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The Undergrowth of Science
from the delusion-and-venality-in-research dept.
| The Undergrowth of Science | |
| author | Walter Gratzer |
| pages | 328 |
| publisher | Oxford University Press |
| rating | 8/10 |
| reviewer | Jon Katz |
| ISBN | 0-19-850707-0 |
| summary | how science can go outrageously awry |
A scientist once wrote that all truth passes through three stages: first it is ridiculed, then violently opposed and eventually, accepted as self-evident. Charles Kettering, the legendary former head of General Motors, once lamented: 'First they tell you you're wrong and they can prove it; then they tell you you're right but it isn't important; then they tell you it's important but they knew it all along.'
Both of these notions are quoted in Walter Gratzer's excellent new book, "The Undergrowth of Science: Delusion, Self-Deception and Human Frailty." Gratzer writes exceptionally well. He teaches at the Randall Institute, King's College London. His books include the "Longman Literary Companion to Science" and "The Bedside Nature."
Gratzer examines the underbelly of scientific theory, namely how some of the most delusional and outrageous scientific theories -- Russian water that could congeal oceans, Monkey testis implants that restore declining sexual powers, "truths" about genetics and the discovery of matter -- occur and are widely accepted in the scientific community. This book is equal parts science and history, a collection of gripping tales that remind us to take even the most high-minded and supposedly scientific discoveries with some caution.
Science makes much of its rules and legendary peer review procedures, but personal vanity, contemporary politics, greed, stupidity, and incompetence all pop up in these shocking episodes. Gratzer details how intelligence and reason don't necessarily exclude irrationality. One chapter takes us to eighteenth-century France, where Franz-Anton Messmer persuaded a gullible public of the existence of animal magnetism and harnessed it to cure diseases. (Messmer didn't actually invent the theory of animal magnetism, he learned it from a notorious Austrian priest known as Father Hell.)
One powerful chapter details the tragedy of Soviet genetics, the history of Russian biology in the period between the Revolution and the death of Stalin in l953, a time the author calls "a woeful chronicle of wanton destruction of both a scholarly discipline and the lives of many of its most respected practioners." Gratzer also explores the misuse of science in the Third Reich, and the rise and fall of Eugenics.
This isn't just ancient history, though. Misguided scientific theory is all too contemporary.
"Most remarkable," writes Gatzer, "is the way that false theories and imagined phenomena sometimes spread through the scientific community. A kind of mass hysteria, which parallels in the world at large, such as UFO sightings alien abductions, 'recovered memory' and probably chronic fatigue syndrome, takes possession of a hitherto rational population, like a virus of the intellect. On such occasions scientists in some area of research throw aside, to the amazement of their colleagues, the intellectual constraints that had until then guided their working lives. They become selectively uncritical and intolerant of any unsought evidence. Sometimes such a perversion of the scientific method results from external, especially political, pressures, but at other times it is a spontaneous eruption."
In the media age, these scientific stumbles are particularly dangerous, as they become powerful memes that are rapidly and virally transmitted to the general population by information technologies like TV and the Net.
In this era, science and technology are central to contemporary political, social, economic and cultural lives. How science can sometimes go awry is thus an important story. Despite the fact that Gatzer tells it entertainingly and with enormous authority, this is a disturbing book. Science in the wrong hands, used for the wrong reasons, is scary stuff.
Purchase this at ThinkGeek.
Your missing the point (Score:3)
We are not discussing societal or cultural pressures forcing a scientist to recant against his will or better judgement. That is well documented, and actually is still happening today.
What we are talking about here is that scientists, trained and immersed in the discipline of skepticism and doubt, are often blind to their own propensity for making assumptions. This, coupled with believing you are being scientific leads to moronic theories at best. At its worst, it brings us mass extermination and eugenics.
Humility, a value of many religions scoffed at by scientists, is still the paramount character trait to seek. If you are seeking truth, you must first realize your own limits and your own propensity to think of yourself more highly than you ought.
science is self-correcting by definition (Score:3)
However, it may take a generation or two to get
past some wrong or evil idea if controlled by a
dogmatic group.
The opposite of science is dogmatism and revealation.
By definition, their body of knowledge is presumed
correct, albeit errors in transmission.
All new data has to fit their world view or be
rejected.
Re:what about more recent examples? (Score:3)
The problem with the cold fusion fiasco wasn't a credulous scientific establishment, it was that Fleischman and Pons went to the media instead of publishing for peer review first. There's a reason that major discoveries show up in Nature before the New York Times - the editors and readership of the former are equipped to examine claims critically. The general media is not.
Once other labs started trying to duplicate the cold fusion experiments of Fleischman and Pons, it quickly became evident that they hadn't discovered anything except poor experimental procedure. There was some brief noise about a couple of labs that said they had seen something that might, maybe, have been evidence of a cold fusion reaction, but that it wasn't reproducable and didn't produce statistically significant results. Again, the media broadcast this all over the place as collobarative evidence.
Now, I'm not saying that cold fusion shouldn't be researched further. I'm not qualified to make that judgement. What bothers me about this is how frequently I hear this particular incident cited as an example of why we shouldn't trust the scientific method. The damage that was done to public perception of the scientific establishment, and the methods of scientific inquiry, was inexcusable.
The ignorant are always looking for an excuse to remain so.
Re:Radical Science and Ending Teaching Evolution (Score:3)
Don't forget the Big Bang and heliocentrism as well.
It's not enough that these subjects be taken out of the curriculum; they must be banned outright. The teaching of evolution needs to be criminalized immediately, and in order to give this legislation teeth, the Congress needs to authorize an expedited death penalty for anyone who is caught disseminating information on these topics. Along with this, we will need to incinerate any and all books related to these topics. I would recommend beginning a complete and total purge of the works of Darwin, Hawking, Einstein etc. from our society.
Professor Timothy Allan at the UW-Madison (Score:3)
And yes, he is a scientist-- a systems-science approach botanist.
Ironicly, after showing how the scientific structures basically prevent most truely new dieas from gaining the wide audiance the need for acceptance, he concluded with the observation that this is necessary. Withotu such constraints science would be TOO creative and nothing woudl get explored in depth.
A moment of philosophy:
The world is what it is and is ultimately unmeasurable by us in any direct way. All we have are the inputs of our flawed senses and the arbitrary pattern matchign of our intellect. We are model builders and not Truth finders. Truth is unacessible.
What's left to judge our models by are just the dual criteria of utility and esthetics. (Predictive cability is a utility measure. Occam's razor is an esthetic measure.) All real scientists know this, unfortunately they usually aren't terribly good at communciating this to the common man.
UFO's and other "fringe" science (Score:3)
The problem I have is this: traditional science is only set up to understand that which is easily and repeatedly observable under controlled conditions. Traditional science is unlikely to be able to investigate paranormal phenomena because many of these phenomena are transient and almost impossible to produce on demand. This doesn't mean such phenomena don't exist; it simply means that traditional science is ill suited to the study of such phenomena.
Another factor enters in at this point: ego. Traditional science is conducted by PhD's at universities and research institutions. Most of us have gone to college or are at least familiar with the academic environment. The egos, narrow-mindedness and short-sightedness of some of these experts is unbelievable! They're as dogmatic as the most fanatical religious fundamentalists. They worship knowledge rather than question it. If something doesn't fit their picture of how things work, it's discarded, ridiculed, and those who proposed the idea are ostracized and regarded as fools. Only the smallest, most obvious new ideas, or those with overwhelming evidence in their favor, are accepted by the traditional scientific community. The problem is that this leaves little or no room for quantum leaps forward in understanding.
I know a lot of you must think I'm full of shit by now, so let me give you an example most of you can relate to. Have you ever had a transient problem with a piece of equipment and the manufacturer/vendor/whatever refused to admit the problem existed? Most of us have. I remember having a problem with static on a phone line once. It was so bad that my modem wouldn't stay connected, and often couldn't connect at all. It wasn't always like this - some days it was almost okay, and others it was terrible. The telco insisted that there was nothing wrong with the line. They tested it from the central office - "looks okay from here!" They sent a tech out to my house. He hooked up some piece of equipment that tested the voltage, impedence, and other line characteristics. "They all look normal." They told me the problem was with my in-house wiring (even though the static was still there when I disconnected the indoor wiring and tapped in directly at the telco interface). After many days of calling and complaining I finally got a competant tech who started at the house and traced the line step-by-step back toward the central office. He found a bad splice a couple hops down the line, in a junction box on another street. Well, what do you know - I was right all along!
Sounds a lot like how the traditional scientific community works, doesn't it? Now, imagine if the telco worked even more like the scientific community. Imagine if, when I first called to report a problem, they not only denied the problem's existance but cancelled my phone service and refused to speak to me ever again on the grounds that I spoke heresy. I would have been right all along, but proving it would have been damn near impossible. That is how the scientific community works. It's roughly on a par with the Catholic church in open-mindedness.
Just because paranormal phenomena are difficult to observe under controlled conditions, that does not mean they don't exist. The explanations for them may be other than what people think (strange lights in the sky being aliens from outer space vs. secret military aircraft, for example), but the phenomena themselves are quite real and quite explainable for those who are willing to open their minds to possibilities and just look.
Re:Does this book mention exposing spiders to LSD? (Score:3)
There really have been some cool experiments with spiders on drugs, and how that impacts their work. Check out this page [cling.gu.se]. And this page [geocities.com], which includes a picture of a web spun by a spider on LSD -- it's more precise than the work done by a straight spider. Pretty damn weird.
what about more recent examples? (Score:3)
FP.
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
But when science is right (Score:3)
I think more interesting though are the examples of where science is manipulated in a more subtle way. Namely by emphasis of funding. A good example would be the maniuplation of entomology by the large agrochemical companies. By extreme selectivity of funding, science can be used to prove anything. I think that within my own field, the large scale commercial pressures are pushing things in the same way.
Phil
Re:But when science is right (Score:3)
In the 1700's and 1800's, racist scientists tried to prove that since the different human races had different body and skull shapes then the caucasian races were 'more developed' and 'more highly evolved'. This false science was used as everything as a justification for slavery to evidence in criminal trials.
In the late 80's and 90's, scientists started finding *very* early human fossils in Canada and the U.S. that seem to indicate that the first Asians who cross the Bering Strait were caucasoid rather than mongoloid. At first there was an outcry by the human rights activists who feared a new round of 'evolution scaling'. Then there was an outcry and a demand for posession of the fossils by certain Native American tribes. The tribes claim that it is their legal right to bury the fossils respectfully since they were the 'first'.
Indeed, they may have legal precident. It also seems, however, that they are trying to effectively destroy any evidence that the current race of Native Americans weren't necessarily the first race to inhabit North America.
Another example: dinosaur extinction (Score:4)
There were, however, some problems. First, the dinosaurs didn't die off in a few years; they became extinct over a period of millions of years. Second, there was never any palaeoecological evidence of such a "winter" found. Thus, although there definitely was a large impact around the time of the dinosaur extinction, the hypothesis that it's dust caused the extinction could not realistically have been true. Moreover, there's an alternative hypothesis: massive extended flood-basalt volcanism from the Deccan Traps, in India.
Alvarez, however, was a Nobel prize winner. He used the power that gave him to discredit anyone who questioned him. He launched major attacks in the media. And he pressured the chairpeople of academic departments to fire departmental researchers who tried to show the flaws in the hypothesis. Some careers were severely damaged. Read all about it, and the science, here [vt.edu].
The impact crater was eventually found, in Yucatan, Mexico. Research has shown, however, that the amount of dust injected into the atmosphere, by the impact, was far too small to have forced cosmic winter. With Alavarez dead, there is now at least some reasoned debate. Recent work by Sharpton at the U of Alaska speculates that the impact might have vaporized enough rock to make the atmosphere very acidic--and that this might have led to long-term ecological changes that forced dinosaur extinction. (This research was presented at last month's meeting of the American Geophysical Union [agu.org]; abstracts available online via http://www.agu.org/meetings/waisfm00.html [agu.org].)
Maybe, in the end, it will turn out that Alvarez was right. Or maybe not. For the integrity of the scientific process, though, it makes no difference. A powerful scientist used his political power to squash any scientific debate.
__________________________________
"... the microkernel approach was essentially a dishonest approach aimed at receiving more dollars for research. I don't necessarily think these researchers were knowingly dishonest. Perhaps they were simply stupid. Or deluded." --Linus Torvalds on kernel research by Computer Scientists (in Open Sources)
Just remember... (Score:4)
They laughed at Einstein.
But they also laughed at Groucho Marx."
--Carl Sagan
Does this book mention exposing spiders to LSD? (Score:4)
IIRC, one scientist postulated that exposing spiders to LSD ruined their depth perception, when later is was realized that spiders have no depth perception. This was later made into an open source truism:
Many eyes makes bugs shallow.
Re:Pardon me, but "Junk" Science seems to be the r (Score:5)
And people like you and your colleagues are one of the biggest reasons why our citizens are so susceptible to people selling bad science. At every turn you oppose the teaching of any scientific fact that doesn't agree with your precious world view. The Jihad against the theory of natural selection is just the worst example, but across the board, Christian's intolerance of any disagreement with their dogma has stifled the science education of the average person to the point where they can't reliably sort out the wheat from the chaff when it comes to scientific claims.
And then you turn around and point at the resulting niches and cracks where pseudoscience has gained footholds and you use that to support your claim that science in general is unreliable and deceitful. THAT is the ultimate deceit. Those crackpots might just as well be your direct agents for all the mileage you get out of them.
Go away already and let us educate our people so that they can function in a modern society. God knows they can't even program their VCRs, and before long they will have to be able to program their refrigerators just to be able to eat.