scienceoracle

Yep, it's getting warmer

2011-12-10T09:12:00.000-08:00

In a recent issue of Science a trio of scientists who are experts on climate modeling and interpretations of data related to global climate summarize the best available information on variation in Earth’s surface temperature over the past half century or so. Their work addresses a controversial subject that those resisting the idea of global warming love to talk about.

Doubts about the reality of 20th century warming have been fueled by a veritable blizzard of misinformation and outright denial by politicians such as Senator James Inhofe and talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. The political winds from the extreme right have been blowing so mightily against the notion of global warming that the front-runners in the race for the Republican nomination in 2012 seem to be obliged to join in the denialist chant. The American people are being deluged with misinformation and outright lies on this topic. It is thus worth thinking about the significance of this recent work by Santer, Wigley and Taylor.

One of the most difficult challenges in the entire business of drawing conclusions about Earth’s surface temperature is that there really is no single literal measurement that gives us the temperature of the planet. I wrote about this in Chapter 9 of my 2003 book, Making Truth: Metaphor in Science. When we want to measure our own body temperature, we insert a measurement device such as a thermometer, or one of the fancier digital probes, under our tongue, in our ear or up our rectum, as the case may be. The temperature we record in this way we take to be representative of our body as a whole. This works because our bodies are designed to maintain, as closely as possible, a single temperature throughout. But planet Earth is not like that. As I write this in Estero Florida the temperature is about 80 degrees Farenheit. At the same time, my daughter living in mid-central Illinois reports that the temperature there is about 11 degrees Farenheit. It is far colder still in Antarctica. No single value represents the surface temperature of the planet . For this reason, when we talk about the surface temperature of the planet we are using metaphorical language and thought. We talk aboutEarth’s surface temperature as though the planet were a small, temperature-controlled thing like a human body or a refrigerator.

To get to something that resembles a single value for the surface temperature, scientists began with simply averaging the temperatures measured at as many places as possible at the same time, and averaging over time as well. Before the modern age of satellite measurements the estimates were pretty crude. Consider that something like 70 percent of Earth’s surface is covered with water. How do we get sufficient measurements of the vast and varied seas to produce reliable numbers? And what about remote places that are not readily accessible, or crowded urban areas where human activity generates a good deal of local heat? With satellite measurements it has become possible to collect data over a short period of time that reflects surface temperatures
over most of earth’s surface. By averaging these in a suitable way, one ends up with a single number that we call the surface temperature of the planet. It’s a metaphorical entity, not a real single temperature, but its value over time can serve as a reliable measure of the change at Earth’s surface. However, the interpretation of satellite data is not entirely straightforward. A group of scientists at the University of Alabama at Huntsville concluded in 2005 from satellite data that the planet’s surface temperature had declined since 1979. This unexpected result was used to cast doubt on the reality of surface warming.

One of the hallmarks of good science is that controversial results are subject to reevaluation and continued exploration. The satellite measurements were a new technology, and many factors needed to be taken into account in interpreting the data. Climate scientists at a California laboratory identified two serious errors made by the Huntsville group in their analyses. These were acknowledged by the Huntsville scientists, who redid their recalculations. The corrected results showed a warming trend over the entire period 1979 to present. The revised estimate, following from critical scrutiny by other scientists, represents another step forward in our ability to measure and understand the evolution of the global climate.

Modeling the terrifically complicated global climate system is difficult. The challenge is to find a model that reproduces the historical record as well as possible, considering all the uncertainties,and then to use that model to forecast the future course of climate change, assuming various scenarios regarding levels of greenhouse warming gases, energy consumption, population growth and so on. The media are filled with confident pronouncements, for the most part self-serving, about climate change from political, ideological and financial interests. When we hear what people like Rush Limbaugh, James Inhofe or Newt Gingrich are saying or are ready to get behind, we need to ask what motivates them and what is their competence to speak on the issue at hand. We should also do that with respect to scientists, whatever the issue might be. Citizens need to go behind the one-liners of politicians and talk show personalities to learn what scientists think and the evidence that supports their views. There is no scientific conspiracy to deceive the public into believing that global warming is real, and that it has the potential to cause a great deal of human suffering. Scientists are just doing their work, trying to learn more about the way the world is.

An incredible amount of research across many scientific disciplines leads to an unambiguous result: the planet is warming, mostly because of increased concentrations of so-called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Denying this may be politically or financially expedient, but global warming is underway and it will gain strength with each passing year. How much adverse change occurs over the next 50 years and beyond will depend on whether humanity collectively decides to do something about continued generation of greenhouse gases. There is little hope for significant action in the near future. The 2011 Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, just concluded with essentially no progress in setting mandatory goals for reductions of greenhouse gases. This should not surprise anyone. We humans have evolved to possess a strong consciousness of the future, but we still live very much in the present. Our proclivity to discount the future, particularly one so distant that we will not be there to live in it, prompts us to choose present needs and desires over future consequences of our actions. That seems to be the way it is with respect to climate change. As Kurt Vonnegut was fond of saying, “So it goes…”.

Attacking the Messenger

2011-09-04T09:20:00.000-07:00

The lay public’s trust in the work of scientists generally is eroded when there is evidence of fraud or another form of ethical lapse by any scientist or group of scientists. As I’ve written in Imperfect Oracle: The Epistemic and Moral Authority of Science, science’s capacity to exercise authority in the affairs of society is grounded on the presumption that scientists speak reliably and with good intent. This means that when scientists make claims based on their experimental or theoretical work, their representations of what they have found, and the conclusions based on them, are as full and true as they can make them.

For the most part, scientists share their work via talks and papers presented for the benefit of other scientists, in particular those working in the same or closely related fields. Individual contributions meld with others to form, over time, a more or less consensual understanding of what is going on in a given problem area. For that process to work individual scientist’s accounts must be as accurate and faithful to the findings of the research as possible. Futhermore, those individual accounts and claims must be subject to skeptical scrutiny by other scientists to ensure, insofar as possible, that they are correct. In this way, something that the philosopher and scientist Michael Polanyi called “scientific opinion” is formed. The epistemic authority of science as a voice in society’s affairs depends on a general acceptance of this idea. The process of vetting within the scientific community has the effect of producing stronger scientific accounts, but in addition it goes a long way toward rooting out fraud and unethical behaviors such as plagiarism.

A recent story of fraud within the field of chemistry may help to show how this works in at least one case. A former Columbia University graduate student, Bengü Sezen, working under the tutelage of Professor Dalibor Sames, was found to have fabricated nearly the entirety of her doctoral thesis research. By the time her fraud was exposed, her thesis had been accepted, she had been awarded the Ph.D. degree and was the lead author on three research papers published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, one of the most prestigious chemical journals in the world. Her thesis project dealt with a hot topic in organic chemistry. She seemed to have made some major breakthroughs in getting difficult reactions to occur in productive ways. She produced evidence in the form of spectra, analyses and so forth in support of her account. Sames, her thesis director, an up-and-coming young faculty member, was delighted with her work.

But there was a problem, uncovered by fellow graduate students in the Sames research group: no one could reproduce her results. Sames did not want to hear that Sezen’s work was suspect, and he was inclined to lay the blame for the failure to reproduce her work on the newer students. But Sezen’s labmates were more aware than Professor Sames that Sezen was committing fraud, and eventually they were able to convince Sames of that fact. A long and protracted investigation, involving a committee assembled by Columbia University, was undertaken. Because the research had been supported by federal research dollars, the Office of Research Integrity of the Department of Health and Human Services was involved, and eventually a notice was published in the Federal Register stating that she had falsified, fabricated and plagiarized research data in three papers and in her doctoral thesis. Her doctoral thesis was in due course revoked by Columbia University. Sames had to withdraw a total of six published research papers because no one could reproduce the work. His reputation has been severely damaged by the affair. For example, see the comments in the blog ChemBark.

Much has been written about this episode, but I wish to focus on what it might have to teach us about the trustworthiness of science. Sezen, a pathological liar, produced huge amounts of scientific garbage, and got away with it – for a time. She was extremely clever in forging data from other spectra, falsifying analytical results and so on. In the end, though, the fact that the work could not be reproduced, even though attempts were made by several graduate students, triggered the kind of closer look into her files, notebooks and other records that made the deceit completely evident. This case is small potatoes in the large scheme of things, but it serves to illustrate that fraud in science will be caught out eventually. Science does not owe its reliability to the fact that all individual scientists are error-proof or free of moral and ethical lapses. Rather, its organizational structure and ways of forming consensual scientific opinion lead to exposure of errors and fraudulent practices.

All of this has some relevance for the ill-considered criticisms of climate science by many who come to the discussion with biases against global warming based on partisan politics, economics or an ultraconservative aversion to anything that might suggest the need for collective, global actions. The likes of Rick Perry, Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Newt Gingrich or Senator James Inhofe, collectively have no expert understanding of climate science. They also do not seem to understand how science actually works. This has not prevented them from declaring that global warming is some kind of scientific hoax. The community of scientists with expertise in one of the major areas of science, such as atmospheric science, oceanography , chemistry or meteorology, that bears in an important way on questions dealing with climate change, is huge, highly diverse and international in scope. Climate change is a very complex, difficult problem to attack. All these scientists working away at the part of the problem that falls within their expertise have to eventually pull together all the results and projections to produce a complete story. That has been done, and it continues to be done through international efforts as more and more evidence accumulates, and as the tools for making projections grow more reliable.

Given the best projections climate scientists can make there is plenty to be said about what we should or should not do. However, we cannot start talking about climate change with a childish pique that we don’t like what we are being told. The people I have mentioned above, and others like them, have nothing constructive to bring to the scientific aspects of the discussion, nor does it seem that they are interested in grown up considerations of climate policy. It’s sad that society’s responses to the challenges of climate change are held hostage to demagoguery, and self-interest. In time nature will deliver its verdict, and our grandkids can pass judgment on what we might have done.

Whose Moral Authority?

2011-08-29T13:25:00.000-07:00

After a long hiatus I am back to blogging. I hope to keep up a steady rate of writing, on the order of one a week, perhaps more often. Since I last wrote a blog, a great deal has happened in the world of science and politics. What does not seem to have changed is the rate of clashes between a scientifically oriented view of the physical world and perspectives that see nature through the lenses of religiosity, a political perspective or some other form of anti-intellectual outlook. These alternative takes the physical world sometimes pay lip service to science, but deny science’s capacity to speak with authority on matters that present a challenge to preconceptions.

This seemingly perennial impasse is well illustrated by what Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, an announced candidate for the Republican nomination for US president in the 2012 election, had to say in response to questions from a woman and her son during a recent campaign stop in New Hampshire, as reported in the Huffington Post and elsewhere:
"How old do I think the earth is? You know what, I don't have any idea," said the Texas governor when asked about his position. "I know it's pretty old so it goes back a long long way. I'm not sure anybody actually knows completely and absolutely how long, how old the earth is." He went on to say that he regarded evolution as "a theory that's out there" and one that's "got some gaps in it." He added that in the Lone Star State both creationism and evolution are taught to students in public schools. He explained, "I figure you're smart enough to figure out which one is right."
The Texas Tribune expressed disquiet about Perry’s response to the evolution question, pointing out that the state of Texas has no specific curriculum entry for the teaching of creationism, and that in any case the Supreme Court in 1987 made it illegal to teach creationism in public schools, on the grounds that it would be equivalent to teaching religion. Perry may in fact have correctly stated what is actually taught in Texas schools; classroom practices are, after all, largely in the hands of the teachers. What is more important is what Perry’s responses reveal about his lack of basic scientific knowledge and his disregard for that lack in shaping his public persona. A further illustration of this is contained in remarks he made at a breakfast address before business leaders in New Hampshire, as reported in the Huffington Post and elsewhere. Asked about global warming he indicated that he did not believe in it, and referred to the idea as a scientific theory that has not been proven. He would not spend public funds in further research on the matter, or in mitigation of it: "I don't think from my perspective that I want to be engaged in spending that much money on still a scientific theory that has not been proven and from my perspective is more and more being put into question." He is also quoted as saying, "I think we're seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists that are coming forward and questioning the original idea that manmade global warming is what is causing the climate to change." Paul Krugman made several effective rebuttals to Perry’s absurd and false statements in a recent Op-ed. He attributes them to pandering to the no-nothing branch of the Republican party. However, as Richard Cohen wrote in the Washington Post, Perry may be pushing his luck on this topic. While mitigation of climate change through governmental actions may be a losing battle for those who want strong global responses to the threat, the idea that global warming exists is one of those memes that has gone viral, as it were. Outside a narrowing range of public opinion, it is becoming decidedly uncool to maintain that global warming is a myth.

To judge from the public record, Rick Perry’s brain is the domicile of many crazy ideas on a variety of subjects. We could search long and hard to uncover just what sources of authority he draws upon in arriving at his worldview, but there is little point in doing that. More importantly, Perry is not just any ignoramus; he’s a public figure with a strong record of running for elective office, who is now receiving a lot of attention on the national stage. A recent Texan predecessor, George W, spoke in a similar style of mangled syntax and lack of understanding of the history and operation of the physical world, and look where he ended up! What matters for the public good is that Perry’s misstatements about nature and the world of science, fitted to his ultraconservative ideology and the interests of his backers, lead to false claims being presented, for the moment at least, to large audiences . To the extent that Perry is seen as a viable candidate his positions on issues that should be discussed and decided upon with consideration for their scientific basis do matter.

Within a limited sphere there is room for optimism for a more influential role for science in forming public policy and governmental action. The Obama administration has been more progressive than its predecessor in promoting science and technology in both the areas of human resources and industrial R and D. For example, a big bet is being made on development and manufacture of advanced batteries, as reported recently in the New York Times. But at a deeper level, a real shift in the attitudes of ordinary citizens toward a rational scientific outlook, and away from reliance on superstition and demagoguery, eludes us. How could this be brought about? I’m sure that an answer is out there awaiting discovery. It may require capitalizing in some as-yet unrealized way on the ever-increasing presence of social networking and the sources of information that feed it. Whatever their origins and channels of delivery, society needs pervasive and reliable sources of epistemic and moral authority in matters regarding the natural world as effective alternatives to the narrow-minded, ultraconservative rhetoric that seems to dominate contemporary political discourse. In the contests for people’s hearts and minds science is not doing so well.

Paul Krugman ends his Op-ed piece as follows: “ [T]he odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.” That may seem a bit overwrought, but for those who strive for a society in which rational thought governs decision-making, it is also a call to greater participation. Whose moral authority will govern?

Doing science in a greenhouse

2009-12-21T08:03:00.000-08:00

The recent furor surrounding the hacked e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University has died down a good bit, but the effects of it will reverberate for a long time The e-mails reveal a good bit of small-minded belligerence toward some scientists whose views depart from the consensus position, and speak of excluding some of their work. The director of CRU, Phil Jones, has stepped down pending an investigation of the episode. Pennsylvania State University said it would review the work of Michael Mann, a faculty member cited prominently in the e-mail messages, to assure that it meets proper academic standards. Climate change skeptics have seized upon the disclosures as demonstration of what they have been saying all along, that the science behind the claimed anthropogenic changes to climate is dubious at best. Republicans in Congress are calling for investigations into the work of US scientists any way connected, inasmuch as they are likely to be supported by federal funds.

What can this episode teach us about the nature of scientific authority? Clearly the authority of many scientists identified in the e-mails has been substantially weakened, and, by association, that of the climate science community more generally. Analysis of this particular case can help us understand more clearly the boundaries between science and other social sectors, and point to how scientists should behave to sustain science’s proper societal roles (See Steven Shapin’s excellent essay on this subject, and the discussion in Imperfect Oracle).

Michael Gerson wrote in the Washington Post on December 11 about the melding of science and politics. In the interests of advancing the case for urgent responses to the threats represented by climate change, some prominent climate scientists “..appear to exaggerate their public certainty on disputed issues, shade the presentation of information for political effect, tamper with the peer-review process, resist reasonable requests for supporting data ..” He speaks of the insularity of the climate science community: “Climate scientists are clearly accustomed to deference. Theirs is a community coddled by global elites, extensively funded by governments, celebrated by Hollywood and honored with international prizes. But outside the Copenhagen bubble, the field of climate science is deep in a crisis of professional credibility, which many scientists seem too insular to recognize.” Gerson is not a climate change skeptic. His concern is that scientific objectivity seems to have been compromised by a drive for political and economic change: “But without trust in disinterested, scientific judgments on climate, most non-scientists will resist costly, speculative, legislative actions. When the experts become advocates, no one believes the experts or listens to the advocates.” He concludes that the climate scientists involved in the episode have diminished the authority of science more effectively than anyone else could have.

But Gerson’s position borders on saying that scientists’ expert authority is compromised whenever they move beyond the boundaries of their expert, or epistemic, authority to argue for what should be done in a given situation, as opposed to what is simply the case. In fact, there is a hierarchy of positions involved. At the first level the scientist is an expert, and exercises epistemic authority by reporting as objectively as possible on the scientific results. In the present case, climate scientists might offer expert opinions on the potential for climate change based on vast amounts of data accumulated on various aspects of the climate, and with the aid of extensively tested computer modeling of what future climate will look like given particular scenarios of fossil fuel use. If those opinions are a realistic representation of what the science community holds to be the case, we have a straightforward example of the exercise of epistemic authority. Beyond this a scientist can exercise moral authority, by moving beyond offering an expert scientific opinion to advise that a particular course of action be taken; in the present instance, to advise that certain policies should be established to mitigate the harmful effects of climate change. This effort to exercise moral authority presupposes the epistemic authority of the scientist. The scientist’s expertise plays a role, but in the broadest sense of making a moral judgment the scientist is no better positioned than anyone else in arguing for what actions should or should not be taken. A non-scientist acquainted with the results of the scientific studies might argue that, assuming a doubling of the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere will result in an increase in the Earth’s surface temperature sufficient to cause much human travail, we should stop burning fossil fuels quickly as possible. In advancing the same argument, a climate scientist's view should not count for more than the non-scientist’s, since both are premised on the same scientific considerations. It's not that the scientist’s expert authority has been weakened, it is simply not the driving influence; in making the moral judgment the science is taken as a given, equally available to both scientist and non-scientist. Beyond this, the scientist and non-scientist alike can move to active advocacy in the public domain for the particular actions that were advised in the exercise of moral authority. In moving into this kind of advocacy, the scientist surrenders her credentials as a scientist; those have already been cashed out.

This of course all seems quite reasonable in the abstract, but when the topic is as huge, urgent and plagued with manifold complexities as climate change, distinctions become blurred. The differences between these different stances with respect to an issue of such wide social importance are not sufficiently appreciated, particularly by scientists. There is nothing inherently wrong in scientists getting caught up in political advocacy for causes that grow out of their scientific work. When they do so, however, they must reconcile themselves to the loss of much of their scientific expert and moral authority. When the arguments are flying back and forth as to what should be done, advocacy for particular courses of action is already premised on knowledge that is taken as a given. If the scientific basis for the argument is contested, we are back at the stage of shoring up expert authority. In the case of climate change, Senator James Inhofe, Glenn Beck and their ilk keep wanting to return the argument to that first stage. It has been tempting for climate scientists to depart from norms of objectivity and disinterestedness in the interest of protecting and enhancing their epistemic authority. But doing so has proven embarrassing for some, and damaging for science’s image as a reliable, trustworthy source of knowledge. Disagreements within the climate science community over data interpretations, adequacy of the models and the reality of human effects on climate are being thrashed out in a glass house. A lot of people are watching; science’s epistemic authority is being determined by what non-scientists can see of how science moves toward increasingly reliable knowledge. Climate scientists can help keep the focus where it should be by not providing further unfortunate diversions.

The costs of fossil energy

2009-12-12T09:20:00.000-08:00

We’ve known for a long time that the energy we need to keep society running costs us more than just the market price. There is also the price of repairing damage wreaked upon the environment and collateral impairments to human health. Think, for example of coal, the largest single source of energy for generation of electrical power. Coal mining typically makes a sorry mess of the environment. To get at the coal the terrain is ripped up, so pristine countryside is denuded. The residues left exposed to the weather leach out chemicals that change the acidities of streams and lakes, killing fish, often poisoning wildlife and rendering the water unfit for human consumption. As though that were not damage enough, the coal that is combusted in the power plants is contaminated with trace metals such as mercury. These find their way into the gas plumes from the plants to create health problems for those who live within a large radius. The sulfur in the coal is emitted as sulfur dioxide, which adds to the acidity of the atmosphere and is a health hazard in its own right. But the coal industry is very powerful; it can afford ads that reassure you that we are a safer and more prosperous nation because we can rely on coal as our very own energy source.

We are soothed even more by ads that claim that natural gas is a huge, clean source of energy, one that will serve us well for decades to come. It certainly burns more cleanly than coal, and may add less greenhouse gas to the environment than coal per unit of derived energy. But there seems always to be a dark side to each of these energy types. A recent article in the New York Times reinforces what we have been learning from other sources: that new technologies for freeing up natural gas in shale formations, called hydraulic fracturing, cause disturbances to the underlying strata that end up compromising water supplies vital to those who live in the environs. It can get pretty bad; for example, wells that are sufficiently contaminated with methane that they explode on contact with an igniting source. Furthermore, the water is also polluted with toxic chemicals used in the fracturing process.

Well, then, how about those tar sands up in Alberta, a huge and largely untapped source of fossil fuel energy? To learn more about the costs, environmental and otherwise, of extracting useful energy from the sands, read Elizabeth Kolbert’s 2007 report in the New Yorker magazine. What is being done to the environment in that quest for yet another source of fossil energy can make one ill. I could go on with more stories of our desperate quest for fossil fuels, such as deep drilling on the ocean floor; incredible technologies employed in ever riskier attempts to obtain fossil fuels. Every success, however limited, and at whatever price in terms of human health and environmental damage, helps lull us into thinking that we needn’t make special efforts to develop alternative sources of energy – solar, wind, new battery technologies, and yes, nuclear energy - that hold the promise of releasing us from our dependence on fossil fuels.

All of this is bears on the intense discussions presently being waged over the reality and extent of climate change. As Thomas Friedman recently pointed out, the details of the climate change debate are really not material to the larger issue of making ourselves less dependent on fossil fuels for the health of our economy and the prospects for a more livable world. Humankind has somehow to negotiate a very difficult transition in the decades ahead: creating a world society that is more balanced in terms of living standards, living more efficiently in terms of resource utilization, and bringing the human population to equilibrium at a number that the planet can sustain. Shouldn’t we in the United States be leading the way?

Science with its pants down

2009-12-05T14:55:00.000-08:00

Because the consequences of a human contribution to climate change are huge, scientific research that could shed light on this question is very important, and has risen to high visibility all over the world. Thus it has come to pass that a scandal of sorts in the world of climate science, referred to by some as “climategate”, has drawn a lot of attention.

I need not rehearse here the saga of the past couple of decades of intense debate over the question of whether humans are causing climate change. The implications for the workings of modern society are enormous. If it were the case that fossil fuel emissions are causing an increase in the temperature of the planet, and if that increase has the potential to cause disruption of society at many levels, a world-wide effort to mitigate that increase would be called for. We have had a succession of reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), each presumably updating and improving upon its predecessor, that point to a likely increase in global temperature over the next 50 to 100 years. The predictions point to alarming changes in weather pattern s, and a potentially disastrous rise in sea level, along with a host of other changes that would require great adjustments in human society. So we are coming up to the Copenhagan conference, at which the nations of the world are once again under great moral pressure to respond to this threat. The costs of effective mitigation will run into the trillions of dollars.

On November 20 some files and e-mails originating in the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University were made available publicly, by whom or by what means I don’t know. For those who have read the files and dug into some of the background, what they reveal is not a pretty story. Meagan McCardle summarized some of her conclusions and reactions in Atlantic magazine on December 1. What emerges from the discussions of this episode is that influential climate scientists at this very prominent voice of expertise on climate change appear to have behaved badly in several respects. They exercised undue power over the peer review process on papers dealing with climate change, and thus were able to stifle work that did not meet their well baked-in ideas of what is happening in the field. Here is a quote from one of the e-mails uncovered:
“I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !”

An even more serious problem has to do with the quality of much of the historical data on which the modeling studies depend. Climate models are tested in part by their capacity to produce temperature and other trends that match the historical data. It now emerges that the original data sets are nowhere to be found! The problem is that many of the older data have been adjusted for one reason or another over the years, by persons unknown, and for reasons that were not well documented. Much of the original computer code is formatted in computer languages no longer in use, and backing out the original data is maddeningly difficult if not impossible. These data are the source of what eventually becomes an estimate of the global temperature. So we have the situation that the historical record of the planet’s temperature is now in disarray, and may not even exist!

This episode is very distressing to me as it is to all who want to see science respected as a reliable and truthful source of knowledge of the world. I’ve written in Imperfect Oracle of the ingredients that make for science’s epistemic authority. I won’t recite all that here, but clearly truthfulness and a disinterested approach to one’s work are key ingredients. However, aside from what appear to be serious lapses from professional ethical standards, something else about this case strikes me as especially interesting. The reactions to this story would have one imagine that that original historical record of the global temperature is somehow sort of gold-plated scientific data, the true story of the planet’s temperature over the past 150 years. I believe that to be false. At best, much of that record is quite unreliable and subject to uncertainties that are much larger than the variations that are being talked about.

I wrote about the concept of global temperature in a book published in 2003, Making Truth: Metaphor in Science, (see pages 163-165). As I pointed out, there is no physical thing that corresponds to the global surface temperature, or at least there has not been to this point. Measuring the earth’s temperature is not like sticking a thermometer under the tongue and getting a measurement that is satisfactorily representative of the temperature regime throughout the entire body. When the tongue thermometer registers a change of a degree or two from the normal, the fact of that temperature change is evident in the way the person feels: feverish. There is no analog to the under-the-tongue thermometer in measuring the surface temperature of the planet. Until the advent of satellite measurements which only now are becoming well enough standardized to serve as a reliable measure, climatologists relied upon a patchwork of measurements non-uniformly covering the planet’s surface, many of them individually unreliable, which was then somehow put together to give a number we call the global temperature. In truth, it is a sad fact that this idea of a reliable global temperature has been sold by climatologists with scarcely any acknowledgement of how sketchy it really is.

It is important to note that the absence of a reliable historical record of the planet’s surface temperature does not render impotent the idea that the planet is warming. Suppose you had an unreliable thermometer for measuring your body temperature. Even if the device did not give you a reliable measurement, you would know if you had a significant fever, right? In the same way, it is evident from what we see occurring in nature that the planet is growing warmer: disappearing arctic ice, glacial melting, shifts in weather patterns that clearly betoken warming in both hemispheres. The big issue, however, is whether and to what degree this warming is due to human activity. This is where climate modeling comes in. If they are sufficiently complete and self-consistent, the very large, complex computational programs that the climatologists have produced should be able to tell us how much change in surface temperature could be accounted for by greenhouse gases added by human activity. But are the models sufficiently realistic ? One way to test this is to see whether they reproduce historical climate change. Also, though I am unsure about this point, the programs may need the historical data for some aspects of the computations. But if we don’t have a reliable, sufficiently complete historical record…well, climate science has a credibility problem.

This episode has dealt a blow to science’s epistemic authority, and to its moral authority as well.

Update on Nebraska

2009-11-25T10:47:00.000-08:00

In my most recent blog I wrote about the possibility that the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska might vote in a policy that would place severe restrictions on the range of embryonic stem cell research that could be conducted within the university. According to a news item published on November 25 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the board did not have sufficient votes to carry the policy forward:

“University of Nebraska Votes Against Changing Policies on Stem Cell Research. The University of Nebraska's Board of Regents voted against changing its existing policy governing research on embryonic stem cells, a move that will allow the university to continue research on stem cell lines in accordance with the new NIH guidelines. A resolution was proposed that would have restricted the campus policy to allow only research on the cell lines that were approved under the 2001 policy issued by former President Bush. The eight-member Board voted 4-4, and since a majority of votes is required to pass a resolution, the proposed change was defeated. AAAS issued a letter to the University's President and Board of Regents emphasizing its support for human embryonic stem cell research conducted with appropriate ethical guidelines.”

The Board's decision is, I suppose, something of a victory, but the closeness of the vote demonstrates how divided the Board was on the matter. I think of it as more of a reprieve than a victory. Those who would like to force their constructions of what is right and wrong on the rest of us will not give up on their efforts, not in Nebraska or elsewhere. The only defense for those who value intellectual freedom, and an open, pluralistic society in which to practice it, is to keep working on communicating their core values as vigorously as possible. If we want free choice within reasonable societally accepted boundaries, there is no real alternative to pushing back against extremism while engaging with others who may have differing viewpoints but seek a satisfying framework for making social policy.

Religion and Scientific Autonomy

2009-11-20T12:24:00.000-08:00

When we determine whether we can trust someone, a prime consideration is whether that person is independent of external influences that might affect judgment or testimony. In a similar way, a core element in science’s claim to be a socially productive source of knowledge of the natural world is that it has autonomy . In science autonomy operates at different levels, from the freedom of the individual scientist to choose research goals and methods of pursuing them to the independence of the scientific establishment as a whole from interference from government or other powerful influence groups. This does not mean that there are no constraints on scientists. A host of laws and norms of good practice operate to prohibit certain kinds of research; for example, research with the potential for harming human subjects, or that would endanger anyone in the vicinity of a research facility. These are motivated by moral and ethical standards of the broadest kind, the same sorts of constraints that apply to people and organizations generally.

As I have explained in the book Imperfect Oracle, science frequently comes into conflict with other social sectors because it challenges older traditional understandings. These conflicts are nowhere more evident than in the United States, in science’s contentious encounters with conservative Christian groups. Here the issue that comes to the fore is whether certain kinds of research should be constrained because they are deemed contrary to the religious dogmas of a particular group of people. One of the hot topics over the past several years has been embryonic stem cell research. Christian conservatives, in concert with the Catholic Church, have campaigned against the use of embryonic stem cells, whatever the source from which they have been obtained, on the grounds that such cells literally constitute a human life, and their destruction would be a violation of God’s law.

The latest chapter in this seemingly endless saga is centered in Nebraska, where the extreme right-to-lifers have taken a new tack: get opponents of embryonic stem cell research elected to the University’s board of regents. A majority of such board members there could pass a ruling that restricts research on embryonic stem cells to the limited list approved years ago by President George W. Bush. The policies related to stem cell research were greatly liberalized by the Obama administration in Executive Order 13505. Thus the policy that may be put into place by the Board of Regents would move the University of Nebraska back to the dark ages of stem cell research. Actually, no embryos would be destroyed at the University of Nebraska in any case; cell lines that are, or would be, used were developed elsewhere and copied cells would be employed. That, however, still causes problems for those who advocate forbidding research with such materials.

The continuing controversy over the use of stem cells has led to formation of such organizations as The Nebraska Coalition for Ethical Research. These people claim not to be opposed to science, or even to stem cell research; they just want it done on their terms. They are free with their advice that scientists simply focus on adult stem cells. They point to recent work that has shown that adult stem cells can be reprogrammed so that they mimic the properties of embryonic stem cells. But what qualifications do these people have for advising scientists on how best to carry out their work? Reprogramming of adult stem cells is in its infancy, and there are many impediments to its general application. There is no assurance that it will ever constitute a substitute for work with embryonic stem cells. Even setting that aside, however, the point is that science cannot operate effectively when it is confined by an entity outside science on grounds that have nothing to do with the scientific merits of the work.

Science’s autonomy, its capacity to move in directions dictated by scientific considerations, is constrained in this and related instances because one particular social group frames the work in its own extra-scientific terms, and wants to hold the rest of society hostage to its judgments. The public seems dismayingly willing to tolerate such extremism. I hope, however, that it will become increasingly evident that most of us are the losers when the extremists win; things might then change. Society is not well-served by outmoded ways of thinking based on religious doctrines tailored by church authorities in other eras for their own dubious reasons. One does not have to become an atheist or agnostic to conclude that organized religion has, for the most part, become a bad thing for society. Like other addictions, however, it seems to be a hard habit to break.

Weather, Climate and Global Warming

2009-11-15T07:37:00.000-08:00

In my most recent blog I made mention of the common fallacy of drawing conclusions about the reality of global climate change from observations of local weather. Climate change denialists like to bring up the cold, wet summer or an unusually heavy snowfall during winter as evidence against global warming. But, as I pointed out, weather and climate must be understood differently. Weather is highly changeable on a day-to-day basis. Climate can also vary, but it does so on much longer time scales. It is quite possible that in a given year some large scale measure of climate, such as hurricane intensity, or rainfall over a large area, will move in opposition to a longer scale trend. But for the most part, changes occurring over a period of time such as a year will tend to show behavior that follows the long term trends.

I was therefore pleased to see the piece in this Sunday’s New York Times by Andrew Revkin that deals with the trends in record high and low temperatures across the United States over recent time. The data illustrate nicely that while record highs and lows continue to occur, the number of record high temperatures is increasing year by year, whereas the number of record lows is decreasing. The video in the piece, by Gerald Meehl, provides a nice explanation of what is going on.

Changing minds about climate change

2009-11-09T19:05:00.000-08:00

One scientific question that has relevance for every person on the planet is whether the global climate is changing in response to human activities. The major causative agents of the change, if indeed there is change, are the so-called greenhouse gases. Some of them, such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, are naturally occurring components of the atmosphere, but humans have caused their concentrations to increase greatly. Other greenhouse gases are substance that humans have learned to make and use for various purposes. These include the so-called chlorofluorocarbons and hydrofluorocarbons.

Not everyone is convinced that human activities are the driving force for some of the climate changes we have been seeing in recent years, or that the scientific models for climate reliably predict what may happen in the future if we continue to consume fossil fuels and add increasing amounts of other greenhouse gases such as methane to the atmosphere. In one sense this is not entirely surprising, because climate is not a well-defined entity, not easily described in terms of just a few critical measurements. Weather, something that happens at the local level, and climate, which extends over large regions and ultimately to the entire planet, are easily confused in many peoples’ minds. Although seasonal weather changes from one year to the next are not reliable indicators of climate change, they are frequently brought into discussions as though they were. Thus, a cold spring in the northwestern states of the United States are taken by many as evidence that global warming is not occurring. It seems that nearly everyone is an expert of some sort on climate. Political entertainers such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, who have not a shred of expertise, don’t hesitate to declare that global warming is a massive hoax perpetrated by an establishment that wants to use it as a pretext for sinister incursions into private rights and freedoms.

This is a big topic, because if climate changes are occurring as a result of human activities to date, those changes will accelerate greatly over the next few decades as more and more greenhouse gases are pumped into the atmosphere. I need not rehearse here again, as I have in earlier blogs, the vast range of studies performed by scientists working in many different disciplines, and in a host of environments all over the planet, to attempt to learn about past climates and the changes occurring now in our own climate. Those studies have all gone into formation of the successive reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the information collected there is continually updated as new evidence is produced. All of this scientific work, and the inferences drawn from it by the best minds working in all the areas of science related to climate change, have led to the conclusion that the climate is indeed changing as a result of human activities, and that the changes are accelerating. For example, the Greenland ice mass is decreasing; the latest evidence is that the loss is accelerating.

This past March, a group of about 2000 climate scientists gathered in Copenhagen to assess the current views on climate change. Because the group was not brought together under the auspices of the IPCC or any other single governmental agency, participating scientists were more free to offer frank appraisals and prescriptive statements. Many factors that bode ill for our prospects were either not considered in the IPCC report or were very conservatively estimated. For example, it is only now becoming evident that permafrost holds vast amounts of carbon that is becoming “unlocked” as the permafrost warms. The upshot is that the prospects look worse than the projections of the IPCC would lead one to expect.

The evidence for global warming and the role of human activities in the process, is at this point overwhelming. One way of putting this is that there is a strong consensus in the scientific community on these matters, of the same sort that exists with respect to many widely held bodies of evidence in chemistry, physics, genetics, and other branches of science. The National Academies of Science have produced a very nice video, America’s Climate Choices, that reveals the degree of consensus that obtains in the scientific world, and describes the organization of groups of experts that are being convened to assist the government in addressing the challenges that lie ahead. I urge you to watch this, to sense how deep and widely felt are the views of outstanding scientists and other citizens on this matter. Yet there are scientists, mostly without credentials in any of the relevant areas of science, and lacking acceptable scientific evidence that contravenes the current understanding, who continue to reject the consensual scientific position. Some seem to think it is a conspiracy of some kind, an attempt to somehow put something over on society. I can understand how some politicians, entertainers, entrenched interest groups such as those representing certain segments of the energy industry and the like, might find it convenient to resist the existing scientific evidence, but what is going on in the heads of deniers who have a supposedly scientific training? It must have to do with a deep-seated unease with the implications of greater governmental oversight as society comes to grip with the steps that must be be taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and at the same time begin to deal with mitigating global warming effects.

In a letter published in a recent issue of Chemical and Engineering News a writer reluctantly seems to agree that Earth’s climate is getting warmer, though he cites the low spring temperatures in the northeast as evidence that might contradict the global warming hypothesis (!). But he thinks that “blaming it (global warming) on human activities seems to be speculative.” What blows my mind is that this person can’t seem to imagine that the virtual army of scientists working on this problem would not have held this very question at the fore in all their work! What does that say about this person’s understanding of how science works? Apparently the means by which science establishes its epistemic authority, within the scientific community and outside it, is not clear to some scientists. We have a long way to go.

Evolution: theory or fact?

2009-10-28T15:22:00.000-07:00

In writing Imperfect Oracle, which deals with how science exercises influence, or fails to do so, in contemporary society, I was struck many times by the challenges science faces in communicating its outlook. It is widely understood that communication is critical in determining science’s place in society. Much has been written on how scientists and the science establishment generally need to do better than they have done. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) does a great deal at its annual meeting to present thoughtful commentary on important issues that affect society at large. This is but one venue, and it has limited reach into most peoples’ consciousness. One hopes that the program and others like it, such as the national meetings of the American Chemical Society, will be noticed and reported on by those who shape the content of internet, TV, cable and print media. Even when science content appears on these outlets, however, not much insight into how scientists actually learn about the world, or how their work leads to new scientific knowledge, goes with it.

As I show in the book, such insight is essential to establishing science’s authority when there is an inconsistency between what science has to say on some topic and what people hold as part of their core cultural understandings. An example came up this past weekend. Nicholas Wade has written a review of Richard Dawkins’s new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, in which he argues that Dawkins failed to appreciate the distinction between a theory and scientific fact in talking about the status of evolution. Those who wish to dismiss evolution as “just a theory” employ the notion of a theory as something supported by evidence but inescapably incomplete and always subject to refutation at some level. This view in varying degrees has dominated much of the philosophy of science for decades. Dawkins will have none of that; for him evolution is a “fact in the same sense as it is a fact that Paris is in the Northern Hemisphere.” Wade suggests a way of thinking about evolution that avoids Dawkins’s dogmatic stance, but in doing so he moves to an account that philosophers of science are likely to find wanting. Indeed, in the Letters section of the following week’s issue of the Review of Books, the philosopher of science Philip Kitcher wrote to defend Dawkins. He argues that evolution is a theory because it is a general systematic explanation, and because it accounts for such a vast amount of relevant experimental data “it may be accepted without debate.”
Perhaps, then evolution is a “fact” in the same sense as Paris’s location. But this rather facile response bothers me. The term “evolution” has meaning at many levels. There is the general theory grounded in Darwin’s original idea that organisms have evolved through time. Evolution in that sense can be traced in a paleontological record so extensive and self-consistent that, as Kitcher suggests, there is really no room for reasonable doubt. At the same time, evolution is a vital part of modern biology, and new insights relating to it are reported frequently. New technologies in biology have given rise to experiments that have required new interpretations of what “evolution” means in particular cases. Think, for example, of the contributions from molecular phylogenetics, which relates organisms in terms of the similarities in their DNAs. In other words, evolution is not a dead science, and in this sense it does not have the status of accepted fact. We need to be careful not to muddle our notions of what we mean by theory in a vain effort to make “evolution” impregnable to the objections of the congenitally unconvinced.

The truth is that arguments with creationists and others who fail to accept the claims of modern science will not be settled for the great audience of uncommitted nonscientists when one side or the other lands a telling blow. Daniel Dennett, in his letter preceding Kitcher’s in the Review of Books, wonders how the judge’s decision in the famous Dover, Pa. case of a few years ago can have failed to convince The Times that the intelligent design campaign is a hoax unworthy of any news space. He must be aware that within a week or so of the Dover decision the Discovery Institute had issued a book-length rebuttal. It is altogether like swatting flies; one of course should swat, but not really expect flies to disappear. The Times is a newspaper, not an arbiter of science wars. What is at issue here is how science can establish its epistemic and moral authority in society outside the scientific community. How can it bring people to the point of openly considering what science has to tell us about the world when its findings conflict with settled cultural biases and cognitive leanings? Science has not done well at engaging people in terms that have meaning for them. In his fine little book, The Culture of Education, Jerome Bruner wrote about what we need to do to equip people for participation in the full range of the culture in which they live. Science must learn how to be part of that challenging educational project in ways that it has not been in the past. As I have explained in Imperfect Oracle, it has a lot of difficult, uphill work to do.

Uncertain science

2009-09-11T11:36:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it is impossible for science to produce certain knowledge about matters upon which we would dearly love to have definite answers. Consider the challenge that the Environmental Protection Agency faces in setting exposure limits in water supplies for substances known or strongly suspected of being carcinogenic . The concentrations of such substances in a water supply are typically very low, in the parts per million range. Still, such low levels could be harmful, at least to a fraction of people. We can’t get all of the carcinogen out of the water, but we could reduce its concentration at some cost. At what level of concentration would a particular carcinogen be expected to cause no more than a certain very low level of added cancer, and what would it cost to get to that level? Toxicologists can’t do useful experiments on test animals with the water as it is found, because at the low concentrations of pollutant, it would take a huge number of test animals to produce a statistically meaningful result. Instead, what is done is to use much higher concentrations of the pollutant in the laboratory, much greater than would ever occur in the natural situation, with a manageable populations of animals. Various concentrations of the carcinogen are used with groups of test animals, and the incidence of excess cancers is monitored after a period of using those levels. A graph is then constructed of excess cancers vs. the concentration used. We might then get the red data points, as shown in the figure above.

All the investigator sees of course are the red data points: they show that the more carcinogen, the more cancers. But what happens when we extrapolate backward, into the region of very low concentrations typical of natural water? The so-called linear dose-response assumption is that the data would fall along the straight line shown. But is it a good approximation to what happens at those low concentrations? Many scientists believe that the model is not a good one, and there are cases where it is known to be wrong. One could argue that the body has mechanisms for dealing with very low concentrations of carcinogens and that at some low level a carcinogen is not a threat at all. The actual response thus might be more like the curved line shown. This is called the threshold model.

To test the model on a specific case, George S. Bailey and colleagues at Oregon State University studied the effects of extremely low dosages of a known carcinogen, dibenzo[a,l]pyrene on more than 40,000 rainbow trout. With such a large population of fish, small excess cancer levels could be detected. These studies extended the studies of this compound to concentrations a thousand times lower than had been done before. The results showed that the linear dose response method greatly overestimates the cancer risk from this compound at these low concentration levels, by a factor of between 500 and 1,500. In other words, their data are consistent with the threshold model; their data would fall somewhere around the blue line in the graph (however, my drawing is just an approximation, not an accurate representation of the fish study). While this study applies for just this one substance and its effect on one species of fish it is important, because it shows that the linear dose-response model can greatly overestimate the dangers associated with very low concentrations of known carcinogens or other toxic substances. This study thus is significant for those in the EPA responsible for setting exposure limits.

Most people long for certainty in the affairs of their lives. They wish assurance that their jobs are secure for the foreseeable future, that their children are safe at school, that their spouse or significant other is faithful to agreements they have made. Yet we know that many aspects of life are uncertain. We’re unsure of the future of the housing market, of the impacts of climate change, of – well, of an awful lot of things! So we look for pillars of certainty, things that we know are true and will stay true regardless. The foundational documents of governance, such as the Constitution; religious dogma; fundamental scientific laws – all these promise certainty of a kind in particular domains of our concerns. Our reliance on these certainties is often so deep-seated that we instinctively react against evidence that they may not be as immutable as we have been led to believe.

This nearly universal need for certainty poses a continuing challenge for science in its attempts to inform the society outside the scientific community about how the world is. A great many ideas, theories and laws are very widely accepted in science and taken for all practical purposes to be true. Many of these form the basis of the technologies that undergird our modern life. If what science has to say about the operations of lasers were not true, how could they be effective in the multiple uses made of them, from removal of cataracts to reading the contents of CD’s and DVD’s? If very complex theories of combustion and turbulent gas flow were not very reliable descriptions of how airline jet fuel burns and propels a jet aircraft, how likely is it that jet aircraft would ever get off the ground? These examples and thousands of others like it promote the notion that science is a fountain of rigorously true statements and ideas. Yet a great deal that concerns scientists in the course of their everyday work , and that necessarily influences opinions they must deliver on matters consequential to the public good, is clouded by uncertainty. Just how much of a particular carcinogen can we have in our water supply before it constitutes a significant health risk? Scientists can attempt to narrow the range of uncertainty but there is no such thing as a single, true answer.

Scientific witness in the courtroom

2009-09-05T10:38:00.000-07:00

This past June the U.S. Supreme court issued a decision with fascinating ramifications for the notion of scientific authority. They ruled that reports from crime laboratories may not be used at trial against a criminal defendant unless the analysts responsible for creating the data are present to give testimony and bear cross-examination. This decision is an interpretation of the Sixth Amendment, which provides in part that an accused has the right “to be confronted with the witnesses against him. “

The case brought before the court arose from the conviction of Luis E. Melendez-Dias on cocaine trafficking charges. Part of the evidence against him was a laboratory report stating that bags of white powder allegedly belonging to Melendez-Dias contained cocaine. The lab report was submitted by prosecutors with an analyst’s certificate, but no analyst appeared to give testimony.

Adam Liptak, reporting in the New York Times on the court decision, notes the unusual way in which the court divided on the 5-to-4 decision. With the majority were Justices Scalia, Thomas, Stevens, Souter and Ginsburg. Dissenting were Justice Kennedy who wrote vigorously for the dissenters; Roberts, Alito and Breyer. This was no ordinary cleavage along conservative/liberal lines! Scalia, writing for the majority, took the view that defendants had the same right to confront adverse expert testimony as they enjoy with respect to any other form of testimony. Kennedy, in dissent, pointed to the huge disruptions that might occur in court cases if every laboratory report needed to be brought to the court by a bona fide representative of the laboratory making the report; that is, a real analyst who could as needed provide expert background testimony. However, according to Jeffrey L. Fisher, a law professor at Stanford, who represented Mr. Melendez-Dias, about a third of states already follow procedures that comply with the new decision.

The court’s decision raises several questions that are of importance for science’s relationship with society. The first level at which to approach this is to ask whether there is a matter here at all of science’s epistemic, or expert, authority. Justice Scalia, in his majority opinion wrote that the Constitution would require allowing defendants to confront witnesses even if “all analysts always possessed the scientific acumen of Mme. Curie and the veracity of Mother Teresa.” In other words, even assuming that the crime lab results are of the highest scientific quality, and that the reporter is a person of impeccable moral standards, the Constitution requires that the defendant have the opportunity to confront the witness. But of course not all crime lab personnel are fully competent, free from making errors of various kinds, or always above suspicion of reporting results tilted toward the prosecution’s case. In these respects, cross examination of a witness reporting forensic results is of a kind with cross examination of any other witness. It really doesn’t go to the question of whether the scientific principles and applied technology that undergird the reported results are sound and relevant to the evidence being presented. Nor does it cover the question of whether the laboratory has obtained the results through full and competent observance of all the required protocols.

There is plenty of reason to be concerned regarding the quality and veracity of much forensic evidence. The National Academies of Science in February of this year issued a report on the state of forensic science in the US, and on what steps might be taken to strengthen it. Quoting from the report’s executive summary, “…in some cases, substantive information and testimony based on faulty forensic science analyses may have contributed to wrongful convictions of innocent people. This fact has demonstrated the potential danger of giving undue weight to evidence and testimony derived from imperfect testing and analysis. Moreover, imprecise or exaggerated expert testimony has sometimes contributed to the admission of erroneous or misleading evidence.” Defense counsel thus may have plenty of grounds for questioning the technical witness that brings forth the forensic evidence. It may be a good strategy to question the basic scientific assumptions underlying the methods employed. On the other hand, when the matter at hand is fairly simple, raising too many questions can be a poor strategy in that it merely serves to call attention to the results. In any event, the defense now possesses a power it had not previously had. Justice Kennedy and the other dissenting justices seem to be very concerned about cases where the analyst may not be available, or where over the passage of time the analyst may have retired, changed jobs and so forth. These are legitimate concerns, but they seem to me to pale in comparison with the prospect of defendants facing a written laboratory report without any means of cross examining the person or persons responsible for the analyses.

It is not always easy to keep the non-scientific world attuned to the notion that the doing of science, even at the level of often mundane analysis of forensic materials, is a human activity. Science is not really about objective truth in some abstract and disembodied sense. It is about kinds of truth found in the course of looking at aspects of the world with a certain kind of eye, with a certain ethic of disinterestedness. That sort of work is done by humans. Even given the best of intentions, errors may be committed, omissions may occur. When scientists report to the larger society on what they have done they should not be perceived as oracles, presenting something drafted by Gods. It is one of science’s shortcomings that is has not engaged the larger society as fully as it should, that science is not seen as the product of human endeavor. Yes, the social structure of science does go a long way toward weeding out errors and falsifications during the formation of new knowledge, but in the day-to-day applications of science, as in a forensic laboratory, human nature is at work. When someone’s future may hang on the outcome of courtroom deliberations, the human who has generated scientific evidence that bears on the case should be there to testify to it.

Competition and war metaphors in science

2009-08-30T12:21:00.000-07:00

I have long been interested in the roles of metaphor in science, and find it interesting to note the ways in which metaphors are employed by those actively pursuing scientific research. The subject is of continuing interest, in part because the particular metaphors used as explanatory devices color the nature of the interpretations of observations, and help to shape the directions in which science moves. Several years ago Matthew Chew and Manfred Laubichler published a paper in Science dealing with the sorts of metaphors used in ecological research. They pointed to the pervasive use of war and conflict metaphors in describing ecological dynamics involving introduced species. They criticized the heavy use of metaphors of human conflict because it imparts a strong bias to scientific discussions. To quote from a story on their paper, "In this particular context it is especially interesting that one finds almost no references to 'natural allies' in the literature, yet symbiosis is also a very common ecological phenomenon. Have we become so fixated on war, that we can only perceive nature through that lens?"

I don’t buy fully into Chew and Laubichler’s concerns; there is a certain moralistic tone to them that I think distracts from the larger question of how metaphors are chosen by scientists. Nonetheless, they and others who have written on this theme have a point. There is a general concern in many quarters that the use of war and conflict metaphors engenders still more of the same usage by other workers in that field. This is a question that should yield to empirical analysis, and we should ask whether that is the case. But the prevalence of such metaphors is more a commentary on societal values and preoccupations than the result of idiosyncratic choices by scientists. What we learn from conceptual metaphor theory is that scientists employ conceptual metaphors that are deeply grounded in their basic experiences in the physical and social worlds. If they see much of what occurs in their lives in the domains of politics, government, religion, law or what have you, in terms of conflicts and oppositions, they are bound to employ conceptual frameworks associated with conflicts and oppositions in their attempts to interpret what they see in nature, whether in field studies of ecological systems or microscopic and molecular studies of bacterial colonies and cells. (As an aside, I find it quite mysterious that even today, about 30 years after the appearance of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s book on conceptual metaphor theory, and much subsequent work by them and many other workers, there is not a more general appreciation of its explanatory power and consistency.)

Aside from the points I have made above about the pervasive use of competition and war metaphors , there is interesting food for thought regarding the extent to which some of these metaphors are, or could be, taken literally. In his book, “Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell”, Dennis Bray outlines the view that single cells are capable of possessing features we ascribe to conscious beings, such as learning, knowledge and awareness. We talk about cells employing “strategies” to avoid toxins, of how cells can “learn” to move along chemical gradients, to “pursue” swimming prey. In using such teleological descriptions of what we see cells do, scientists are mapping their understandings of what they experience in the macro world they live in onto what they “see”, under the microscope if you will. We find these kinds of mappings from one domain to the other quite facile, and they can be fruitful in suggesting new directions for experiments, and for relating one aspect of the science to another. But just because these particular social metaphors are so convenient we must not become so bemused by them that we think that the cells literally “think”, or “learn” or “pursue”. Or should we? Perhaps there is a sense in which we just need to enlarge our definitions of these terms. One way of approaching this topic is to try to imagine other metaphorical frameworks that would serve equally well as explanatory devices for what we observe of cellular behavior.

A recent paper in Science by Laura Johnston is concerned with competitive interactions between cells. It epitomizes the strong thread of competition and conflict that forms the basis of much biological interpretation at the cellular level. She begins as follow: “Competition is pervasive at every level of life – in ecology, economics, between countries and states, and in families – and helps to determine order, status and survival. Competition also occurs at the cellular level, where it plays a role in tissue homeostasis, organ size control, and stem cell maintenance.” So we see here the obvious analogy drawn between processes occurring in the macroscopic social world and those occurring at the cellular level. Figure 2 of her paper has labels such as “Losers die” and “Winners engulf losers”. But when we think about the meanings we normally ascribe to “competition”, or to winning and losing, we can see that these do not have literal meaning at the cellular levels. What we conventionally think of as competition is activity driven by higher order cognitive processes, with motivational underpinnings, emotional content and all the rest. Similarly, winning and losing, even staying alive and dying, are processes that involve complex motivational aspects and complex strategies, as well as raw instinct. What can it possibly mean to a cell to be engulfed by other cells? In employing conceptual metaphors of the kind under discussion, we impose our own cognitive impulses on cellular systems that are simply obeying biochemical demands.
I feel sure one could find ways to think about cell colony growth and development other than in terms of competition and conflict, to take this one example. One could talk in terms of decision theory, about spontaneous allocations of roles, about automata behavior – I’m not equipped to make the biological connections, but I feel sure that there are such ways. The conflict and war metaphors are so commonplace because biological scientists find it easy to draw upon those mappings from daily life, not because of something intrinsic in cellular systems. In turn, those to whom communication is directed can be expected to find them intuitively easy to grasp. Thus, they are an important factor in communication within science and in science’s communications with the larger society. We should, however, be thoughtful about this. As I have described in Imperfect Oracle, the language scientists use has an influence on how nonscientists comprehend what science has to say, and on the spirit in which it is received.

Where in the world was Diego Garcia?

2009-08-18T15:06:00.000-07:00

Perhaps I should ask where in the world is Diego Garcia, because at the moment it actually exists - as an atoll in the Pacific ocean about 1,000 miles south of the southern tip of India. It is owned by the United Kingdom; the UK and US jointly operate a large military installation there. The story of how it came to its present ownership and use is interesting, but not what I want to talk about here. Diego Garcia, like many atolls, is not very far above sea level; average elevation on the atoll is about 9 feet. The atoll is one of many concerns of the people at the Pentagon who do long range planning and forecasting, and who need to take into account the likely consequences of global warming.

One of those is a rise in sea level. That the sea level is rising is incontrovertible; but how rapidly and how far? The complexity of the global climate model makes for a lot of uncertainty in this aspect of climate change. What one can say is that processes that produce a rising sea level – for example, loss of the Greenland ice cap - are advancing at rates substantially greater than had been anticipated just a few years ago. Land masses such as Diego Garcia with low elevations are particularly sensitive to a rise in sea level, because weather events and tsunamis push water far up onto the land mass. It is not easy to find shelter on an atoll from even a relatively small tsunami. Maybe in the not too distant future we will ask where Diego Garcia was. So it is no surprise that Pentagon planners are thinking about this little atoll and many other installations, as well as about the social disorders that will surely accompany a rising sea level in poor nations that lie at low elevation, notably Bangladesh. John M. Broder recently reported on this topic in the New York Times. The prospects for future disruptions that will adversely affect national security are evident to many in the Pentagon and to many legislators in congress.

I don’t know whether the comedian Glenn Beck and other denizens of the FoxNews newsroom believe that the sea level is rising, or what the future course of that variable in Earth’s climate may be. They seem not to have any faith in the predictions of the community of climate scientists, as expressed through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the scientific reports of hundreds of scientists. They declare themselves unsatisfied with those conclusions, presumably because it follows that global governmental agreements and actions are needed to forestall even greater changes than will likely occur as a result of greenhouse gas emissions that have already occurred. But the natural world doesn’t know about libertarian inclinations; it just is what it is. So denying science's expert authority out of petulance is not a responsible stance.

Meanwhile Andrew C. Revkin reports, also in the New York Times, that the IPCC is being buffeted by a variety of forces that have had the cumulative effect of weakening its moral authority in matters of climate change policy. Charges of bias and cherry-picking studies, an inability of the panel as the highest level voice of the climate change community to report promptly on the fast-changing research understandings related to climate change, the difficulties in rapidly planning and organizing studies and conferences on specific areas of concern as they arise, the pressures from individual nations that grow out of a requirement that sponsoring governments approve the summary document line by line, all make for an unwieldy aggregate. As Revkin notes, the effect has been that “there is scant evidence that nations are acting on its warnings.”

The history of climate change understanding, and of policies that might or might not grow from the vast array of scientific studies already conducted and continuing, provides powerful examples of the distinction between science’s epistemic and moral authority. There is, of course, a coupling between what society thinks it needs from science in the way of knowledge about particular aspects of the natural world and the wherewithal it provides for that knowledge to be obtained. At present, with the exception of a clutch of climate denialists motivated by everything from blinding religious beliefs to libertarian and ultraconservative sensibilities, science’s epistemic authority regarding climate change in progress and the dominating contributions to that change from human activities is widely if not enthusiastically acknowledged. Its moral authority, however; that is, its ability to gain assent to recommendations about what needs to be done to mitigate anthropogenic contributions, is not strong.

Science is not generally very effective in exercising moral authority, for many reasons. One of them is just the difficulty of selling people on making a sacrifice today for a potential gain that is off in the future. But beyond that, science’s place in modern society is not strongly grounded in a cultural acceptance of it as a beneficent, reliable source of knowledge and good advice. I’ve traced the historical and contemporary cultural reasons for this in imperfect Oracle, and point to what science must do to establish a stronger cultural authority in society. There is much work to be done.

Can Jim save the world?

2009-08-12T13:38:00.000-07:00

James Hansen is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan. The research mission of the Institute is to study global climate change. Hansen has been director since 1981. He was among the first climate scientists to call attention to the climatic consequences of increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere, and he is widely regarded in the climate science community as one of the outstanding figures in the field. He collaborates widely with other scientists.

In the June 29, 2009 issue of The New Yorker magazine Elizabeth Kolbert has written a profile of Hansen in a piece entitled “The Catastrophist”. She recounts how Hansen has over the years become increasingly concerned about the threats to society from global warming. As the models have become more sophisticated, as the data regarding climatic change accumulates, the projected effects of climate changes that will occur if humanity continues on its current trajectory of fossil fuel consumption look progressively more ominous. Kolbert relates how Hansen has over the years become increasingly frustrated with the failure of the political system to act on the basis of scientific evidence for the dangers that lie ahead. Political activism is not Hansen’s métier; he is reportedly rather shy, and does not at all enjoy being in the public eye. Nevertheless, he has become one of the most vocal and insistent voices arguing for immediate and sweeping changes on a global scale. During the years of the Bush administration Hansen was repeatedly pressured to restrict his contacts with public media. Instead of buckling under to these pressures, he went public about the pressures being exerted. Today he is frequently at the battlefronts of the climate wars; speaking to groups of all persuasions and sizes, on radio talk shows, testifying before governmental committees, and participating in demonstrations against construction of new coal-burning power plants. All of this activity has brought him a world of headaches.

James Hansen’s story illustrates vividly the distinction between epistemic and moral authority that I have been at some pains to make in Imperfect Oracle. I can’t imagine that there are any credible climate scientists who would challenge Hansen’s credentials or record of accomplishment, even if they didn’t agree in full with his positions on scientific issues. So he obviously has epistemic authority. But he has gone far outside that range in his vigorous advocacy for large-scale societal responses to the threats posed by fossil fuel emissions and other factors that promote global warming. His 2008 testimony before a congressional committee gives the flavor of his advocacy. His statement is replete with the scientific evidences for impending climate change driven by increasing fossil fuel consumption. That is well and good for “This is the way the world is, and where it is heading” – for epistemic authority. But he then goes on to argue urgently for what must be done if we are to avoid what he envisions as a calamitous future. His frustration with the inaction he sees is evident in statements like this: “CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.”

I won’t comment here on the wisdom of using such language in arguing for social change on the basis of scientific evidence. It is the case that Hansen has been vilified in the conservative news and opinion outlets , most of which contest the reality of climate change or disagree with the measures proposed to curb CO2 emissions . For example, in 2007, a NewBusters columnist saw strains of hysteria and mis-information in Hansen’s public pronouncements on climate change going back more than two decades . Look at this piece, and ask yourself, whether or not you are a scientist, just what it conveys about the reliability of Hansen’s predictions. We could dissect this kind of critique to our heart’s content, but it is undeniably true that Hansen has been challenged repeatedly over his forecasts of regional climate change, and changes in the global temperature over the past few decades. Note that these challenges, prompted by Hansen’s highly visible advocacy and sometimes strident opining, deny his epistemic authority. For the fans of those sources, Hansen’s status in the scientific community counts for zilch. Beyond this, however, there is a veritable blizzard of stuff out there questioning his motivations, calling him a liar and a fraud and more - for example.

What can we learn from James Hansen’s story? It is, of course, not over by any means, but if offers an object lesson. Scientists are often at a place where they need to decide whether to advocate, as scientists, for a position or policy in the public realm. Even when scientists are not expert in a given subject area, such as climate science, they are in a position to appreciate much more than non-scientists can the depth of research findings, the extensive accumulations of data over time, the continual back and forth within the scientific community on specific research questions - all that goes into forming a reliable scientific opinion on a complex problem such as global climate change. Scientists who are informed can thus in good conscience promote a serious audience for those scientific findings in the halls of government and in the public sphere. Scientists are also perhaps in a better position than most non-scientists to appreciate the consequences of taking an action or not taking it; for example, reduction of fossil fuel emissions. So they can argue for policies that mitigate emissions of greenhouse gases of all kinds, that promote alternatives to fossil fuels, and that make plans for dealing with the consequences of climate change. In short, scientists can attempt to exercise moral authority in the public sphere. I believe, however, that we will make the most progress by a steady reliance on the science, and on continued efforts to inform non-scientists on what the best scientific opinions is telling us. It is not very useful to get caught up in arguments of the sort that contrarians tend to raise, based on details: the temperatures in the Midwest this past summer, year-to-year changes in the thickness of the Arctic ice sheet, and so on. Rather, it should be focused on explaining how the scientific community comes to the consensus embodied in the IPCC reports, and on the bigger, longer-range course of change. That means that we should individually take a look at those documents as they appear. You can find the latest at IPCC.

In the end, science may prove to have little leverage in shifting societal priorities. There seems to be widespread agreement that the climate is changing, in some places more rapidly than was predicted. But actually making sacrifices to deal now with the seemingly distant threats of climate change will not come easily. The science will eventually out; we will just have to keep on keeping on. At a minimum society will need scientific expertise to help it figure out how to cope with the changes ahead. I know that sounds a bit wimpy; a sort of Kurt Vonnegut response. So be it.

Expert vs. Moral Authority

2009-08-06T13:23:00.000-07:00

One of the themes developed in Imperfect Oracle is the distinction between various kinds of authority. Depending on the context, people refer to authority via one or another sobriquet: expert, or epistemic, cultural, moral, coercive, and so on. This sometimes creates confusion about what kinds of authority actually operate in science’s interactions with the larger society. The most important contrast, in my view, is that between expert (epistemic) authority and moral authority. To define the distinction in the most general terms: Epistemic authority as it applies to science is the capacity to make statements of how things are in the world that are taken to be true or a good approximation to the truth. A chemist asserts that a particular arrangement of atoms exists in the molecules of a certain substance; a geologist tells us that a geological formation is composed of a particular set of minerals, and that it was deposited in a particular geological epoch; an oceanographer describes the ways in which increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide are affecting the ocean’s acidity, and the effect this may have on development of shell-bearing organisms. Moral authority, on the other hand, is the capacity to hold forth on how the world should be. All sorts of people claim to possess moral authority, to be able to tell us how we should behave in one respect or another. Moral authority can be based on a variety of sources, among them divine revelation (religious leader), election to a political office (the President), traditional authority (a king or queen), appointive authority (a policeman), or expertise ( a garage mechanic or a scientist).

When scientific findings carry implications for the ways in which things are done or understood in the larger society, there is a potential for conflict with other ways of doing or understanding things. Science then must compete with other societal elements in arguing for acceptance of its findings. In these efforts, whether by individual scientists or by the scientific enterprise more generally, science is arguing for acceptance of science’s epistemic, or expert, authority; that science has the capacity to report reliably on how particular things are in the world, and on how things might change as a result of processes that are occurring. So when thousands of climate scientists all over the world report the results of making measurements and developing models of increasing complexity and capacity to make climate predictions, they are exercising epistemic authority. Out of all that work there has emerged what Michael Polanyi long ago referred to as a ‘scientific opinion’, a product of the way in which the scientific world is organized, of the critical evaluative steps taken in validating individual scientists and particular pieces of scientific work.
With respect to global warming, to cite a salient example, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has employed processes of sieving, merging, comparing and reconciling scientific reports to produce a consensus. Not every scientist involved in these processes agrees with every element of the final report. Some may find it too conservative in evaluating predictive models, others may feel that a particular component of the entire system has been given too little weight. Because the global climate system is excruciatingly complicated, with many interactive elements, the science is not yet at the point where it can predict climate futures with high precision. Yet the vast bodies of data collected to date are consistent with the best models available, and those models have become increasingly sophisticated as a result of dramatic increases in computational capacity. I have followed this field since the early 1970s, when the earliest computer-based models for predicting global temperature changes due to increasing carbon dioxide levels appeared. I find it remarkable that the predicted increases in global temperature caused by a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration have not really changed a great deal over four decades of intensive scientific development. The scientific research on this topic is an example of science working in society to produce the best possible expert opinion on a matter of grave concern for the world’s human population, advice that is sufficiently reliable to form the basis of actions that society might wish to take in response to the findings.

Entities that are directly or indirectly sources of large CO2 emissions can be expected to look critically at the scientific claims. If they were playing by the same rules as science, their course of action would be to look for scientific evidence that contradicts the accepted findings and predictions. Indeed, there have been debates over whether phenomena such as variable sunspot activity are responsible for global temperature changes. However, the mainstream view of the climate science community has been that explanatory alternatives to greenhouse gas emissions as the major source of global warming do not adequately account for the range of climate changes observed.
Lacking viable scientific explanations for the observed warming effects, the next move for some has been to deny that the planet is warming significantly, or to adopt one or another of a set of positions that refuses to accept scientific authority. Science holds the cards in this contest as it really has no competition as far as expert authority is concerned. The opposition can, however, employ other strategies. One is to weaken the epistemic authority of science by flooding the discussion with counterviews that are supposed to be from legitimate scientists. The public has difficulty in distinguishing one set of credentials from another. For propaganda purposes the weatherman for a radio station in Kansas will do as an “expert” on climate. Thousands of signatures from such "experts" are presented as evidence that the scientific community does not buy into global warming. In another strategy, climate scientists are associated with unpopular views, by invoking terms such as “liberal” or “advocate of big government”. The main point is that a favorite tactic of those who oppose a consensus scientific position, for reasons other than doubts about the science itself, is to undermine the notion that there is indeed a consensus, and concomitantly, that those most vigorously arguing a consensus position are tainted in some way.
So when science attempts to exercise expertise in the world outside science, there is often resistance from other interests.

In my next blog I want to look at what it means for scientists or the science establishment to go beyond expertise , to attempt an exercise of moral authority. For example, science or its representatives would exercise moral authority with respect to the climate change issue by making arguments that go beyond simply the evidence for climate change. They would urge that society should act in some way in light of the prospects for climate change. At this point we come to a new set of questions and concerns. It is not entirely clear that science or individual scientists have any special capacity for exercising moral authority, even on an issue they know a lot about in terms of the underlying causations and likely consequences. Put simply, the capacity to tell it like it is does not in itself convey an authority to pronounce on how it should be. Attempts to exercise moral authority on matters fraught with controversy can be risky. It has been well illustrated in the climate change debates that when scientists offer advice on what, if anything, should be done they sacrifice epistemic authority to some degree, and often let themselves in for a rough time.

Science's Authority

2009-08-01T09:09:00.000-07:00

I am back to writing in this blog after a long hiatus, mostly driven by the need to complete some writing projects. In particular, I have been completing review of final pages and preparation of the index for a forthcoming book, Imperfect Oracle: The Epistemic and Moral Authority of Science, which should appear on the bookshelves by mid-September or thereabouts. I have also finished up a shorter work, Bridging Divides: The Origins of the Beckman Institute at Illinois, based on experiences in helping to establish the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. That book should be out by about October 1 at latest.

Now I want to return to blogging, to continuing the theme I began with several months ago: the relationships of science with society, with a special attention to aspects of science’s authority. How does science exercise influence in society? What are the grounds for its claims to having an especially reliable path toward truth with respect to questions that concern the natural world? Why does the public, or various groups of people within the larger society, sometimes accord science a high degree of deference with respect to some issue or question and at other times simply ignore or reject what appears to be an established position within science? Imperfect Oracle is my attempt to deal with these and related matters. The notion of authority can be powerful in shedding light on the day-to-day instances of science’s attempts to exercise influence, and resistances to those attempts that are grounded in commitments to competing social forces: government, law, religion, public culture and so on. Although science has been instrumental in shaping the modern world as no other social force, it is for all that just one among many influences that make up the cultural tenor of modern life. To understand how and to what extent science competes with other social forces, the nature of the authority it exercises, and the limits to that authority, must be understood.

Recent surveys by the Pew Research Center provide a good stepping-off place for this discussion. Pew surveyed two groups of adults. One survey consisted of telephone interviews of the general public, with a sample size of about 2,000 adults. A second survey consisted of a random sample of about 2,500 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The survey of the public was designed to ascertain peoples’ perceptions of both American science and scientists, and attitudes toward both. Here are a few results: The public has high regard for science; 84% think that science has a mostly positive effect on society, and only 6% think it has a mostly negative effect. In rankings of different professions, scientists are thought by 70 % of respondents to contribute “a lot” to society’s well-being. Scientists came in third behind members of the military and teachers, comparably with medical doctors, and well ahead of clergy, journalists, lawyers and business executives. A majority of the public (60%) believes that government funding of research is “essential”. These and many other responses suggest that the public has generally positive feeling about science and scientists.

For their part scientists feel that this is a good time for science (76%), though they have some complaints. Predictably, they don’t feel that there is sufficient funding for basic research (87%). They feel overwhelmingly that the public does not know very much about science (85%), that the news media fail to distinguish between findings that are well-founded and those that are not (76%), and that the public expect solutions to problems too quickly (49%).
These results are pretty much in line with those garnered ten years ago in a similar survey, and results from other surveys conducted over the past couple of decades. The comparison of what scientists believe about the natural world with what members of the general public believe is also consistent with past survey results. As examples, only 32% of the public, as compared with 87% of scientists, believe that humans and other living things have evolved due to natural processes. Only 49% of the public believe that earth is getting warmer because of human activity. Surprisingly, even among those who disagree with the scientific consensus - for example, that living things have evolved – a strong majority affirm that scientists have contributed to the well-being of society.

As we think about these and similar survey results in relation to science’s authority in society, the first important point is that science is generally well-regarded by the public, and scientists are deemed trustworthy. Science’s authority rests upon trust in its expertise, and on the feeling that scientists as a group mean to do the right thing. But that general complaisance does not automatically translate into acceptance of scientific findings when they seem to raise conflicts with beliefs anchored in religion, politics or variously derived social understandings. Furthermore, there is ample evidence based on other surveys, one of which was part of the Pew project, that the public has a quite limited understanding not only of accepted science, but also of how science actually works; that is, the means by which science comes to hold what we can call ‘scientific opinion’. These two factors together combine to weaken science’s influence when there appear to be conflicts between broadly consensual scientific opinion on the one hand, and inured beliefs grounded in experiences and teachings beginning in early life on the other. The multiple influences that determine the extent to which any person is inclined to accept scientific authority seem to operate almost independently of educational attainment or adult life situation. For example, I wrote in this blog in February about George Will’s obdurateness with respect to a scientific matter relating to global warming. From a scientific perspective, Will had virtually no ground (ice?) to stand on in his assertion that arctic ice is not thinning, and that the claim that it is serves as one more example of global warming hysteria. I attempted there to address the question of why an intelligent man with little or no expertise in the subject matter would persist in a assertion that conflicts with a strong scientific consensus. I hope to write in following blogs about similar instances in which individuals or groups adopt positions with respect to scientific questions that amount to direct challenges to scientific authority. The easiest cases to understand are those in which the individual has a financial or powerful political interest that would be adversely impacted by implementing policies based on a scientific consensus; think, for example, Exxon Mobil or Senator James Inhofe. We can call attention to their obvious bias and attempt to counter their views with arguments based on science. It is not so easy to deal with the likes of George Will, religious conservatives, political libertarians, and a host of others who choose to follow the dictates of some other authority or cultural inclination than science in determining their views on a wide range of societally important issues. If we are to make progress in increasing science’s authority, we need to recognize the conflicts with other cultural forces represented in these cases and find ways to present science and scientists more effectively.

Not-so-curious George

2009-02-24T06:29:00.000-08:00

There has been a little tempest over George Will’s recent column on the subject of changes in sea ice and its relationship to global warming. For example, Rick Piltz got on it right away, writing in ClimateScienceWatch. Joseph Romm also put it rather strongly to Will on the Climate Progress post. The overwhelming response of the scientific global climate science community has been that Will doesn’t know what he’s talking about. That may indeed be so, but I’m not sure that this is all that needs to be said in dealing with conservatives of his ilk.

While George Will strikes many as an unappealing, opinionated curmudgeon, he is not a dummy. It behooves those who don’t care for his political and social views to at least respect his power to influence public opinion. When he writes about climate change he isn’t really examining the scientific evidence, but rather operating from a certain political, social and moral stance. In his way of looking at things, ideas that carry implications for change in the social order, particularly those that call for large scale actions, are tainted with the potential for limiting individual freedom, and are to be looked at skeptically.

An important part of the conservative stance on all such matters is a distrust of authority that emanates from sources other than a narrow canon of conservative orthodoxy. This makes for rejection of assertions resting on scientific premises. Conservatives love to go back to materials that seem to show that scientists have often been wrong in the past. In the February 15 column dealing with sea ice, Will runs off a bunch of quotes from about 35 years ago, when there were headlines claiming that the world might be heading into another ice age. He quotes widely from newspaper and magazine articles, though- significantly- not from scientific sources. The implication is that science was incorrectly crying wolf then, and is likely to be just as wrong now in predicting serious consequences of global warming.

Interestingly, Will also reprises the story of Paul Ehrlich’s wager with Julian Simon on whether the costs of five natural resources would increase or decrease over a 10 year period. Conservatives love to tell this tale; Erhlich lost his bet on all five of the metals he chose. This example is supposed to illustrate that social progressives such as Ehrlich tend to be drama queens, continually promoting notions of impending shortages, environmental distress and lowered quality of life. Ehrlich may be an appropriate target for ridicule; more than once he seemed to be too quick and a bit over the top with dire predictions. But whether one person in a prominent role occasionally makes a fool of himself has little to do with the broad issues at stake. Julian Simon was dead wrong in his idea that human ingenuity will always find a gainful pathway out of the cul-de-sacs into which it lurches because of improvident disregard for the planet’s limits. Ten years does not provide a test of the notion that there are limits to the availability of materials, of energy, of space for people to live in.

Years ago, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign I occasionally played squash with Julian. We sometimes ended up sitting on the squash court floor arguing about some of his ideas. I believe Julian simply didn’t understand basic science concepts. He had this libertarian, no-holds-barred view of how society should be run, and anything that didn’t fit within its laissez faire structure was dismissed as being of no essential consequence. He was fun to be with because he challenged one’s assumptions, but it became obvious that the laws of nature were not going to get in the way of his vision.

There is some of that stubborn determination to let ideology take precedence over the facts in George Will. On matters relating to science’s interface with society, as in the climate change debate, Will seems to simply deny the authority of science to pronounce on the basic science involved. Nitpicking one’s way through the voluminous literature on climate change provides plenty of opportunities to note inconsistencies in the claims issuing from various sources, or to focus on some short term weather changes or more localized changes that have little weight in comprehensively assessing the overall direction of global change. The global climate is the product of an enormous number of variables, many of them interactive with one another. Science has been making steady progress in building reliable models for this incredibly complex system. It is noteworthy is that predictions of the increases in the planet’s temperature that will result from a given amount of carbon emissions have not really varied much over the past few decades, as the models have become increasingly sophisticated and reliable. The implications of significant climate change are there, and they are sufficiently dire that responsible scientists who understand this particular area of science feel obliged to call for responsive actions.

Ah, at this point they have stepped on George Will’s toes. He does not seem to be truly interested in where this global experiment in climate change will eventually take the human race. Like Julian Simon, he simply has the idea that if we just don’t limit people’s free choices the challenges will be met and all will be well. His reluctance to accord science an epistemic authority in matters that bear upon societal affairs is but one more example of the manifold ways in which science’s epistemic and moral authority are contested. The irony is that if we were to follow George Will and Julian Simon down the path they advocate, science would be our only source of rescue from the horrible messes that would result.

Darwin, the Reluctant Antagonist

2009-02-20T16:13:00.000-08:00

D. Graham Burnett and Chris Mooney recently wrote a piece on the website Science Progress, entitled “Darwin Day: A Celebration of Science, Not Conflict”. They argue that the commonly held view that science and religion are in essential conflict over evolution, and have been so from the beginning, is basically wrong. At the very least, they argue, more attention should be paid to the fact that in Darwin’s time and into the early twentieth century, Christian thinkers found it possible to reconcile the tenets of Darwinism with their religious beliefs.
I don’t believe, though, that the authors’ argument is well-supported by the historical references they cite. Certainly there is little doubt that the scientific theory of evolution is not widely accepted among people of faith, especially in the United States. Indeed, the authors themselves quote Gallup poll figures that show some 45 percent of those surveyed agreeing with the statement: “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” Surely no person with a modern scientific outlook could reasonably hold to such an opinion.
It was interesting to see in the several posted comments that the column engendered the sort of bimodal distribution of attitudes that we always see in these circumstances. There are those who think that anyone who holds religious beliefs that are patently inconsistent with modern scientific finding is hopelessly irrational. There is no point in even trying to discuss the topic. On the other hand there are those who find the claims of science to be entirely unconvincing: “Darwin is the best example of how an unproven hypothesis can become a “Scientific Fact” without any proof.” Comments like this are seen by scientists as prima facie proof of an irreducibly obdurate attitude toward scientific knowledge.
While it is possible for many to come to some sort of accommodation of their religious beliefs with scientific rationalism, conflicts will arise. In the end every educated person needs to decide whether to accept the epistemic authority of science or the traditional authority of an established religion. For those who have been nurtured in early life in a conservative, Christian fundamentalist environment, a break with the belief systems instilled there is bound to be painful. The same could be said for those whose formation occurred in a conservative Muslim culture, or many other established religious traditions. Historically, science has wrested epistemic authority from other societal sectors as it gained practitioners and made increasingly important contributions to day-to-day societal life and culture. Organized religion provides the most salient examples of these contests, as exemplified by the Galileo case and the subsequent growth of scientific influence during the Enlightenment. How far this process will take us remains to be seen. Certainly, in the United States, the persistent influence of evangelical Christian churches is evidence of the power of early cultural conditioning to imprint attitudes and outlooks.
There has been a good deal written of late on the notion that our evolutionary heritage has left us with an inherent propensity for holding religious beliefs. To the extent that this is true, we can’t really expect that people will fully embrace scientific naturalism as the guiding framework for their thoughts about their lives and the world they live in. One can hope that the sense of wonder, fear and awe that overtakes many as they contemplate the world and our place in it will be increasingly channeled into social activities that do not demand dogmatic belief in a creator who is some transmogrified version of ourselves. But there is the problem that rational methods of inquiry and thought are not part of intellectual and cultural formation in the lives of most children. By the time science appears in their lives they have become locked into a worldview that does not recognize authority based upon rational inquiry. I have dealt with this topic in a forthcoming book, Imperfect Oracle, due out in September.
In summary, I don’t believe that rational arguments will prevail in attempting to convince religious conservatives of the validity of evolution as a scientific theory. Those who see a naturalistic, scientific outlook as the most tenable framework for gaining new knowledge and thinking about how to use that knowledge to improve human welfare will just need to keep making the arguments for it. Some will see the light, but most will not. If it is indeed true that human society makes progress, in the sense of evolving away from tendencies and practices borne of our evolutionary development and toward naturalistic, rational habits of mind, science will eventually win out. Not because Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris have changed any human hearts, but because the old will have given way to the new through the multitudinous little ways in which society changes in response to the instrumentality of science. Granted, not all such change is for the good, but change it is, and it will wear away the old as water wears away the rocks.

Hey, college science teachers! Time to Play Baseball!

2009-02-14T18:30:00.000-08:00

The distinguished scientist Bruce Alberts, formerly President of the National Academies of Science, is now Editor-in-Chief of Science, one of the top voices for science both within and outside the science community. He has a bully pulpit, and he’s using it these days to beat the drums for reform in science education. He led off the year 2009 with an editorial entitled “Making a Science of Education”. He argues there that we need to use all the new tools placed at our disposal by technological advances to deliver science education to young people in both school and non-school settings. But as Alberts has made clear on other occasions, improving science education will depend on much more than implementing new technologies. As he says, in addition to emphasizing a knowledge of the facts and figures of a given science, or rote knowledge of how to use formulas and diagrams, three additional goals “of equal merit and importance are to prepare students to generate and evaluate scientific evidence and explanations, to understand the nature and development of scientific knowledge, and to participate productively in scientific practices and discourse.” These goals must be addressed if we are to have a scientifically literate citizenry, and if we are to inspire young people to consider careers in science. But he goes on to ask of science courses taught at the college level: “Why do most science professors teach only the first one [of these four goals]?”

It’s not as though there were no evidence bearing on this subject. For starters, consider the format of learning. It has been known from several studies that the amount of conceptual understanding conveyed in a typical science lecture is pitifully small. Eric Mazur, professor of physics at Harvard University, has been teaching introductory physics to undergraduates for many years. In a recent Perspective on Education in Science Mazur describes how he came to realize that while lecturing is a great ego trip for him, as it is for all “popular” science lecturers, he was conveying very little conceptual understanding to his students by that mode of delivery. He describes the techniques he now uses to impart greater conceptual understanding of physics. They involve dynamically engaging the students during class in active discussions of the concepts needed to come up with a correct answer to a question. The students come to class now to do real intellectual work!

His methods have been adapted by others; there is a great paper in that same issue of Science on how in-class peer discussion improves student performance on measures of conceptual understanding in biology as well as physics. These successes are readily understandable in terms of cognitive science principles. Frederick Reif, in his new book, “Applying Cognitive Science to Education”, shows that the standard lecture format does not get at students’ conceptual misunderstandings. They memorize a lot of stuff they are told they should know, but the process does nothing to help them overcome their limited and often incorrect beliefs of how things work in the world. Reif shows that to overcome this sort of blockage to understanding, students must be presented with questions and problems that stimulate them to rethink their beliefs, that produce a reorganization in their conceptual frameworks. Reif writes about teaching mathematics and physics, but what he, Mazur and others have to say applies as well to chemistry, biology or any other introductory science course. (Reif’s book is reviewed in Science)

Given that the methods employed in teaching introductory science courses fail to convey genuine understanding of the subjects, one has to wonder why science departments and faculty persist for the most part with the traditional format. Sure, we now have Powerpoint presentations and visual aids to enliven lectures, but the underlying metaphor that sustains this mode of instruction remains the same. It was powerfully analyzed many years ago by Michael J. Reddy, in his classic chapter in the book “Metaphor and Thought”. I can’t do justice in this short space to Reddy’s analysis of the underlying concepts we hold of how we communicate, but a much bowdlerized version is as follows:
Ideas are (metaphorically) objects. Our minds are (metaphorically) containers that hold these objects. Communication consists in putting these thoughts or ideas into other containers -words, sentences or paragraphs. We communicate by placing our thoughts and ideas into these containers- words, sentences, paragraphs, and so on-that are then sent from one person to another through some sort of conveyance-direct talk, TV, telephone, writing. The recipient, takes them out of the conveyance and places them in his/her mind. If you are not into conceptual metaphor theory this will sound weird, but believe me, it is a powerful and useful way to understand what people believe, mostly unconsciously, about how they communicate. The wonderful book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, “Metaphors We Live By” contains a discussion of Reddy’s conduit metaphor, in which they show that this metaphor underlies much of our understanding of human communication. One consequence of the conduit metaphor is that we think of communication as a passage of an “object” from speaker to listener, and that this process occurs without any change in the object. Whatever it was to the speaker, it is to the recipient. In Reddy’s words, we “transfer human thoughts and feelings.” So in lecturing we imagine that we are transferring ideas from ourselves to the students, and they absorb these ideas in the form and shape that we gave to them as we uttered them. But as Reddy. Lakoff and Johnson make clear, that’s all wrong! We know full well from a multitude of psychological and cognitive studies that it doesn’t work that way. What a thought means to the speaker may not match at all what that thought means to the recipient. Thus, the lecture format, in which the intended meaning of the lecturer’s words is mostly not conveyed, is a poor means of transferring ideas, and particularly conceptual understanding.

So why do science educators at the college level keep to this failed method of education, especially in the context of the large lecture hall? There are several reasons, some not so flattering to the professoriate:
· Ignorance. Not many teaching faculty in the sciences pay much attention to the literature of science education, nor are they aware of cognitive science results that might inform their decisions on how to teach more effectively.
· Inertia and stubbornness. It has always been done it this way, and it seems to be satisfactory. Clearly, in this response there is a lot of denial, laziness and hubris. The problems are with the students, not with us.
· Lack of commitment. It would take too much effort to change to another system. To busy faculty, whose teaching duties often take second place to their research ambitions, the effort needed to research best practices, prepare an entirely new set of materials for conducting the class, and implement new technologies such as the “clicker” responders that Mazur and others use seems overwhelming. It is easy to just keep at the same old way of doing things.
· Lack of support from departments and colleges. Many faculty who might be willing to make an effort to instigate change are not encouraged by the administrations of their departments and colleges.
· Assessment. It is difficult to properly assess a student’s conceptual understanding of material, especially when one is dealing with large classes. Try writing a multiple choice test that really gets at whether students have a conceptual understanding of the material. It is much easier to test for whether students can “name that compound” or “plug and chug.” Much has been written about all the grievous failings of programs that call for assessments based on test scores. But even after taking account of the ways in which such standards are gamed- for example by teaching to the test – the simple fact is that there are no really good instruments for evaluating conceptual understanding that can be conveniently applied to large groups of students. Ever try grading an essay question administered to 1,200 students?

This list is hardly exhaustive, but it does illustrate the impediments to real change. But as Alberts has written, if the model set by the colleges doesn’t change, it is doubly difficult to instigate change at the K-12 level. So we need to keep working at this, at every level.
As a coauthor of a widely used general chemistry textbook, I feel obliged to say that the problem is not with the textbooks available, or at least not with the ones I am familiar with. Good textbooks do of course provide loads of factual information, nomenclature and so on, but they also encourage conceptual understanding and application of science to the real world. These texts are precisely what a teacher needs to build a format based on problem-solving and conceptual reasoning.

My previous blog had to do with baseball and science. I hope to come back to that analogy in further discussion of science education. For now, just imagine you are a little league coach with a new bunch of kids who don’t know a lot about baseball. Imagine teaching them baseball as if you were a college level chemistry lecturer. Would that work? Or conversely, imagine that you are responsible for teaching some kids about chemistry. Imagine teaching them chemistry as if you were a little league baseball coach. The one mode is “learn by listening”. The other is “learn by doing.”

Science is a baseball game. Well, sort of.

2009-02-10T13:21:00.000-08:00

Alex Rodriguez a baseball superstar with the New York Yankees, recently admitted that he used steroids, performance enhancing drugs, during his playing days with the Texas Rangers. This news came to my attention just as I was completing a review of a manuscript for a social sciences journal. The authors were making the claim that a particular group of scientists they had interviewed saw their professional activities as a kind of game. This did not strike me as a particularly interesting claim on the face of it; don’t we all at times view our professional and even our private lives as a game? From the viewpoint of conceptual metaphor theory, particularly as advanced by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, it is easy to see how the elements of a game, particularly a sports game, could be mapped onto those of one’s work life.
But as I began to think through some of the implications of this metaphor as it might apply to scientific work, it became more interesting. Let’s begin with a brief analysis of the sort that cognitive scientists would term structure mapping. It reveals some of the ways in which a sports game like baseball is analogous to the pursuit of science.

· Baseball has rules, standards of conduct. Science also is carried out according to certain rules and conventions. Just as in baseball there are rules forbidding intentional beaning of the batter or interference with a base runner, in science there are rules forbidding plagiarism, requiring a sharing of credit, mandating truthful reporting and so on.

· Baseball is competitive. Every baseball game played is a competition. Players strive to be the best at their position: pitcher, second baseman or hitter. Everyone would like to be an MVP. Teams compete to be the best in the league. In science, analogously, individual scientists strive to be considered one of the best in their field of endeavor. They work hard to be chosen for prestigious awards and election to honorific societies or academies. Similarly, universities, departments, laboratories and institutes aim to be ranked among the best in national or global surveys.

· Baseball is played for audiences of fans. Clearly, a professional sport such as baseball could not exist were it not for the interest shown by its fans, their willingness to attend games or watch them on TV, purchase baseball-related paraphernalia and so on. Science has its fan base also; those who use scientific results in their industry, in government regulatory agencies, in education, in environmental agencies both governmental and non-governmental, and among those who appreciate the elegance of scientific studies and what they reveal of the natural world.

· Baseball is dependent on patrons, or owners. Professional sports teams are owned by individuals or companies, some of whom hope to profit from them, and others of whom simply want to be owners out of love of the game, pride of ownership, publicity or from some other motivation. Science similarly relies on its patrons. These may be government funding agencies, private foundations, institutions such as universities or institutes with various sources of funding, including industrial support. Just as unproductive baseball players are dropped from a team, unproductive scientists lose their research support and are forced to discontinue their research or at least reduce its scope, and undistinguished research institutions may lose support and just have to shut down.

· Star baseball players get special treatment. We are all familiar with the fact that superstars such Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds or Alex Rodriguez have drawn huge salaries, and are, or were, accorded other special considerations. These superstars have been recognized for their accomplishments on the baseball field, but they also often have compelling personal stories or personality traits that appeal to fans. Science also has its superstars, those who have made important new discoveries, who have made game-changing new inventions, or who have been involved in high profile science such as the genome project or discovery of the AIDS virus. Analogously to baseball, scientific superstars come to prominence both within the science community and outside it through a combination of scientific accomplishment and skillful public relations.
I could go on, but this much serves to convey the idea: Metaphorically, the pursuit of science is playing baseball.

You may already have thought of many respects in which baseball and the pursuit of science are entirely dissimilar. Of course! One of the characteristics of any metaphor is that it has a limited range of applicability. For example, in the present case, baseball and science have different motivations. Baseball is played for entertainment, science is pursued for the purpose of gaining new knowledge of the natural world. How could one hope to convincingly link two such different entities? But we should think of this analogy from the perspective of the baseball player or scientist. Secondly, to consider baseball as merely an entertainment is to ignore much of its appeal. As conveyed in the writings of Jim Bouton, George Will and others, baseball itself is a metaphor for much deeper matters. As to the motivations of scientists, it is fair to say that like baseball players, they keep at what they do because they love the game they are in: The competitions, the day-to-day fun of doing their work, and the hope that burns, perhaps more brightly in some breasts than others, of receiving special reward and recognition.

There is much more than could be said about this interesting metaphorical connection, but I will close with a return to Alex Rodriguez. On February 9, at the first press conference of his presidency, Barack Obama spoke in response to a question about A-Rod’s admission. He took it seriously, and made the point that baseball as an institution was responsible in some measure for allowing drugs to have assumed such a large role. He said that the game of baseball is diminished by such transgressions, and the wrong message is sent to youngsters who look up to baseball players as heroes. In the same way, when ethical violations in science come to public attention they have the unfortunate effect of reducing science’s expert and moral authority in society at large. If scientists can get away with publishing fabricated or falsified data, how can society trust what science has to say on issues of societal importance? Just as those responsible for the governance of baseball must ensure that the game is played in strict accord with reasonable rules, those responsible for monitoring the processes within science that go into forming what society regards as “scientific opinion” must ensure that those processes maintain vigilance in guarding against unethical and fraudulent behavior by scientists. It is not an easy job in either case, but the first and most obvious rule is: don’t take anything for granted.
There are further insights to be had by regarding the pursuit of science as a game with respect to science education; that will be matter for a future blog.

I see your pain - or do I?

2009-01-31T19:42:00.000-08:00

The January 9, 2009 issue of Science has an interesting report on a conference recently held at Stanford University Law School on Neuroimaging, Pain and the Law. The conference dealt with the applicability of neuroimaging methods to the law. Prominent in the discussions is whether functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is capable of providing reliable information about pain. Given that pain is an issue in about half of all tort cases, including personal injury cases, a reliable method of measuring pain would provide highly relevant evidence. People experiencing real pain are generally unable to prove it, or convey how much pain they have. People with natural acting skills are often able to convincingly fake pain.

Science is once again claimed by some to provide probative evidence in our legal system, as it has so often in the past. Perhaps the closest contemporary analogy is the use of DNA analysis for identification of individuals. There, after many years, DNA evidence has become firmly established as reliable and relevant to many legal proceedings. Neuroimaging, however, is not so well established. The idea behind the technique is that cells in the brain that are in active use consume oxygen at an increased rate, and experience greater blood flow. The fMRI method effectively senses a change in the ratio of oxygenated hemoglobin to deoxygenated hemoglobin, which is taken to be a measure of cellular activity. The fMRI signals are eventually displayed as a two-dimensional representation, a cross-section of the brain, in which the active regions are lighted up. There are many open questions about interpretations of the images. One of the more obvious is: which regions of the brain, if any, are uniquely associated with pain sensation? Another has to do with how directly and rapidly the sensation of pain is expressed as increased cellular activity. Still a third is: can a person produce a convincing image of pain merely by conjuring up vivid thoughts of pain? These and other outstanding issues are being addressed on a continuing basis by highly active research programs throughout the world.

Definitive answers to many questions that have arisen in the use and interpretation of fMRI as a general measure of brain activity are lacking. That, however, has not impeded an avalanche of studies using the technique in hopes of finding answers to all sorts of questions in cognitive sciences and medicine. Many of these studies will eventually be advanced as potential evidence in legal proceedings. It will then be up to the judge, usually, to determine whether it should be admitted, using as guidelines the Federal Rules of Evidence and prior court cases. Among these the Daubert ruling of the Supreme Court has been highly influential. The Rules of Evidence and the Daubert ruling place a great deal of responsibility on the judge to understand enough of the science and methodology to determine whether the evidence will be conducive to finding the facts, or whether instead it could be misleading and prejudicial.

When the scientists working in a relatively new area such as fMRI are not in consensual agreement on the interpretations, reliability and details of best practice, science is unable to exercise an effective expert authority. If fMRI is pushed forward in its present state of development as reliable science it could easily come to be seen as pseudoscience, possessing a semblance of rigor that it in fact lacks. Science’s authority in society as a source of reliable knowledge of the natural world depends on many factors, among them the perception that science can attain truthful knowledge. The search for new knowledge, the evaluation of new results and the promulgation of those results within the science community is maintained by processes of internal control within the scientific community, such as peer review of submitted articles for publication, and various mechanisms for identifying the most significant new work. These processes work tolerably well, but they apply only indirectly to the communication of science to the larger society.

Scientists are like everyone else in wishing for recognition of their work by others; it should be no surprise that they sometimes bypass science’s normal review processes in promoting their work to non-scientists. We thus often see reports of studies that suggest new materials, medical treatments, tests and even potential cures when in fact the work is controversial, not fully corroborated or just plain slipshod. At times the science involved carries important public policy implications, touches on sensitive areas from an ethical perspective or may involve applications in the legal area, as with fMRI. Then the public notice it attracts, along with the evident conflicts within science regarding the meaning of the work or its significance, raises doubts in the public mind about science’s epistemic authority. For this reason, the scientific establishment has an interest in minimizing such public conflicts. One method for doing this is to have widely recognized panels of experts study the issues in controversial cases and issue reports of findings. The National Academies are regularly called upon to do this. They perform a unique public service by bringing together committees of experts in all areas of scientific and technological endeavor. These experts serve pro bono to address critical national issues and give advice to the federal government and the public. We can be sure that before long it will be necessary to convene a panel to assess the capacity of fMRI studies to reliably detect and measure the extent to which people experience pain. Until then, and perhaps even after such a report has issued, judges and juries will have to struggle with assimilating yet one more new body of scientific knowledge into our justice system.

Updike passes

2009-01-27T17:55:00.000-08:00

The New York Times today published an obituary for John Updike, the novelist who opened a window on an important segment of American society during the past half century. It was populated with mainly white folk who struggled to accept the lives they led for the good lives they were. It was an important element in his fiction that many of his characters lived in some degree of fear of the Lord. Updike’s obituary contains this quote: ''I am very prone to accept all that the scientists tell us, the truth of it, the authority of the efforts of all the men and woman (sic) spent trying to understand more about atoms and molecules. But I can't quite make the leap of unfaith, as it were, and say, `This is it. Carpe diem (seize the day), and tough luck.'''

These two sentences tell us a lot us about John Updike’s understanding of the relationship between science and religious beliefs. He senses the dichotomy inherent in holding religious convictions of the sort embodied in his variety of American Protestantism while simultaneously accepting the capacity of science to tell us with full authority more and more about the nature of the natural world. We hear from many quarters that science and religion are not in conflict; one can be simultaneously a believer and fully naturalistic. But Updike knew that when one is pressed it is possible to subscribe to only one authority. If you are into scientific rationalism there is precious little space left for traditional religious faith.

I was disappointed by what I take to be Updike’s belief that fully surrendering to the authority of science means that one is thereby free of certain constraints on behavior, that it would be OK to just cut loose. After all, what have you got to lose? The notion that religion, but not naturalistic thought, can act as a brake on our baser instincts strikes me as pretty hackneyed. It’s something that Rabbit Angstrom might have come up with, but I expected better from his creator. John Updike was a fine writer, but in acceding to the conventional story of religion’s role he missed the chance to explore a deeper and more interesting theme in contemporary life: Slowly but surely the authority of science is usurping that of organized religion.

Endangered professoriate?

2009-01-19T11:29:00.000-08:00

In a recent New York Times, Stanley Fish wrote a column called “The Last Professor”. It was prompted in part by a new book . “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities”. The general theme of the book and Fish’s column is that the traditional model of a university populated by a tenured or tenure-track faculty teaching humanities and other subjects that may not connect directly with the economic world outside the campus is –indeed, has been – on the way out, and the trend will continue. Donoghue paints a grim picture of a stark contrast between those who espouse a life of the mind apart from practical, economic considerations and those for whom the humanities are a preoccupation of an effete and largely dispensable group.

But it seems to me that things are more nuanced than Donoghue’s bleak ruminations would suggest. He mentions Andrew Carnegie as an example of someone with no patience for “dead languages” and presumably other forms of learning that stand apart from practical use. Yet in 1902 Carnegie founded the Carnegie Institution, dedicated to scientific discovery “in the broadest and most liberal manner.” The philosophy was and is to devote the institution’s resources to “exceptional” individuals so that they can explore the most intriguing scientific questions in an atmosphere of complete freedom. Yes, it is true that the Institution had no place for humanists. However, that same Andrew Carnegie built more than 2500 libraries around the world, dedicated to self-improvement through learning.

Fish’s interesting post generated 163 comments before further posting was cut off. A good many were from anguished younger scholars pursuing studies in the humanities, sorrowful that their dreams of becoming a professor in some nice academic setting would never be realized. I sympathize with their concerns, but society does not owe anyone a living just because they have a passion for some field of activity. Americans have historically been very practical-minded with respect to institutions of higher education. This was especially true of the public universities that came into existence in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Those institutions were justified by their promise to provide skills that would answer to the needs of society. Basic, long-term research and humanistic scholarship were introduced over many objections, and only gradually took hold. The argument is made that study of the humanities can be rewarding for those who invest in it. However, the benefits of the study of history, philosophy and literature: a capacity for analytic reasoning, the ability to assimilate and organize information, and to express oneself lucidly and with some degree of grace, are too often not made evident to those who study the humanities. As higher education has become an accepted rite of passage for an increasing fraction of the nation’s young, it is perhaps not so surprising that the emphasis should shift more toward the most obvious social returns on society’s investment in that education.

Fish begins his column with this quote: “In previous columns and in a recent book I have argued that higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world.” With all due respect, I think this notion leads us in the wrong direction. All humanistic studies implicate the world outside ourselves. It is the task of education to show the student what those implications are, how they bear upon everyday life. This requirement is as true for the sciences as it is for the humanities. A chemistry class that consists mainly in drilling on more or less rote methods for solving problems and memorizing facts and figures, as opposed to emphasizing the methods used in science to learn about the world, and the larger social implications of the current state of knowledge of chemistry, is no more “practical” than a poetry course that fails to dig beneath the poets’ words.

Donoghue provides many facts and figures to support his thesis, and I will not venture to contest them. A related source of information on this subject is the Humanities Indicators, a publication of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. There is a lot to be said on this topic, but this is enough for now.

Perchlorate and bankruptcy

2009-01-12T11:10:00.000-08:00

This is a short followup on my post of yesterday on perchlorate in the environment. The polluting site about which I wrote, located in Henderson, Nevada, is operated by Tronox, a spinoff from Kerr-McGee, which operated the site for many years. I was surprised to learn this morning, from an article in the Las Vegas Sun , that just today, January 12, 2009, Tronox has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The article says in part that when Tronox was spun off from Kerr-McGee, it assumed responsibility for cleanup of the perchlorate production site. It further states that "In court filings, attorneys for Tronox said the primary reason for the bankruptcy filing is the company's financial responsibility for environmental cleanup efforts at and around its BMI plant."

I don't know whether bankruptcy protection will have the effect in this case of releasing the company from its cleanup obligations. There is certainly plenty of precedent for corporate dodging of this kind, as evidenced by the investigations that U. S. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and others have undertaken. We will have to see what follows from this latest development.

Perchlorate - soluble salt, not so solvable pollutant

2009-01-11T08:39:00.000-08:00

Perchlorate is an inorganic ion, analogous to chloride or sulfate, found in perchlorate salts. Perchlorates are used in explosives or as a component of rocket fuels and fireworks, because under the right conditions they are powerful oxidizing agents. They are manufactured mainly for use by the military and NASA. Over many decades of their manufacture, particularly in the Cold War years following World War II, perchlorate salts were dumped into waste ponds or discarded in other ways. Because perchlorates are quite soluble in water, they readily found their way into groundwater systems. In 2007 the General Accounting Office (GAO) reported the results of a national survey of sites identified as having a significant concentration of perchlorate in the water. Of the nearly 400 sites identified, 153 were public drinking water supplies, serving up to about 10 million people.

Is perchlorate dangerous? It appears that the only recognized source of potential risk implicates the thyroid. It turns out that perchlorate ion looks to the thyroid gland a lot like iodide ion, which is essential to its proper functioning. So if the perchlorate level in the body gets high enough, the perchlorate ion could block iodide from the place it needs to be, thus impairing proper thyroid function. However, the levels of perchlorate found in most water supplies do not pose a problem for adults. They could, however, be a health threat to very young children and pregnant women.

At the behest of environmental and public interest health groups, the National Academies of Science (NAS) convened a panel of experts to look at the issues. The committee of experts eventually recommended a reference daily dose, let’s call it REF-d, which they believed could be taken in over a lifetime without appreciable risk of deleterious effects. The experts also indicated that this level of exposure would not cause adverse effects on children or pregnant women.

On a couple of occasions, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) has reported on perchlorate to Congressional Committees. In 2007 the CDC reported that in a national survey of substances found in urine samples, all 2820 participants in the survey were found to have measurable levels of perchlorate. However, only a handful had levels exceeding the REF-d proposed by the NAS panel. So there seems to be little cause for great concern for the general population. However, children showed higher levels of perchlorate than adults. Further, for the 36 percent of women who had relatively low iodine levels in their urine, higher perchlorate levels were associated with lower levels of two key thyroid hormones. This is particularly significant for pregnant women, because low levels of thyroid hormones are associated with neurodevelopmental impairments in the fetus.

Perchlorate is largely a legacy pollutant. The plants that were built to manufacture it in the mid-twentieth century are largely closed, or if they still produce perchlorates operate with much stricter environmental rules than in the past. But there is a lot of perchlorate in the ground. One of the best-known cases concerns a plant in Henderson, Nevada, near Las Vegas, built under a U. S. Navy contract in the 1950s. The navy eventually sold the plant to an industrial firm and it passed some years later into the hands of Kerr-McGee Chemical company. The plant is no longer active but its operations over time left a huge amount of perchlorate salts in the ground around the plant. It’s a long story I needn’t recite here, but suffice to say that there is a continuing flow of perchlorate-laden water from around that plant into Lake Mead just above Hoover Dam, and thence into the Colorado river. All the water in that river system, used to provide drinking water and crop irrigation, from Hoover Dam to the Mexican border, contains varying levels of perchlorate, but generally in the range below about 15 parts per billion. The states that draw their water from the Colorado river at one stage or another have benchmark standards that vary from 1 part per billion for New Mexico to 4 parts per billion for California to 14 parts per billion for Arizona.

So shouldn’t the EPA be involved here? Well, the EPA doesn’t seem to have found this an interesting topic for investigation. In October of 2008 it announced that it would not regulate perchlorate in drinking water, arguing that “there is not a meaningful opportunity for health risk reduction”. The rationale is that perchlorate levels are low in most public drinking-water systems. The decision not to move toward setting a regulatory standard was happily received by governmental agencies such as NASA and Defense, which- in a perfect mimicking of industrial responses - detest having to divert money from new and exciting projects to the tiresome business of cleaning up messes left in the past. But it was not applauded by environmental and public health advocates such as Earthjustice. After much dithering, EPA has issued a new statement that says in effect that perhaps they moved too fast.

But what rhetorical firepower is delivered in dealing with these issues! In the winter 2008 issue of In Brief, Earthustice’s magazine, the article dealing with this topic is headed: “Rocket Fuel in your Drinking Water?” Other potent phraseology includes: “…toxic legacy of the cold water.” “Weapons makers will benefit at the expense of millions of Americans’ drinking water spiked with rocket fuel.” I’m a big fan and supporter of Earthjustice, but all this hyperbole seems a little over the top, in light of the National Academies report, and the work of the GAO and CDC.

Further, the story is more nuanced than Earthjustice’s perspective would suggest. Kerr-McGee began many years ago to clean up the Henderson, Nevada site, and has successfully sued the U. S. Government to pay for some of its share in the costs. In 2005 Tronox, the successor company to Kerr-McGee, received $20.5 million in a settlement with the government. By the end of 2005, Tronox has spent $122 million on the cleanup, and expected to spend considerably more in the following years. However, as reported by Cheryl Hogue in the August 18, 2003 issue of Chemical and Engineering News, the process of cleanup is necessarily slow; you can’t just suck all the contaminated water out of the ground and somehow purge it of perchlorate. The level in the water leaching into Lake Meade will more rapidly decline over time as a result of the cleanup, but there will be some perchlorate in the Colorado River for decades to come. Furthermore, because so much of the water is used in southern California for irrigation of crops, the lettuce, table grapes and other foods grown in the region that we all eat contain some level of perchlorate.

Clearly, we need more knowledge of the health effects of perchlorate in drinking water and the food supply. Here is a case where science can exercise an expert authority on an issue of broad public concern. Not easy to do when the issue is clouded with controversy and conflicting special interests. It’s also not easy to do when the funds for carrying out needed studies are not available. More urgently, all the agencies that can play a role, governmental and otherwise, should make sure that women who contemplate becoming pregnant or are pregnant understand the need to maintain a healthy level of thyroid activity. Public education is also one of science’s roles. We can inform people who are drinking water that has a relatively high level of perchlorate, to assuage needless fears and advise on what they should do to maintain good health.

Praying and poker

2009-01-03T13:13:00.000-08:00

Do religious people stand to be better poker players than non-religious?

I've been thinking of late on the question of how science can uphold standards in presenting the results of scientific work in the larger public domain. Here's something I picked up on from the New York Times a day or so ago. Michael McCullough and a fellow psychologist at the University of Miami have in press a paper in an upcoming issue of the Psychological Bulletin, entitled "Religion, Self-Regulation, and Self-Control: Associations, Explanations and Implications". The authors ask whether the available data permit conclusions about whether religion's influences on health, well-being and social behavior can be ascribed to its influences on self-control and self-regulation. This is a big paper, reviewing a large body of data from various sources. The Times piece about the paper appears in John Tierney's column. Tierney offers readers a chance to weigh in on the issues in TierneyLab.

I can't point to egregious faults in the paper itself or Tierney's report on it, but there is a looseness of language throughout that bothers me. It is not easy to establish scientifically valid conclusions on questions that revolve around human behavior and thought. Much of the evidence is in the form of data from surveys. But it can be difficult to trace through seemingly sound survey data to something that can reliably be proposed as a cause and effect relationship. There simply doesn't seem to be a way to test the question of whether religion, or religious observation, is causally related to particular attitudes and behaviors. To cite just one bit of non-survey evidence adduced, there is a bit in the paper about whether religious or spiritual behaviors promote self-regulation. One of the studies cited had "experienced meditators or "pray-ers" engage in meditation during functional imaging brain scans." It is a bit unclear from the paper just what is being compared with what, but in any event, I wonder what the results have to do with religion. I think of myself as moderately meditative, and I think I'm also highly self-regulated and self-controlled. But I don't think of my meditative activity as religious in nature.

The complexity of human social interactions and situations makes for tough going in moving from correlations to causal implications. Many people are religious because they were brought up that way, and they continue in those traditions. Many others may have been brought up in a religious tradition, but have rejected it in whole or part in adulthood. If these latter turn out to be well-balanced people with high levels of self-control, empathy, generosity and many other good characteristics, are all those virtues ascribable to their religious upbringing? When we look at people generally how do we factor in the powerful roles of socio-economic environment on parenting and other cultural forces that make for whether one is exposed to a religious influence, or to examples of altruism, kindness, generosity in other contexts? And what about the fact that religion seems to come in a wide range of colors and flavors? In short, is this paper really testing scientifically interesting questions? Tierney doesn’t allude to these kinds of difficulties in his column.

Scientists are by no means of one mind on the question of what constitutes valid scientific evidence. Science prides itself on having internal mechanisms of quality control, such as peer review. Even that mechanism, however, is only as good as the intellectual standards that prevail within each particular science community. Thus, “scientific opinions” on topics of societal concern (climate change, stem cell research, religion and emotional health) are not of uniform quality. Physical and natural scientists tend to dismiss much social science work as being “soft”: not based on replicable experimentation, often presenting conclusions that seem to rest on rather sketchy distinctions or slim statistical margins. But it is all too easy for physical and natural scientists who normally deal with highly controlled laboratory situations, to find fault with empirical social science research. At the same time, because so much work in the human sciences finds a receptive audience with non-scientists, sometimes too much attention is paid to work that is not really very good, or is over-interpreted by the media. Here is yet another challenge for science in its relations with the larger society: How to ensure that the science that makes it into the public sphere meets high standards of significance and reliability.

Of babies, popcorn and the precautionary principle

2008-12-29T05:05:00.000-08:00

My spouse Audrey and I are looking forward to becoming great grandparents early in 2009. Yikes! Am I ready to be a great grandfather? Everyone in the family is of course very enthused over this coming event. My granddaughter's husband Victor, a keenly analytic sort of guy, tries to think of anything and everything that could affect the health of our granddaughter and the fetus she is carrying. That brings me to popcorn, one of Audrey's favorite snack foods. A liking for popcorn has been passed on to our grandkids, including our pregnant granddaughter (who is also named Audrey). The Audreys' favorite way of making popcorn is to use a plastic bowl with a lid and a bit of oil, and run the assembly in the microwave on high for an appropriate time. Victor has insisted that our granddaughter stop eating popcorn made in this manner, because of the chance that bisphenol A (BPA) might find its way out of the plastic and into the popcorn.

Victor has a good point. There has been a lot written of late on the potentially harmful effects from ingestion of BPA incidental to its use in many plastic objects with which we regularly come into contact. The biggest worries have to do with the health of the fetus and infants. Animal studies indicate that even low levels of BPA in the mother can result in neural and behavioral changes in the infant, especially those related to the development of normal sex-based differences between males and females. But in this case, as in so many others relating to the potentially harmful effects of trace contaminants, the evidence directly relating to humans is nonexistent or inconclusive. In response to much concern, a great many studies have been conducted. The results of all these were recently summarized in a report from the Center for the Evalution of Risks to Human Reproduction. Two things come to mind as I read through this lengthy, detailed report: First, there has been a vast amount of study of the biological effects of BPA. Secondly, it is devilishly difficult to conclude with any level of certainty the extent of the risk that BPA poses to humans. In a kind of battle of agencies, the FDA issued a report in August 2008 suggesting BPA is not something to worry about. That report was blasted by environmental and consumer groups such as the Consumers Union. It's hard to know for sure, but on the basis of the CERHR report I believe that there is little cause for adults to worry, unless they are put into extensive contact with BPA in a work environment. On the other hand, while direct evidence relating to humans is lacking, the studies with rats and mice show that BPA does pose significant dangers in the prenatal and infant stages of life.

How should we respond when faced with a state of knowledge that falls far short of certainty? First we need to assess the authority with which scientific evidence can be called into play. In this case, the evidence, though indirect, is sufficiently compelling to make a case that every effort should be made to minimize exposure of the fetus and infant to BPA. Science in this case provides no certainty, only indirect indications that BPA might cause problems. Animal responses to toxins often fail to mirror those of humans. Sometimes the animals show greater sensitivity than humans, sometimes less. Nonetheless, there is a general similarity in responses, and it is often possible, as in this case, to trace the biological pathways taken by the substance under study to achieve some degree of confidence in inferences based on animal results.
Second, in deciding what response to make to a potential risk, we should invoke the Precautionary Principle, which is embodied in such folk sayings as "look before you leap", and "better safe than sorry". In short, it has to do with the avoidance of risk. In the case of the popcorn popper Victor is applying the principle to say that if there is any chance that using the plastic popcorn popper will increase our granddaughter's body load of BPA, she should avoid using it. This is not a difficult decision for them to make. There are ways to make popcorn that avoid the contact with heated plastic. But for manufacturers who use BPA in a host of applications, the search for a substitute can be arduous and expensive. Substitutes have already come on the market to replace BPA-containing water bottles, baby bottles and infant formula cans. But for some uses, no alternative known to be safe in all respects has been identified. For example, food cans and soft drink cans are lined with a polymer formed from BPA. The amount of BPA that finds its way into the contents of the can is very small, but many environmental groups have lobbied against continued use of the liners.

Enter again the Precautionary Principle. Manufacturers of BPA-containing products are eager to point to the many virtues of plastics in our everyday lives. They stress their safety and the lack of definitive evidence that BPA produces any harmful effects in adults. And there is another side to the Precautionary Principle coin. In an effort to avoid a potentially harmful effect of some action or use, we might inadvertantly create an even greater harm. The American Chemistry Council, an association of chemical companies, makes the point that the plastic liners of cans help to prevent food poisoning. If that's true, and if lives are saved by the use of plastic liners, their removal might do more harm than the potential harm from ingestion of tiny amounts of BPA.

Cass R. Sunstein, writing in the journal Deadalus, [ Sunstein, Cass R. "Taking Precautions", Daedalus, Spring 2008, p. 49] discusses the difficulties in employing the Precautionary Principle as a source of concrete guidance. The problem is that we seldom know all the relevant risks. So we continue to struggle to find the appropriate place for science to exercise an authority consistent with what it can claim to know. Many nonscientists mistakenly expect that real science produces bulletproof answers to the questions put before it. However, the science we draw upon to address issues that affect society in the here and now more often than not can deliver only hedged bets.

What lies behind skepticism of global climate change?

2008-12-26T06:49:00.000-08:00

This blog is in part about the ways in which scientific methods of inquiry and the processes of rational analysis come into contact with the affairs of the larger society outside science itself. In a future blog I want to comment on the concept of science as a distinct social domain with a myriad of interfaces with the larger society. Many of these interfaces involve matters of wide social significance: climate change, medical advances, evolutionary theory and so on. In these cases it is often the case that the viewpoint from science is in conflict with other widely held views that are grounded in other cultural outlooks. In trying to understand the positions taken by many outside science when they conflict with widely held scientific views we need to look into the deeply held values and imbued cultural outlooks that motivate those positions. For scientists it can be very frustrating to encounter arguments based on incorrect understandings that are stubbornly held in the face of a storehouse of reliable information to the contrary. If one wants to be cynical, it is easy to see arrogance, greed, hubris and a litany of other unflattering attributes at work in many cases. The issue of climate change affords plenty of examples; for example, CNN's Lou Dobbs.

We have to ask just why Dobbs has decided to be a skeptic about climate change. The simplest and most likely explanation is that he sees it as generating a positive audience response. Some years ago in a turn from reporting the financial news, he adopted the persona of the 'outsider', the one willing to call into question a mainstream view. For example, he has pushed a chauvanistic approach to immigration that bypasses all the difficult nuances of this complicated issue, appealing instead to people's fears and feelings of being victimized. Characteristically, the solutions he proposes to deal with immigration are pretty much bereft of a serious analysis of the origins of the problems, the longer term consequences, or the effects of his proposals on "those others". Of late he seems to think that the audience he wants to attract will be drawn to the idea that man-made climate change is a fraudulent concept cooked up by some indistinct establishment interest.

As reported by Fair, we have plenty of other examples of this sort of climate change skeptic, including ABC's John Stossel a free market advocate who apparently thinks that the world can run quite well by allowing anyone and everyone to what they damn well please; CNN meteorologist Chad Myers and the conservative columnist George Will. It is hard to know what motivates these people to be publicly skeptical of the mainstream scientific view, in light of their own weak scientific credentials, the vast amount of data, modeling and other forms of analysis that inform the relatively conservative IPCC forecasts, and the acceptance of the mainstream scientific view by nearly all scientists who are bona fide climate scientists of one sort or another. However, if we for the moment put aside our suspicions that these people are looking for attention or market share, or are in the clutches of Exxon Mobil or others of that ilk, we are left with two thoughts: First, there is something in their cultural formations that makes them resistive to an authority that based on the results of a process of observation, hypothesis formation, modeling, testing - in short, of dispassionate rational thought regarding matters dealing with the physical world. Somehow, perhaps because of the conflicts that have arisen with other domains of their lives, science is not seen as a coherent body of practice and knowledge that deserves to be accepted willingly. Secondly, they may have no real idea of what has gone into the conclusions of the IPCC, or of how to distinguish the longer term secular changes that define climate from the shorter term variations in the planet's atmospheric and oceanic systems that we think of as weather. Thus they don't see themselves as denying established scientific opinion.

It takes a lot of time and attention to process and come to a reasonable familiarity with the IPCC reports. I've been interested in this subject for a long time, and I can readily see that it would require more time and effort than most nonscientists would be willing to give. We can't expect, then, that the average person will do that sort of due diligence. But nonscientists can have an understanding of how the scientific enterprise is structured. They should be able to appreciate how what Michael Polanyi referred to in his classic The Republic of Science paper as 'scientific opinion' comes to be formed. Whether or not they are knowledgeable about the particular issue before them, they should be in a position to judge the difference between, say, the uninformed ramblings of a weatherman or news hustler and the consolidated, integrated conclusions of an entire community of researchers. Science needs to find ways to impart this sort of understanding of how it actually works. It is not clear, though, how this is to be accomplished.

And on the first day...

2008-12-24T11:32:00.000-08:00

I recently returned an edited copy of my new book, Imperfect Oracle: The Epistemic and Moral Authority of Science, to Pennsylvania State University Press PSU Press. If all goes well, the book should be out by September, and should appear on bookseller lists long before that. I felt a great sense of relief and something like finality for a project that has occupied much of my attention for the past few years. At the same time, I now realize more intensely than I could ever have when I began it that the book deals with a very broad and multifaceted set of topics. Every day as I hear and read news and commentary on the web, in newspapers and other media, I see connections with ideas dealt with in the book. Or, as also happens with some frequency, I see matters arising that are relevant to the major themes of the book, but which I did not treat in any detail, in the interests of saving space or becuase they are new. I hope to make amends for these shortcomings in this blog, which I intend to be a locale for a broadly-based discussion of science's authority in society; both its expert, or epistemic authority and its moral authority.

To get started, here are a few quotes from the preface to the book. I hope that they will set the tone for what I want to do here.

"We all know that science, whether we love it, abide it or even detest it, is here to stay and that science and technology in important senses define modern culture. They are the agents on which much else depends, whether it’s food and fresh water for the world’s billions, or new fabrics being shown on the fashion runways of Paris and New York. From matters of life and death to trivial pursuits, contemporary life hinges on science and technology. There is no turning back the clock on scientific and technological “progress”; even the most resolutely organic farm commune finds itself partaking of scientific knowledge.
It is this very omnipresence that gives people the willies, as indeed it should. If the world holds itself in thrall to all the instrumental offerings of science and technology, with little regard for their larger implications, for what they mean for our destiny as a species, or for our moral obligations to one another and to the world in which we live, human civilization is not long for this planet.
We seem to have overrun ourselves as a species; we’ve been very clever in dealing with the physical world, in using our evolutionary biological inheritance to such good effect that we can do quite amazing things. But we still carry with us cognitive predilections that served humanity well on its way up the evolutionary slopes, but which may now contribute to our undoing. A rational approach to study of the physical world that employs the methodologies of scientific research has provided humanity with a cornucopia of beneficial products. Ironically, some have consequences that can be disastrous over time if not properly dealt with. Science has much to offer in addressing the complex social, economic and political problems confronting society, but its voice is only one of many. There is no doubt that science exercises influence, but it often falls short of what it might attain. So it’s worth asking why it does not have a stronger voice in shaping the culture of society, as distinct from simply delivering a great many products.
I’ve chosen to analyze this and important related questions by using the concept of “authority” as a kind of lens through which to view science’s interactions with the larger society. Part of my task has been to identify the kinds of authority exercised by science, and to show how scientific authority stands in relationship to the authorities that characterize other social sectors.
....my approach has been to consider authority generally: a classification in terms of the kinds of authority that exist, and their origins in social institutions. I then deal with how science came to have authority, and the contests with other societal sectors through which that authority was won. "

So I've set my point of departure. I hope in the next few posts to more clearly illustrate my interests and intentions, and I hope that you, the reader, will be sufficiently interested to offer your views.