Skeptics should cast a much wider net

Professional provocateur John Horgan bravely took on a room full of skeptics a few days ago when he scolded them for what he thinks are their misplaced priorities. Horgan thinks that a lot of skeptics are taking on ‘soft’ targets – homeopathy, astrology, UFOS etc. and instead should be spending far more time on ‘hard’ targets. Horgan thinks that this kind of cherry-picking not only allows skeptics to keep on patting each others’ backs in echo chambers, but it detracts from other important issues that deserve skeptical scrutiny even more. To a large extent his argument is simply one of degree, since he clearly does not think homeopathy or UFOs don't deserve skeptical takedowns.

What are Horgan’s favorite ‘hard’ targets? One is war. He says that more skeptics should spend time debunking the idea that war is intrinsic rather than cultural. The other hard target is belief in highly speculative theories from physics like string theory, parallel universes and the idea that our universe may be a simulation created by aliens. I won’t go as far as he does to say that string theory is akin to astrology or homeopathy, and I also think that these theories have come under much harsher criticism than he thinks in the last decade or so: I am more concerned about the fact that popular science books expounding these theories are taken quite seriously by uninformed laymen. But the general idea that many informed skeptics should spend more time on talking about the shaky pillars of some of these speculations seems to be a reasonable one. The third target that Horgan addresses is the field of medical diagnosis. By now it’s quite clear that standard diagnostic tests like mammograms and PSA (prostate-specific antigen) testing are subject to such a high false positive rate that they may cause more harm than good (a very good book on these pitfalls that I read recently is Steven Hatch's “Snowball in a Blizzard”).

Many bloggers and self-proclaimed skeptics have responded to Horgan. The main criticism is simply that skeptics are far less monolithic and more diverse, both in degree and kind, than he thinks. The criticism also includes the admonition that the good is not the enemy of the great and one needs to work on both. I would also add that a target like homeopathy or even UFOs is not ‘easy’ in the sense of easily convincing its proponents. But generally speaking I think Horgan is not wrong. There are certainly some topics which would benefit from more scrutiny than what they currently get.

Skepticism has a long tradition in both eastern and western cultures, best exemplified for me by the Royal Society’s motto “Nullius in verba”, or “Nobody’s word is final”. Sadly, I think that motto points to another failing of skeptics; their tendency to steer away from politically controversial topics, either because they think the last word on such topics has already been said or because they think that saying anything about them would be dangerous. To Horgan’s list of topics that reasonable skeptics don’t criticize as much as they should, I would add climate change and the study of genetic factors underlying race and gender (Ironically, Horgan himself once wrote a post asking if research on such topics should be banned). To me it appears that many skeptics seem to think that even discussing these topics is taboo or unreasonable. Such a stance would be deeply antithetical to the skeptical spirit of free inquiry. No topic should be taboo or unreasonable as long as it contains facts to be explored and assessed.

There are several interesting aspects of each of the above topics that not only deserve attention but which can also be discussed in a reasonable and respectful manner without dealing in either/or fallacies or derailing your basic beliefs for that matter. For instance, to cite only a few examples, as writers like Steven Pinker and Diane Halpern have discussed, you can talk about biological aspects underlying gender differences without believing even an iota that one gender is ‘superior’ or ‘inferior’ to the other. Similarly, as biologists like Jerry Coyne and E O Wilson have pointed out, you can accept the existence of different races (or groups) and genetic differences underlying them without ever thinking that one race is superior or inferior to others. In fact, not only is it an elementary logical fallacy to equate ‘different’ with ‘inferior’ or ‘superior’, but it's not even clear what superior or inferior could even mean in these contexts. Halpern, Pinker, Coyne and Wilson are all proud upholders of the skeptical and liberal traditions who believe in clearly separating what is known from what is unknown. The same goes for climate change; you can clearly accept the basic reality of climate change while pointing out that certain details about the phenomenon might still be ill-understood. For instance, you don’t have to trash climate change as a whole in order to question the validity of computer models of climate. Or you can acknowledge good scientific knowledge of the atmosphere while acknowledging poor scientific knowledge of the biosphere.

Sadly, many skeptics not only shy away from discussing these topics, but they also have a tendency to vilify or ignore those on the other side who raise the kinds of interesting questions which I pointed out above. An unfortunate instance would be the time that an entire organization of scientists ended up slandering the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon because he tried to reveal rigorously researched facts about the violent culture of the Yanomamo tribe that flew in the face of everyone’s comfortable leanings about violence and human nature. Another example would be the censure that the historian of science Alice Dreger had to go through when she brought up some inconvenient scientific questions about transgender people (this is documented well in her readable book). The reaction to physicist Freeman Dyson’s views on climate change would also be in the same category. 

The most startling fact is that Dyson, Chagnon and Dreger are all liberals who have long championed liberal causes and freedom of the individual. Dreger's case is especially troubling since she has been an unusually vociferous and dedicated supporter of LGBT rights for almost her entire career; it would thus seem that the very community which she loved and fought for turned against her. She and the others also happen to be champions of going where the scientific truth leads, believing that knowledge is always better than ignorance and that even inconvenient knowledge can be prevented from being misused through our shared humanity. The antidote to misuse of knowledge is not opposition to knowing the facts, not the least because the facts have an inconvenient way of making themselves known.

The reality of critical discourse on many of these topics is more nuanced than we think; for instance, as I pointed out a few years ago, there is no doubt that some climate change “deniers” are actually deniers with vested financial or political interests, but some are also genuine skeptics who are asking fine-grained questions about specific parts of the topic in honest faith. Dreger and Chagnon were raising questions based on perfectly reasonable research and theorizing. Dyson who agrees with the basic reality of climate change nevertheless questions poorly understood aspects of computer models, cloud formation and soil chemistry. Science is complicated, and scientific disagreement is often also complicated, gray rather than black and white, and irreducible to binary categorization. Just because you are skeptical of some of the pieces does not mean you don’t trust the big picture, and just because you trust the big picture does not mean you cannot be skeptical of the little pieces.

As history demonstrates, there will always be ideologues with racial, misogynistic or otherwise ulterior motives who will use even the barest quibbling about details to bolster their prejudiced views (creationists do this in the context of evolution all the time), but opposition to these ideologues should be clearly distinguished from opposition to the inquiry itself. Ironically, in casting these skeptics as kooks or paid shills, it’s the so-called skeptics who are being close minded and the so-called kooks who are being the real open-minded skeptics.

Skepticism is tough because it involves not only modifying entrenched beliefs but rewiring emotional and gut responses that have been reinforced by conformation bias, echo chambers and community kinship. To thrive, the skeptical community needs to be diverse and open to careful consideration of arguments on all sides as long as the arguments have a good dose of serious science in them; it needs to separate empty, bullheaded or purely bigoted opposition from genuine criticism and concerns, and needs to address the latter. It needs to be tough minded in respectfully taking on politically or socially controversial topics. Perhaps some of the findings of science regarding these topics would be unsavory to our sensibilities, but as moral beings with control over their fate, we have the power to decide how to use such findings. 

The ultimate word on skepticism could well belong to Francis Bacon, one of the founders of modern science who said, “All depends on keeping the eye fixed upon the facts of nature…for God forbid we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world". We should strive toward our dream but build it on a foundation of facts.

Can a religious person head the National Institutes of Health?

Francis Collins is an unusual scientist. A physical chemist and doctor who rose to prominence as the leader of the Human Genome Project, he has recently been appointed by President Barack Obama as head of the NIH, the largest biomedical funding and research organization in the country. Collins is unusual because along with this undoubtedly distinguished scientific credentials he brings another kind of background to the job; that of a pious, church-going Christian. A few years ago Collins published a book that argued for a scientific basis for belief in God, and not just a theological one. Needless to say, his views have caused concern among a number of atheist scientists and secular scientists in general.

It is one thing to be a deist, namely someone who believes in the kind of abstract God embodied in the laws of nature who could have set the universe in motion and then let it run its course without interfering, but quite another to be a proper theist, a person who believes in the kind of material God that most people who believe in God invoke, one who helps out or doles out punishment in daily life and personal matters. Collins seems to be more of a theist. And therefore his appointment to the NIH again raises a question which has fomented reams of arguments, and sometimes almost violent argument, on blogs and in books. The central question is; can a scientist truly be religious? Since this question immediately gets you into a morass of conflicting views and definitions, I will simply state my one line answer to the question in this specific context; from an empirical standpoint of course you can be religious and a scientist, as demonstrated by the existence of many religious scientists like Collins. But from a philosophical standpoint, you then have to accept that there is some very strange compartmentalization in your mind that allows you to essentially sustain two opposite and clearly conflicting paradigms simultaneously, one paradigm in which faith without evidence is positively eschewed and another in which faith without evidence is positively extolled. As an aside, it is a fascinating scientific question how such compartmentalization can occur.

Collins has come under fire from, among others, one of my favorite writers Sam Harris, whose controversial book The End of Faith made a compelling case against religious faith. In a piece in the New York Times, Harris criticizes Collin's views, best enumerated in his book, which essentially proclaim that God must exist since some things are beyond the scope of science. Both Harris and me find this kind of reasoning remarkably simple-minded. How does someone know that things that are beyond the scope of science today would always be so? For instance Collins quips that God must have adjusted the values of the so-called fundamental constants of nature (such as Planck's constant, the speed of light etc.), since life seems to depend on an incredibly precise fine-tuning of their values. But how do we know that science is never going to provide an answer for their origin? If "God" is simply a place card for "we don't know" then it sounds fine, but Collins seems to actually imply some kind of interventionist God here.

More importantly, does such a belief in God mean that we should automatically stay away from certain things and not apply critical questioning to them because they have been declared by religions to be supernatural by definition? Even Collins will admit that pushing any question under the rug by default by declaring that it is beyond the purview of science is completely antithetical to rational inquiry.

Harris is particularly concerned about Collins's enunciations about neuroscientific research. The last few decades have provided spectacular and remarkable insights into attributes that were for many years considered almost mystical, things like human emotions, love and the nature of faith itself. But in recent years, science is gradually opening a window into these attributes, answering questions like; What happens when someone is praying? How does the brain look when it is experiencing intense emotion? Studies like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are making significant headway into answering such questions and detecting common patterns of neuronal activity that are at play. Collins essentially says that there is something special about faith and human emotions and that God injected these qualities into human beings at some point in our evolution. Would Collins then have us not explore the scientific basis of such human attributes by assuming that they are beyond scientific inquiry? These questions worry Harris and some others like evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago, and they worry me. Some of Collins's statements from a set of slides that are cited by Harris and Coyne really sound preposterous.

Is it dangerous to have a bona fide Christian heading the most important biomedical research agency in the country, and one of the most significant of its kind in the world? In spite of the above concerns I would say not per se. I would say that Collins should be given the benefit of doubt. After all, there does not seem to be a shred of evidence that his religious leanings have affected his capacity for objective scientific judgement. The NIH is a scientific organization and Collins's leadership of it should be judged purely based on his handling of the science. We should not care as much about what he says as about what he does. In the absence of evidence that his religious views are affecting his ability to allocate funding for specific kinds of research, he should be closely watched but not condemned.

At the same time, I share Harris, Coyne and others' sense of unease for a totally different reason; Collins's appointment might unfortunately have the disastrous side effect of enabling creationists and proponents of intelligent design to clamor and push their agenda for turning science and religion into convenient bedfellows. Creationists might make Collins's appointment a case for asserting that not only is religion compatible with science but it's even necessary, as purportedly exemplified in the highest echelons of science policy and research. Collin's appointment may sadly make it easier for the creationists to weasel their way into sensible scientific debate. For this reason the appointment may cause problems, and we will have to make sure that Collins is constantly watched and criticized wherever appropriate. The price of scientific freedom, it seems, is indeed eternal vigilance.

The price of scientific ignorance will be liberty itself

The Bush administration has reached new highs in suppressing sound science and manipulating scientific evidence about key national issues to suit its whims and to divert funding towards politically expedient projects. But even more disturbing is the lack of scientific thought and skepticism and complicity of a public which cannot evaluate the actions of the administration for itself and which lets the government spend its tax dollars wherever it wants to. Important issues will never get funded if the public is not well-informed. If this trend continues, the price the country may pay for scientific ignorance would not just be a poor standard of living and retarded technological growth, but liberty and freedom themselves...

Read the rest of my post on Desipundit...