Category: Science communication

Sounds like science, but it ain’t …

we are increasingly assailed with science-related “news” – stories that too often involve hype and attempts to garner attention (and no, half-baked ideas are not theories, they are often non-scientific speculation or unconstrained fantasies).

The other day, as is my addiction, I turned to the “Real Clear Science” website to look for novel science-based stories (distractions from the more horrifying news of the day). I discovered two links that seduced me into clicking: “Atheism is not as rare or as rational as you think” by Will Gervais and Peter Sjöstedt-H’s “Consciousness and higher spatial dimensions“.  A few days later I encountered “Consciousness Is the Collapse of the Wave Function” by Stuart Hameroff. On reading them (more below), I faced the realization that science itself, and its distorted popularization by both institutional PR departments and increasingly by scientists and science writers, may be partially responsible for the absurdification of public discourse on scientific topics [1].  In part the problem arises from the assumption that science is capable of “explaining” much more than is actually the case. This insight is neither new nor novel. Timothy Caulfield’s essay Pseudoscience and COVID-19 — we’ve had enough already focuses on the fact that various, presumably objective data-based, medical institutions have encouraged the public’s thirst for easy cures for serious, and often incurable diseases.  As an example, “If a respected institution, such as the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, offers reiki — a science-free practice that involves using your hands, without even touching the patient, to balance the “vital life force energy that flows through all living things” — is it any surprise that some people will think that the technique could boost their immune systems and make them less susceptible to the virus?” That public figures and trusted institutions provide platforms for such silliness [see Did Columbia University cut ties with Dr. Oz?] means that there is little to distinguish data-based treatments from faith- and magical-thinking based placebos. The ideal of disinterested science, while tempered by common human frailties, is further eroded by the lure of profit and/or hope of enhanced public / professional status and notoriety.  As noted by Pennock‘ “Science never guarantees absolute truth, but it aims to seek better ways to assess empirical claims and to attain higher degrees of certainty and trust in scientific conclusions“. Most importantly, “Science is a set of rules that keep the scientists from lying to each other. [2]

It should surprise no one that the failure to explicitly recognize the limits, and evolving nature of scientific knowledge, opens the door to self-interested hucksterism at both individual and institutional levels. Just consider the number of complementary/alternative non-scientific “medical” programs run by prestigious institutions. The proliferation of pundits, speaking outside of their areas of established expertise, and often beyond what is scientifically knowable (e.g. historical events such as the origin of life or the challenges of living in the multiverse which are, by their very nature, unobservable) speaks to the increasingly unconstrained growth of pathological, bogus, and corrupted science  which, while certainly not new [3], has been facilitated by the proliferation of public, no-barrier, no-critical feedback platforms [1,4].  Ignoring the real limits of scientific knowledge and rejecting, or ignoring, the expertise of established authorities, rejects the ideals that have led to science that “works”.  

Of course, we cannot blame the distortion of science for every wacky idea; crazy, conspiratorial and magical thinking may well be linked to the cognitive “features” (or are they bugs) of the human brain. Norman Cohn describes the depressing, and repeated pattern behind the construction of dehumanizing libels used to justify murderous behaviors towards certain groups [5].  Recent studies indicate that brains, whether complex or simple neural networks, appear to construct emergent models of the world, models they use to coordinate internal perceptions with external realities [6].  My own (out of my area of expertise) guess is that the complexity of the human brain is associated with, and leads to the emergence of internal “working models” that attempt to make sense of what is happening to us, in part to answer questions such as why the good die young and the wicked go unpunished. It seems likely that our social nature (and our increasing social isolation) influences these models, models that are “checked” or “validated” against our experiences. 

It was in this context that Gervais’s essay on atheism caught my attention. He approaches two questions: “how Homo sapiens — and Homo sapiens alone — came to be a religious species” and “how disbelief in gods can exist within an otherwise religious species?”  But is Homo sapiens really a religious species and what exactly is a religion? Is it a tool that binds social groups of organisms together, a way of coping with, and giving meaning to, the (apparent) capriciousness of existence and experience, both, or something else again?  And how are we to know what is going on inside other brains, including the brains of chimps, whales, or cephalopods? In this light I was struck by an essay by Sofia Deleniv “The ‘me’ illusion: How your brain conjures up your sense of self” that considers the number of species that appear to be able to recognize themselves in a mirror. Turns out, this is not nearly as short a list as was previously thought, and it seems likely that self-consciousness, the ability to recognize yourself as you, may be a feature of many such systems.  Do other organisms possess emergent “belief systems” that help process incoming and internal signals, including their own neural noise? When the author says, “We then subtly gauge participants’ intuitions” by using “a clever experiment to see how people mentally represent atheists” one is left to wonder whether there are direct and objective measures of “intuitions” or “mental representations”?   Then the shocker, after publishing a paper claiming that “Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief“, the authors state that “the experiments in our initial Science paper were fatally flawed, the results no more than false positives.’ One is left to wonder did the questions asked make sense in the first place. While it initially seemed scientific (after all it was accepted and published in a premiere scientific journal), was it ever really science? 

Both “Consciousness and Higher Spatial Dimensions” and “Consciousness Is the Collapse of the Wave Function”, sound very scientific. Some physicists (the most sciencey of scientists, right?) have been speculating via “string theory” and “multiverses”, a series of unverified (and likely unverifiable) speculations, that they universe we inhabit has many many more than the three spatial dimensions we experience.  But how consciousness, an emergent property of biological (cellular) networks, is related to speculative physics is not clear, no matter what Nobel laureates in physics may say.  Should we, the people, take these remarks seriously?  After all these are the same folks who question the reality of time (for no good reason, as far as I can tell, as I watch my new grandchild and myself grow older rather than younger). 

Part of the issue involves what has been called “the hard problem of consciousness”, but as far as I can tell, consciousness is not a hard problem, but a process that emerges from systems of neural cells, interacting with one another and their environment in complex ways, not unlike the underlying processes of embryonic development, in which a new macroscopic organism composed of thousands to billions of cells emerges from a single cell.  And if the brain and body are generating signals (thoughts) then in makes sense these in turn feed back into the system, and as consciousness becomes increasingly complex, these thoughts need to be “understood” by the system that produced them.  The system may be forced to make sense of itself (perhaps that is how religions and other explanatory beliefs come into being, settling the brain so that it can cope with the material world, whether a nematode worm, an internet pundit, a QAnon wack-o, a religious fanatic, or a simple citizen, trying to make sense of things.

Thanks to Melanie Cooper for editorial advice and Steve Pollock for checking my understanding of physics; all remaining errors are mine alone!

  1. Scheufele, D. A. and Krause, N. M. (2019). Science audiences, misinformation, and fake news. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, 7662-7669
  2. Kenneth S. Norris, cited in False Prophet by Alexander Kohn (and cited by John Grant in Corrupted Science. 
  3.  See Langmuir, I. (1953, recovered and published in 1989). “Pathological science.” Research-Technology Management 32: 11-17; “Corrupted Science: Fraud, Ideology, and Politics in Science” and “Bogus Science: or, Some people really believe these things” by John Grant (2007 and 2009)
  4.  And while I personally think Sabine Hossenfelder makes great explanatory videos, even she is occasionally tempted to go beyond the scientifically demonstrable: e.g. You don’t have free will, but don’t worry and An update on the status of superdeterminism with some personal notes  
  5.  Norman Cohn’s (1975) “Europe’s Inner Demons” will reveal.
  6. Kaplan, H. S. and Zimmer, M. (2020). Brain-wide representations of ongoing behavior: a universal principle? Current opinion in neurobiology 64, 60-69.

Misinformation in and about science.

originally published as https://facultyopinions.com/article/739916951 – July 2021

There have been many calls for improved “scientific literacy”. Scientific literacy has been defined in a number of, often ambiguous, ways (see National Academies of Sciences and Medicine, 2016 {1}). According to Krajcik & Sutherland (2010) {2} it is “the understanding of science content and scientific practices and the ability to use that knowledge”, which implies “the ability to critique the quality of evidence or validity of conclusions about science in various media, including newspapers, magazines, television, and the Internet”. But what types of critiques are we talking about, and how often is this ability to critique, and the scientific knowledge it rests on, explicitly emphasized in the courses non-science (or science) students take? As an example, highlighted by Sabine Hossenfelder (2020) {3}, are students introduced to the higher order reasoning and understanding of the scientific enterprise needed to dismiss a belief in a flat (or a ~6000 year old) Earth?

While the sources of scientific illiteracy are often ascribed to social media, religious beliefs, or economically or politically motivated distortions, West and Bergstrom point out how scientists and the scientific establishment (public relations departments and the occasional science writer) also play a role. They identify the problems arising from the fact that the scientific enterprise (and the people who work within it) act within “an attention economy” and “compete for eyeballs just as journalists do.” The authors provide a review of all of the factors that contribute to misinformation within the scientific literature and its media ramifications, including the contribution of “predatory publishers” and call for “better ways of detecting untrustworthy publishers.” At the same time, there are ingrained features of the scientific enterprise that serve to distort the relevance of published studies, these include not explicitly identifying the organism in which the studies are carried out, and so obscuring the possibility that they might not be relevant to humans (see Kolata, 2013 {4}). There are also systemic biases within the research community. Consider the observation, characterized by Pandey et al. (2014) {5} that studies of “important” genes, expressed in the nervous system, are skewed: the “top 5% of genes absorb 70% of the relevant literature” while “approximately 20% of genes have essentially no neuroscience literature”. What appears to be the “major distinguishing characteristic between these sets of genes is date of discovery, early discovery being associated with greater research momentum—a genomic bandwagon effect”, a version of the “Matthew effect” described by Merton (1968) {6}. In the context of the scientific community, various forms of visibility (including pedigree and publicity) are in play in funding decisions and career advancement. Not pointed out explicitly by West and Bergstrom is the impact of disciplinary experts who pontificate outside of their areas of expertise and speculate beyond what can be observed or rejected experimentally, including speculations on the existence of non-observable multiverses, the ubiquity of consciousness (Tononi & Koch, 2015 {7}), and the rejection of experimental tests as a necessary criterion of scientific speculation (see Loeb, 2018 {8}) spring to mind.

Many educational institutions demand that non-science students take introductory courses in one or more sciences in the name of cultivating “scientific literacy”. This is a policy that seems to me to be tragically misguided, and perhaps based more on institutional economics than student learning outcomes. Instead, a course on “how science works and how it can be distorted” would be more likely to move students close to the ability to “critique the quality of evidence or validity of conclusions about science”. Such a course could well be based on an extended consideration of the West and Bergstrom article, together with their recently published trade book “Calling bullshit: the art of skepticism in a data-driven world” (Bergstrom and West, 2021 {9}), which outlines many of the ways that information can be distorted. Courses that take this approach to developing a skeptical (and realistic) approach to understanding how the sciences work are mentioned, although what measures of learning outcomes have been used to assess their efficacy are not described.

literature cited

  1. Science literacy: concepts, contexts, and consequencesCommittee on Science Literacy and Public Perception of Science, Board on Science Education, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.2016 10 14; PMID: 27854404
  2. Supporting students in developing literacy in science. Krajcik JS, Sutherland LM.Science. 2010 Apr 23; 328(5977):456-459PMID: 20413490
  3. Flat Earth “Science”: Wrong, but not Stupid. Hossenfelder S. BackRe(Action) blog, 2020, Aug 22 (accessed Jul 29, 2021)
  4. Mice fall short as test subjects for humans’ deadly ills. Kolata G. New York Times, 2013, Feb 11 (accessed Jul 29, 2021)
  5. Functionally enigmatic genes: a case study of the brain ignorome. Pandey AK, Lu L, Wang X, Homayouni R, Williams RW.PLoS ONE. 2014; 9(2):e88889PMID: 24523945
  6. The Matthew Effect in Science: The reward and communication systems of science are considered.Merton RK.Science. 1968 Jan 5; 159:56-63 PMID: 17737466
  7. Consciousness: here, there and everywhere? Tononi G, Koch C.Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2015 May 19; 370(1668)PMID: 25823865
  8. Theoretical Physics Is Pointless without Experimental Tests. Loeb A. Scientific American blog, 2018, Aug 10 [ Blog piece] (accessed Jul 29, 2021)
  9. Calling bullshit: the art of skepticism in a data-driven world.Bergstrom CT, West JD. Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2021ISBN: ‎ 978-0141987057

Anti-Scientific & anti-vax propaganda (1926 and today)

“Montaigne concludes, like Socrates, that ignorance aware of itself is the only true knowledge” – from “Forbidden Knowledge” by Roger Shattuck

A useful review of the history of the anti-vaccination movement: Poland & Jacobson 2011. The Age-Old Struggle against the Antivaccinationists NEJM

Science educators and those who aim to explain the implications of scientific or clinical observations to the public have their work cut out for them. In large part, this is because helping others, including the diverse population of health care providers and their clients, depends upon more than just critical thinking skills. Equally important is what might be termed “disciplinary literacy,” the ability to evaluate whether the methods applied are adequate and appropriate and so whether a particular observation is relevant to or able to resolve a specific question. To illustrate this point, I consider an essay from 1926 by Peter Frandsen and a 2021 paper by Ou et al. (2021) on the mechanism of hydroxychloroquine inhibition of SARS-CoV-2 replication in tissue culture cells.                

In Frandsen’s essay, well before the proliferation of unfettered web-based social pontification and ideologically-motivated distortions, he notes that “pseudo and unscientific cults are springing up and finding it easy to get a hold on the popular mind,” and “are making some headway in establishing themselves on an equally recognized basis with scientific medicine,” in part due to their ability to lobby politicians to exclude them from any semblance of “truth in advertising.”  Of particular resonance were the efforts in Minnesota, California, and Montana to oppose mandatory vaccination for smallpox. Given these successful anti-vax efforts, Frandsen asks, “is it any wonder that smallpox is one thousand times more prevalent in Montana than in Massachusetts in proportion to population?”  One cannot help but analogize to today’s COVID-19 statistics on the dramatically higher rate of hospitalization for the unvaccinated (e.g. Scobie et al., 2021). The comparison is all the more impactful (and disheartening) given the severity of smallpox as a disease, its elimination, in 1977, together with the near elimination of other dangerous viral human diseases (poliomyelitis and measles) primarily via vaccination efforts (Hopkins, 2013), and the discouraging number of high profile celebrities, some of whom I for one previously considered admirable figures (various forms of influencers in modern parlance) who actively promulgate positions that directly contradict objective and reproducible observation and embrace blatantly scientifically untenable beliefs (the vaccine-autism link serves as a prime example).                 

While much is made of the idea that education-based improvements in critical thinking ability can render its practitioners less susceptible to unwarranted conspiracy theories and beliefs (Lantian et al., 2021), the situation becomes more complex when we consider how it is that presumably highly educated practitioners, e.g. medical doctors, can become conspiracists (ignoring for the moment the more banal, and likely universal, reasons associated with greed and the need to draw attention to themselves).  As noted, many is the conspiracist who considers themselves to be a “critical freethinker” (see Lantian et al). The fact that they fail to recognize the flaws in their own thinking leads us to ask, what are they missing?            

A point rarely considered is what we might term “disciplinary literacy.” That is, do the members of an audience have the background information necessary to question foundational presumptions associated with an observation? Here I draw on personal experience. I have (an increasingly historical) interest in the interactions between intermediate filaments and viral infection (Doedens et al., 1994; Murti et al., 1988). In 2020, I found myself involved quite superficially with studies by colleagues here at the University of Colorado Boulder; they reproduced the ability of hydroxychloroquine to inhibit coronavirus replication in cultured cells.  Nevertheless, and in the face of various distortions, it quickly became apparent that hydroxychloroquine was ineffective for treating SARS-CoV-2 infection in humans. So, what disciplinary facts did one need to understand this apparent contradiction (which appears to have fueled unreasonable advocacy of hydroxychloroquine treatment for COVID)? The paper by Ou et al. (2021) provides a plausible mechanistic explanation. The process of in vitro infection of various cells appears to involve endocytosis followed by proteolytic events leading to the subsequent movement of viral nucleic acid into the cytoplasm, a prerequisite for viral replication. Hydroxychloroquine treatment acts by blocking the acidification of the endosome, which inhibits the capsid cleavage reaction and the subsequent cytoplasmic transport of the virus’s nucleic acid genome (see figure 1, Ou et al. 2021).  In contrast, in vivo infection involves a surface protease, rather than endocytosis, and is therefore independent of endosomal acidification.  Without a (disciplinary) understanding of the various mechanisms involve in viral entry, and their relevance in various experimental contexts, it remains a mystery for why hydroxychloroquine treatment blocks viral replication in one system (in vitro cultured cells) and not another (in vivo).             

 In the context of science education and how it can be made more effective, it appears that helping students understand underlying cellular processes, experimental details, and their often substantial impact on observed outcomes is central. This is in contrast to the common focus (in many courses) on the memorization of largely irrelevant details. Understanding how one can be led astray by the differences between experimental systems (and inadequate sample sizes) is essential. One cannot help but think of how mouse studies on diseases such as sepsis (Kolata, 2013) and Alzheimer’s (Reardon, 2018) have been haunted by the assumption that systems that differ in physiologically significant details are good models for human disease and the development of effective treatments. Helping students understand how we come to evaluate observations and the molecular and physiological mechanisms involved should be the primary focus of a modern education in the biological sciences, since it helps build up the disciplinary literacy needed to distinguish reasoned argument from anti-scientific propaganda. 

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Qing Yang for bringing the Ou et al paper to my attention.  

Literature cited:
Shattuck, R. (1996). Forbidden knowledge: from Prometheus to pornography. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Doedens, J., Maynell, L. A., Klymkowsky, M. W. and Kirkegaard, K. (1994). Secretory pathway function, but not cytoskeletal integrity, is required in poliovirus infection. Arch Virol. suppl. 9, 159-172.

Hopkins, D. R. (2013). Disease eradication. New England Journal of Medicine 368, 54-63.

Kolata, G. (2013). Mice fall short as test subjects for some of humans’ deadly ills. New York Times 11, 467-477.

Lantian, A., Bagneux, V., Delouvée, S. and Gauvrit, N. (2021). Maybe a free thinker but not a critical one: High conspiracy belief is associated with low critical thinking ability. Applied Cognitive Psychology 35, 674-684.

Murti, K. G., Goorha, R. and Klymkowsky, M. W. (1988). A functional role for intermediate filaments in the formation of frog virus 3 assembly sites. Virology 162, 264-269.
 
Ou, T., Mou, H., Zhang, L., Ojha, A., Choe, H. and Farzan, M. (2021). Hydroxychloroquine-mediated inhibition of SARS-CoV-2 entry is attenuated by TMPRSS2. PLoS pathogens 17, e1009212.

Reardon, S. (2018). Frustrated Alzheimer’s researchers seek better lab mice. Nature 563, 611-613.

Scobie, H. M., Johnson, A. G., Suthar, A. B., Severson, R., Alden, N. B., Balter, S., Bertolino, D., Blythe, D., Brady, S. and Cadwell, B. (2021). Monitoring incidence of covid-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, by vaccination status—13 US jurisdictions, April 4–July 17, 2021. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 70, 1284.

Going virtual without a net

Is the coronavirus-based transition from face to face to on-line instruction yet another step to down-grading instructional quality?

transitioning education overnight

It is certainly a strange time in the world of higher education. In response to the current corona virus pandemic, many institutions have quickly, sometimes within hours and primarily by fiat, transitioned from face to face to distance (web-based) instruction. After a little confusion, it appears that laboratory courses are included as well, which certainly makes sense. While virtual laboratories can be built (see our own virtual laboratories in biology)  they typically fail to capture the social setting of a real laboratory.  More to the point, I know of no published studies that have measured the efficacy of such on-line experiences in terms of the ideas and skills students master.

Many instructors (including this one) are being called upon to carry out a radical transformation of instructional practice “on the fly.” Advice is being offered from all sides, from University administrators and technical advisors (see as an example Making Online Teaching a Success).  It is worth noting that much (all?) of this advice falls into the category of “personal empiricism”, suggestions based on various experiences but unsupported  by objective measures of educational outcomes – outcomes that include the extent of student engagement as well as clear descriptions of i) what students are expected to have mastered, ii) what they are expected to be able to do with their knowledge, and iii) what they can actually do. Again, to my knowledge there have been few if any careful comparative studies on learning outcomes achieved via face to face versus virtual teaching experiences. Part of the issue is that many studies on teaching strategies (including recent work on what has been termed “active learning” approaches) have failed to clearly define what exactly is to be learned, a necessary first step in evaluating their efficacy.  Are we talking memorization and recognition, or the ability to identify and apply core and discipline-specific ideas appropriately in novel and complex situations?

At the same time, instructors have not had practical training in using available tools (zoom, in my case) and little in the way of effective support. Even more importantly, there are few published and verified studies to inform what works best in terms of student engagement and learning outcomes. Even if there were clear “rules of thumb” in place to guide the instructor or course designer, there has not been the time or resources needed to implement these changes. The situation is not surprising given that the quality of university level educational programs rarely attracts critical analysis, or the necessary encouragement, support, and recognition needed to make it a departmental priority (see Making education matter in higher education).  It seems to me that the current situation is not unlike attempting to perform a complicated surgery after being told to watch a 3 minute youtube video. Unsurprisingly patient (student learning) outcomes may not be pretty.     

Much of what is missing from on-line instructional scenarios is the human connection, the ability of an instructor to pay attention to how students respond to the ideas presented. Typically this involves reading the facial expressions and body language of students, and through asking challenging (Socratic) questions – questions that address how the information presented can be used to generate plausible explanations or to predict the behavior of a system. These are interactions that are difficult, if not impossible to capture in an on-line setting.

While there is much to be said for active engagement/active learning strategies (see Hake 1998, Freeman et al 2014 and Theobald et al 2020), one can easily argue that all effective learning scenarios involve an instructor who is aware and responsive to students’ pre-existing knowledge. It is also important that the instructor has the willingness (and freedom) to entertain their questions, confusions, and the need for clarification (saying it a different way), or when it may be necessary to revisit important, foundational, ideas and skills – a situation that can necessitate discarding planned materials and “coaching up” students on core concepts and their application. The ability of the instructor to customize instruction “on the fly” is one of the justifications for hiring disciplinary experts in instructional positions, they (presumably) understand the conceptual foundations of the materials they are called upon to present. In its best (Socratic) form, the dialog between student and instructor drives students (and instructors) to develop a more sophisticated and metacognitive understanding of the web of ideas involved in most scientific explanations.

In the absence of an explicit appreciation of the importance of the human interactions between instructor and student, interactions already strained in the context of large enrollment courses, we are likely to find an increase in the forces driving instruction to become more and more about rote knowledge, rather than the higher order skills associated with the ability to juggle ideas, identifying those needed and those irrelevant to a specific situation.  While I have been trying to be less cynical (not a particularly easy task in the modern world), I suspect that the flurry of advice on how to carry out distance learning is more about avoiding the need to refund student fees than about improving students’ educational outcomes (see Colleges Sent Students Home. Now Will They Refund Tuition?)

A short post-script (17 April 2020): Over the last few weeks I have put together the tools to make the on-line MCDB 4650 Developmental Biology course somewhat smoother for me (and hopefully the students). I use Keynote (rather than Powerpoint) for slides; since the iPad is connected wirelessly to the project, this enables me to wander around the class room. The iOS version of Keynote enables me, and students, to draw on slides. Now that I am tethered, I rely more on pre-class beSocratic activities and the Mirroring360 application to connect my iPad to my laptop for Zoom sessions. I am back to being more interactive with the materials presented. I am also starting to pick students at random to answer questions & provide explanations (since they are quiet otherwise) – hopefully that works. Below (↓) is my set up, including a good microphone, laptop, iPad, and the newly arrived volume on Active Learning.

Remembering the past and recognizing the limits of science …

A recent article in the Guardian reports on a debate at University College London (1) on whether to rename buildings because the people honored harbored odious ideological and political positions. Similar debates and decisions, in some cases involving unacceptable and abusive behaviors rather than ideological positions, have occurred at a number of institutions (see Calhoun at Yale, Sackler in NYC, James Watson at Cold Spring Harbor, Tim Hunt at the MRC, and sexual predators within the National Academy of Sciences). These debates raise important and sometimes troubling issues.

When a building is named after a scientist, it is generally in order to honor that person’s scientific contributions. The scientist’s ideological opinions are rarely considered explicitly, although they may influence the decision at the time.  In general, scientific contributions are timeless in that they represent important steps in the evolution of a discipline, often by establishing a key observation, idea, or conceptual framework upon which subsequent progress is based – they are historically important.  In this sense, whether a scientific contribution was correct (as we currently understand the natural world) is less critical than what that contribution led to. The contribution marks a milestone or a turning point in a discipline, understanding that the efforts of many underlie disciplinary progress and that those contributors made it possible for others to “see further.” (2)

Since science is not about recognizing or establishing a single unchanging capital-T-Truth, but rather about developing an increasingly accurate model for how the world works, it is constantly evolving and open to revision.  Working scientists are not particularly upset when new observations lead to revisions to or the abandonment of ideas or the addition of new terms to equations.(3)

Compare that to the situation in the ideological, political, or religious realms.  A new translation or interpretation of a sacred text can provoke schism and remarkably violent responses between respective groups of believers. The closer the groups are to one another, the more horrific the levels of violence that emerge often are.  In contrast, over the long term, scientific schools of thought resolve, often merging with one another to form unified disciplines. From my own perspective, and not withstanding the temptation to generate new sub-disciplines (in part in response to funding factors), all of the life sciences have collapsed into a unified evolutionary/molecular framework.  All scientific disciplines tend to become, over time, consistent with, although not necessarily deducible from, one another, particularly when the discipline respects and retains connections to the real (observable) world.(4)  How different from the political and ideological.

The historical progression of scientific ideas is dramatically different from that of political, religious, or social mores.  No matter what some might claim, the modern quantum mechanical view of the atom bears little meaningful similarity to the ideas of the cohort that included Leucippus and Democritus.  There is progress in science.  In contrast, various belief systems rarely abandon their basic premises.  A politically right- or left-wing ideologue might well find kindred spirits in the ancient world.  There were genocidal racists, theists, and nationalists in the past and there are genocidal racists, theists, and nationalists now.  There were (limited) democracies then, as there are (limited) democracies now; monarchical, oligarchical, and dictatorial political systems then and now; theistic religions then and now. Absolutist ideals of innate human rights, then as now, are routinely sacrificed for a range of mostly self-serving or politically expedient reasons.  Advocates of rule by the people repeatedly install repressive dictatorships. The authors of the United States Constitution declare the sacredness of human rights and then legitimized slavery. “The Bible … posits universal brotherhood, then tells Israel to kill all the Amorites.” (Phil Christman). The eugenic movement is a good example; for the promise of a genetically perfect future, existing people are treated inhumanely – just another version of apocalyptic (ends justify the means) thinking. 

Ignoring the simpler case of not honoring criminals (sexual and otherwise), most calls for removing names from buildings are based on the odious ideological positions espoused by the honored – typically some version of racist, nationalistic, or sexist ideologies.  The complication comes from the fact that people are complex, shaped by the context within which they grow up, their personal histories and the dominant ideological milieu they experienced, as well as their reactions to it.  But these ideological positions are not scientific, although a person’s scientific worldview and their ideological positions may be intertwined. The honoree may claim that science “says” something unambiguous and unarguable, often in an attempt to force others to acquiesce to their perspective.  A modern example would be arguments about whether climate is changing due to anthropogenic factors, a scientific topic, and what to do about it, an economic, political, and perhaps ideological question.(5)

So what to do?  To me, the answer seems reasonably obvious – assuming that the person’s contribution was significant enough, we should leave the name in place and use the controversy to consider why they held their objectionable beliefs and more explicitly why they were wrong to claim scientific justification for their ideological (racist / nationalist / sexist / socially prejudiced) positions.(6)  Consider explicitly why an archeologist (Flinders Petrie), a naturalist (Francis Galton), a statistician (Karl Pearson), and an advocate for women’s reproductive rights (Marie Stopes) might all support the non-scientific ideology of eugenics and forced sterilization.  We can use such situations as a framework within which to delineate the boundaries between the scientific and the ideological. 

Understanding this distinction is critical and is one of the primary justifications for why people not necessarily interested in science or science-based careers are often required to take science courses.  Yet all too often these courses fail to address the constraints of science, the difference between political and ideological opinions, and the implications of scientific models.  I would argue that unless students (and citizens) come to understand what constitutes a scientific idea or conclusion and what reflects a political or ideological position couched in scientific or pseudo-scientific terms, they are not learning what they need to know about science or its place in society.  That science is used as a proxy for Truth writ large is deeply misguided. It is much more important to understand how science works than it is to remember the number of phyla or the names of amino acids, the ability to calculate the pH of a solution, or to understand processes going on at the center of a galaxy or the details of a black hole’s behavior.  While sometimes harmless, misunderstanding science and how it is used socially can result in traumatic social implications, such as drawing harmful conclusions about individuals from statistical generalizations of populations, avoidable deaths from measles, and the forced “eugenic” sterilization of people deemed defective.  We should seek out and embrace opportunities to teach about these issues, even if it means we name buildings after imperfect people.  

footnotes:

  1. The location of some of my post-doc work.
  2. In the words of Isaac Newton, “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”
  3.  Unless, of course, the ideas and equations being revised or abandoned are one’s own. 
  4.  Perhaps the most striking exception occurs in physics on the subjects of quantum mechanics and relativity, but as I am not a physicist, I am not sure about that. 
  5.  Perhaps people are “meant” to go extinct. 
  6.  The situation is rather different outside of science, because the reality of progress is more problematic and past battles continue to be refought.  Given the history of Reconstruction and the Confederate “Lost Cause” movement [see PBS’s Reconstruction] following the American Civil War, monuments to defenders of slavery, no matter how admirable they may have been in terms of personal bravery and such, reek of implied violence, subjugation, and repression, particularly when the person honored went on to found an institution dedicated to racial hatred and violent intimidation [link]. There would seem little doubt that a monument in honor of a Nazi needs to be eliminated and replaced by one to their victims or to those who defeated them.