Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you want to take issuewith any position expressed here, you first have to answer this question:
What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?
I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutabilityis one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific. Moreover,I have found it to be a great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determinewhether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just playing mind games.Note, by the way, that I am assuming the burden of proof here - all youhave to do is commit to a criterion for testing.It's easy to criticize science for being "closed-minded". Are you open-mindedenough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?
In 1843 a schizophrenic named Daniel McNaghten shot and killed the secretary to the Prime Minister of England. McNaghten had imagined that the Prime Minister was persecuting him, and killed the minister's secretary by mistake. After a sensational trial, McNaghten was found not guilty by reason of insanity. The verdict was so explosive that the House of Lords asked the judges to account for their reasoning, and the judges in reply formulated the so-called McNaghten Rules. A person is not criminally responsible for an act if he was "labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong." With modifications, the McNaghten Rules form the core of the insanity defense to this day.
On March 30, 1981, as President Reagan was about to enter his limousine, John Hinckley walked up and began firing. The President and three others were wounded, none fatally. After a trial that cost an estimated $2.5 million, Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Predictably, the public response was one of outrage. Generally liberal California Governor Jerry Brown denounced "a legal system that totally disregards the issue of guilt or innocence and instead relies on so called psychiatric experts to tell us whether a man who committed a deliberate attack should be acquitted because he watched too many movies."
The Hinckley trial points up one of the major public relations problems of science: the role of scientific and expert testimony in decision making. The problem is an ironic one; when science has clear cut answers to problems it is generally left in peace to do the job. Congress may debate how much money to spend on space exploration but the task of designing the missions is left to science. It is in just those areas where science lacks definitive answers that the need for scientific input into the public decision making process is often most needed. Often the issue is one where science plays a role but the issues are ethical or moral, and two equally qualified experts may disagree. Two competent physicists may have diametrically opposed opinions on whether to develop nuclear power; they might well have identical information but very different values and ethics. In other cases there may not be enough information, and subjective professional appraisals of the evidence come into play. Non scientists often get very impatient with the ambiguity of such situations; Senator Edmund Muskie once lamented that he wished there were more "one armed scientists" after hearing "on the other hand" so often in testimony before Congressional committees. There is a widespread and not altogether unfounded suspicion that many expert witnesses are "for hire". There are, indeed, many experts who earn substantial incomes by testifying for clients. In most cases the testimony is probably honest, but there are a few cases, such as the scientists who work for tobacco companies looking for ways to "prove" that tobacco is not a health hazard, where the experts back positions that are simply preposterous. One can fall into a sort of sophistry in which the data are no longer tools for finding the truth but pieces in a sort of chess game. Scientists are also just as prone to ideological bias as any one else. For example, it is axiomatic in the social sciences that studies that attempt to link intelligence with race tell more about the politics of the tester than about the intelligence of races. Many of the areas where scientists are asked to furnish guidance are heavily polarized, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that ideologists have learned the hard way to stick to topics where scientists cannot provide definitive answers!
The legal process creates many problems involving the abuse of expert testimony. In the first place, with rare exceptions, witnesses are not neutral; they are recruited for one side or the other. Secondly, the object of expert testimony is often not so much to determine the truth as to raise doubt or legitimize some action; the testimony is designed to confuse as much as inform. An attorney who is suing a factory might not be as interested in whether or not the factory's product really is dangerous as whether there are reasonable grounds for believing the product to be dangerous. There are strict rules governing evidence, but no such rules for reasoning. Faulty evidence can be excluded; faulty reasoning can be exposed but cannot be thrown out of court. Deliberately telling lies on the witness stand is perjury; deliberately using false but persuasive arguments is not.
This all sounds perfectly cynical, but for the life of me I cannot come up with an alternative that cannot be perverted even more easily. It sounds marvelous to imagine a situation in which the court, the defense, and the prosecution all engage in a harmonious search for the truth, but what if our concept of "the truth" is colored by ideological bias? If all parties in a court case agreed, as was widely believed not too long ago, that blacks were more sexually active than whites, what chance would a black defendant in a rape case have? For all the evils of the present system, it is probably best to have each side represented as forcefully as possible. At least then no one will be able to say that both sides did not get a thorough hearing. Nevertheless, the adversarial process that is used in American courts can often lead to confusion or worse. As a Hinckley juror complained: "If the expert psychiatrists could not decide whether the man was sane, then how are we supposed to decide?"
A notorious legal abuse of technical reasoning took place in San Pedro, California in 1964. A black man and his white wife were arrested for a mugging. There were no direct eye witnesses who could positively identify the couple, but the couple matched the general description of the actual robbers in five major details. The prosecuting attorney estimated the probability of a given person matching each detail, multiplied the probabilities together, and persuaded the Jury that the odds against any other couple being the robbers were 12,000,000 to one. Not until 1968 did the California Supreme Court overturn the conviction.
The chance that any given couple would match the description of the robbers might well have been 12,000,000 to one. The fallacy is this: there are perhaps ten million people in Southern California, any one of whom might be seen with a large number of other persons. There could easily be fifty million possible "couples" in the region. What the prosecution should have calculated is the probability that none of these couples matched the description of the robbers. For any one couple the probability is .999999917. For all the couples, the probability is .999999917 raised to the fifty millionth power, or about sixty to one odds that there was at least one other couple that could have committed the robbery! Granted, the couple may well have been guilty, but our legal system is not supposed to send people to prison because they might well be guilty! What is so appalling is that the defense attorney and the jury failed to catch the error and that it took so long to find lawyers and judges who could. The prospect, in a nation where students often take as little science and mathematics as possible and where creationism and astrology flourish, is for much more of the same.
It is not hard to find controversial issues where both sides muster scientific support for their conclusions: nuclear power, hazardous waste disposal, the hazards of tobacco, marijuana, saccharin, Agent Orange, or myriad other materials; abortion, or the effectiveness of social programs. A good example of an issue on which the experts are divided is the "yellow rain" controversy. There have been reports for a long time that the Soviet Union has used poison gas in combat: in Yemen, Afghanistan, and Southeast Asia. After villagers in Laos and Cambodia reported being sprayed by aircraft, samples from the area were obtained. The samples had high levels of mycotoxins: poisons produced naturally by some fungi but also eminently useful in chemical warfare. Therein lies the problem: are the toxins natural or artificial? Those who claim a natural origin point to the presence of pollen in the samples and claim the samples may be nothing more than bee excrement; the bees ingested fungi along with nectar and excreted the toxins. (I'm omitting a lot of details for brevity; the position is not as silly as it sounds). Those who claim an artificial origin point to the eyewitness accounts, the high levels of toxins in the samples, and the absence of pollen from some samples. Both sides accuse the other of ideological bias. How is a nonscientist to know? When we consider the very real possibility that Soviet chemical forces may have sprayed fake materials expressly to confuse the issue (as there is some evidence to suggest) the problem becomes hopeless.
Fortunately, there are a great many cases where it is easier to tell the real from the fake. We have considered real and fake evidence in past chapters. In this chapter let us turn to the touchy matter of telling real experts from fake ones. One of the least understood aspects of science is the matter of credentials; of telling whether or not a person's training and accomplishments entitle his opinion to be given extra weight.
Credentials are simply a record of a person's professional training, certification, and on the job accomplishments. Ideally, credentials should act as a guide to tell us how competent a person may be to function in a given field. Unfortunately, credentials can be faked, over inflated, padded or misapplied. If someone claims to be a lawyer, physician or law enforcement agent without proper credentials, that person may be liable to criminal penalties. If someone claims to be a scientist without credentials, there are no penalties what ever. There certainly is no law against calling a run of the mill scientist "famous" or "world renowned". In today's global society, almost any professional will have contacts outside the U.S. and therefore be able to claim, in complete honesty, that he or she is "internationally known".
We must therefore be able to evaluate credentials and know what they can and cannot tell us. It is a foregone conclusion that any attempt to evaluate the credentials of the pseudoscientist will be loudly denounced as a personal attack. Evaluating credentials is perfectly fair; the purpose of credentials is to persuade the public that some person's opinion is entitled to special consideration. If the credentials do not support the claims that are based on them we have every right to say so.
The first point to remember is that credentials are guides, not guarantees. Experts can be wrong, amateurs can be right. Scientists with brilliant records can blunder dismally, people with a dismal track record can perform brilliantly on occasion. Somebody can perform adequately in one particular topic and be a complete crank on some other issue. A person can be competent at some times in his life but not others, and so on. The majority of scientists can be wrong. Bear in mind, though, that most of the cases of science being wrong and changing its mind involved the collapse of some plausible but untested basic assumption such as the earth being stationary or the continents immobile. There are no cases of science rejecting a once accepted belief, adopting a new position after much travail and testing, and then reverting back to the old idea. The chance of a wrong idea surviving the worst beating its opponents can give it and winning general acceptance is very low. Not zero, but very, very close. The chance of a challenger like Velikovsky or Henry Morris being wrong is immeasurably greater.
The second point to remember is that credentials are not magical. No credentials, however good, will make a bad theory work. If your mechanic fails to repair your car, the number of recommendations he has hanging on his wall is irrelevant. As a matter of fact, if the mechanic botched the job badly enough we would start to wonder if he was really as competent as his credentials suggested. Most of the theories we have considered in this book have been so far outside the realm of respecta bility that no scientistts testimony, no matter how renowned, would save them. Instead, we would have good cause to wonder about the scientist's continued competence. New evidence would be another matter entirely, but credentials will not improve bad evidence, either. Creationists are fond of citing the speculations of Fred Hoyle as evidence that the conventional theory of evolution is wrong. Unfortunately, Hoyle's evidence is little more than a rehash of shopworn creationist arguments. Not even Hoyle's reputation can save them.
Creationist Henry Morris laments in the October, 1982 issue of Acts and Facts that, "In an astonishing admission of ignorance, one Episcopal bishop said that he did not know of a single reputable Biblical scholar who believed in the recent, direct creation of mankind!" Unfortunately for Morris, the bishop is right. The evidence for the creationist view is so flimsy and that for the antiquity of man so strong that a Biblical scholar who insists on recent creation is providing evidence of his own incompetence, not support for creationism. Like so many other things in pseudo science, credentials are used in a one sided manner. The credentials of a few supporters of a theory is evidence for the theory, but the credentials of the people opposed to the theory never seem to count as evidence against it.
Even a working scientist is not equally qualified in all areas. The astute reader will perhaps have noted that most of my analysis has been directed at pseudo science in the physical sciences. This is the realm where I am most qualified. In the topics related to the life sciences or social sciences I rely more heavily on the opinion of other scientists who are considered most reliable by the scientific community. There are subjects I could explain briefly to non scientists but not teach a college class on; Subjects I could teach undergraduates but not advanced students, and finally subjects I can handle at advanced levels. A scientist's qualifications vary with time; a scientist can acquire expertise in a new area or become out of touch with a topic he or she once knew well.
One of the most misunderstood aspects of scientific reasoning is the role of speculation. Speculation means making plausible guesses before all the evidence is in. We might make an analogy with a group of people following a trail of marked trees in the woods. Some people can see marks several trees ahead and these people tend to lead the group. It is permissible to leave the trail and try to find a short cut. A few people may have this talent; if they are successful they become leaders among the leaders, but if they fail, they simply lose time. If they fail repeatedly, they risk losing their credibility entirely.
All too often, speculations are used as evidence for pseudoscientific theories even after the speculations have long since been disproven. In other cases, theories are introduced with a few perfunctory remarks about "speculation", but the ideas are treated thereafter as if they were solidly proven.
Fred Hoyle, whose recent works on creation have so delighted creationists, is a long time scientific speculator. For many years, he championed the "steady state" theory of the Universe. Now Hoyle is both a good astronomer and a good popular science writer. If he wrote a new book on astronomy I would recommend it to laymen; is he formulated a theory on the formation of the Solar System I would give it serious consideration. But in my view, Hoyle is simply not a very good speculator; his speculative ideas have too often been wrong. Sometimes unsound speculation creeps into even the most respectable publications. I doubt if there is a scientist alive who has not encountered n article in some professional journal and wondered how in the world it ever got accepted. One of the worst examples I know of is an article by H.C. Dudley called The Ultimate Catastrophe in the November, 1975 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Dudley has some highly unorthodox ideas on nuclear physics, and his theories are commonly cited in creationist attacks on radiometric dating, though Dudley himself is not a creationist.
Dudley's theme is a concern that plagued scientists on the Manhattan Project: was it possible that a nuclear explosion might cause atoms in the air to undergo fusion, possibly turning the atmosphere into a giant thermonuclear bomb? The scientists agreed to halt work if the chance of such an event exceeded three in a million .000003. The odds turned out to be less and the rest is history. Dudley's theme is simple: if we set off enough nukes, we'll hit the three in a million jackpot someday!
Unfortunately, Dudley completely misunderstood the problem. How could one possibly estimate the chances of a phenomenon that had never been observed? The scientists knew what the measured values for various nuclear constants were, and what the uncertainties in the values were. They also knew what the values would have to be for fusion to occur. What were the odds that their accepted values were so far off the mark that fusion might be possible after all? Put another way, if we had data of comparable quality, and we based a decision on the data (not necessarily such a momentous decision!) how often would we expect to be wrong? The answer, less than three times out of a million. The detonation of the first nuclear bomb settled the matter: it was not possible period. for a journal of the caliber of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to run such an article as serious commentary on nuclear safety is a lapse of editorial judgement as inexcusable as it is inexplicable.
What about people who have no formal training at all in science, or scientists who move into an area outside their original area of expertise say, a geologist who decides to write a book on science and pseudoscience? It is perfectly possible to achieve professional competence without formal training. After all, every science was started by people who had no formal training in the subject! Probably no science has benefited more from skilled amateurs tin the sense that Olympic athletes are amateurs) than astronomy and space science. Almost every major technological concept used in space exploration was developed by amateurs in the Interplanetary Societies of the U.S., England, Germany and the U.S.S.R., mostly before World War II. Amateur astronomers, especially those linked to organizations, do much of the routine surveillance work in astronomy: monitoring variable stars, searching for comets, and so on. Many of these people have equipment that would have been the envy of any observatory in~the world a century ago.
Generally, amateurs excel at routine observations over large areas or extended periods of time. Bird censuses are a good example. In the People's Republic of China there are a large number of amateurs who collect data related to possible warning signs of earthquakes. Amateurs are also good at detailed identification. It is not at all uncommon to find rockhounds who are better at identifying rocks and minerals than professional geologists. There should be more ways to put the talents of knowledgeable amateurs to work. I wonder how many of the people who read Pate might be far happier participating in some research project if only there were more ways of allowing amateurs to participate.
It is extremely unusual for amateur scientist to work at the very forefront of research, principally because doing research at an advanced level is a full time job that requires time for reading, reflection, and doing the research itself, as well as access to scientific journals, equipment, and the opinions of other scientists. It is considerably easier for a scientist to move across disciplines because a trained scientist will already have basic skills in mathematics, physics and chemistry, will know what standards are expected, how to find information, and how to publish the results. For instance, Alfred Wegener, the scientist who developed the theory of continental drift, was not a geologist but a meteorologist. In all cases, the final decision of whether a person, trained or untrained, is competent to speak on a scientific topic must be based on the quality of the person's ideas.
Pseudoscientists often claim that, being outsiders, they are not hampered by the preconceptions that keep specialists from seeing the forest for the trees. While an outside perspective is sometimes just what is needed, more often than not the outsider is hampered by an inability to tell important details from unimportant ones. Catastrophists certainly take the broad view! Unfortunately, Velikovsky chooses to focus on the wrong details; catastrophe myths as opposed to the chronological evidence that disproves his catastrophe theories.
Taking the broad view is not a license to omit, gloss over or ignore inconvenient details. The outsider actually is under a special obligation to be sure he knows which details are relevant and which are not. The dividing line is not be tween those who take the broad view and those who specialize, but between those who pay attention to detail and those who are superficial. It is perfectly legitimate to explore whether a catastrophe myth describes a real event, but Velikovsky is not entitled to ignore the details of geology just because he is dealing with mythology as well. It is impossible to be truly interdisciplinary without a good grasp of all the relevant fields one has to deal with. Being half knowledgeable in two fields is not the same as being knowledgeable in one.
Distortion of credentials is part and parcel of pseudoscience. Most non-scientists have little idea how the various branches of science interrelate, what constitutes scientific training, or what the limitations of a scientist's training are. As a result, many people accept almost anyone with any sort of technical background as a "scientist", and pseudoscientists take full advantage of this weakness. For the rest of the chapter, let us examine some fields that are commonly but erroneously thought to be populated by scientists. There are members of all these professions who are, or could be, scientists, but merely being in one of these fields, by itself, does not make a person a scientist. A competent professional in any field will recognize the limitations of his or her
training and exercise restraint in claiming expertise outside his or her professional competence. To begin with, engineers and physicians are not necessar ily scientists. Many are; they are involved in research, publish research findings, and are firet rate scientists. Others are not scientists but could easily perform that role if the situation called for it. Both physicians and engineers receive a great deal of scientific training, but that training of itself does not make them scientists, and certainly does not qualify them to pose as experts on subjects completely unrelated to engineering or medicine. When creationists pre sent Henry or John Morris, both of whom are engineers, or A E Wilder Smith, who is a professor of pharmacology, as examples of "famous scientists" who oppose evolution, the claim is simply worthless.
Lawyers are not qualified to decide on scientific theories, even though they are trained in the use of evidence. Begal evidence differs considerably from scientific evidence. Evi dence that may not be admissible in court might very well be admissible in science, and evidence that i9 admissible in court may be totally irrelevant to the scientific issues. When an ancient appearing map, the so called "Vinland map" turned up in the late 1960's, it seemed to offer striking new evidence that the Vikings reached America before Columbus. One writer to a ma30r news magazine protested, saying that as a judge he considered the evidence for the authenticity of the map to be inadmissible in court. Interestingly, the judge had an Italian surname! Not only did His Honor fail to realize there were
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many cases in which valid evidence i9 inadmissible and in
) valid evidence admissible, but he also forgot the ancient legal principle that a judge who has a personal interest in a case should disqualify himself! By the way, the consensus of most historians is that the Vinland map is probably a forgery. We need only recall the case mentioned earlier in which a couple was sent to prison on the basis of faulty sta t tistical reasoning to see how different the legal concept of t evidence is from scientific evidence. Almost all scientists would agree that a sound education in the humanities is essential for a scientist. Even at schools like M.I.T. or Caltech, students spend at least a quarter of their time studying the humanities. Very few students in the humanities spend a quarter of their time studying science! ) Nevertheless, education in the humanities does not qualify a person to nudge scientific theories. The most famous case of humanists attempting to do so was the case of the humanists who supported Velikovsky, but there have been many others. A list of literati who have backed crank theories at some time or other reads like a Who's Who. John Dewey, Aldous Huxley, Upton Sinclair, socialist leader Eugene Debs and George Bernard Shaw were all devotees of some medical cult or other. Debs died as a result of his naturopathic "treatments". H~xley, who suffered from cataracts, became a champion of a crank optometrist named Bates who claimed that eye exercises could cure almost any eye ailment. The episode ended painfully when Buxley gave an address without his glasses, flawlessly at
) first. Later on he faltered, brought the paper up to within
a few inches of his eyes, and finally resorted to a magnify ing glass. It was obvious to everyone that he had simply mem orized his speech.
Believers in ESP have included Sinclair, Huxley, William James, H.G. Wells, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Conan Doyle fell for perhaps the most pathetic cult of all. He believed in the literal existence of fairies and accepted purported photographs of them. The photos have long been known to be of cardboard cutouts, and even the children'^ book from which the fairies were copied has been located. Conan Doyle wrote a book, The Coming of the Fairies, in which he wrote, "that with fuller knowledge and with fresh means of vision, these people are destined to become just as solid and real as the Eskimos." Variants of this argument, which we might call the "boy, won't we look silly" fallacy, are common in paranormal literature: when all is said and done, ESP will be just as real as gravity or electricity, so believe now and avoid the rush. Conan Doyle also believed that Houdini could perform his escapes by dematerializing, and no amount of denial by Houdini could dissuade him
Arthur Koestler stands out as the literary figure who in recent years has been the champion of unorthodox theories. Koestler is deservedly famous for his chilling novel of the Stalin era, Darkness at Noon, and for such works on the history of science as The Sleepwalkers and The Watershed. But he has also championed some highly unsound ideas. For example, he argued in The Gase of the Midwife Toad that biologist Paul Kammerer, who was the last major biologist to believe in the Lamarckian theory of evolution, was a man of too sincere a personality to have faked his specimens. Instead, Eoestler paints Kammerer as the stock persecuted maverick, though the "persecution" that Koestler cites seems more like sound and routine scientific questioning than persecution. Koestler's most controversial work resurrected one of Eammerer's other theories, the "Law of Sequence". In the Roots of Coincidence Koestler collected a large number of coincidences and concluded that there were presently unknown laws that caused similar phenomena to occur together far more often than one would expect by chance. Koestler, who died in 1981, also was very impressed by the psychic talents of Uri Geller. It's a pity that he never drew a connection between Geller, Kammerer, and his sympathy for both, because these connections are not a coincidence. There is a strong anti establishment current in pseudo science, and Koestler, who detested dictatorships, may well have seen the scientific Establishment in the same light.
Science teachers are not necessarily qualified to pass judgement on scientific theories. Being able to describe established results in the classroom is not the same thing as being able to determine whether a new idea is true or false. The Institute for Creation Research reported the dismissal of a South Dakota biology teacher for teaching creationism, and noted that the teacher had been named South Dakota Outstanding Biology Teacher of the Year. Unfortunately, even fine teachers are often ill equipped to spot fallacious reasoning, and non creationist teachers are woefully inadequate at spotting the fallacies of creationism. The sad reality is that training in educational techniques rather than science is the criterion most used in hiring teachers, and often science teachers are recruited from other areas and used to fill slots for which they have little or no training.
Science writers range from superb to totally inept. The best known popular science writers, like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Nigel Calder, and Carl Sagan are first rate. The output of other writers is more variable. John Gribbin has written some rather good material, but was also a co author of The Jupiter Effect. John G. Fuller wrote the competent book Fever!, about the discovery of a new disease, Lassa Fever, but he has also written a whole raft of abysmal pot boilers: Arigo: Surgeon of the Rusty Knife, The Interrupted Journey, Incident at Exeter, and The Ghost of Flight 401. This matter would be unimportant if it were not for the fact that Fuller also wrote We Almost Lost Detroit, about a partial meltdown in the Fermi nuclear power plant in Michigan. How seriously should a non scientist take this book? Is it on the level of Fever! or The Ghost of Flight 401? There is simply no way for a layman to be sure.
Detroit Edison, the utility that owns the Fermi reactor, went to the unusual length of writing a lengthy rebuttal called We Did NOT Almost Lose Detroit which summarized Fuller's book in such terms as these:
The unique aspect of the work is that considerable detail is provided of both a technical and documentary nature tending to add credibility to the views of the author as perceived by the average lay reader. In some quarters the book is being cited as some sort of technical authority. Herein lies the major danger of the book because the treatment of much of the source information is distorted such that the average reader without technical background could easily be misled to agree with the anti nuclear stance of the author.
We Almost Lost Detroit is an interesting combination of historical fact, colorful adjectives, a few mistakes, and extremely carefully chosen excerpts cleverly combined to lead the reader inexorably to the conclusion that nuclear power is too dangerous to be handled by fallible man, and that the government knows this, but is unwilling to admit it. ... A mood of impending disaster is created by the simple use of well chosen modifiers and phrases sprinkled throughout the book.
The term "meltdown" conveys the image of the core of a reactor turning into a white hot glob of molten metal that melts its way into the earth, but the actual Fermi meltdown involved 40 pounds of fuel in one fuel assembly. Fuller leads the unwary reader to believe that a "Class I Emergency" that was announced was tantamount to nuclear holocaust when actually Class I was the least serious class of emergency, implying a purely local problem that did not even extend throughout the plant. He builds up the tension when one of six control rods sticks, as if failure to insert that rod might vaporize Detroit, when actually any one of the control rods alone would have stopped the chain reaction. He implies that a study called WASH 740 attempted to calculate the probability of a reactor accident, and when the study failed to show reactors "safe" the Government suppressed it. Actually the WASH 740 study was a "worst case" study that ignored probability entirely and estimated what the very worst outcome of a reactor accident, no matter how unlikely the circumstances, would be. Fuller states baldly that some types of breeder reactor can become "superprompt critical", or, "this technical terminology translated into layman's language is an atomic bomb." Well, there is superprompt and then there is superprompt! Superprompt in a reactor might be less than one second; nuclear bombs must initiate a chain reaction and run it largely to completion in a few millionths of a second. In sum, all the evidence suggests that We Almost Lost Detroit belongs on the same level as Arigo.
It is sobering to see how many leading critics of nuclear power were impressed by Fuller's book and wrote glowing (figuratively!) reviews. Paul Ehrlich said the book had "the tension and immediacy of a fine novel". As we have seen, there is every reason to believe the book was a novel! Dr. John Gofman noted, "This book points out simply how the government has steadfastly endeavored, using tax dollars, to keep any but the most laundered information from the public." The obvious implication is that any information that disagrees with Gofman's position must have been "laundered".
Given Fuller's track record for accepting the most absurd nonsense uncritically, we certainly cannot say, as Henry Kendall of the Union of Concerned Scientists did, that Mr. Fuller's book is a careful and thoughtful contribution to the nuclear power controversy." All the evidence indicates that Fuller, not the Government, "laundered" the information, using his finely honed skills in writing popular pseudoscience to turn out a book that was guaranteed to reinforce the beliefs of anti nuclear advocates. And here lies the most ominous development on the modern pseudoscience scene: the very real possibility that pseudoscience may insinuate it self into public decision making, and be all but impossible to refute because any attempt to do so will be dismissed as a "cover up". Weapons of this sort can be just as easily used by the enemy as by one's own side. Any anti nuclear advocate who is prone to excuse Fuller should give careful thought to the ways their opponents could use pseudoscience. There are fundamentalist writers, for example, who argue that environmentalism is part of a plot to cripple the U.S. energy industry and pave the way for the global economic control of the Antichrist. I would sooner let a rattlesnake loose in my house than attempt to control the forces of irrationalism.
Science reporting in the media varies widely in quality. The traditional format of a newspaper article is the "inverted pyramid": essential facts in the lead paragraph, major details in the second paragraph, successively smaller details in later paragraphs. This format has the virtue that a reader in a hurry can read only part of the article, and that an editor cramped for space can cut paragraphs. Some stories, like the eruption of Mount Saint Helens, fit this format ideally. Generally, once reporters got their bearings, the media coverage of the eruption was excellent. Space exploration is another topic the media generally do well.
When the story does not fit the inverted pyramid format, the results are not so fortunate. For example, an Associated Press story in 1980 was headlined "Scientists Halve age of Universe." and begins, "Three astronomers say the discovery of a mistake in the way distances in space are measured means that the Universe is only about half as old and half as big as they previously thought."
This is a good example of how not to cover a science story. The headline itself suggests that scientists, by fiat, changed the age of the Universe: "Move we cut the age of the Universe in half ... Second ... All in favor? ... Opposed? ... Abstentions? ... Motion carries. Now let's move on to deciding how many paper clips to buy." The story actually deals with a quantity called the Hubble Constant. The farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is receding from us. Until 1980, there was no way to tell if our own Galaxy was moving
in any particular direction, and if so, how fast. If we our selves are moving, obviously our estimate of how fast other galaxies are moving will be affected. There was not, as the story implies, a "mistake", but an unknown piece of information. In 1980, a way was found to get the needed information and the effect was to change our estimate of the Hubble Constant (Creationists, of course, were elated, as if cutting the estimated age of the Universe from 20 billion to 10 billion years somehow supported the notion that the actual age was only 10,000 years!)
This is a story the non scientist cannot possibly comprehend without massive background information; incomplete information in this case is the same as no information, and the only cure is for editors to be willing to scrap the inverted pyramid format on occasion. When the same story ran in Sky and Telescope, the "lead" item, the change in the Hubble Constant, did not appear until after a full page of background information! A story of this nature is valueless unless the reader understands it completely. If the editor cannot run the full story, or the reader read the entire story, it is better to omit it entirely.
Pseudoscience often appears in the media, often cloaked in a Constitutional mantle. Scientists who have protested to the TV networks about ridiculous "documentaries" have been told in no uncertain terms that the networks would show whatever they thought the public wanted to see. Martin Gardner was in the final stages of negotiating a book contract when the publisher brought out a crank medical work. Gardner cancelled his contract. The publishers were genuinely amazed that anyone would see a moral issue involved. After all, doesn't the Constitution guarantee Freedom of the Press?
In the wake of the Jupiter Effect, Sky and Telescope (July, 1982) printed a blistering critique of a news series that was run by at least 100 stations, going so far as to urge readers to write letters of protest to the station that produced the series and the news service that distributed it. In the November, 1982 issue, the reporter who narrated the series replied:
You dismiss out of hand positions of experts who assisted me simply because you don't agree with their stance. Shame on you. In a society in which the free exchange of ideas is so integral a part, your intolerance is inexcusable ... I stand by every word in all three segments of "The Jupiter Effect" and regret only that the effort was lost on viewers as narrow and pedestrian as yourselves. I am disappointed, appalled, and disgusted at the gross intolerance of nontraditional ideas by thinkers who allegedly are in the vanguard of scientific thought.
The editors responded: "Like poker players with royal flushes, Gary Mechler (public relations officer for Kitt Peak National Observatory) and I stand pat on all points of substance . . . Readers can judge the issues for themselves.”
There is a weird idea going around that criticism is censorship and that the Constitution somehow guarantees immunity from criticism. The First Amendment gives the reporter, Howard Joffe, every right to produce his series. It just as forcefully gives Sky and Telescope the right to say the series is balderdash. The principal reason for valuing the "free exchange of ideas" is so that good ideas may flourish and bad ideas be exposed so that they die out. A "free exchange" that does not allow us to call worthless concepts worthless is not a "free exchange". In recent years a number of slick, lavishly produced science and science fiction magazines have come out. Some, like Discover and Science 83, are generally reliable. Others, like Omni and Science Digest, mix reliable science with some fairly awful speculation. Recall that Science Digest published Thomas van Blanderen's Exploding Planets (Chapter 3) and Larry Arnold's Human Fireballs (Chapter 9). The unwaxy reader might assume that these articles are on the same level as the more reputable articles by serious researchers. Mixing good and bad science generally has only the effect of giving credibility to the bad science. Science Fiction writers as a general rule, are not qualified to speak out on scientific issues, apart from those who have actually worked as research scientists themselves. Often a science fiction writer will not wrlte about science as it is, but as it might be in the future. In other cases the story has a scientific setting but the story itself involves the actions of the characters. The movies E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are science fiction in the sense of having a scientific setting, but their actual scientific content is very small. A science fiction writer must know enough science to keep from writing absurdities, but need not have a very great level of expertise. (Special effects are another matter!)
It is probably true that quite a few people get their scientific understanding from science fiction. Reading any sort of fiction requires what has been called "a willing suspension of disbelief". Author and reader make an informal contract; the author will do his best to tell a plausible story and the reader will agree not to probe too hard for accuracy. If the writer violates the contract, he loses a reader. In most novels, the only suspension of disbelief required is a willingness to believe, for the duration of the story, that the characters exist; that there really is a Captain Ahab, a ship called the Pequod, and a great white whale, for example .
In science fiction, we are asked not only to believe that the characters exist, but often that the laws of nature are different. A viewer of Star Wars must not only accept the existence of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, but also the ability to travel faster than light. If Luke Skywalker had
to travel across the galaxy at sub light speeds, Darth Vader would be dead and the Empire long since fallen by the time he got where he was going! Many people have gotten the idea through science fiction that it is possible to travel faster than light, travel through time, devise anti gravity devices and force fields of all kinds, and that psychokinesis, clairvoyance and other psychic phenomena are well established. In reality, there is no scientific basis at all for any of these concepts; they are literary conventions whose sole purpose is to make the story more interesting. It's easy to see that many readers of science fiction are not aware of the fine print in the contracts they make with authors. It's also easy to see that a person can be a staunch believer in some varieties of pseudoscience and still be a successful science fiction author.
Science fiction stories where the hero triumphs over a pig headed establishment, where there are remarks by future scientists wondering how the Twentieth Century could have been so obtuse as not to accept psychic research, and the like are common enough to suggest that something more is involved than mere literary device. It is more than likely that some authors use science fiction as a vehicle for denouncing science and extolling the virtues of unorthodox theories.
One of the more obvious examples of this use of science fiction is D. L. Hughes' short story Local Effect, published in Analog ( April , 1968). The plot line involves some aliens who travel to earth to deactivate the space drive of a derelict ship, lest it provide a signal for hyperspace marauders known as Starkbeasts. The plot, however, turns out to have nothing whatever to do with most of the story! Once the aliens are under way, the whole second half of the story is a running dialog on terrestrial science. It seems that the space drive distorts space and creates the effects that we call relativity. The aliens recapitulate the history of the Michelson Morley Experiment (Chapter 8) and even comment on the failure of a scientist named D.C. Miller to replicate the experiment. (In all probability, Miller was simply another victim of the threshold effect.) The aliens comment that scientists "must, for their own peace of mind, feel that conditions on their planet are representative of the rest of the universe." Earth scientists "were not really pragmatists, or instrumentalists; many of them despise the idea that the function of theories is to enable one to manipulate one's environment in some way. They, therefore, had no objection to a theory... which would bar them from reaching the stars. We would inevitably reject such a theory because it had no pragmatic value..."
There's an almost Marxist tone in this insistence on "pragmatism". The overall message is that if a theory has un palatable implications we should scrap it in favor of one that does tell us what we'd like to hear. The aliens conclude by noting that there are two kinds of scientific activity: creative and institutional, and that "Institutional science is hostile to creative science."
Pretty clearly, the plot line in this story is secondary and the primary purpose of the story is to deliver a lengthy sermon on the obtuseness of the scientific establishment. The riddle is how a story like this could slip into a major science fiction magazine like Analog. The riddle becomes a lot clearer if we recall that John C. Campbell, whom we met in Chapter 5, was then editor of Analog. In all likelihood, Campbell approved this clunker not because of the story but because he sympathized with its resentment of the scientific establishment.
Astronauts and Military leaders, finally, are not necessarily scientists. Jim Irwin of Apollo 15 and Charles Duke of Apollo 16 have both spoken out on behalf of creationist topics, but going to the Moon does not make a person an expert on evolution, nor does it make Edgar Mitchell of Apollo 14 an expert on the paranormal. A letter to my local paper extolling the virtues of scientific creationism cited the qualifications of Dr. Walter Brown, director of the Institute for Creation Research Midwest Center: "Dr. Brown's impressive academic background includes graduation from West Point and a Ph. D. from Massachusetts institute of Technology. His most recent assignment was Chief of Science and Technology Studies at the Air War College. Eight years ago Dr. Brown was a thorough evolutionist. Today he is a zealous, qualified, well informed creationist". Ignoring for the moment whether that last sentence is a contradiction in terms, is there anything in Brown’s admittedly impressive credentials that suggests he is an expert on evolution and earth history, any more than my Ph. D. in geology suggests that I am qualified to command a fighter wing?
It is easy to find past examplesof military men who have fallen for pseudoscience. There was Captain John Symmes, retired from the U.S. Army,who championed a hollow earth theory in n the early 19th century. Therewas Major General Alfred Wilkes Drayson, professor at the British Royal MilitaryAcademy, who propounded a theory that the ice ages were caused by tilting of theearth's axis. And there was Donald Keyhoe, former Marine pilot and one of thefirst major UFO writers. And let's not forget the attempt to use dowsing rods tolocate Viet Cong tunnels in Vietnam. There are, surprisingly, few studies of thepsychology of incompetence, and one major study is Norman Dixonts 9n ThePsvehology of M ~ IncomPetence. I stress, as did Sixon, that these remarks are"not an attack upon the armed forces nor upon the vast majority of seniormilitary commanders, who, in time of war, succeed in tasks which would make therunning n of a large commercial enterprise seem childts play by comparison." The traits Dixon finds in the military bungler have 80 many parallelsamong pseudoscientists that they probably will do for a psychological profile ofthe incompetent in any field. Some of the traits Dixon finds are: "Afundamental conser vatism and clinging to outworn tradition, an inability to profit from past experience (owing in part to a refusal to admit
past mistakes)... A tendency to reject or ignore information which is unpalatable of whichconflicts with preconceptions ... Obstinate persistence in a given task despitestrong contrary evidence ... Tendency to underestimate the enemy and overestimate one's own capabilities ... Failure to engage in adequate reconnaissance... Undue readiness to find scapegoats for fail ure ... Preference for frontalassaults."
Ehe parallelswith the personality of the pseudoscientist )are uncnnny. There is thereactionary attitude, the tendency to deny contrary evidence, the egoism andtendency to put the blame on others (the scientific establishment), the totallack of original thinking, and the failure to check things out. Last but notleast among the traits Dixon lists is one that scarecely needs comment: "Abelief in mystical forces". Perhaps the best way to examine the abuse ofscientific 0 credentials is to reverse the process. I have a Ph.D. in V geologyand solid training in the physical sciences in general. If I am not qualified towrite literary criticism, how are l literary critics like Horace Kallenqualified to proclaim Veli kovsky a genius? If I am not automatically qualifiedto build a bridge, how is engineer Henry Morris qualified to pass for )an experton evolution? If I cannot automatically fly an Apollo spacecraft, what qualifiesJim Irwin to lead expeditions in search of Noah's Ark? There are severalprinciples to keep in mind in evaluating credentials. First, the credentials ofthe people most closely concerned with the theory count the most. Second, if thecre dentials of someone who supports an unorthodox theory count for the theory,the credentials of the people who oppose the theory count just as heavilyagainst it. Third, nobody is immune to pseudoscience; even the best mind canfall for a bad idea. Fourth, there is no idea on this earth that is so crazy itcan't find a few expferts to support it. Finally, cre dentials are only a guide.No credentials can make a bad idea good. The essential issue is always: Does thetheory work?
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