Doing science in a greenhouse

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.

Science is a baseball game. Well, sort of.

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.