Science Needs A Reformation That It Is Probably Never Going To Get

I LIKE AND RESPECT JOHN HORGAN, the science journalist who works at Scientific American and quite often agree with what he says.  When this ten-year old article, his critique of Stephen Pinker's idiotic promotion of scientism in the New Republic, showed up as a link in an article on a different subject the other day I agreed with the main thrust and most of the detail of his criticism of Pinker.

Pinker faults Humists [Horgan's temporarily proposed name for those who work in the humanities] for accusing scientists of "scientism," which could be defined as excessive trust in science. Attempting rhetorical jujitsu, Pinker suggests that science, because it is such a uniquely self-critical and successful generator of knowledge, deserves all our trust. Hence scientism is justified and we should all embrace it!

While I wouldn't be surprised if a dolt like Pinker would be so stupid as to hold that to have "excessive trust" in something he approved of was a good idea, I think that mild definition of "scientism" doesn't get to the point. Pinker and his ilk actually hold science is exclusively trustworthy as the only legitimate source of knowledge.  Holding that while, as I noted the other day, having a career in the very science which was founded in, continued in, flourished in and still practices the most basic violations of every method of legitimate science since what it purports to study cannot be successfully and rigorously subjected to the methods developed for investigating physical phenomena with some measure of care, rigor and review.  

The frequently encountered demand of scientists that we merely trust the scientists and take their assertions as truth is, of course, to demand a violation of one of the claimed virtues of science, that there is no idea held in science which is above questioning. Of course, there is honest and informed questioning and there is a pose of questioning when we merely dislike what is asserted.  I'm certainly not advocating that dishonest pose of questioning, which, by the way, is endemic in Pinker's own ideological faction, the remnants of the 00's fad of ideological atheism, perhaps more so than most places outside of FOX style "news." 

If Pinker's kind of fundamentalist faith reigned, there would never be any kind of progress in scientific knowledge because so much of that came about through continued questioning and testing of established ideas.  It would be more static than scholastic theology of the middle ages is ignorantly held to have been.  Since physics is taken as the most basic of the sciences, how does someone like Pinker think the entire modern physics since 1900 came into being if not by some pretty radical questioning on the basis of things that didn't fit into the previously dominant physics which does so well to explain so much?  

That a professional psychologist could hold that is rather hilarious considering the history and literature of his very own field.  The sham that psychology is has been proven in the history of psychology as an alleged science, its generation of dominant schools (fads) which reign supreme for a period, become embedded in alleged treatments and are embedded into even legal procedures, are eventually criticized by those wanting to start a new school (fad),  discredited, junked and replaced by the next in a series of shabbily built and ephemeral schools only to be scrapped, themselves.  And in the still ongoing replicability crisis which is merely a very belated attempt at finally doing one of the most basic of alleged scientific requirements, proving the reported results could be found again through repeating the experiment and seeing if the results match the claims, its status as scientific fraud is what gets confirmed.  Why such a test has not been applied to psychology all along* is certainly relevant to its promotion as science and how psychology, as a supposed science has gotten away with what it has for more than a century is a signal that the general status of fact checking and rigorous replication of experiments as a means of judging claims - even some of those claims entirely bonkers or outrageous - which are published in reviewed journals and sold as science is in need of very serious general reform.  

I think the replication crisis in psychology and allied fields, even some of them in the more attenuated and complex fields of legitimate biochemistry, is a more general crisis in the practices and standards allowed in science as what has been called "science" has expanded through the hegemonic assumptions of ideological materialism.

The unstated idea is that if science is the legitimate study of material phenomena and all that is is held to be material, everything must, ultimately be explicable through science, even in those fields in which the rigorous application of replicable observation, measurement, rigorous analysis and rigorous professional review, then all humanly apprehended phenomena must be vulnerable to that methodology.  If everything is, on faith, to be taken as an expression of basic "physical laws" then, the assumption is that everything, even what we can't see or observe "objectively" is vulnerable to scientific methods.  That, plainly, is a leap of faith that most of us are imbued with by the habit of respect for anything that manages to get called "science," a leap which most of us don't realize we have taken.  If that leap is not taken unconsidered or by choice, those who don't are often pushed into leaping to it through some level of coercion. Often something on the order of being accused of having cooties.  The invective of the enforcers of scientism is generally of that level of sophistication.

What was quite successful in what was, early on, studied through science was quite simple and quite successfully discovered through that method, such as the mathematics of falling and moving objects, atoms and molecules considered singly and combining in chemical compounds.  But all hell started breaking loose when the methodology turned into an ideological stand and then a cultural attitude and universities started allowing stuff that so obviously could not be studied in the same way, allowing what was far less successful than contemporary experimental physics and chemistry in its discovery to be enthroned as science.

The legitimate study of living beings imitating the methods of physics and chemistry was, in most of what was studied, a partial success especially when well done and what was studied was sufficiently simple, falling rapidly off in many cases and often claims made turned out to be quite wrong. As one of my relatives who works in a field of biology likes to say, "It's not rocket science, it's a lot damned harder than rocket science."  What should have been a series of warning signals and Proceed With Caution signs was often discounted out of professional desires and necessity and, at times, practical necessity.  

But, insisting that what they do was as reliable as physics and inorganic chemistry and should enjoy the same status ruled the day. When biology insisted on studying what could not be observed directly and, honestly, not even indirectly, filling in with conjecture the tiny fragments of the fact of evolution and other things that were far more complex than its resources could deal with, it set the stage for the decay of science. The fact is that all but the tiniest fragments of the billions of years of evolving, changing life on Earth are lost forever and those things in the lives of living beings which leave no physical trace, behaviors, habits, chance events, minds, differences in minds and what those lead to which are directly relevant to the topic will never be had which has not kept those deputed to be scientists to just make that stuff up, it not being obtainable.  That is certainly not within scientific method.   The items available are so scares, so randomly spaced in time and location and it is certain that so much more which is never going to be known in anything but unverifiable conjecture, that its scientific characterization is unfounded.   And there is even worse.

Once they allowed eminent philosophers, such as William James and others to push the alleged study of psychology, the alleged study of minds, invisible to observation, accessed only through self-reporting of unknowable reliability and even more unknowable comprehension by second and third parties often on the look out for what they want those to be, enormously variable and often not operating with any perceivable order or predictability, allowing the "study" of minds into the universities as science things were bound to go even farther to hell.  I haven't looked to see what evidence there was to a push-back in the late 19th century by those who did genuine science to that invasion of the obviously unscientific, though I can't imagine some of them didn't look askance if not oppose that inclusion. If they read the papers and books that started being published, they certainly must have noticed that they were not actually doing science in most of their claims.  Horgan touches on that in his criticism of science as it really is:

Moreover, even a casual survey of modern science—and of this blog--reveals the degree to which science continues to serve the interests of powerful groups. The U.S. health care industry delivers lousy service at exorbitant prices, arguably because it is more concerned with profits than with patients. Modern psychiatry has become little more than a marketing branch of the pharmaceutical industry.

Neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence and other fields are increasingly dependent on military funding. Pinker himself has popularized the hypothesis that war is an instinct, rooted deeply in our evolutionary past, which civilization has helped us overcome. This notion serves as a convenient justification for modern U.S. militarism and imperialism.

I do actually quite agree with what he says about postmodernism and how it can be done well or badly, like everything else, including science.

Postmodernism is, in a sense, simply another expression of a truism of science journalism: If you want to understand modern debates about climate, energy, genetically modified food, economic equality or military policies, you should follow the money. Money certainly doesn't explain everything—and just because a group is rich and powerful doesn't mean that it's corrupt--but it explains a lot.

As a figure in that "science" which, along with its associated field in sociology has been the foremost venue of inserting ideological and other interests into science it's no wonder Pinker would object to an intellectual trend that calls that out. Which gets us immediately to my main objection to what was for the most part good commentary.

Pinker never seems to have understood postmodernism. Postmodern scholarship, like science itself, can be done well or badly, but its animating assumption is simple: All truth claims--whether scientific, religious or political—reflect the prejudices and desires of those who make them. Claims that become dominant in a culture often serve the interests of powerful groups.

Social Darwinism and eugenics are two especially egregious examples of pseudo-scientific ideologies that reflected the racism, sexism and classism of proponents. Pinker depicts Social Darwinism and eugenics as historical aberrations that had little or nothing to do with science--even though their central claims keep reappearing in modern scientific trappings.

Horgan puts his finger directly on the very act of promoting as scientific claims "the prejudices and desires of those who make them."  However, he, as is typical of English language college-educated people, fails to trace that back to its origin because to do that is taboo.  

What he said of eugenics and "Social Darwinism"** was and is true of THE most conventionally accepted scientific theory which was the origin of eugenics, natural selection, which is no less an assertion of class, ethnic, racial, etc. interests inserted directly into science, far more basically, far more successfully and which still is held up as a required framing of science and a required belief among those held to be educated.  The wealthy, aristocratic Darwin, himself, signaled that when he based his theory on the aristocracy reinforcing and enhancing-class based economic theory of Thomas Malthus.  That Galton used his and his cousin's, Darwin's wealthy combined families as his primary model of eugenic superiority in his original articles and Hereditary Genius, a book which Darwin wrote he approved of, entirely and endorsed as science, confirms that character was embedded to the very root of natural selection. When Darwin wrote his congratulatory letter to cousin Galton, he noted that he was, typically, infirm and he had had his wife (and cousin) read it to him and she, a member of the same family, had liked it a lot, too. Big surprise, huh?  Their son George (one of the earliest proponents of eugenic laws during his father's lifetime, and with his father's approval) had recommended it to his father.  The British class system made science, eugenics, was more than a removable part of the theory of natural selection, it was AND IS its very essence. In a book that Darwin himself said he agreed with entirely, Ernst Haeckel said that Darwinism supported an aristocratic system and was anti-democratic and, most of all anti-socialist. It should be remembered at this point that Darwin once said he was a better investor of money than he was a scientist.

More generally as a refutation of the idea that eugenics is separable from natural selection, as I've pointed out from before Horgan answered Pinker, eugenics was from the start a thoroughly scientific entity in exactly the same way that natural selection was, through the assertion OF EXACTLY THE SAME SCIENTISTS WHO SUPPORTED NATURAL SELECTION.  To make the claim about it that Horgan and virtually everyone else who has been credentialed by an English language university after WWII does he has to deny that eugenics was science and proposed applied science invented by one of the true scientific polymaths, Francis Galton, a man who was held to be one of the preeminent scientists in the history of science in many fields, would not be doing science while he said he was doing science.  To deny he was a scientist is as absurd as to deny Darwin or Huxley or Pearson or Fischer or Watson and Crick, or any credentialed biologist today  were or are scientists.   

As I've pointed out many times and as anyone who read The Descent of Man would have to know, it was Galton's very eugenics that was held up to be science of the highest reliability by Charles Darwin in that very book published as reliable science and built on by scientists of his time and after. His motive was that eugenics supported his theory of natural selection as much as anything, circular reasoning as that was.  He also upheld the eugenics of Ernst Haeckel, W.R. Greg and others in the very same book, he supported some of the most seriously bad assertions of them, promoting the alleged eugenic effects of infanticide, allowing the poor to die of starvation and neglect and even genocidal warfare and what the Nazis would promote as lebensraum, the "fitter" replacing those deemed "less fit."  He did it in his second most esteemed book supporting his theory of natural selection as it allegedly impacts the human species. A book which has, since it was written, been considered a part of the legitimate literature of science.

Eugenics was openly held to be science by most of the eminent figures in biology up to the Second World War, including such figures as Karl Pearson, Ronald Fischer, Julian Huxley, etc. the very founders of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis that still rules biology with an iron fist.  It was taught in schools of science in universities and departments of science in colleges and high schools and pervaded biology textbooks written by members of science faculties at respected colleges and universities.

And, perhaps more to the point, that includes everyone in German biology and related fields who created Nazi Rassenhygine, who were universally considered men and a few women of science at the time, who taught science at major universities and other academic institutions. Before America's entry into WWI, the eminent American biologist, Vernon Kellogg, reported that the German military elite, university grads, had been thoroughly indoctrinated in its most extreme beliefs.  It should never be forgotten that Germany was the first place where science was professionalized, what Thomas Huxley and others in Darwin's inner circle had as one of their primary goals for British science in later decades.

Eugenics itself had and has the support of many eminent post-war scientists, including both James Watson and Francis Crick and a man whose eugenics Crick actively supported, the psychologist Arthur Jensen.  To hold that it is some "aberration" is to deny the plain facts of eugenics in the past AND NOW.  Numerous other colleagues of Stephen Pinker in psychology have been major proponents of it, some of them more eminent than he is. To make the claim that science doesn't rightly have to own eugenics you have to misrepresent everything about its history and its present.  The very figures who created and expanded eugenics had the highest credentials in science, given to them by other scientists and university schools and departments of science.

While I really like and respect John Horgan, he's too good and honest a journalist to say what he did then, I wonder if ten years after, he'd still say that now.  I will admit to having no respect for Stephen Pinker at all and I never have.

To represent eugenics as an aberration in the history of science, distancing something which was considered science by all of those already mentioned and probably thousands of others who could be named, working, reviewed, published, acknowledged scientists, every one of them, is to tell one huge whopper of a lie because it has been a feature of science too long for it to comprise an aberration.  There is probably nothing taught today in psychology which has stood as long as the general assertions of eugenics and scientific racism which is still present in science.  Eugenics, by Galton's widely accepted assertion is a necessary conclusion from a belief in natural selection.  He credited his spark of creation of it in his reading of the first edition of On the Origin of Species, he documents his cousin, Darwin's support for his conclusions in that regard.  Darwin, himself, through his endorsement of Galton's early eugenics and the even more explicitly racist and genocidal eugenics of the eminent German scientist, Ernst Haeckel, certainly supported Galton's  conclusion as to what natural selection must mean for the human species.

There is no English language university department of psychology I'm aware of which is older as a distinct scientific claim and field of assertion than eugenics.  It is certainly present in the public understanding of science, eugenics has certainly been a feature of the very evolutionary psychology that Pinker hitched his wagon to and the Sociobiology that preceded it.  The 1976 declaration of the scientists, students of science, in the Sociobiology Study Group pointed out that it was eugenic in character. That's not any great shock, eugenics will always be found, acknowledged and explicitly or with a public-relations false front wherever natural selection is asserted as science.

The very evolutionary psychology that Pinker champions has had the most blatant scientific racism, including antisemitism publicly, as reviewed science! promoted in it by those with major positions in science at accredited, even very respected  universities.  Eugenics as an ongoing effort has come from what are unambiguously called departments of science from even the most august of institutions of higher learning, including the one Pinker works at. One of the most damaging pieces of eugenics in the post-WWII period, The Bell Curve, was co-authored by one of his colleagues, the psychologist Richard Herrnstein.  

I would not say that eugenics is a totally useless thing though it's as bad a theory as there is and generated horrors including a genocide that murdered millions.  I hold it is everything wrong that John Hogan said it was and think the theory is based on the imaginary instead of being founded in reality.

But the phenomenon of eugenics is useful for is as an example of how bad science, the theory of natural selection, can become as established and accepted in science, in academia, in the culture of those who are credentialed in learning, be taught as being perhaps as reliable as Newtonian physics (Stephen Jay Gould said it was the best idea a scientist has ever had), promote some of the worst of our moral defects, racism, class ranking, family snobbery, neglect of the least among us, etc.as being factually supported with the reliability of science,  be as massively discredited as it was when the Nazis did what many eugenicists started advocating almost from the beginning, eliminating those held to be a source of dangerous dysgenic pollution in order to improve the human species.  Eugenics, though not openly advocated, survived - since the source of eugenics, natural selection was, after the war even a more rigorously insisted on framing of biology - began to be promoted again in the 1970s, openly in the case of Arthur Jensen and covertly through the active soliciting of support from him by Francis Crick, etc. and is once again thriving even as the mere word "eugenics" dare not speak its name by the very people who are promoting it.

It's as much an example of how successful a blatantly dishonest PR campaign, such as was mounted to rescue Darwinism from what Darwin, himself, said it was and what must come from it, when its real meaning was shown to the world in the mass murders of the Nazis. It is most useful as a study in how science is no better, no more rigorously done, no more honestly done than the mere human beings who are doing it and their colleagues who are fully prepared to let them get away with everything up to the advocacy of murder and genocide.

Considering the complicity of science in the practice of eugenics, whether the violence of forced or uninformed sterilization of those targeted for elimination from the human future, as was still being done so very recently in the United States, Canada, etc. and the scientific genocides of the 20th century.  German scientists were fully on board with German eugenics as it turned from sterilization to mass murder and during the entire industrialized murder of them.  Scientists honored in science, granted Nobel prizes such as Konrad Lorenz was AFTER THE WAR AND FULL KNOWLEDGE OF THE COMPLICITY OF SCIENCE IN GENOCIDE, were writing scientific papers and books supporting it as it was happening.  Many scientists, university science departments, etc. were soliciting Mengele and other German men of science for biological samples taken from those murdered in the genocide, many of them would either retain or regain their position in science even as those crimes must have been known. Some of them had the support of colleagues in science in other countries. The status of such science has never really been resolved, if that kind of thing is consistent with the methods of science, though Mengele had his university credentials belatedly removed from him, at least partially, those he collaborated with often went right on being scientists, employed at eminent universities and without much in the way of shunning by their colleagues.

In the end, science is whatever scientists as a body say is science, since we know that the actual methodology of science can be so easily put aside when it is impossible or inconvenient, that has to be the actual definition of what science is.  That scientists have no kind of ethical disqualification for that, is certainly something that must be faced in the question of their right to automatic public trust. The problem that is for some of the most vitally important science facing us, environmental science, the science of global warming, science surrounding pandemics such as the ongoing Covid-19 virus could not be more dangerous or serious and scientists will not take the steps necessary to insert the requirements of morality or even basic integrity into its practices.  

No, the self-regulating features of science are no more dependable than the mere mortals who have, since pretty much the middle of the 19th century, proven they are quite fallible, especially in promotion of their ideological predilections, their professional, class, ethnic and racial and gender interests.  

Just as I pointed out to have anything like a rational claim or a moral right to be considered followers of Jesus, those deputed to be Christians had to follow his teachings.  They often fail to do that and the common received habit of disdaining and shunning anything to do with Christianity tars both those who do follow him and those who fake it.  Those deputed to be scientists, in order to be allowed to enjoy the often exaggerated esteem and privilege of being considered scientists  have to be held to the rigorous observations and practices alleged to constitute scientific method.  But that's not enough, that's not all we have a right to demand of them. No less than those who are held up as religious figures, we have a right to demand that they act out of moral responsibility to the good of life on Earth.  

Christians have a long history of calling out the sins committed in the name of Jesus, though the effectiveness of that in protecting the reputation of Christianity is very, very mixed.  Internally, within especially those denominations which are highly hierarchical, there is a problem very much like that of science, internally known problems are swept under the rug in public.  Often even great crimes are known of internally among those who hold power, as in the Catholic sexual abuse scandal, but the cover-up is held to be all important.  Someone once said the devil is a gentleman and human demons are often members of a gentlemen's club in which scandals are not to be revealed to those outside it.  Scientists and the fan base of "science" generally refuse to admit it has any problem, often relying on the obscurity and difficulty of its claims to shield its problems from the public. It insists that it be exempt from any criticism, pretending it has proven its internal criticism is fully effective when the history of science proves it seldom is as a general thing. Though that varies from field to field and whether or not what is published has the support of alleged observational verification or is merely theoretical. In much of published science, its methods of procedure, review and internal criticism can be something of a sham.   Psychology could never get away with being called a science if they were not.

I don't, by the way, take Pinker to be much of scientist, he's more of a huckster than anything. Pretty much the same for Richard Dawkins.  I put them more on the level of a Charles Murray.

* In his speech "Cargo Cult Science" the regular practice of never confirming claims in psychology because it was deemed "too hard" to regularly replicate alleged experiments, was one of Richard Feynman's reasons for impeaching the scientific identity of psychology.  

** As one always must point out due to the ubiquitous propaganda that claims they are not the same thing, that "Social Darwinism" is an aberration that he didn't hold with, Darwin, himself, said that natural selection was exactly the same thing as Herbert Spencer's formulation "survival of the fittest" on page 92 of the fifth edition he prepared of On the Origin of Species.  He had been requested to make that clear by his "co-discoverer" of natural selection, A.R. Wallace because "natural selection" seemed to imply some intelligent agency of nature and that was a violation of the holding of materialism that nature is non-teleological. Of course Darwinists have held that it is all along while also denying that's what they claimed.  Putting that admission by Darwin together with the fact the same idea, "selection," was used for what the man of science, Mengele did at the railroad siding at Auschwitz should always have evoked a terrible spark of understanding of what natural selection was.  But that was suppressed by the post-WWII cover up of what just about every conventional Darwinist would have recognized as the nature of natural selection before the Nazis showed what it meant in reality. Today's Neo-Nazis certainly recognize their fondest hopes to be expressed in Darwinism.