It's often said that part of the public's lack of a grip on the science of evolution comes from the fact that its consequences don't play a concrete role in the day-to-day lives of people. But the emergence of antibiotic resistance and diseases such as HIV and the avian flu would suggest that the consequences are real and in the news on a regular basis. An Open Access paper in PLoS Biology suggests an alternative explanation: scientists themselves are to blame.
The people involved in this study wondered how antibiotic resistance, a major health threat that arises and spreads via evolutionary processes, is portrayed in the scientific literature itself. After an extensive literature search, they chose 30 articles on the topic, half from journals focused on evolution and the other half from general biomedical journals. When these papers were analyzed for word choice, some striking patterns emerged. Despite addressing the same topic, the papers appeared to be using a different language.
In evolutionary journals, the term "evolution" was used to represent the concept in two-thirds of the potential occurrences; in general biomedical literature, it dropped to less than three percent, replaced by terms like "emerging," "spreading," and "increasing." Similar results came when other concepts were examined, as the evolutionary literature used the correct technical term, while biomedical literature erupted in a festival of euphemisms. With rare exceptions, papers in biomedical journals actually got evolutionary concepts right; they simply refused to refer to them by name. It was so pronounced that the paper's title used "the E-word" to refer to evolution.
Clearly, the general public does not look at the biomedical literature, so what's the harm? The harm comes when the press gets involved. The study showed that press reports on published research used the term "evolution" in proportion to its use by a paper's authors. If they don't use "evolution," the press won't, and the public won't see it. The authors go on to show that this treatment of evolution as a concept that must not be named comes at a time when the use of the term in the title of papers and grant proposals is on a general upward trend, suggesting that studies of antibiotic resistance are lagging the field as a whole.
The authors wrap up with a powerful closing statement:
The evolution of antimicrobial resistance has resulted in 2- to 3-fold increases in mortality of hospitalized patients, has increased the length of hospital stays, and has dramatically increased the costs of treatment. It is doubtful that the theory of gravity (a force that can neither be seen nor touched, and for which physicists have no agreed upon explanation) would be so readily accepted by the public were it not for the fact that ignoring it can have lethal results. This brief survey shows that by explicitly using evolutionary terminology, biomedical researchers could greatly help convey to the layperson that evolution is not a topic to be innocuously relegated to the armchair confines of political or religious debate. Like gravity, evolution is an everyday process that directly impacts our health and well-being, and promoting rather than obscuring this fact should be an essential activity of all researchers.
Even if scientists do get better at conveying the importance of evolution, however, it may not be enough, as scientists also have to contend with an active misinformation campaign on the topic.