#35516: — 08/14  at  10:20 AM
"Good science ... aims to describe the world as it is, not how we wish it would be."

Great quote.

#35526: — 08/14  at  10:59 AM
"[W]hat's truly weird, though, is how often they also don the trappings of science, attempting to assume the mantle of scientific authority, in confused efforts to "prove" religious beliefs." This is cargo cult science, where one adopts the outer trappings of science without understanding how science actually works.

Alfred Bester did a fine job of parodying this mentality in "The Stars My Destination" with his hero Foyle encountering the tattooed 'Scientific Race', who preserve only vague recollections of science. ['Quant suff' is a term from chemistry - quantity sufficient to produce desired reaction]:
"You are the first to arrive in fifty years. You are a puissant man. Very. Arrival of the fittest is the doctrine of the Holy Darwin. Very scientific."
"Quant suff!" the crowd bellowed.
Joseph seized Foyle's elbow in the manner of a physician taking a pulse. His devil mouth counted solemnly up to ninety-eight.
"Your pulse. Ninety-eight point six," Joseph said, producing a thermometer and shaking it reverently. "Most scientific."
"Quant suff!" came the chorus.

#35531: notheory — 08/14  at  11:12 AM
HEY! Thanks PZ. Get me all hyped up about reading the book and then tell me that i can't get a copy until september.

#35532: notheory — 08/14  at  11:16 AM
Well, i posted something similar to this just last night here, but i haven't gotten to sit down and write about things that i think need to be fixed (cause i've been arguing about ebonics ).

#35558: coturnix — 08/14  at  01:18 PM
Pre-order the book by clicking on the button on Mooney's blog - he gets some money that way.

#35571: vjack — 08/14  at  02:34 PM
Thanks for the tip. The book has been in my Amazon.com wishlist for awhile. I'll buy it directly from him instead.

#35573: — 08/14  at  02:53 PM
It's good to see a book that shows the attack on science from a wider perspective. It's important for scientists to understand that they need to stand together, across their various disciplines.
This is a political attack and needs to be answered as such, with organizing and other political tools.
Another thing to think about. Over in the humanities they are also undergoing an attack funded by the same people that are attacking inconvenient science. Perhaps there should be some effort made to form a common cause.

#35580: ekzept — 08/14  at  03:23 PM

Good science needs to be independent of and unfiltered by desired outcomes; it aims to describe the world as it is, not how we wish it would be.

and why is that? it is surprisingly hard to get people to understand this simple thing.

facts are that when you're pushing the edge of knowledge you really don't have much basis for what you're doing. consequently, planning to find things is pretty much a crap shoot. if you did know what you were doing, it wouldn't be fringe of knowledge stuff.

that's why i have long distrusted excessive reliance upon committees who award grants based upon past successes. there should be some of that, to identify who is competent, who knows how to manage, and so on. and there should be requirements for periodic progress reports. but beyond that, those who are being too successful aren't doing what's really wanted in research.

i once served on a corporate applied research committee which evaluated and scored projects being undertaken. we'd meet thrice a year at several corporate sites to hear about the projects done there. and we'd score them. there'd be a wrapup at the end of each day's review. after doing this for a year-and-a-half i observed that it was odd how overwhelmingly successful all the projects were as presented to us. i commented that there seemed to be three possibilities. either unsuccessful projects were being censored, and never appeared. or the principal investigators were presenting what amounted to fraudulent results, saying things were working well and were successful when they weren't. or none of the projects were taking enough risk.

i wasn't invited back the year after that.

facts are that scientific research is an educated fumbling around in the dark. you only learn a lot when you have a lot of it going on. and i think the public has a really hard time with that. and professional managers have even a harder time.

at least IMO.

#35606: judgeMC — 08/14  at  05:25 PM
A Million Scientist march on Washington!

or Crawford, TX.

Trackback: Our Science... Could Use a Little Mercy Now Tracked on: smijer & Buck (217.160.226.3) at 2005 08 14 15:09:05
Pharyngula, on anti-science Republicans (big surprise, huh?). Jeff Blogworthy, on anti-science scientists anti-biology academics, including an actual biologist or two, and people from other disciplines, including mathematician William Dembski, astronomer Guillermo Gonzales, Historian and philosopher Steve Meyer, philosopher and theologian...

#35620: — 08/14  at  06:09 PM

i commented that there seemed to be three possibilities. either unsuccessful projects were being censored, and never appeared. or the principal investigators were presenting what amounted to fraudulent results, saying things were working well and were successful when they weren't. or none of the projects were taking enough risk.

You seem to have ignored the possibility that people were spending some of their time, while allegedly working on an existing project, in planning the next one and checking which paths looked fruitful. That's not quite the same as censoring complete unsuccessful projects, nor not taking risks at all. It's a bit of a mixture - more of a looking ahead game strategy.

#35628: — 08/14  at  07:07 PM
> This does not necessarily entail an outright partisan agenda. Encouraging the electoral success of Republican moderates with good credentials on science [oh, rara avis!—pzm] could potentially have just as constructive an effect as backing Democrats.

Beware that apartisanism will be labeled by partisans as partisanism. If you simply vote for the more humane, ethical, and informed candidate, you will very rarely vote for a Republican -- especially these days where moderate Republicans can't get party support and funding. Since you're going to be labeled a Democrat, you might as well join the party -- strength in numbers; political reality is that working within the party is more effective than not. But keep voting for the better candidate, including in primaries, and financially support promising primary candidates, rather than getting stuck voting for tweedleMediocreDem vs. tweedleRightWingFascist.

#35629: — 08/14  at  07:18 PM
"who want that rare species living on their proposed factory site to be gone"

Lets be careful now, deciding it's our responsibility to have the government intervene to protect rare species is a political and moral question, not a scientific one.

#35643: Arun — 08/14  at  09:49 PM
Scientists should stand for science and not for one political party or the other. The whole game against science is to relativize its truths in the way that the political facts depend on whom is examining them. If the scientist indeed sacrifices some intellectual integrity by holding religious beliefs (as argued on the atheism thread) then there is even more danger of that happening by being political. The stakes are more real than afterlife, and the possibility of corruption is greater.

#35648: — 08/14  at  10:08 PM
"Lets be careful now, deciding it's our responsibility to have the government intervene to protect rare species is a political and moral question, not a scientific one."

The consequences of absence of such intervention is a scientific question, which can help us decide whether it's a good idea for the government to intervene. Of course, that might not matter to you if no government intervention is a religious tenet of yours.

#35650: — 08/14  at  10:11 PM
"If the scientist indeed sacrifices some intellectual integrity by holding religious beliefs (as argued on the atheism thread) then there is even more danger of that happening by being political."

Uh, no, there isn't. Being political doesn't require one to hold false beliefs. In fact, I would argue that holding only true beliefs, together with some obvious ethical assumptions, mandates being political.

#35721: Arun — 08/15  at  07:40 AM
ts, it is not a question of holding true or false beliefs, it is how politics leads one to behave, a behavior that is often not compatible with doing science. The simplest example is that democratic politics is a popularity contest, while science is not. A scientist can perhaps be an activist, but not a politician.

Anyway, we already see how businesses pour money into think-tanks to get ideas and even "science" that buttresses whatever the businesses want. Who are the people in the think-tanks? Would we call them scientists? What happens when scientists get the same taint as the think-tank-wallahs?

#35723: notheory — 08/15  at  07:49 AM
The simplest example is that democratic politics is a popularity contest, while science is not.

Not true! Science is still a social behavior. Science still functions on who's most popular (i.e. should get funding), but what is considered when assessing popularity is different. Remember, the direction research takes is often driven by scientific fads. The history of psychology is particularly indicative of this fact.

And i definitely think that scientists could be politicians. I don't think they should be doing research at the same time as they would be deciding policy matters (to be certain), but the whole idea behind a technocracy is that the people in power know what's going on. Unlike our current leaders

#35775: — 08/15  at  11:54 AM
"A scientist can perhaps be an activist, but not a politician."

Nice strawman goalpost moving, Arun, but I'm glad you've come to your senses.

#35800: Arun — 08/15  at  01:36 PM
ts, here's what I'm worried about - this is an excerpt from the book:

If Americans come to believe you can find a scientist willing to say anything, they will grow increasingly disillusioned with science itself. Ultimately, trapped in a tragic struggle between "liberal" science and "conservative" science, the scientific endeavor itself could lose legitimacy.

If scientists are involved in politics, how do they avoid the perception of a conflict of interest? If a scientist advocates a position based on current science, and tomorrow a new finding invalidates current science, will said scientist turn on a dime and stop his advocacy? It isn't in human nature to do so, especially, if the stakes have been raised by making it not just a scientific dispute, but also a political one. So, I withdraw my statement that activism is permissible.

#35806: ekzept — 08/15  at  01:50 PM

If scientists are involved in politics, how do they avoid the perception of a conflict of interest? If a scientist advocates a position based on current science, and tomorrow a new finding invalidates current science, will said scientist turn on a dime and stop his advocacy?

my problems with the "activist scientist" or "politician scientist" thing concerns divided loyalties. activist movements and political parties work in part because members are "team players" who subjugate their individual interests and viewpoints for the common goals of the movement or party. when this doesn't happen, particularly with political parties, we get the phenomenon of "party discipline". with a member of a government or administration, there may be an expectation that the member serves at the pleasure of the President (Congress, committee head, whatever) and that loyalty is owed. such loyalty may be invoked to suppress their viewpoint or ask that revelations of data and analysis not be made at awkward times. that sounds reasonable, but it is often done as part of a manipulation of the political setting or of the media or of public opinion.

this kind of horsetrading may be fine for politicians or business, but it's a practice IMO in which no scientist should dabble.

#35811: Arun — 08/15  at  02:16 PM
http://www.ostina.org/html/bridges/article.htm?article=1211

#35823: coturnix — 08/15  at  02:33 PM
Excellent article in the new New Yorker

#36009: — 08/16  at  02:37 PM
From the latest New Yorker:

MIRED
by Hendrik Hertzberg
Issue of 2005-08-22
Posted 2005-08-15

How did we-not just Americans but human beings in general—come to be? Opinions differ, but for most of recorded history the consensus view was that people were made out of mud. Also, that the mud was originally turned into people by a being or beings who themselves resembled people, only bigger, more powerful, and longer-lived, often immortal. The early Chinese theorized that a lonely goddess, pining for company, used yellow mud to fashion the first humans. According to the ancient Greeks, Prometheus sculpted the first man from mud, after which Athena breathed life into him. Mud is the man-making material in the creation stories of Mesopotamian city-states, African tribes, and American Indian nations.

The mud theory is still dominant in the United States, in the form of the Book of Genesis, whose version of the origin of our species, according to a recent Gallup poll, is deemed true by forty-five per cent of the American public. Chapter 2, in verses 6 and 7, puts it this way:

But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

Mud is not mentioned by name, but you'd have to be a pretty strict Biblical literalist not to infer that mud is what you get when you add water to dust.

A competing theory is that people, along with the rest of the earth's animals and plants, evolved over billions of years, beginning as extremely simple organisms and, via the accumulation of the tiny fraction of random mutations that turn out to be useful, developing into more complex ones. This view has gained many adherents since it was conceived, a century and a half ago, by Charles Darwin. It commands solid majorities in most of the developed world, and, thanks to the overwhelming evidence for its validity, has the near-unanimous support of scientists everywhere. Here in the United States, according to Gallup, it is subscribed to by about one-third of the populace—still running second to mud, but too large a market share to ignore altogether, especially in some of the battleground states.

On the one hand this, on the other hand that. George W. Bush is not normally the type to endorse shilly-shallying, but this time he went for it. At a “round table” with Texas reporters, the President was asked to comment on “what seems to be a growing debate over evolution versus intelligent design” and whether “both should be taught in public schools.”

THE PRESIDENT: I think—as I said, harking back to my days as my governor—both you and Herman are doing a fine job of dragging me back to the past. (Laughter.) Then, I said that, first of all, that decision should be made to local school districts, but I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught.

Q: Both sides should be properly taught?

THE PRESIDENT : Yes, people—so people can understand what the debate is about.

Q: So the answer accepts the validity of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution?

THE PRESIDENT : I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought, and I'm not suggesting—you're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes.

Looked at one way, this colloquy is an occasion for national shame, albeit with a whiff of the risible: here is our country's leader, the champion-in-chief of educational standards, blandly equating natural science and supernatural supposition as “different schools of thought.” Looked at another way, it represents progress of a sort. Twenty-five years ago, Ronald Reagan, then the Republican candidate for President, endorsed the teaching of “creationism”; five years ago, George W. Bush did the same. “Creationism” holds that dinosaurs and people coexisted, and that the fossil record is a product of Noah's flood. Next to that, “intelligent design” represents a scientific advance, or a tactical retreat, or maybe just the evolutionary process at work. I.D. recognizes that the age of the universe is measured in billions, not thousands, of years; that fossils are evidence, not divine tricks to test believers' faith; and that organisms change over time, sometimes via natural selection. This is tantamount to an admission that the Genesis story is poetry, not history; allegory, not fact.

But I.D.—whose central (and easily refuted) talking point is that certain structures of living things are too intricate to have evolved without the intervention of an “intelligent designer” (and You know who You are)—enjoys virtually no scientific support. It is not even a theory, in the scientific sense, because it is untestable and unsupportable by empirical evidence. It is a last-ditch skirmish in a misguided war against reason that cannot be won and, for religion's sake as well as science's, should not be fought. If the President's musings on it were an isolated crotchet, they would hardly be worth noting, let alone getting exercised about. But they're not. They reflect an attitude toward science that has infected every corner of his Administration. From the beginning, the Bush White House has treated science as a nuisance and scientists as an interest group—one that, because it lies outside the governing conservative coalition, need not be indulged. That's why the White House-sometimes in the service of political Christianism or ideological fetishism, more often in obeisance to baser interests like the petroleum, pharmaceutical, and defense industries-has altered, suppressed, or overriden scientific findings on global warming; missile defense; H.I.V./ AIDS; pollution from industrial farming and oil drilling; forest management and endangered species; environmental health, including lead and mercury poisoning in children and safety standards for drinking water; and non-abstinence methods of birth control and sexually-transmitted-disease prevention. It has grossly misled the public on the number of stem-cell lines available for research. It has appointed unqualified ideo_logues to scientific advisory committees and has forced out scientists who persist in pointing out inconvenient facts. All this and more has been amply documented in reports from congressional Democrats and the Union of Concerned Scientists, in such leading scientific publications as Nature, Scientific American, Science, and The Lancet, and in a new book, “The Republican War on Science,” by the science journalist Chris Mooney.

Mooney's book is more judicious than its move-product title, which, as he acknowledges in an opening chapter, is not meant to apply to moderate Republicans past (such as Dwight D. Eisenhower) or present (such as John McCain). Anyway, a few small fissures are beginning to appear in the stone wall. Bill Frist, M.D., the Senate Majority Leader, has broken with the White House on stem-cell research. The White House science adviser, John H. Marburger III, evidently embarrassed by his boss's evolutionary equivocations, told the Times that “intelligent design is not a scientific concept.” And the cover story in the current National Journal, a well-informed and relentlessly nonpartisan Washington weekly, reports that growing numbers of Republican politicians and corporate chieftains “who once dismissed as unproven the idea that the burning of fossil fuels is causing a harmful rise in Earth's temperature have now concluded that global warming is real—and very dangerous.” As a result, the magazine says, “Advocates of muscular gove_rnmental efforts to slow or reverse global warming predict that the United States will eventually take strong action—but they doubt that such action will come on Bush's watch.” In this White House, science's name is mud. And, unlike those intelligent designers in the sky, all this crowd knows how to do is sling it.