The ministry of truth is a thing.

Mimetic Behavior in the Scientific Community

David Klinghoffer 

Yesterday I wrote about French philosopher René Girard’s idea of mimesis, and I alluded to having seen such behavior in the scientific community (here). I have been a research scientist for almost thirty years. I personally have seen persecution of scientists who support intelligent design. Some have been tossed out or denied degrees. Others see the threat, so they hide their beliefs. I have seen papers turned down because the reviewer was powerful in his or her field and often suppressed other people’s work. I have seen grants and papers turned down because the individuals writing the paper held certain scientific positions. I have repeatedly seen people lose their jobs because they hold an unpopular view. I have seen misinformation and mockery used against people with unpopular ideas. And I have seen professors pressure graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to be selective in the data they use. All these things are forbidden officially but still happen. The question is, how much do they distort scientific progress?

Just in the last month I saw a report of bad science by a scientist. He was a graduate student who tried to replicate the work of a well-known group. He could not. After careful work, he determined it was because inappropriate controls were used. Because many others were using the same assay and were publishing based on the faulty design, he wrote to the original lab to tell them, and was ignored. He then wrote up his findings and tried to publish them. He was turned down by the journals he submitted to, and rather than submit to a journal that would be ignored, he ended up publishing in a non-reviewed online site called arXiv that is seen by many. He did this just so people might not have the same difficulty he had — it had wasted months of his fellowship and prevented him from performing the work he came to do. 

It is very hard to publish negative results, even if they are important. A student was about to lose his degree because he could not change an enzyme’s activity by repeated mutation. Scientists often believe that enzymes can be modified easily. This is because the failures don’t get published. A friend who was on the student’s committee, and very knowledgeable about enzyme modification, reported that he had to demonstrate to the student’s committee that the thing the student had been assigned to do could not be done. This is another way that scientific resources of time and money are wasted.

Held Hostage Because of Propaganda

Sometimes an entire discipline can be held hostage because of propaganda. A well-known case is that of continental drift. Alfred Wegener first published his hypothesis in the early 1900s that the continents moved over geologic time. He accumulated a great deal of evidence from biology, geology, and fossils showing where the continents were originally linked. He called that super-continent Pangaea. Geologists ignored his hypothesis, despite strong evidence supporting it. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the idea was accepted, based on evidence of the movement of the northern magnetic pole.

Doctors and pharmaceutical companies are another whole category of the role of mimesis and propaganda, and I don’t have space to treat those things fairly. However, I will give one infamous example of doctors behaving badly because of resistance to change. Ignaz Semmelweis was a young doctor who was eagerly following the work of Louis Pasteur. He was aware of Pasteur’s work on the role of microbes in disease. The hospital in Vienna where he worked had a mortality rate in obstetrics of 25-30 percent, which is horrifying. He thought that maybe the childbed fever that was killing women was due to infection carried by the medical students from their dissections to the women in labor. He demanded that all the students wash their hands in a strong antiseptic before seeing women patients. The childbed fever cases dropped dramatically as a result. Some doctors took up his method, but others did not. He had seminars and consultations canceled. He had to leave Vienna and find work elsewhere after his involvement in politics turned everyone in Vienna against him. 

He found work in his native Budapest and published his research. He wrote to doctors all over Europe and beyond, but he was ignored. Women continued to die of childbed fever. Semmelweis’s mental health deteriorated, and he became angry and bitter at the medical profession’s refusal to change. He died in an insane asylum, where his colleagues had taken him two weeks before, from an infected wound inflicted by the guards (who had beaten him), probably from the same bacterium as caused childbed fever. 

Suppression by the State

Sometimes the suppression comes from the government. The restriction on doctors’ freedom to use promising treatments during the recent pandemic was unprecedented. Promising lines of research were shut down. The government of many states issued a mandate: police, firefighters, nurses, transit workers, and many others lost their jobs because for moral reasons they refused to comply with the mandate. Many had to move to other less punitive states. All these things were done to impose the agendas of Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and of the CDC, on vaccine implementation. Whatever your views on the virus or the vaccines, such coercion and suppression is wrong. Uniformity of opinion cannot be imposed. As a result, we have had a significant polarization of society.

Tomorrow I will narrow my focus and discuss the treatment, in this regard, of intelligent design scientists.

File under "well said" CIII

" It is far easier to concentrate power than to concentrate knowledge. That is why so much social engineering backfires and why so many despots have led their countries into disasters."

Thomas Sowell

On the death of science?

 

Yet another miracle molecule?

 

On the Darwin of the gaps?

 An Argument from Ignorance?

William Dembski

Editor’s note: We are delighted to welcome the new and greatly expanded second edition of The design inference, by William Dembski and Winston Ewert. The following is excerpted from the Introduction.

Tacitly in the first edition of The Design Inference and explicitly in its sequel, No Free Lunch, I argued that natural selection and random variation could not create the sort of complexity we see in living things. My approach in applying the design inference to biology was to piggyback on the work of design biologists such as Douglas Axe and Michael Behe. They had identified certain subcellular systems (e.g., bacterial flagella and beta-lactamase enzymes) that proved highly resistant to Darwinian explanations. 

Our joint task was to put plausible numbers to these systems so that even factoring in Darwinian natural selection, the probability of these systems arising was exceedingly small. Note that the specification of these systems, as in their exhibiting the right sort of pattern for a design inference, was never in question. The issue was always whether the probabilities were small enough. In using specified improbability to draw a design inference for biology, I therefore needed to argue that the probabilities for Darwinian processes producing certain biological systems, such as those identified by Axe and Behe, were indeed small. 

Misguided and Irrelevant

As far as Darwinists were concerned, however, all attempts to show such biological systems to be vastly improbable were misguided and irrelevant. Any design inferences meant to defeat Darwinian evolution were, according to them, arguments from ignorance. For them, unidentified Darwinian pathways could never be decisively ruled out, so their mere possibility invalidated any design inference applied to biological evolution. In short, no calculated improbability could ever convince the Darwinian critics that the probabilities were actually small. 

It didn’t matter that Darwinists were ignorant of any detailed evidence for such Darwinian pathways, and thus had no counter-probabilities to offer. It was enough for them merely to gesture at the possibility of such pathways, as though raising a possibility could itself constitute evidence for an argument from improbability. To ID proponents critical of Darwin’s theory, the argument-from-ignorance objection seemed to apply more aptly to the Darwinists themselves for positing unsubstantiated Darwinian pathways that offered no nuts and bolts, no nitty-gritty, just hand-waving.

No matter. For Darwinists to refute ID, they merely needed to postulate unidentified, and perhaps forever unidentifiable, indirect Darwinian pathways in which structure and function coevolved and led to the complex biological features in question. Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller led the way. Michael Behe had defined a system (biological or otherwise) to be irreducibly complex if its function was lost by removing key parts. He argued that such systems resisted Darwinian explanations. Miller countered that Behe’s concept of irreducible complexity was ill-conceived because removing parts from, or otherwise simplifying, a biological system could always yield a system with a different function. To convinced Darwinists like Miller, design in biology was therefore a nonstarter. Darwinian pathways to all complex biological systems had to exist, and any inability to find them simply reflected the imperfection of our biological knowledge, not any imperfection in Darwin’s theory. 

Dawkins’s “Laziness Challenge” 

Richard Dawkins, better than anyone, has publicly championed the dogma that Darwinian pathways can and must always exist for any biological system. In a 1990s television interview he memorably took Behe to task for claiming that irreducibly complex biochemical machines, of the sort Behe popularized in Darwin’s Black Box, were beyond the reach of Darwinian processes. Dawkins charged Behe with being “lazy” (yes, he used that very word) for seeing in the irreducible complexity of these machines a reason to conclude design, and thus to rule out any further effort to discover how Darwinian processes could have formed, say, a bacterial flagellum. That is, instead of concluding that these systems were designed by a real intelligence, Behe should get back into the lab and redouble his efforts to discover how Darwinian evolution could have produced them apart from design.

The reaction of the ID community to Dawkins’s “laziness challenge” was that he might just as well have recommended to physicists that they keep trying to construct a perpetual motion machine. Yet why did one task seem futile (constructing a perpetual motion machine) but not the other (discovering Darwinian pathways to irreducibly complex biochemical machines)? Physicists had the second law of thermodynamics to rule out the charge of laziness. That’s why Dawkins would never have said to a physicist, “You’re just being lazy for giving up on inventing a machine that can run itself forever.” 

Even so, Dawkins’s “laziness challenge” was and remains misguided because Behe’s skepticism is based not on ignorance but on careful study of the obstacles that Darwinian evolution must overcome and its consistent failure to do so. To seal the deal, however, the ID research community still needed something like the second law for biology. We found it in the law of conservation of information. This law logically completes the design inference. We’ll address this law in the epilogue.

Time to take the hint re:quantum gravity?

 

The sword Rome lived(and died) by?