Public debates driven by incomplete scientific data: the cases of evolution theory, global warming and H1N1 pandemic influenza

Public opinion is today a key ingredient in modern societies policy making. To discover the laws and eventual biases which govern its forming is thus a major challenge to avoid political choices founded on distorted expressions from what is the overall majority of individual opinions [4,5,6,1,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]. Any progress in the understanding of opinion dynamics could have drastic effects on the way sensitive issues are tackled.

Among them stand the public debates initiated from “science” in presence of incomplete scientific data. They are driven by the necessity to fill up the missing parts to come up with a complete view of the issue from which rationally motivated political decisions can be made. It is therefore of central importance to determine if what is accepted as the complete theory corresponds to the real scientific status of the issue. Evolution theory, global warming and H1N1 pandemic influenza debates are emblematic of this class of public issues. Accordingly we investigate the conditions in which those debates were set with an emphasis on the scientific facts, the scientist positions, the associated general beliefs, the political stakes and the resulting public opinions.

First, we examine the two cases of Evolution theory and global warming, which both have controversial impact. Similarities and differences are enumerated as well as some apparent contradictions between the respective outcomes. A throughout analysis reveals that to adopt a cautious balanced attitude based on clear but inconclusive scientific facts is a lose-out strategy. In contrast, overstating arguments and asserting wrong statements which cannot be scientifically refuted, is found to be necessary but not sufficient to eventually win a public debate.

These findings are then confronted to the more neutral case of the H1N1 pandemic influenza, which has neither emotional nor religious character. Moreover, it has the advantage of being over with available data on the debate final outcome together with both opposed side retrospective stances.

On this basis, to identify the underlying key mechanism, which produces these puzzling but unfortunate conclusions, we use the Galam sequential probabilistic model of opinion dynamics [1,2,3]. It is shown that the existence of inflexible agents, i.e., agents who never change their opinion, is the instrumental parameter to determine the faith of a public debate based on incomplete data. Depending on their respective densities the associated opinion forming obeys either a non threshold or a threshold dynamics. Initial supports may thus turn to be irrelevant.

The results shed a new but disturbing light on Designing adequate strategies to eventually win public debates. To produce inflexibles in one’s own side is thus critical to win a public argument whatever the rigor cost and the associated epistemological paradoxes. At odds, to focus on convincing open-minded agents is useless. In summary, when the scientific evidence is not as strong as claimed, the inflexibles rather than the data are found to drive the collective opinion of the population. Consequences on Designing adequate strategies to win a public debate are discussed.

The issues of global warming and evolution theory have triggered intense public debates to enforce eventual political decisions in order to modify fundamental setting in the society organization. Both issues are concerned with the understanding of global phenomena whose characteristic timescales are extremely long. However, only scarce and incomplete data are available. It was thus necessary to build ad hoc theories to produce a coherent explanation of the whole respective fields, embodying isolated facts, fuzzy measures and partial knowledge. To bridge the missing links, complicated models have been elaborated under the constraint of reproducing all past known data [20]. Ultimately, large scale simulations were performed on big computers to make predictions about possible evolution in the future as well as Designing new research programs with guidelines for research funding. Nevertheless, these theories are suffering the basic fact that up to date no global science has been established in any field of research. The recent effort to develop the so called science of complex systems aims to remedy these deficiencies [21]. But yet without any major breakthrough so far. Present “sciences” are restricted to local domains and can produce scientific evidence only for isolated phenomena. Along these difficulties, it is worth to stress that the major limitation of both evolution and climatology theories is their incapacity to make predictions, which could be refuted by setting an experiment. This is due to the huge timescales involved in each case, of the order of millions of years for evolution and hundreds of years for the climate. It thus p

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