History

Below these two videos is a post I made (perhaps to the Kate Bush fans’ “love-hounds” mailing list, I don’t recall) back in 1986 regarding a 1985 Christian “rock music seminar” about alleged Satanic backwards messages in rock music. I was familiar with the claims of supposed “backwards masking” where the sounds of ordinary lyrics were interpreted to have different messages when reversed, as well as actual examples of recordings that were put into songs in reverse. The former seemed to me to be examples of subjective validation, and I tested it myself by closing my eyes and covering my ears when the presenter gave their claims about what we were supposed to hear prior to playing the samples. Subsequently, this became one of the first tests the Phoenix Skeptics conducted as a student group at Arizona State University in October 1985. We invited the speaker to give his demonstrations before our group, but required him to play the samples first without explanation and have everyone write down what they heard. The result was that on the first pass, those unfamiliar with the samples had a wide variety of responses; on a second pass, once the expectation was set, everybody heard what they were supposed to hear. It’s interesting that this demonstration, the key example of which was a sample from Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” made a comeback two decades later–being used by skeptics to show the power of suggestion and expectation, as these two videos from Simon Singh and Michael Shermer demonstrate. Simon Singh, 2006: ...

After witnessing the despicable pseudo-historian David Barton on “The Daily Show,” inadequately rebutted by Jon Stewart, author Chris Rodda decided to take action. She’s giving away her book, Liars for Jesus, which carefully documents the historical revisionism of Barton and others, online as a PDF. You can download Rodda’s book here. You can also purchase a paper or Kindle copy of the book from Amazon.com. Rodda depends on income from her book, but felt it was important enough to give it away. I suspect she’ll see an increase in sales along with the free distribution. UPDATE: Rodda’s book seems to be selling well: Paperback: ...

John Lynch and I have co-authored a review of the Creation Ministries International film on Darwin which will be appearing in vol. 30 of Reports of the National Center for Science Education and which may be found on their website. My previous blogged review of the film is here. I gave a little more background on the film here. John Lynch has said more about it here, here, here, and here, mostly about the deception used to get interviews by prominent historians. ...

Earlier today on Twitter, Adam Bourque (@A_Damn_Bourque) asked if anyone knew the origin of the term “woo” as applied to the paranormal. I know I’ve heard the term used for at least a decade (or two or three?), but after seeing that neither the Skeptics Dictionary entry on “woo woo” nor threads at the JREF Forums had an etymology, I decided to take a look at Google Books. “Woo” wasn’t a good search due to the homonym, and “woo woo” led to lots of matches in stories of children imitating fire engine sirens, but adding “astrology” and “occult” as additional terms led to some useful matches. On my first pass, the oldest reference I found was in Nicholas Evans’ novel The Loop (1999), p. 244: ...

On the last day of my class on Scientific Revolutions and the law, one of the students in the class, Lijing Jiang, gave a presentation titled “To Consider the Heavens: The Incorporation of Jesuit Astronomy in the Seventeenth Century Chinese Court." Her presentation was about how Jesuit missionaries in China brought western astronomy with them, and how it was received. This added a very interesting complement to the course, as much of the early part of the semester was about the Copernican revolution (using Kuhn’s book of the same name). Part of what happened early on in astronomy was a division between cosmology and positional astronomy, with the former being about the actual nature of the heavens, and the latter being about creating mathematical models for prediction, to be used for navigation and calendar-setting that incorporated features not intended to represent reality (like epicycles). These two types of astronomy didn’t really get reconnected (aside from the occasional realist depiction of epicycles in crystalline spheres) until Galileo argued for a realist interpretation of the Copernican model. And that didn’t fully catch on until Newton. In China, calendar reform was very important as they used a combination of a lunar month (based on phases of the moon) and tropical year that had to be synchronized annually, and an unpredicted eclipse was considered to be a bad omen. The Chinese had gone through many calendar reforms as a result of these requirements, and they considered that theories needed to be revised about every 300 years (in other realms as well, not just astronomy). The Jesuits happened to bring Copernican astronomy to China in the late 16th/early 17th century, with a goal of impressing and converting the Emperor. They got their big chance to make a splash in 1610, when the Chinese court astronomers mispredicted a solar eclipse by one day, which the Jesuits predicted correctly in advance. But this turned out in a way to be poorly timed, as the Counter-Reformation decided to start cracking down on Copernican heliocentrism after 1610, making it a formal doctrinal issue in 1616. The Jesuits in China thus switched to the Tychonic system which was geometrically equivalent to the Copernican model but geocentric. Multiple factors persuaded the Chinese to maintain a relativistic, anti-realist understanding of positional astronomy beyond the Scientific Revolution. In addition to Taoist and Buddhist views of life involving constant change and their past experience with calendars suggesting revisions every 300 years, the Jesuits presented another example of apparent arbitrariness in cosmological model selection, and they continued to stick with the Tychonic model as the western world switched to heliocentrism. You can read Lijing Jiang’s blogging at Science in a Mirror, where she may post something about her presentation in the future. ...

Matthew LaClair, who exposed his proselytizing U.S. history teacher/youth pastor in 2006, now hosts his own radio show, “Equal Time for Freethought,” on WBAI 99.5 FM on Sundays at 6:30 p.m. ET in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut area. The show is also online via streaming audio. This coming Sunday, April 25, Matthew will be debating a conservative member of the Texas Board of Education about their recent changes to the curriculum (e.g., removing Thomas Jefferson). If you happen to miss the show, it will subsequently be available in the online archives.

James Scott’s Seeing Like a State (about which I’ve blogged previously) talks about how the state imposes standards in order to make features legible, countable, regulatable, and taxable. J. Stephen Lansing’s Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali describes a case where the reverse happened. When Bali tried to impose a top-down system of scientifically designed order–a system of water management–on Balinese rice farmers, in the name of modernization in the early 1970s, the result was a brief increase in productivity followed by disaster. Rather than lead to more efficient use of water and continued improved crop yields, it produced pest outbreaks which destroyed crops. An investment of $55 million in Romijn gates to control water flow in irrigation canals had the opposite of the intended effect. Farmers removed the gates or lifted them out of the water and left them to rust, upsetting the consultants and officials behind the project. Pesticides delivered to farmers resulted in brown leafhoppers becoming resistant to pesticides, and supplied fertilizers washed into the rivers and killed coral reefs at the mouths of the rivers. Lansing was part of a team sponsored by the National Science Foundation in 1983 that evaluated the Balinese farmers’ traditional water management system to understand how it worked. The farmers of each village belong to subaks, or organizations that manage rice terraces and irrigation systems, which are referred to in Balinese writings going back at least a thousand years. Lansing notes that “Between them, the village and subak assemblies govern most aspects of a farmer’s social, economic, and spiritual life.” Lansing’s team found that the Balinese system of water temples, religious ritual, and irrigation managed by the subaks would synchronize fallow periods of contiguous segments of terraces, so that long segments could be kept flooded after harvest, killing pests by depriving them of habitat. But their attempt and that of the farmers to persuade the government to allow the traditional system to continue fell upon deaf ears, and the modernization scheme continued to be pushed. In 1987, Lansing worked with James Kremer to develop a computer model of the Balinese water temple system, and ran a simulation using historical rainfall data. This translation of the traditional system into scientific explanation showed that the traditional system was more effective than the modernized system, and government officials were persuaded to allow and encourage a return to the traditional system. The Balinese system of farming is an example of how local knowledge can develop and become embedded in a “premodern” society by mechanisms other than conscious and intentional scientific investigation (in this case, probably more like a form of evolution), and be invisible to the state until it is specifically studied. It’s also a case where the religious aspects of the traditional system may have contributed to its dismissal by the modern experts. What I find of particular interest here is to what extent the local knowledge was simply embedded into the practices, and not known by any of the participants–were they just doing what they’ve “always” done (with practices that have evolved over the last 1,000 years), in a circumstance where the system as a whole “knows,” but no individual had an understanding until Lansing and Kremer built and tested a model of what they were doing? [A slightly different version of the above was written for my Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology core seminar. Thanks to Brenda T. for her comments. More on Lansing’s work in Bali may be found online here.] ...

Chapter 3 of Langdon Winner’s The Whale and the Reactor (1988) is titled “Techné and Politeia,” a discussion of the relationship of technology and politics that draws upon Plato, Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson to recount historical views before turning to the “modern technical constitution.” The contemporary “interconnected systems of manufacturing, communications, transportation” and so forth that have arisen have a set of five features that Winner says “embody answers to age-old political questions … about membership, power, authority, order, freedom, and justice” (p. 47). The five features are (pp. 47-48): ...

It’s a bad misconception about evolution that it proceeds in a linear progression of one successfully evolving species after another displacing its immediate ancestors. Such a conception of human history is equally mistaken, and is often criticized with terms such as “Whiggish history” or “determinism” with a variety of adjectives (technological, social, cultural, historical). That includes the history of science, where the first version we often hear is one that has been rationally reconstructed by looking back at the successes and putting them into a linear narrative. Oh, there are usually a few errors thrown in, but they’re usually fit into the linear narrative as challenges that are overcome by the improvement of theories. The reality is a lot messier, and getting into the details makes it clear that not only is a Whiggish history of science mistaken, but that science doesn’t proceed through the algorithmic application of “the scientific method,” and in fact that there is no such thing as “the scientific method." Rather, there is a diverse set of methods that are themselves evolving in various ways, and sometimes not only do methods which are fully endorsed as rational and scientific produce erroneous results, sometimes methods which have no such endorsement and are even demonstrably irrational fortuitously produce correct results. For example, Johannes Kepler was a neo-pythagorean number mystic who correctly produced his second law of planetary motion by taking an incorrect version of the law based on his intuitions and deriving the correct version from it by way of a mathematical argument that contained an error. Although he fortuitously got the right answer and receives credit for devising it, he was not justified in believing it to be true on the basis of his erroneous proof. With his first law, by contrast, he followed an almost perfectly textbook version of the hypothetico-deductive model of scientific method of formulating hypotheses and testing them against Tycho Brahe’s data. The history of the scientific revolution includes numerous instances of new developments occurring piecemeal, with many prior erroneous notions being retained. Copernicus retained not only perfectly circular orbits and celestial spheres, but still needed to add epicycles to get his theory any where close to the predictive accuracy of the Ptolemaic models in use. Galileo insisted on retaining perfect circles and insisting that circular motion was natural motion, refusing to consider Kepler’s elliptical orbits. There seems to be a good case for “path dependence” in science. Even the most revolutionary changes are actually building on bits and pieces that have come before–and sometimes rediscovering work that had already been done before, like Galileo’s derivation of the uniform acceleration of falling bodies that had already been done by Nicole Oresme and the Oxford calculators. And the social and cultural environment–not just the scientific history–has an effect on what kinds of hypotheses are considered and accepted. This conservativity of scientific change is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it suggests that we’re not likely to see claims that purport to radically overthrow existing theory (that “everything we know is wrong”) succeed–even if they happen to be correct. And given that there are many more ways to go wrong than to go right, such radical revisions are very likely not to be correct. Even where new theories are correct in some of their more radical claims (e.g., like Copernicus’ heliocentric model, or Wegener’s continental drift), it often requires other pieces to fall into place before they become accepted (and before it becomes rational to accept them). On the other hand, this also means that we’re likely to be blinded to new possibilities by what we already accept that seems to work well enough, even though it may be an inaccurate description of the world that is merely predictively successful. “Consensus science” at any given time probably includes lots of claims that aren’t true. My inference from this is that we need both visionaries and skeptics, and a division of cognitive labor that’s largely conservative, but with tolerance for diversity and a few radicals generating the crazy hypotheses that may turn out to be true. The critique of evidence-based medicine made by Kimball Atwood and Steven Novella–that it fails to consider prior plausibility of hypotheses to be tested–is a good one that recognizes the unlikelihood of radical hypotheses to be correct, and thus that huge amounts of money shouldn’t be spent to generate and test them. (Their point is actually stronger than that, since most of the “radical hypotheses” in question are not really radical or novel, but are based on already discredited views of how the world works.) But that critique shouldn’t be taken to exclude anyone from engaging in the generation and test of hypotheses that don’t appear to have a plausible mechanism, because there is ample precedent for new phenomena being discovered before the mechanisms that explain them. I think there’s a tendency among skeptics to talk about science as though it’s a unified discipline, with a singular methodology, that makes continuous progress, and where the consensus at any moment is the most appropriate thing to believe. The history of science suggests, on the other hand, that it’s composed of multiple disciplines, with multiple methods, that proceeds in fits and starts, that has dead-ends, that sometimes rediscovers correct-but-ignored past discoveries, and is both fallible and influenced by cultural context. At any given time, some theories are not only well-established but unified well with others across disciplines, while others don’t fit comfortably well with others, or may be idealized models that have predictive efficacy but seem unlikely to be accurate descriptions of reality in their details. To insist on an overly rationalistic and ahistorical model is not just out-of-date history and philosophy of science, it’s a “coloring book” oversimplification. While that may be useful for introducing ideas about science to children, it’s not something we should continue to hold to as adults.

It has been argued by many that science, politics, and religion are distinct subjects that should be kept separate, in at least one direction if not both. Stephen Jay Gould argued that science and religion have non-overlapping areas of authority (NOMA, or non-overlapping magisteria), with the former concerned about how questions and the latter with why questions, and that conflicts between them won’t occur if they stick to their own domain. Between science and politics, most have little problem with science informing politics, but a big problem with political manipulation of science. Failure to properly maintain the boundaries leads to junk science, politicized science, scientism, science wars, and other objectionable consequences. Heather E. Douglas, in Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal argues that notions of scientific autonomy and a scientific ideal of being isolated from questions of value (political or otherwise) are mistaken, and that this idea of science without regard to value questions (apart from epistemic virtues) is itself a contributing factor to such consequences. She attributes blame for this value-free ideal of science to post-1940 philosophy of science, though the idea of scientific autonomy appears to me to have roots much further back, including in Galileo’s “Letter to Castelli” and “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina” and John Tyndall’s 1874 Belfast Address, which were more concerned to argue that religion should not intrude into the domain of science rather than the reverse. (As I noted in a previous post about Galileo, he did not carve out complete autonomy for natural philosophy from theology, only for those things which can be demonstrated or proven, which he argued that scripture could not contradict–and where it apparently does, scripture must be interpreted allegorically.) Douglas describes a “topography of values” in the categories of cognitive, ethical, and social values, and distinguishes direct and indirect roles for them. Within the “cognitive” category go values pertaining to our ability to understand evidence, such as simplicity, parsimony, fruitfulness, coherence, generality, and explanatory power, but excluding truth-linked epistemic virtues such as internal consistency and predictive competency or adequacy, which she identifies not as values but as minimal negative conditions that theories must necessarily meet. Ethical values and social values are overlapping categories, the former concerned with what’s good or right and the latter with what a particular society values, such as “justice, privacy, freedom, social stability, or innovation” (Douglas, p. 92). Her distinction between a direct and indirect role is that the former means that values can act directly as reasons for decisions, versus indirectly as a factor in decision-making where evidence is uncertain. Douglas argues that values can legitimately play a direct role in certain phases of science, such as problem selection, selection of methodology, and in the policy-making arena, but should be restricted to an indirect role in phases such as data collection and analysis and drawing conclusions from evidence. She identifies some exceptions, however–problem selection and method selection can’t legitimately be guided by values in a way that undermines the science by forcing a pre-determined conclusion (e.g., by selecting a method that is guaranteed to be misleading), and a direct role for ethical values can surface in later stages by discovering that research is causing harm. Her picture of science is one where values cannot directly intrude between the collection of data and the inference of the facts from that data, but the space between evidence and fact claims is somewhat more complex than she describes. There is the inference by a scientist of a fact from the evidence, the communication of that fact to other scientists, the publication of that fact in the scientific literature, and its communication to the general public and policy makers. All but the first of these are not purely epistemic, but are also forms of conduct. It seems to me that there is, in fact, a potential direct role for ethical values, at the very least, for each such type of conduct, in particular circumstances, which could merit withholding of the fact claim. For example, a scientist in Nazi Germany could behave ethically by withholding information about how to build an atomic bomb. Douglas argues that the motivation for the value-free ideal is as a mechanism for preserving scientific objectivity; she therefore gives an account of objectivity that comports with her account of science with values. She identifies seven types of objectivity that are relevant in three different domains (plus one she rejects), all of which have to do with a shared ground for trust. First, within the domain of human interactions with the world, are “manipulable objectivity,” or the ability to repeatably and reliably make interventions in nature that give the same result, and “convergent objectivity,” or having supporting evidence for a conclusion from multiple independent lines of evidence. Second, in the realm of individual thought processes, she identifies “detached objectivity”–a scientific disinterest, freedom from bias, and eschewing the use of values in place of evidence. There’s also “value-free objectivity,” the notion behind the value-free ideal, which she rejects. And there’s “value-neutral objectivity,” or leaving personal views aside in, e.g., conducting a review of the literature in a field and identifying possible sets of explanations, or taking a “centrist” or “balanced” view of potentially relevant values. Finally, in the domain of social processes, Douglas identifies “procedural objectivity,” where use of the same procedures produces the same results regardless of who engages in the procedure, and “intersubjectivity” in two senses–“concordant objectivity,” agreement in judgments between different people, and “interactive objectivity,” agreement as the result of argument and deliberation. Douglas writes clearly and concisely, and makes a strong case for the significance of values within science as well as in its application to public policy. Though she limits her discussion to natural science (and focuses on scientific discovery rather than fields of science that involve the production of new materials, an area where more direct use of values is likely appropriate), her account could likely be extended with the introduction of a bit more complexity. While I don’t think she has identified all or even the primary causes of the “science wars,” which she discusses at the beginning of her book, I think her account is more useful in adjudicating the “sound science”/“junk science” debate that she also discusses, as well as identifying a number of ways in which science isn’t and shouldn’t be autonomous from other areas of society. [A slightly different version of the above was written as a comment for my Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology core seminar. Thanks to Judd A. for his comments.]