Summer break over...

My vacation with my family (children aged 8, 10, and 12) was once again in the Lake Champlain - Adirondacks region, a beautiful part of the country that we keep returning to (it also feeds the native-born Pacific Northwesterner in me). As I did when I last blogged on this topic in 2006, I again wish to give kudos to the Leahy Center for Lake Champlain in Burlington VT, also known as the ECHO science center, for Ecology, Culture, History and Opportunity of the Lake Champlain Basin.

This is a top-notch center for the general public, deftly melding science -- including a good dose of evolutionary thinking -- with cultural, historical, and socioeconomic topics. The exhibits also give good treatment to climate change, acid rain, sustainability, and going Green.

But the ECHO center, like all public science centers, relies heavily on gate receipts and giftshop sales. That means getting people through the doors -- and in the Lake Champlain area that means including a campy but carefully uncritical exhibit about Champ, the Monster of the Lake. Champ is cute. Champ is a major local industry. Kids get a kick out of Champ and I'm all for such Waterhorse fantasies in context, but not in a science center the rest of whose exhibits are devoted to promoting scientific reasoning.

Alongside lucid exhibits explaining the geological history of Lake Champlain before and after the retreat of glaciers 10,000 years ago and its closing off from the sea, the exhibit and lecture on Champ is a mix -- from a marketer's point of view, pitched so as not to alienate any constituency -- of information about Champ "sightings" (the photos! the videos! the interviews with believers as well as with skeptics!) mixed in with notes on crytozoology (equal treatment given to coelacanths, okapis, Big Foot, and Champ) and the fact that Champ would have to be either a single plesiosaur more than 10,000 years old (and there's also that 65mya extinction problem), or a 10,000-year old population of plesiosaurs -- air-breathing animals -- none of whose members have ever been irrefutably sighted while surfacing, caught, or washed up on shore.

Champ: real or not? The ECHO science center says: You decide, dear customer; we're going to present all sides of the argument equally and will stay away from the messy business of debunking.

The whole thing -- even though it is presented with well-intentioned jest -- can do as much harm to the public understanding of science as any creation museum. It promotes sloppy thinking among the general public that can be taken advantage of by anti-science proponents.