In First Things, William A. Wilson has what may be the most trenchant takedown of the "Science Says" mentality that I've come across. It's a long and fearless essay. Seeing it all put together in one place as Wilson does is liberating.
He utterly disenchants the popular, cult-like notion that science, any field of it -- from physics to psychology and everything in between -- is simply a distributor of objective truth, to be trusted implicitly. The reality is that scientists are built from the same "crooked timber" we all are, and it shows in their work. Buyer beware.
Much of this is familiar. There is the scandal of widespread failed replication. There is Stanford University Medical School professor John Ioannidis's notorious essay, "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False." Says Wilson, "There is no putting it nicely, deliberate fraud is far more widespread than the scientific establishment is generally willing to admit." Retractions of research findings are common -- that's well known. But when celebrated findings are withdrawn, that is less likely to catch the attention of the media:
Two of the most vaunted physics results of the past few years -- the announced discovery of both cosmic inflation and gravitational waves at the BICEP2 experiment in Antarctica, and the supposed discovery of superluminal neutrinos at the Swiss-Italian border -- have now been retracted, with far less fanfare than when they were first published.
And there's peer review. Ah, the vaunted standard, peer review. This hits the nail on the head: "If peer review is good at anything, it appears to be keeping unpopular ideas from being published." Yes, proponents of counter-theories in competition with Darwinism know this dynamic particularly well:
What they do not mention is that once an entire field has been created -- with careers, funding, appointments, and prestige all premised upon an experimental result which was utterly false due either to fraud or to plain bad luck -- pointing this fact out is not likely to be very popular. Peer review switches from merely useless to actively harmful. It may be ineffective at keeping papers with analytic or methodological flaws from being published, but it can be deadly effective at suppressing criticism of a dominant research paradigm. Even if a critic is able to get his work published, pointing out that the house you've built together is situated over a chasm will not endear him to his colleagues or, more importantly, to his mentors and patrons.
It's built into the structure of the modern scientific enterprise that senior researchers are jealous guardians of orthodoxy, to whom younger colleagues bow and scrape. Funerals, as the aged pass on with the advance of time, don't solve the problem -- as some have hopefully suggested:
The quantum physicist Max Planck famously quipped: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." Planck may have been too optimistic. A recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research studied what happens to scientific subfields when star researchers die suddenly and at the peak of their abilities, and finds that while there is considerable evidence that young researchers are reluctant to challenge scientific superstars, a sudden and unexpected death does not significantly improve the situation, particularly when "key collaborators of the star are in a position to channel resources (such as editorial goodwill or funding) to insiders."
Wilson raises the possibility that some of the best science may involve the rediscovery and unearthing of dormant truths. He gives a helpful formulation to describe this -- "scientific regress." Yes, check:
[I]f raw results are so often false, the filtering mechanisms so ineffective, and the self-correcting mechanisms so compromised and slow, then science's approach to truth may not even be monotonic. That is, past theories, now "refuted" by evidence and replaced with new approaches, may be closer to the truth than what we think now. Such regress has happened before: In the nineteenth century, the (correct) vitamin C deficiency theory of scurvy was replaced by the false belief that scurvy was caused by proximity to spoiled foods. Many ancient astronomers believed the heliocentric model of the solar system before it was supplanted by the geocentric theory of Ptolemy. The Whiggish view of scientific history is so dominant today that this possibility is spoken of only in hushed whispers, but ours is a world in which things once known can be lost and buried.
His description of the Cult of Science, a noxious and juvenile culture familiar from countless science blogs and news sites, cannot be improved on:
The Cult is related to the phenomenon described as "scientism"; both have a tendency to treat the body of scientific knowledge as a holy book or an a-religious revelation that offers simple and decisive resolutions to deep questions. But it adds to this a pinch of glib frivolity and a dash of unembarrassed ignorance. Its rhetorical tics include a forced enthusiasm (a search on Twitter for the hashtag "#sciencedancing" speaks volumes) and a penchant for profanity. Here in Silicon Valley, one can scarcely go a day without seeing a t-shirt reading "Science: It works, b--es!" The hero of the recent popular movie The Martian boasts that he will "science the sh-- out of" a situation. One of the largest groups on Facebook is titled "I f--ing love Science!" (a name which, combined with the group's penchant for posting scarcely any actual scientific material but a lot of pictures of natural phenomena, has prompted more than one actual scientist of my acquaintance to mutter under her breath, "What you truly love is pictures"). Some of the Cult's leaders like to play dress-up as scientists -- Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson are two particularly prominent examples -- but hardly any of them have contributed any research results of note. Rather, Cult leadership trends heavily in the direction of educators, popularizers, and journalists.
It's significant that Wilson himself is a software engineer, meaning that he is in the business of satisfying paying customers, not merely ginning up publicity for himself, impressing colleagues, and boosting his own self-esteem. If he were active in any other area of science, he could not possibly have gotten away with writing as frankly as this.
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