and so forth. These are occasionally perfect in their accuracy, often partly true, sometimes invented. That's more than enough plausibility to motivate archaeologists to inform their digs partly using biblical material. If the creation and flood story were in the same "sometimes true, often plausible" category as the stories of ancient Israel, they too would be used for predictive purposes. But they are not.

So the debate over evolution in schools isn't about whether evolution is so. It is about keeping evolution out of the body of common knowledge. The motivation for this isn't necessarily bad. Although I do think evolution should be forthrightly taught in schools, I also recognize that some truths carry dangerous implications, and that bad moral implications can be and have been improperly but easily derived from natural selection. So I have patience for a debate over whether evolution should be taught, even though I have little patience for a non-scientific debate over whether evolution is so.

Now take an intermediate case: climate change. Here again, the serious money (the insurance and real estate industries) speaks clearly: there is a real risk here, although nothing like a certainty as to severity of effects. Will there be dire climate change? We do not know. Is there a serious risk of dire climate change? Yes.

The debate over climate change thus falls into two categories: the first treats likely outcomes, mitigating policies and efforts and the general probabilities. That's the genuine policy arena. Then there's the question of whether climate change is bogus - this is really a question about the boundary between common knowledge and esoteric knowledge, motivated by voting effects.

Most knowledge can't and shouldn't be part of common knowledge - there's only so much that will be known right across the range of normal adults in a society. But what gets in, is important for just that reason. Celebrity versus salience.