What is science?
“There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others”. — Harry Anslinger, testimony to Congress [10]. Anslinger was rewarded for his ’scientific knowledge’ of the subject, by being made head of the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics. A noble tradition of scientific excellence in government which has exponentially unfolded like a fragrant blossom into our own time.
Science, real science, is the love and joy of discovery and the search for truth.
1.Fact, Truth, and Postmodern Relativism
More prosaically however, science may be thought of as a methodology of generating and objectively testing hypotheses concerning the underlying nature of data. It is a self-correcting, recursive, replicable investigative means for amassing and categorizing data, and for making predictions using objective mathematically verifiable tools.
Yet despite this, the debates surrounding scientific truth are usually won by those in power. In the west no one would be teaching the
creationist myths of some arbitrary religion - in this case Christianity - if some high ranking fundamentalist politicians had not ordered that it be taught. For as in a court room, truth has only incidental relevance - the person with the better legal team, money to throw at an issue, or political power usually wins. Those scientists speaking truth are often persecuted. One need merely recall the persecution of Galileo or Copernicus, the martyrdom of Hasrat Mansur, the character assassination of Dr. Oliveri [29], the firing of Stephen Nutt [52], or the marginalization of physicist Dr. Stephen Jones [30], to see that scientists who challenge the dominant acculturated-to narrative are taking grave personal risks.
There are two principle reasons for this:
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The first is the confusion between facts and truth. Popper’s analysis of science [53] is a good example of this, wherein he and others IMHO fail to recognize that scientific truth is a product of human endeavor and as such not objective fact. In one sense this is accurate, if one is a Baysian... since empirical data can only be used to calculate a probability that an idea accurately describes reality. But Popper when a tad too far, IMHO. For he also said that there is no way to assess the truth of a proposition, only its untruth. Presumably he was unfamiliar with n-valued fuzzy logics, or Spencer-Brown’s work?. Nor is Latour’s idea of ’facts’ (see below).
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The second is postmodern relativism. Postmodernism has so penetrated political discourse, the feel-good curricula of education, and indeed much of scientific discourse that there is often disdain for the presentation of truth. The oft heard argument of political correctness that all opinions are equally valid and equally valued is an example of this bereft-of-reason postmodern relativism.
2. Real world science
In contrast to such real-world scenarios, post-Kuhn (viz. Kuhn’s “La structure des revolutions scientifiques”) thought has been to assume science is evolutionary - beginning with broad strokes of theoretical change, filling in details with experiments designed to support rather than simply test the theory as it becomes standardized into practice. As this occurs the historical antecedents to the newly adopted theory are left behind as no longer necessary to current scientific development. Or as Alfred North Whitehead said:
“A science that hesitates to forget its founders is lost ... It is characteristic of a science in its earlier stages ... to be both ambitiously profound in its aims and trivial in its handling of details" [12]
Such a statement can be re-framed to indicate that the adoption of a particular narrative necessitates that contrary knowledge be abandoned. And that only that which actively supports the replacement narrative be sought out and adopted. Said another way, science progresses not as Kuhn stated, but rather through selection of that which supports already existing theory or which slowly moves toward a new one. The so-called paradigm shifts occur not through revolution but through dedication and sacrifice of a few individuals. Often in the face of overwhelming societal attack, from simple ad hominum through much worse .
For real world science seems to me to be little like the ideal fostered by Kuhn and his followers. Real world science is no longer the proprietary domain of the university or of scholars, but rather has moved to the corporation or corporate funded university laboratory. It is most often for profit rather than for the joy of learning and discovery. Real world science is a place of intrigue, bribery, status seeking, and falsification no different from any other human endeavour.
3. Funding issues
And like everyone else subject to these trends, intellectual freedom and creativity has been severely impacted. On the whole, scientists now spend much more time justifying their work, applying for funding, and in trying to find commercial uses for their work, than on science. Is it any wonder so many ... bend ... the results to fit what will garner them continued employ?
Basic science assumes that questions about the universe must be followed up without knowing answers or where research might lead. Try getting that concept across when your department funding is being cut and you have to justify continued expenditure. If you are trying to do something that has never been done before, you have to be on the edge - different from everyone else. And different means different, such that you probably will have trouble communicating with the professional manager or MBA bureaucrat holding the purse strings.
Try explain why you need six months to think about chaos theory and its application to quantum spin in lowering rounding errors in FPUs. And by the way, you do not know if it will amount to anything, cannot say if you will have anything to show for it at the end, but you think it might be interesting. Add to this that being a good scientist is not necessarily equivalent to having good social skills, having a high tolerance of wilful ignorance, or writing good grand applications, and you will see why funding is unlikely.
So who does get funded? Conservatives.
4. Conservatives rule
“In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.” - Samuel Langhorne Clemens [107]
And who are the conservatives in science? Those who do mediocre research and who do not rock the boat.
They are researchers who can generally justify their work based on its contribution to society - such as producing more fuel efficient missiles (waste not want not). Or who cater to the intellectually bereft. Such as those who portray their psychopathology as religion, or their warmongering as bringing freedom. And of course it is these folks who are asked by managers to sit on ’Peer Review’ committees to help decide who is funded.
So along comes a grant application which took three years to develop proving that axiomatic set theory is inherently flawed. Who’s going to approve this grant? The Peer Review conservative who spent 20 years building a career based on the fact that rats kept in dirty overcrowded cages eat each other?
Consider too the dissertation process for the senior degree. One idly may ponder the question of how many graduate students make it through a PhD in the hard sciences if they disagree with the ontological outlook of the majority on their thesis committee, or worse, discover flaws in the work of committee members. How many brilliant scientists who could not or would not bow to the pressure to conform to the majority view, failed to have their doctoral research approved? Failing to cite to say, APA standards appears to be for some entrenched (tenured) folk more important than the ideas being presented. William Cude’s work [32], to give but one example, presents case after case were brilliant minds were denied entry to the academy for just such picayune foolishness.
5. Mediocrity ensues
The same standard of mediocrity occurs when trying to publish new research.
Peer-reviewed research journals have practised exclusion as their modus operandi [32, 33, 34]. They exclude authors by limiting their publications to just a few papers. They suppress innovation by limiting their peer reviewers to a small cadre of ’established’ scientists. They exclude potential readers by having subscription fees of hundreds of dollars per year, or being available only in the libraries of big research universities. They exclude by exorcising material inimical to their own work. They exclude by precluding work inimical doxa, (as was done for example in the United States with those seeking research grants to create non-fiction versions of the Warren Commission or 9/11 Commission Reports). It is an up hill battle for anyone in pure (rather than applied) research who seeks to explore innovative ideas.
One small example: I was at a conference once where a scientist’s unique contribution to certain mathematical tools important in quantum mechanics and genetics was recognized. He had paid his own way to the conference. He had never been able to receive funding for his work - the peer review committees suggested his work was too esoteric and not in keeping with recognized practices. He could not find work in his field. He ended up spending much of his career teaching high school. He even worked doing odd jobs in order to survive. He wrote half a dozen papers all of which he had to self publish. At the age of sixty-eight, his work was finally recognized for the brilliant contribution it was. But he was a broken and bitter man.
6. Alternative theories
"One of the most insidious and nefarious properties of scientific models is their tendency to take over, and sometimes supplant, reality.” — Erwin Chargaff
Part of the reason that this person’s work had not been accepted was that it was different - far different - from the mainstream narratives in his field. Nor (unlike say, Einstein) was there any prior work by others which had prepared the field.
Acceptance of alternate explanations for accepted ideology, particularly from unknown researchers, is... unlikely. A few examples:
Many who study M-theory (though not all!) use the anthropic principle, a teleology no less tautological for some than that of creationism. But perhaps they are just stringing us along (ha ha!). This because of the idea that vacua (multiple universes) which allow for observers (sentience) are preferentially favoured. Fundamentalism in the guise of scientific theory is still fundamentalism. There are other ways to create vacua - computing them for example, as Schmidhuber [18] and others have shown. The idea is to have a universal computer - CA or Turing should do the trick, operating as follows: The first program runs for one instruction per second; the next at one instruction per second for the remaining steps, etc. If one accepts that Turing machines are really universal, then such a system could actually compute all universes without recourse to quantum mechanics, M-theory, or little homunculus-hiding-cats-in-boxes theory
But try publishing this or other more out-there alternatives. Sure, the Journal of Theoretics or similar might accept same. But seldom will mainstream journals.
What about alternative archaeological explanations? For example the idea that Clovis people where the oldest in North America dominated for a long time. Clovis people the theory ran, migrated across the Bearing Strait following big game somewhere about 13,500 years ago. In the process they supposedly populated the empty-of-humans Americas. Then research began to uncover much older artifacts in North America. DNA and carbon dating traced these to as much as 50,000 years ago. But the researchers involved were vehemently attacked. Although it is now almost universally accepted that the Clovis people were not the first North American settlers, at the time a few of those presenting contrary research lost their positions and careers. Others lost funding and advancement opportunities. Most could not even get their work published in peer reviewed journals.
Peer-reviewed research journals practise exclusion as their modus operandi. Sometimes of course this can be a good thing. Careful testing and debate before accepting something contrary to the perv ailing narrative is sensible. But not to the point of practicing exclusionism. Most peer-reviewed journals exclude authors by limiting their publications to just a few papers. They suppress innovation by limiting their peer reviewers to a small cadre of ’established’ scientists. They exclude potential readers by having subscription fees of hundreds of dollars per year (the old argument of justification concerning printing cost largely vanishes with on-line publication), or being available only in the libraries of big research universities under the careful dictum of ’reference only’. It is an up hill battle for anyone in pure (rather than applied) research who seeks to explore innovative ideas.
"You could write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of papers rejected by Science or Nature." – Paul C. Lauterbur [35], winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine, whose seminal paper on magnetic resonance imaging was originally rejected during the peer review process at Nature.
7. Science studies
"Idols are the profoundest fallacies of the mind of man. Nor do they deceive in particulars...but form a corrupt and crookedly-set predisposition of the mind; which doth, as it were, wrest and infect all the anticipations of the understanding. For the mind of man...is so far from being like a smooth, equal and clear glass, which might sincerely take and reflect the beams of things, according to their true incidence; that it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstitions, apparitions, and impostures." — Roger Bacon [60], 13thC, CE
All of this brings up the general field (if it is one) of “science studies” and Bruno Latour. The old idea that scientific fact is a sociologically influenced endeavor has been resurected by Latour.
Amongst other things, he suggests [54] that due to the far reaching web of inter-connectivity (journals, granting agencies, conferences, etc.) that in a sense everyone in the network is a scientist. Obviously science is constructed as a set of social/cultural beliefs. And obviously there is a political side to scientific explanation. The terminology used concern reflexivity, which may be thought of (albeit not with Latour’s full meaning) as rendering a paper un-readable to someone not in the field. Meta-reflexivity where a paper or some finding is presented in such a way that any reader can relate it to his own referents. The postulate that some sort of internal framework is used to explain events or observations (Latour, pop psychology, etc.) is just non-reflexivity in action. (See [55,56] for details.)
It is obvious that reflexivity is used in publication for the reasons Latour states. But also for a host of historic, sociological, and cultural reasons. As well because, which Latour does not seem IMHO to quite grasp, that one publishes in a particular language not for the obfuscatory purposes he proposes, but rather quite the opposite. When I publish papers filled with equations, I am speaking to an audience of those familiar with the language of mathematics because it clarifies for that audience, and allows them to confirm or reject my reasoning without (or at least with minimal) recourse to opinion, societally induced or otherwise. To claim that a + b ~ c is a postulate which does not stem from cultural values (or if it does, only in such a broad sense as to be meaninglessly picayune.)
Another point in this regard: To me science is something that very few people do but which many practise. Hence in my view the graduate student monitoring flow wavefront from a solar flare is practising science, but the person dreamily walking along the street creating tensor equations in her head for the pure pleasure of it, is actually doing science.
That is to say, science is what proceeds when a gifted individual pursues truth in her own unique fashion for her own unique reasons. It is not the daily grind in the lab or sitting in front of a peer review panel hoping for tenure. It is an act of profound love of truth. So I disagree with Bachelard’s [57] (and later Latour’s) idea of non-independent social existence of data and conclusion (which is seems to me - just my opinion of course - is just Bourdeau, Foucault, and other postmodernist sentiment stated in different terminology).
In reading through Latour’s “Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society” [58] I felt deja vu regarding hidden curriculum studies. As if postmodernists, particularly of the French variety it seems, are intent upon paraphrasing one another as if there is something new in what they say. I find Sokal’s criticism [59] quite justified, for it is my own feeling that along with Kuhn, Latour may not have a complete grasp of some basic scientific theories and practice.
If the ideas have any veracity, it would be to the practise of science, not its doing.
8. Peer Review?
“I played the violin for about 15 years, and had to stop, because for me the strain of a performance plus the need for constant practice overshadows the joy received from playing. I now play quite happily at the back of the second violins in an orchestra - room for fun, and mistakes are rarely heard :) Anyway, my point is, perhaps something similar is happening in the field of science.” [Hung, 2006]
This is exactly so. Those at the forefront, whether it is in science, leading a country, or holding satsangs as an enlightened master, are in my experience seldom the best. Rather it is those who are largely unknown, who shun the limelight, but whose love of what they do propels them foreword toward an unfolding joy are those of true genius. It is not at the head of the line that the smartest and best congregate, but much further back, unnoticed and therefore unhampered.
And then there are those who are ignored because those at the head of the line are simply not bright enough to recognize what is before them.
One simple example: Niels Abel work of genius regarding the insolubility of the quintic equation was ignored by Gauss and the scientific establishment as the worthless work of a crank. Able died unknown, in abject poverty at the age of twenty-six. History has all but forgotten him, but remembers the more affluent and well-connected Gauss quite well.
A small thought experiment: Let the reader suppose for a moment that an astrologer expert in both Vedic and Ptolemaic astrology has applied to a prestigious government or private agency for funding. The astrologer wishes to research hypothesized causal relationships between small changes in astronomical bodies and correlative changes in small bodies on earth. The reader will doubtless readily agree that the probability of the astrologer receiving funding approaches zero.
But consider this. In theoretical physics, Mach’s principle states that acceleration of a mass relative to absolute space is meaningless – that acceleration is only relevant when viewed relative to extreme stellar distance. Or said another way, inertia of a local body is influenced by matter at great astronomical distance – distances so vast that gravity or any other known force should not be of measurable effect. Or said yet again more simply, every particle effects every other particle, and so every theory of influence (such as gravitational theory) should be relational. While Mach’s Principle is not proved by Einstein’s general relativity, there are scalar tensor theories (such as Brans-Dicke [36]) which do lend it some (though not conclusive) additional support.
Now – suppose that the astrologer had changed her application, couching her proposal in terms of testing certain elements of Brans-Dicke for confirmation of Mach’s Principle. The reader will of course see that her probability of receiving funding would have immeasurably improved. This even though the subject of her research had not changed nor had the statement that the distant stars influence local activity. Only the descriptions – the language of application - differ.
Description or language which does not fit patterns of an orthodox norm is rejected in part because class systems fail to fund those who cannot speak within the limitations of an accepted vernacular. And because reviewers all too often are incapable of properly understanding that which differs from acculturated habitus – their carefully indoctrinated opinions.
The journal peer review process has seldom been objectively studied, although there are a handful of small studies in the area. One such study distributed a previously accepted paper for the British Medical Journal to 420 medical reviewers. The study made a small change in the paper however – it inserted eight deliberate errors. Few of the reviewers spotted the errors, none spotted all of them [31]. Others have lamented the entire peer review process as severely flawed [29,30]. To my knowledge however, there are no formal studies of the peer review process as a quality assurance task, and no application of the considerable literature in this area has been applied to peer review – clearly an area for further research. In software engineering, a process known as software peer review is a well known tool [32] for finding errors in code.
Yet again, none of the techniques therein appear to have been applied to the peer review process of journal publication. Challengers to current orthodoxy need not apply. While of course there are exceptions, all to frequently it is not about what you know, but whom.
In general one might say that the ability of scientific, academic, political, military, police, or government review committees to find water is limited to checking if their feet are wet. Some committee members may require staff to point out which appendages are feet.
9. What everyone knows to be true
In reality of course peer review is merely agreement amongst a particular group as to the scientific merits of data and its interpretation. Sometimes this can go very, very wrong. What follows is rather extreme example of this. I leave it to you to draw your own conclusions as to whether or not similar bias amongst scientific peer groups is occurring today.
In the 20th century a scientifc theory, which for the moment I will term “Theory X”, took hold. Theory X was supported by Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill, and other powerful men. The theory was backed by the force oflaw in the United States, and supported unanimously by that country’s Supreme Court. [92].
Luminaries such as Alexander Graham Bell, Margaret Sanger, Luther Burbank, Leland Stanford, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and other equally distinguished persons of note supported Theory X [93]. Research on Theory X was funded as valid science by the Carnegie Foundation. Nobel prizes were awarded to researchers who supported Theory X as scientifically valid [94].
In the North America major universities and research institutions - the Cold Springs Harbor Institute, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Johns Hopkins Universities - supported and taught Theory X as factually correct, scientifically proven. The National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council all took Theory X as being scientifically valid [95]. Those few who opposed this theory were considered ignorant or worse, conspiracy theorists [96].
What was Theory X? It was the “scientifically proven” hypothesis that the gene pool of humanity should be manipulated to grant child birthing rights only to a select few. Immigrants, beatniks, the feeble minded, degenerates, the poor, east Indians, people of color, Japanese, the uneducated, those of low social class, factory workers, farm labourers, and other such groups were, accorting to the the theory, a detriment to the evolution of mankind. They were therefore strongly encouraged, sometimes forced, not to have children [97]. By now you will have guessed that Theory X was a strict interpretation of eugenics theory - that the gene pool should be manipulated to exclude certain ’undesirables’.
This “science” was awarded vast sums of money [91] by government leaders in several countries, by heads of large corporations, think tanks, universities, and the taxpayer. Eugenics scientists were often held in high esteem.
For most people of that time, save for a few kooks and nay-sayers, knew that eugenics even in its so-called mild form (steralizing the mentally ill), was “scientifically” justified.
10. Meritocracy?
In addition to the tendency of review committees to be extremely conservative in what they will consider to be acceptable science, there are other factors which limit the ability of research to be recognized. For example, sometimes some senior academic long past his prime will put his name on a graduate student’s work, and publish [16, 45, 46]. But whatever the reason, the real world of science contains many examples of genius being ignored in favour of those whose perhaps not quite so deserving:
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Robinson: Ms. Robinson’s research in economic theory has been standard in the curriculum for decades. Her ’The Accumulation of Capital’ [37] and ideas on imperfect completion changed the way economists viewed the world. Ms. Robinson did not receive the Nobel while others IMHO of much lesser prowess did so. Other than the misfortune of being female (no non-male has ever received the Nobel) she failed to follow orthodoxy, was eclectic in her work, and was against Capitalism – a cardinal sin in the eyes of the Nobel committee of the day.
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Mendeleev: Devised the periodic table of elements. Predicted, accurately, the existence of a host of other yet-to-be discovered elements, laying the foundation for much of modern chemistry. Refused the Nobel Prize when Svante Arrhenius convinced the Swedish Royal Academy Mendeleev did not deserve it. Mendeleev had made (valid) criticisms of Arrhenius’s own theories, but Arrhenius was known and respected – Mendeleev was not.
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Poincaré: Invented many aspects of the special theory of relativity before Einstein. Created the mathematics leading to chaos theory. Poincaré developed the formula E=mc2 [38]. He invented algebraic topology. In every way he was a towering figure in mathematics. But, he did not get recognition in his own time by such groups as the Nobel committee (in part perhaps because Nobel did not like mathematics) – despite Poincaré’s brilliant contributions to physics. This towering figure is virtually unknown to the general public.
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Marconi: Claimed to have invented the radio. In 1943 the U.S. Supreme Patent Court found instead what every historian of the issue had known all along - that Nikola Tesla was the inventor of wireless transmission and radio [38]. Marconi’s related Patent showed nothing new, and nothing other than what had already been published and registered by Tesla. The Court considered Marconi’s claim that he did not knew of Tesla’s patents false [39].
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Reis: Invented the telephone [14, 42, 43]. An early working version, years before Bell, is in a back corner gathering dust in the British Museum in London. But allegedly Bell and others used Phillip Reis’ design drawings and ideas without acknowledging his work, and grabbed the headlines. And the money.
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Papin: Invented the steam engine [40,41]. Much later a Scottish engineer James Watt, allegedly patented the work without acknowledging the source.
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Martinville: Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in 1860 invented a working phonautogram [43, 44] and recorded his and others’ voices. Two decades before Edison claimed to be the first to record voice.
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Morse: The telegraph was invented 1753. It was made famous much later when an artist, Samuel Morse, sent a short message thereby giving his name rather than the inventor’s to history.
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Franklin: Rosalind Franklin discovered the double helix in 1953 [15]. Watson and Crick allegedly used her x-rays without acknowledgment but allegedly with full knowledge of the source [ibid] in what was allegedly one of the worst instances of plagiarism in modern times. They won the Nobel which many believe should have gone to Ms. Franklin.
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Pope: The assembly line was pioneered by bicycle tycoon Albert Pope. His ideas were later allegedly appropriated by Henry Ford. Pope’s engineering genius in development of assembly line manufacturing, has been all but forgotten.
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And so on for a very long list
However it should be pointed out that an important factor is that not all brilliant scientists wish to be known, or to have anything to do with society as a whole. Some obvious examples come to mind:
William James Sidis eschewed most social interaction choosing instead the life of a semi-recluse. Alexandre Grothendieck, arguably the most brilliant mathematician of our time, was disgusted with the mediocrity he saw all around him in scientific circles. He chose not to publish in journals, and disappeared from society altogether, choosing a life of privacy and private writing. Emilie du Chatelet was a genius. She recognized the fallacies of Newton’s Principia regarding impulse, and in contradiction to scholarship of the time supported Leibniz’s contentions regarding E=mv2, doing her own original research to confirm the velocity squared model. Her ideas made her something of a social pariah in Paris, and she was forced to live far from the society of here peers. There are many others, yet the list of those of real genius who eschewed participation in scientific circles is of course short - for obvious reasons.
11. Corporate universities
In the 1930’s Linus Pauling’s analysis of the chemical bond began the unification chemistry and physics at the fundamental level. Unfortunately this was a boon to bio-warfare work, and funding in this area for the next several decades issued from military sources into various research facilities [18]. The infusion of military dollars to large large corporations however did not truly develop until the advent of WWII. This event saw the development of giant new technology based industries. In turn the needless Cold War and funding from schoolyard bullies seeking to outpace each other saw fundamental research in many fields leave the more abstract theoretical interest and turn toward pursuit of practical application. As more and more post-secondary institutions were forced to justify themselves to unsympathetic government bureaucrats, it was natural to turn toward corporate funding and mainly practical, visible, short-term interest applications instead.
Ever since, this trend toward corporate relationships and partnering in higher education particularly in the sciences has been growing. For example in 1988 Harvard had 69 corporate relationships, Stanford forty, and MIT thirty five. By 2000 these numbers had doubled. And the trend keeps rising. Research institutions that do not couple with corporations (and government, military, etc.) find it increasingly difficult to fund good research [1,2].
All of this has resulted in a focus upon research which is deemed "relevant - ie. has some monetary goal. University science risks becoming a means of ensuring research laboratories are extensions of private industry and/or military-government research. Granting programs exacerbate this by invariably asking for industry applications, financial successes of prior projects, and similar such questions. Questions valid in a private corporation perhaps, but surely inappropriate when applied to the enabling/disabling of pure research, of pure science? The days in which scholars engaged in fundamental research for the pure joy of learning without the interference of profit-oriented bureaucrats are perhaps, numbered.
Sometimes this emphasis on profit can lead to questionable ethical practice. It has been alleged that most university research in the sciences is either military or corporate influences, with relatively few exceptions. The grant-funding process certainly indicates this. But in thinking about how to illustrate what is going on using one small web page, I felt a single example might be sufficient. And so consider the University of Toronto:
12. Corporate University Example
Of course many universities are funded by military for military use. The supercomputer on which I ran simulations necessary in my research was often tied up for days at a time by military. Unsmiling people with guns at the entrance to the lab telling us lowly scientists that the system was off limits until Tuesday. Well, that is to be expected I suppose. But over the last decades there is another intruder in academia - the corporation.
For several years following the diaspora of talent north due to the U.S. War of Terror in South East Asia, the university was rated as one of the top five research institutions in North American. But as its population and value-systems changed (due in large part said diaspora), it began to accept donations from large corporate entities. The trend then continued for the next several decades. To choose from many examples, from 1997 to 2000 - a mere three years - the university received over $100 million in donations from pharmaceutical companies, automobile manufacturers, banks, telecommunications giants, computer firms, department-store chains and a large stock exchange [5]. University chairs were named in honor of large multi-national drug companies [4]. The main campus library became the home of an information commons named after a donating bank [3]. Such activity is now of course, normal - all large universities do this... now. But such activities usually come with strings attached:
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In 1997, the university allegedly admitted to allegedly accepting an alleged $8 million ’donation’ from Nortel corporation on the alleged condition that a related agreement with the firm concerning intellectual property rights remain secret [10].
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Shortly thereafter a respected research professor was gagged by the university - she was prevented from speaking of or publishing her findings [11]. Findings which indicated that a certain drug did not work as the producing drug company had said it did. (I am not using names here, for obvious reasons.) The president of her university supported the drug company, and wrote a letter to that effect, basically saying that should her research become known it could damage said company’s intellectual property rights [6]. The researcher’s lab was closed, her tenure track ended, and her notes confiscated [6]. Eventually (it took years) she won a wrongful action case in the courts, but her career was essentially ruined, regardless of the veracity of her case.
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Just a few years later this same university allegedly was still receiving multi-million dollar ’donations’ from this same corporation [7]. This time however having witnessed the alleged impact on ones career and health, allegedly not one professor protested [8] the cozy relationship. For the court case had made it clear that faculty who protested corporate intrusion into pedagogy or research might lose their reputations and their careers. For the case showed that corporate pockets for legal expenses were deep - a dissenting professor might find herself tied up on legal issues, and away from her lab, for decades. That is, with a career in ruins regardless of the validity of her research.
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Shortly thereafter the Union of Concerned Scientists submitted a memorandum signed by over 5000 working scientists, including 48 Nobel laureates, to the effect that government and corporate incursions into universities and other research institutions had steadily been creating suppression and denials of academic freedom similar to that alleged in the case outlined above. Needless to say, the effect of the memorandum was negligible. It was virtually ignored by mainstream media, university administrations, private and public research institutions, and most of all, government.
Since that time, corporate intrusion in university research particularly in the sciences of course, has come to be taken for granted. If one’s findings in the lab threaten the extent of “donations” in any way, pressures are brought to bear, and the research findings somehow may fail to see the light of day. Oh, of course there are exceptions. But for someone starting on a tenure track, at a small university which is in large part dependent upon corporate largess, not too many.
13. Interference in research
Another small example of this corporate intrusion: Dr. Rusi P. Taleyarkhan published a paper on his work in sonofusion. He suggested that by bombarding acetone with ultrasonic pulses it was possible to produce then fuse the bubbles produced, creating nuclear fusion [19]. Needless to say this caused a tremendous stir. Unfortunately colleagues at Oakridge Laboratories where he was working were unable to replicate his results. They found rather that detected neutron emission consistent with chance. Several in the traditional scientific community who had been invited to review his work were highly critical in public. A series of public castigation followed, particularly a series of articles in Nature through culminating with and article by [20] in Nature, another in IEEE Spectrum [21] and a strong response from the Cambridge Cavendish Laboratory to the effect that Taleyarkhan’s work had not been fairly evaluated [22]. Additionally, several papers appeared to confirm and replicate his work eg. [23,24,25]. An investigation at Purdue University where he moved after Oakridge, found no evidence of wrongdoing on his part [26].
Yet the US Congressional House Committee on Science and Technology’s Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee (composed almost entirely of non-scientists) conducted its own review of Purdue’s review. They released a report highly critical of Purdue’s investigation [27]. They argued that since public funds had in part supported the research, Purdue was required to investigate any and all allegations that the research was flawed in great detail. The support of other scientists did not seem to matter to the committee, nor was there questioning of other physicists who had obtained similar findings in the area, such as work by the US Space and Naval Warfare (SPAWAR) Systems centre [28].
Suppose for a moment that sonofusion did work. It could quickly lead to an inexpensive means of generating significant quantities of non-polluting, infinitely sustainable energy. The impact of this upon the profit margins of those paying lobbyist salaries would be significant. But instead, we are left with the necessity of thanking these and other anti-Copernicus-ians for their fine work in the field of excellence .
"The Minister of Science is a creationist who thinks the Flinstones is a documentary"
-- Gilles Duceppe [77], discussing the scientific qualifications of a then Federal Minister of Science. In the opinion of many, Mr. Duceppe was severely understating the actual level of ignorance.
Three very quick examples from the North American experience may help illustrate some of the current political interference in science:
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Canada: A personal story: I had the pleasure of listening to a lecture recently by a world renowned scientist. From my vantage point I was able to watch two of the most powerful federal cabinet members who had been invited to the lecture. The entire time they frequently yawned, looked at their watches, slumped in their seats, played with their smart phones, and above all appeared to be profoundly bored. Whereas the rest of those in attendance where riveted, clearly entranced by the lecture. However as soon as the press was let into the lecture hall, these politicians both stood beaming beside the guest lecturer, giving sound bites and photo-ops, saying how interesting it all was and how their government was 100% behind supporting the sciences. One week later the most senior of these politicians cut federal funding for pure research in that particular field of study to the lowest levels in history [78] while at the same time his government ordered billions of dollars worth of new weapons for the armed forces [79].
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United States: Around the same time in the United States, the then President appointed a panel to investigate the environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing. This is a gas drilling technique which injects water, sand, and various chemicals into the ground at high pressure in order to fracture underground rock formations, making gas and oil more accessible. Hydraulic fracturing also, according to university studies [80] causes methane contamination of drinking water, air pollution, and other environmental damage. Six of the seven panellists appointed by the President to investigate the scientific studies on the safety of this drilling method were oil and gas industry executives and/or managers [81]. There was no representation by independent scientists. Or from the citizens whose environment had been polluted by fracturing.
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Canada: The Office of the National Science Advisor was eliminated by Canada’s evangelical Christian government [82] run by the Republican Party of Canada. Immediately thereafter that country’s environmental scientists were muzzled – they were ordered by the government not speak to the press (as they had done for decades) but rather have a non-scientific PR office answerable only to the Prime Minister’s Office, respond instead 83]. Shortly thereafter the entire Cabinet shunned a ceremony in Ottawa to honour Canadian scientists sharing the Nobel Prize [84]... instead they found the find time to talk with religious lobby groups [85]. The CIHR (a taxpayer funded scientific granting agency) had its budget so reduced that that same government that it could fund less than 16% of scientific worthwhile grant applications (down from 100% in previous years) [86]. But ’fund’ is a relative term - the government had so drastically cut the CIHR’s money that successful applicants only receive 1/4 the average amount given for successful grant application [ibid]. These has been a mass exodus of scientists and academics from Canada [98] since the advent of an allegedly anti-science evangelical Christian government [99], with the country suffering the the largest loss of high-profile researchers in its history [ibid]. The funding cuts for pure research have been so drastic that Canadian science may never recover [74].
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United States: The U.S. Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality has allegedly published several reports purporting to show that heterosexuals are less likely to commit crimes than homosexuals [87]. Despite the American Sociological Association saying that the Institute had “consistently misinterpreted and misrepresented sociological research on sexuality, homosexuality, and lesbianism," [88] this and similar think tanks reports have been cited by courts from Massachusetts to the Florida Supreme Court in decisions upholding bans on on same-sex couple adoption [89]. Some media have even gone so far as to cite this think tank as a valid alternative to American Psychological Association [90].
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Canada: The United Nations has included chrysotile asbestos on the Rotterdam Convention’s list of products too dangerous to sell or use other than under highly controlled laboratory conditions [102]. Chrysotile asbestos as you may know, is a highly active carcinogen with typical reactions to breathing the dust being terminal lung cancer, asbestosis and mesothelioma. The evangelical fundamentalist Christian head of Canada’s government has refused to add asbestos to the Rotterdam Convention [100], as have Iran, Kyrgyzstan and Zimbabwe [101]. Canada, which exports more than 200,000 profitable tons of this toxin to third world countries - the only western country to do so. But neither the science nor the deaths seem to matter when pritted against economic profit. “All types of asbestos cause lung cancer... asbestos kills over 100,000 people a year” — the World Health Organization [100].
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United States: The Union of Concerned Scientists’ report entitled “Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking”. The report was signed by over 6,000 American scientists. These included 48 Nobel laureates, 62 Medal of Science recipients, and 135 members of the National Academy of Sciences [104]. The report outlines how in the name of the U.S. War of Terror, scientific research in everything from Agriculture to Health Sciences has been classified and kept from the public, as well as normal channels of scientific information exchange [103]. Additionally a plethora of research has been retroactively classified, even though it has been in the public domain for decades [ibid]. The report also indicates that funding for basic university research has been systematically reallocated for defence research. For example, funding has been cut from fundamental microbiology and genetics research and poured into research on the dangerous and exotic pathogens (i.e. warfare research). Additionally the report shows how the peer review process has been negated by requiring political rather than peer oversight of federally funded (i.e. almost all) research.
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Canada: Scientists researching why salmon stocks are dropping have been muzzled by the Canadian Conservative government. Results have usually indicated that stocks are dropping due to infestations leaking from farmed salmon (i.e. retained in tanks adjacent to the ocean) [119]. Documents obtained under Canada’s Access to Information Act indicated further that the Privy Council (under the Prime Minister) and Fisheries Department prevented a report showing this from being released and forbade the lead authors from discussing findings [120]. Independent scientists and their labs were allegedly subject to enormous political pressure and censorship by the government [121]. Genomic signature analysis of tagged wild salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) suggested infection by a virus as well as other problems such as related leukaemias [119]. Salmon farms have been shown to be both a source of virus carrying sea lice, and that said lice infect wild salmon fry during their migrations past said farms [120, 121]. Many of these farms were in the ruling party’s electoral ridings.
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United States: Laws have been enacted to prevent scientists in receipt of government funding - which is virtually all researchers in the hard sciences - from communicating with colleagues in the World Health Organization without having the communication vetted by government bureaucrats [111]. (Update: Now copied almost word for word in Britain and Canada, with similar laws in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Germany, etc.) Said bureaucrats are almost always non-scientists [ibid], frequently tied to or from the military [112], and frequently political appointees from the corporate sector [111]. These non-scientists are tasked with reviewing work they seldom are qualified to understand for “appropriateness”. Attendance at WHO conferences is also subject to U.S. government rather than university control. This censorship also extends to publication of findings, which may not occur if the bureaucrats find such publication “inappropriate”. Note that science works through open sharing of findings - it is simply not possible to pursue science without such open sharing. In a similar action, the U.S. government has prevented marine biologists from discussing or publishing information on the allegedly vastly increased fish, dolphin, and marine life mortality rate following oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. Similarly the Canadian government allegedly censored publication of studies showing the full extent of the toxification of Lake Erie [110]. There are many other similar examples.
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Canada: The universities of Western Ontario and Toronto signed a contract to allow private for-profit industry groups to enact surveillance of faculty correspondence. The deal defined e-mailing of hyperlinks (eg. “Look at this new work on DNA sequencing at http://aaa.bbb.ccc”) as equivalent to photocopying a document. This definition meant that any and all links in email to any web address were to all intents and purposes, copyright infringements and therefore imposed an annual $27.50 fee for every full-time (or equivalent) student to pay for said infringement [119]. Expansion of the definition of copyright in this way to suit private for-profit groups, and imposing said definition upon scientists and researchers, is anathema to academic progress and freedom. No government in Canada rushed to protect academic rights in this regard. Shameful.
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United States: The United States has contracted out building of completely autonomous flying drones which can make kill decisions on their own, removing the human controller from the equation [112, 113, 114, 115]. The drones were designed to act in flocks [114], or alone and make their own decisions based upon on-board biometric analysis of “potentially hostile behaviour and intent” [116] by humans... then killing said humans. At time of writing, that country’s government has utterly ignored scientific experts in AI, psychology, and related fields who have warned against not only the implications of such drones, but also of the likelihood of mistakes on an unprecedented order of magnitude [117]. The International Committee for Robot Arms Control for example, tendered serious concern regarding this proliferation of death [118] by those in power. But to date all have been ignored. Some who have raised these issues have found their ability to receive government grants and contracts imperilled [ibid].
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Canada: Despite overwhelming scientific evidence in support of safe injection sites for addicts [112,113,114], the governing evangelical Christian Republican Party of Canada shut down that country’s only such site. The site had been legally operating for eight years, had been proven to save lives, and had had no discernible negative impact on public safety but rather quite the contrary. Yet the government presented no sociological or scientific evidence in support of its decision. Ultimately however the Supreme Court in a unanimous decision ruled that the facility could stay open in large part because it saved lives and in other ways benefitted the public. The Court also reviewed the scientific evidence, and concluded that the shutdown had been without merit, as well as being a clear violation of people’s rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Prime Minister stated in response that his “platform is different” - no mention of the science involved whatsoever. Or as a colleague at my former university who was very familiar with the issues stated: “The government cares nothing about science, only in pushed their agenda to be in goosestep with U.S. drug policy.”
There are quite literally hundreds of other examples from which to choose. The pursuit of truth depends free and unfettered exchange information, ideas, and discoveries within scientific communities, free from political interference. Any attempt to curtail scientific individual expression and mutual exchange is a guarantee that scientific excellence will diminish. And along with it, truth.
Yet the reality of doing science in the modern world is one wherein singularly unqualified people end up dictating what will and what will not be allowed as a valid field of study. And with whom results can be shared. The result if this continues, may be the renewal of the dark age Jacobs’ well known research so clearly predicted [105].
“Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.” - Clark’s Law
14. Religion, not science
“Science finds every soil barren in which miracles are taken literally and seriously and revelation is considered to provide authentic knowledge of the physical world. If the scientific method is trashed, no amount of resources or loud declarations of intent to develop science can compensate. In those circumstances, scientific research becomes, at best, a kind of cataloguing or ’butterfly-collecting’ activity. It cannot be a creative process of genuine enquiry in which bold hypotheses are made and checked." [62]
In the 3
rdC CE Christian monks seized the scientist Hypatia and burned all scientific works they could find. This fine tradition continued through the millennia down to our own time, as discuss in detail,
here.
Consider creationism as an example of this:
Creationism is the pedagogical advocacy of what is believed rather than of that which can be replicated, observed, or subjected to the Baconian method. It is a teleological tautology. This is precisely what occurs when the mythos inherent in
Christian fundamentalism is strong, such as in the U.S. states of Alabama, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Tennessee, Alaska, Texas... and a growing number of areas where the science and fact of evolution are not taught in the lower schools.
In some areas of Texas weekly instruction in the Christian holy book is mandated by law for all high school students [63] regardless of a student’s religion, cultural background, or belief system. An additional twenty-four U.S. states have ordered schools to teach the Christian myth of creation on an equally footing with the science of evolution [64].
In the U.S. state of Louisiana the so-called “Academic Freedom” bill is law [65, 66]. This law requires the Christian creation myth to be taught as if it were factual. This has caused some to posit that evolution is not taught in United States classrooms due to the lack of evidence for it in that country, something which is becoming increasingly obvious as religious fanaticism overtakes reason in that country.
Each year for the past several billion years the earth has been bombarded with tens of thousands of amino acid bearing bits of asteroids, comets, and such in the form of meteorites. Most of the amino acid compounds are laevorotatory, and most are either exceedingly rare or unknown to science. These are truly extra-terrestrial building blocks of life and likely part of the explanation for the overwhelming dominance of laevorotatory amino acids on our own planet. As well as being a likely source of life on earth. Such life became first bacteria, which filled the planet until one of their waste materials, oxygen, killed them roughly possibly 3.5 billion years ago [67]. The point of course, is that the foundations of earthly life – non-ambidextrous amino acids, water, and oxygen - do not nicely fit with creationist models which see the patriarchal deity of a particular religious sect creating humans out of nothing 6000 or so years ago.
This urge to return to the dark ages is echoed in several other countries, some of which I have already mentioned above. In Britain, the teaching of so-called ’Intelligent Design’ theory has been mandated in various government funded schools 76]. In Canada the Minister of State for Science and Technology has stated his view that "evolution is just a theory" [75]. But the United States still wins the prize in the race toward adopting dark-age medieval thought: It is against the law in many parts of the United States to teach Darwinism as more correct or in anyway superior to intelligent design, which must be taught as an equally valid theory [66,65,67,68]. Such faux science, so readily accepted by various politicians fails the well known test of falsifiability (more liberally called hypothesis testing) which Karl Popper has so clearly enunciated as follows:
"...All the statements of empirical science (or all ’meaningful’ statements) must be capable of being finally decided, with respect to their truth and falsity; we shall say that they must be conclusively decidable. This means that their form must be such that to verify them and to falsify them must both be logically possible. Thus Schlick says: ’...a genuine statement must be capable of conclusive verification; and Waismann says still more clearly: ’If there is no possible way to determine whether a statement is true then that statement has no meaning whatsoever. For the meaning of a statement is the method of its verification" [70].
Popper nicely point toward what Intelligent Design, or indeed any ontology based upon non-observability lacks verifiability, replicability, concrete objectivity, or in the extreme case, even normal statistical hypothesis testing. Not to mention common sense. Despite this non-observability based belief systems such as a particular sects interpretation of their holy book have triumphed reason in the curriculum, and indeed in much of academia where one particular religious sect trumps 2000 years of scientific progress. As Dawkins says,
“Once, we were tempted to laugh this kind of thing off as a peculiarly American phenomenon. Teachers in Britain and Europe now face the same problems, partly because of American influence, but more significantly because of the growing [religious] presence in the classroom — abetted by the official commitment to “multiculturalism” and the terror of being thought racist.” [71]
To give a single example of the chill such legislation has on progress and science: The U.S. state of Florida the legislature voted to pass a bill [72] that allowed students to sue professors for beliefs that do not concur with fundamentalist conservative perspectives. Should a professor discusses environmental catastrophe or Darwin’s theory of evolution then she was required to give equal time to the the value of industrial growth or to the Christian creation myth. Should she fail to do so, the bill allows a student to sue the professor for introducing bias into the lecture hall. The concept of Academic Freedom were largely eliminated by this bill – which was presumably its true intent.
In other words, science and the progress of humanity which it has aided for millennia is as in Hypatia’s time, threatened by particular interpretations of a particular religion’s version of truth. And so history repeats. Very sad.
15. Ethics
Someone
wrote to ask why I had had so little to say regarding the literature on scientific ethics. The example he used was the overwhelming presence of military-tied research in most of the world’s top academic institutions and the questionable uses to which the results of said research have been applied.
Well, rather than discuss this literature which is readily available elsewhere, I would ask you to consider for a moment the value system of the scientists and scientific organizations involved in producing the following:
During the U.S. invasion of Vietnam War, its military dispersed 12,000,000 gallons of the biowarfare toxin Agent Orange and other herbicides [108]. These lethal substances impacted/destroyed the health of more than 3,000,000 Vietnamese - almost all civilians. It also resulted in birth defects in more than 500,000 children born since that time [109]. These toxins also decimated the wildlife in that country, almost wiping out some species and lastingly decimating the genetic health of many others [ibid]. As with human births in that country, deformed animal births are common. The forests were so severely contaminated that even today there are large areas where the soil is poisoned and groundwater is still toxic.
Scientists are not necessarily unaware of the uses to which their work is put, or why they are hired for certain jobs. Without the willing acquiescence of many scientists, there would be no mass genocides, censorship, UVA assassinations, etc. These scientists happily rationalize their actions, usually with the following rubrics:
16. Cheating
The great inventors of the past were almost always men of private means and outside the normal scientific strata. Or they had wealthy benefactors. Today? Not so much. Carlos Slim Helú, Ingvar Kamprad, Alice Walton, Li Ka-shing are people of private means - how many of them spend their money and time dabbling in quantum mechanics? How about the billionaires of the computer world? Or Hollywood superstars? Or multimillion dollar football or hockey players? Or the latest multi-millionaire rapper buying bling for himself? For the most part people with money today have no interest in the beauty of the universe. Their sights are set much lower. To dream about things other than survival or looking good or defeating a competitor or having a bigger house or climbing a social list is a completely different skill set than that need to be a real scientist. Who are the social heroes? Movie stars, sports stars, captains of industry, lawyers, bankers, doctors, and so on. Not scientists.
And so as funding gets more and more difficult, and ones research more and more expensive, the need for ’good’ results deepens. Cheating and fraud in science, censorship and suppression of research, and the like are understandably if unfortunately, on the rise [31, 32,49,50]. All of us in the hard sciences know of incidence of data manipulation and outright fraud. We know whose papers are likely to be true, and which (very few) journals to trust. For the rest, the pressures to produce or be denied funding are great indeed.
A fairly recent study of 204 scientists [31] replying to a journal’s questionnaire, 197 reported they were aware of cheating by their colleagues. They judged that 58% of the cheating was intentional, and they reported that only 10% of these intentional cheaters were dismissed; most of them, in fact, were promoted.
However a more recent meta-study with a much larger N found this to be a severe underestimation [32]. This meta-study found instead that 72% reported questionable research practices on the part of their colleagues, with almost 15% reporting falsification of data and outright fabrication of results. Anonymous self-reporting in this particular study, indicated that roughly 34% stated that they themselves used questionable practices (unethical, fabrication, purposefully suspect statistical manipulation, etc.). (Perhaps this is an anti-anthropic principle whereby an entire scientific methodology is constructed on the belief that all others are mere illusion .)
Science and scientists are not separate from society or the mores inherent therein. (Hence T. Kuhn’s implication that paradigms constrain innovation.) Scientists are the same as people anywhere - they have children, mortgages,pay taxes, read newspapers, and suffer the same severe prejudices and belief systems which colour the world view of humans everywhere. Additionally, the clear (or should that be, appalling) trend toward corporatisation of economies and governments, and the instance on efficiencies and market driven outlook has effected scientists no differently from anyone else.
"Short-term performance increases that are sometimes observed after ... successions [which] may be evidence of self-interested behaviour. New CEO’s may cut allocations to long-term investment areas such as research and development (R&D), capital equipment ... in an effort to drive up short-term profits and secure their positions." [51]
Science, real science, is the love and joy of discovery and the search for truth. As such, it is in real trouble.
References
