Attacking the Messenger

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.

Science with its pants down

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.

Changing minds about climate change

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.

Uncertain science

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

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.

Not-so-curious George

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

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.

I see your pain - or do I?

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

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.

Of babies, popcorn and the precautionary principle

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.