You just knew Matt Nisbet was itching to voice his opinion, and we all knew exactly what he’d say.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
You just knew Matt Nisbet was itching to voice his opinion, and we all knew exactly what he’d say.
Uh-oh. Chris Mooney has roused the wrath of both Brian and ERV with his argument that people on the science side should avoid reacting to the anti-science ranters, because we’re just promoting their lies for them.
I sort of agree — it is true that we can’t criticize these loons without simultaneously bringing them to wider attention. But that’s the operational dynamic, and if Chris could come up with a strategy to educate and rebut that doesn’t actually involve mentioning the stupid things people say, I’d like to hear it. I don’t think it exists.
We do have a real problem. Science is providing a perspective that does not support tradition, that often reveals an uncomfortable reality like global warming or our familial relationship with worms, and it’s difficult — there are no simple, intuitive paths to understanding the details of our disciplines. Religion, creationism, climate skeptics, the whole spectrum of ideologies that deny reality are easy: they are selling comfortable lies, the lies your parents and grandparents and whole darn family hold, the lies that make promises that the whole universe likes you personally and will help you out, the lies that require no intellectual engagement to support. You don’t even need to be able to read a bible, as long as you can thump it.
And now we’re supposed to ignore those easy liars, and simply set up our own little science clubhouse, make it look all spiffy and beautiful and lively, and wait for the hoi polloi to rush to join our side. Get real. Reality and hard work vs. wishful thinking and pretty reassurances? Who do you think will win the membership drive?
We must counter the superficial advantages of the anti-science side by directly countering their claims. Look at it this way: if one side is promising a million dollars for free, and my side is promising an opportunity for hard work, I don’t win by announcing that I don’t have a million dollars, but I do have some tools. What I have to do is show that they don’t have a million dollars — I have to go straight for the dishonest advertising practices of my competition and expose them.
This is the flaw in Chris’s proposal. It allows falsehood and error to stand unquestioned. That won’t work. It’s how we got to the situation we’re in today — by allowing generations of people to dwell in their hothouses of dishonesty, never intruding, never confronting. We’re not going to succeed by continuing a policy of neglecting the fraudulent hucksters.
That was also a theme of Nisbet’s awful AAAS panel, an advocacy of cowardice, either avoiding all conflict or trying to coopt the grifter’s ways. That’s a disaster in the making. Those of us who are already on the side of science can see the beauty in the natural world and we can too easily delude ourselves into believing that everyone else will, too … but it’s not true. We are battling people who promise their adherents immortality in paradise, a world of perfect plenty that will never fail, and while there may be horrible diseases out there, they only strike immoral wicked sinners. If there were any truth to those promises, heck, I‘d be joining them.
The conflict is necessary, as is bringing the battle right to them and confronting them with their failures. You don’t persuade people to shun liars by letting the lies pass.
More people, especially public school teachers, ought to be aware of the Ask a Biologist website — it’s an excellent and easy resource. Kids (and adults) can fire off a quick question that gets tucked into the database, and then someone on their team of volunteer professionals will try to answer it. There are some big names on that list!
AAB also turns one year old today, so let’s celebrate by getting more schools to send in questions.
In early February, a number of bloggers brought to your attention a peculiar paper on mitochondrial proteomics, a paper which was obviously odd on even casual inspection, containing grandiose claims of a theoretical revolution that were entirely unsupported and ludicrous assertions of evidence for God in the genome. Deeper examination revealed that much of the paper had also been plagiarized from various sources. To the credit of the journal, the paper was quickly retracted one month ago today; however, the retraction was entirely based on the plagiarism, and none of the other failings of the paper were addressed, nor were any of the patent errors in the review process at the journal Proteomics discussed. This is strange, especially in light of the fact that the Warda/Han paper was the most accessed article in the journal. This is not an issue that should be swept under the rug!
Today, several of us — Steven Salzberg, Lars Juhl Jensen, and Attila Csordas — are repeating our call for an explanation of the events that led to the leakage of such an egregiously ridiculous paper into print. Bad papers are a dime-a-dozen, and we aren’t so much concerned with the detailed discussion of the flaws in this one paper as we are with seeing the integrity of the peer-review process maintained, or better, improved. The Warda/Han paper had obvious red flags that marked it as potentially problematic in the title, the abstract, and scattered throughout the body, and it’s hard to imagine how any reviewer or editor could have let them simply slip by without comment, yet that is exactly what seems to have happened.
We want to know how this paper slipped through the cracks, because we want to know how large the cracks in the peer review process at Proteomics are. It’s a journal with a good reputation, and we are not presuming that there was any wrong-doing or systematic failure of peer review there, but we do think that a lack of transparency is of concern: there is no assumption of a crime, but the ongoing cover-up is grounds for suspicion. Let’s see some self-criticism from the journal editor, and an open discussion of steps being taken to prevent such errors from occurring again.
Alternatively, if the journal wants to outsource its quality control to a mob of bloggers, that works, too … but we tend to be less formal and much more brutally and publicly critical than an in-house process might be, and we’re also going to be less well-informed than the actual principals in the review process. Better explanations are in order. Let’s see representatives of the journal provide them.
Does this story sound familiar?
The narrative goes like this:
- The famous, brilliant scientist So-and-so hypothesized that X was true.
- X, forever after, became dogma among scientists, simply by virtue of the brilliance and fame of Dr. So-and-so.
- This dogmatic assent continues unchallenged until an intrepid, underdog scientist comes forward with a dramatic new theory, completely overturning X, in spite of sustained, hostile opposition by the dogmatic scientific establishment.
Michael White summarizes a common trope in the media and elsewhere; there’s often a misleading attempt to shoehorn the gradual advancement of science into a more dramatic story of sudden breakthoughs — especially by that mythical underdog fighting against the wicked establishment. It’s not true. Even Charles Darwin, a fellow who did advance a revolutionary story, was himself a respected member of, and working within, the scientific establishment of his time. Even the most radical new idea must incorporate and extend the existing body of evidence; good science does not spontaneously emerge out of a vacuum.
The context for this narrative in this case is the Joan Roughgarden story. She has been claiming some strange things, about her role as a transgendered outsider scientist who has identified deep flaws in Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, but I’m afraid her claims are absurd. She does offer an interesting perspective, but what she is primarily opposing is a simplistic version of sexual selection that neither Darwin nor any contemporary scientists have ever accepted — she is basically cobbling up the underdog narrative, and has been getting a fair amount of attention for it.
The article does mention a comment from me on the subject that is actually the mildest thing I said: I do have a more thorough assessment of Roughgarden’s hypothesis from 2004 that is much less polite.
So mainstream journalists play this game with scientists, and some scientists play it up as well; but the real masters are the creationists. It’s all they’ve got: rhetoric that tries to put them in the role of the brave, noble, clever underdog trying to overcome the stifling influence of a stagnant scientific orthodoxy. It’s even more false, but it does appeal to the media.
Can we just get something straight? Science builds on past discoveries. You don’t get to cherry pick what bits you want to include in your theory — successful new theories don’t throw away old evidence, they extend and strengthen and reinforce, and offer new insights. There may be new theories that follow the theory of evolution … but they will all incorporate the basic facts of earth’s history — its age, common descent, the relationships between species, etc. — and will not be any more appealing to creationists than what we’ve got now.
Today is my very, very long day, but it’s going to be loads of fun. This morning, my intro biology students and I are going to shred creationism in lecture; this afternoon, I teach our first fly labs in genetics (warning to colleagues: there may be escapees); and this evening at 6, it’s time for our Cafe Scientifique, down at the Common Cup Coffeehouse in town. The first 7½ hours of my teaching day you only get to join in if you pay tuition here, but Cafe Scientifique is free and open to the public!
Tonight, Jamey Jones of the Geology discipline will talk about “Using rocks to tell time and reconstruct Earth history” — so if you’ve been wondering how we know something is 10,000 or 10,000,000 years old, come on down.
Apparently, there was some panel on the repellent practice of “framing science” at AAAS recently, which I’m sure the principals will consider a triumph, despite their refusal to have any dissenting voices there to speak.
It reminds me of something.
Recall the recent episode with the creationist, Geoffrey Simmons? He had a strategy for winning arguments: it was to get an exclusive hour on the radio to make his case without those troubling critics. He crowed victory afterwards, too.
The old man would be 199 years old today, so biologists and other science-supporting people are celebrating all around the world. Even in Morris.
I’m actually giving two lectures today. The first is a fortunate coincidence: I’m teaching an introductory biology course that emphasizes the history and philosophy of science, and today just happens to line up with my coverage of the late 19th century, and especially Darwin … so the freshman get a mini-biography of Charles Darwin. I emphasize something I think many of them can relate to, that Darwin was a young man once, who went off to college uncertain about what he was going to do with his life, and that the voyage of the Beagle was an event that changed his life. We’re so used to seeing Darwin portrayed as an old man, but he was 22 when he set sail.
The second lecture is a public lecture sponsored by our biology club tonight, at 7:00, in 1020 Science. Charles Darwin’s Origin is 149 years old this year, and although it is a very good book and well worth reading for the historical context and as an outline of the beginnings of a science, it is, well, 149 years old. There’s much more to evolutionary biology than Darwin. My talk is titled “Evo-Devo: the future of biology?”, and I’m going to be discussing new perspectives on evolution, why I think development is an essential component of our understanding of how organisms evolve, and giving several specific examples.
If you can’t make it to Morris tonight, though, that’s OK. This is a preliminary version of a keynote lecture I’ll be giving at GECCO, the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, on 12-16 July in Atlanta, so you could always sign up for that.
Richard Dawkins is retiring from academia, but I’m sure he’ll still be involved in the greater culture, so this isn’t sad news at all. Now the search at Oxford begins for a new professor to take on the Charles Simonyi Professorship in the Public Understanding of Science, and from that manifesto, whoever it is will have to reach high.
Good luck to Richard and to whoever has to try and fill his shoes!
Pharyngula commenter SteadyEddy has uploaded his audio recording of the Rue-Myers discussion. It’s about 22M, so I’m still downloading it…but there it is. Thanks to SteadyEddy!
