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their own lives. I just wish they would approach those problems in a more rational way."
    When science is offered as a body of facts, science becomes a glassy-eyed glossary. You skim through a textbook or an educational Web site, and words in boldface leap out at you. You're tempted to ignore everything but the highlighted hand wavers. You think, if I learn these terms, maybe I won't flunk chemistry. Yet if you follow such a strategy, chances are excellent that you will flunk chemistry in the ways that matter—not on the report card in your backpack, but on the ratings card in your brain.
    The conjuring of science as a smarty-pants set of unerring facts that might be buzzed up on a
Jeopardy!
afternoon also suits the opponents of science, like the antievolutionists who seize on every disputed fossil to question the entire Darwinian enterprise. "Creationists first try to paint science as a body of facts and certainties, and then they attack this or that 'certainty' for not being so certain after all," said Shubin. "They cry, 'Aha! You can't make up your mind. You can't be trusted. Why should we believe you about anything?' Yet they are the ones who constructed the straw man of scientific infallibility in the first place."
    "Science is not a collection of rigid dogmas, and what we call scientific truth is constantly being revised, challenged, and refined," said Michael Duff, a theoretical physicist at the University of Michigan. "It's irritating to hear people who hold fundamentalist views accuse scientists of being the inflexible, rigid ones, when usually it's the other way around. As a scientist, you know that any new discovery you're lucky enough to uncover will raise more questions than you started with, and that you must always question what you thought was correct and remind yourself how little you know. Science is a very humble and humbling activity.
    "Which doesn't mean," Duff added hastily, "that there aren't arrogant scientists around."
    Back at Yale University, Strobel further explains the message of Mastermind. If science is not a static body of facts, what is it? What does it mean to think scientifically, to take a scientific whack at a problem? The world is big. The world is messy. The world is a teenager's bedroom: Everything's in there. Now how do you get it to the kitchen sink? How can you possibly begin to make sense of it? One furred fork, one accidental petri dish, one peg hole at a time.
    "If you're trying to pose a question in a way that gets you data you can interpret, you want to isolate a variable," Strobel says. "In science we take great pains to design experiments that ask only one question at a time. You isolate a single variable, and then you see what happens when you change that variable alone, while doing your best to keep everything else in the experiment unchanged." In Mastermind, you change a single peg and watch the impact of that deviation on your "experiment." In science, if you'd like to know, for example, whether a chemical reaction depends on the presence of oxygen, you would stage the experiment twice, first with oxygen, then without. Everything else you'd keep the same to the closest approximation possible—same heat, same light, same timing, same type of container; and, just to be safe, same white socks and Tevas.
    You don't need to work at a laboratory bench to follow a scientific game plan. People behave scientifically all the time, although they may not realize it. "If someone is trying to fix a DVD player, they do experiments, they do controls," said Paul Sternberg, a developmental biologist at Caltech. "Step one is observation: What does the picture look like? What are the possible things that could be wrong here? Is it really the player, or could it be the television set? You come up with a hypothesis, then you start testing it. You borrow your neighbor's DVD player, you hook it up, you see your TV set is fine. So you check your DVD's input, output, a couple of wires. You