John Staddon - Science in an Age of Unreason

Science in an Age of Unreason

John Staddon

Copyright 2022 by John Staddon

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S cience is in trouble. Some of the problems are internalthe replication crisis, a surplus of scientists, fissiparous subdivision of journals and professional organizations, and what that means for critical review. Other problems reflect issues in the wider society. Facts can cause people to react emotionally. Sometimes thats appropriate: Finding a gas leak in the basement of your building should cause alarm and make you flee and warn your neighbors. It is an emergency. But what about the following claim (from a letter to a college-alumni magazine): I dont think racism is totally responsible for the plight of minority victims?

David Hume, star of the Scottish Enlightenment, made a simple distinction, vital for science, between facts and wishes, between is and ought. Science is about facts; discerning wishes, or what ought to be done, is a purview of other disciplines. There are facts, or factual claims, in both these examples. In the first case, the facts are indubitable, there is a leak; it is an emergency, action is required. But in the second case, there is no emergency, and the facts, unlike the gas leak, are not self-evident. Reasonsciencedemands that the claims be verified: Are family arrangements a problem for the success of poor black people? Do these communities have an unproductive attitude toward work and education? Only if the claims are true is some action justified.

Yet the immediate reaction to these comments was not inquiry but condemnation: reflexive cries of racism. Now society reacts this way to many findings and areas of research, not just race and gender, but also climate change. Topics must not be studied, or only studied with a foregone conclusion in mind. Fact versus passion, but all too often passion wins. This tendency threatens the integrity of science, social science especially. A purpose of this book is to clear up muddle and, perhaps, stem the tide.

Science has other external problems: the job market for scientists, changes in motivation when science shifts from being a vocation to a career, funding patterns and misaligned incentives. These factors have turned many academic departments away from scholarship and toward political bias, if not outright activism. These political factors interact with internal problems to weaken and distort the findings of science. I look at the effects on sociology and history of science.

Many scientific questions give rise to what physicist Alvin Weinbergin an almost-forgotten articlecalled trans-science, by which he meant questions that are scientific but, for practical or ethical reasons, cannot be answered conclusively by the methods of science. Examples are the small, long-delayed effects of low-concentration pollutants, the causes of climate change, and the role of genes in intelligence. When decisive science is impossible, other factors dominate. Weak science lets slip the dogs of unreason: many social scientists have difficulty separating facts from faith, reality from the way they would like things to be. Critical research topics have become taboo which, in turn, means that policy makers are making decisions based more on ideologically driven political pressure than scientific fact.

The book is in five parts. Part 1 is mostly philosophy. It deals with science and faith in the context of Darwinian evolution. Many secular humanists and some evolutionary biologists believe that science provides an ethical systemnot the long-discredited social Darwinism, but a mlange of supposedly secular values derived from liberal and progressive writing over the past three centuries. This issue has implications for the way that religion is treated by U.S. law. Chapter 1 lays out the problem. The next two chapters discuss different aspects of this issue. Chapter 4 summarizes what we actually know of Darwinian evolution.

Part 2 discusses contemporary problems with science as a profession. Are there too many scientists? Is the problem lack of jobs or a shortage of solvable problems? How have the incentives for science changed over the decades? Why is scientific publishing still in the nineteenth century? One challenge is the injection of social-justice ideology into government science funding bodies such as the National Science Foundation. This growing trend devalues merit as a criterion for support and diverts resources from science itself.

Part 3 is on a contentious contemporary issue: climate change. There is a consensus that human-produced greenhouse gases are warming the atmosphere to a dangerous degree. Much passion is involved: critics are termed deniers, and apocalyptic consequences are predicted if massive, society-transforming steps are not taken. President Biden calls climate change an existential threat. Yet the evidence is largely circumstantial, and the consequences are probably less than catastrophic and possibly even benign. It is another trans-science problem.

Part 4 is on social science, which has fragmented to the point that more than one hundred disciplines and subdisciplines study human social behavior, with different vocabularies and critical standards in an increasingly politicized climate. Most sociological problems are in the trans-science category: real experiments are impossible, and correlations are regularly morphed into causes. The technical issues involved in the most-frequently-used method in the social and biomedical sciences are discussed in the appendix.

Adding to the intrinsic difficulty of social science, race, particularly, has become a topic where disinterested research on the causes of racial disparities, for example, is almost impossible. Scientific conclusions increasingly reflect ideological predispositions, rather than appropriately cautious inferences from necessarily inadequate data. Hence the rise of the influential concept of systemic racism. Systemic racism is unmeasurable, hence ineradicable. Its rise has been accompanied by a stifling of research that might shed real light on racial and gender disparities: the study of individual differences in ability and interest. This suppression bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the tragedy of Soviet Lysenkoism (Chapter 14).