Science and Scientism: An Interview with Henry Bauer

 

 

Henry Bauer needs no introduction to many Truth Barrier readers. He has been a chemist, professor of chemistry and science studies, and the Dean of Arts & Sciences at Virginia Tech. For someone with those credentials he has also been extraordinarily open-minded and outspoken on many topics his colleagues shy away from, as the titles of some of his books indicate: Beyond Velikovsky; The Enigma of Loch Ness; Science or Pseudoscience; Scientific Literacy and the Myth of Scientific Method; and The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory. His website is here and his blog is here.

In this interview he discusses the growth of blind faith in science, the dogmatism of "scientific consensus" and the extreme difficulties confronting scientists and researchers who don't run with the herd, why he doesn't think "Climategate" changed anyone's mind, and the need to distinguish the truly anomalous and as-yet unexplained from mere crackpotism and hoaxes when it comes to phenomena like UFOs and Nessie.


JS: A few years ago I wrote that there are people who believe that Global Warming is happening and is a problem that needs to be addressed, and then there are people believe in Global Warming, for whom it is an apocalyptic secular religion. These people exhibit all the traits of a millenarian cult: the blind faith in the received Word, the predictions of the End Times, the dogmatism, the self-righteousness, the anathematizing of anyone who doubts or questions or fails to believe as they do.

I didn't know it at the time, but I think I was describing an example of what you term "scientism." Can you describe what you mean by scientism and how you think it came about?


HB: "Scientism" is science as religion; taking contemporary scientific consensus as unquestionably true. The historical roots are in the 19th century, perhaps in North-Western Europe, when science's progressive triumphs were so notable: atomic theory proved; Periodic Table of the chemical elements; "organic" chemicals no different from inorganic chemicals; germ theory and pasteurization; natural selection as a plausible mechanism for evolution; electromagnetic theory.

Perhaps the material achievements of the Industrial Revolution contributed, because then as now most people think technology comes from applying science — most scholars of science and technology don't accept that, but in any case technologists and theorists were in effective contact in groups like the Royal Society of London.

The notion that Darwin had unseated the Bible probably contributed to putting "Science" onto a religious pedestal for some people.

David Knight's The Age of Science is an excellent, concise survey of how science gained a sort of hegemony by the end of the 19th century; he cites Huxley as a consciously and overtly proud preacher of Scientism, delivering "lay sermons for the Church Scientific."

Nowadays scientism often goes hand-in-hand with secular humanism. The Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) was an offshoot of the American Humanist Association and tended to go in for debunking religious matters as well as paranormal ones. (Of course there are everywhere individuals who don't fit any such stereotypes; some CSICOP people are deists, for example.) CSICOP changed itself into CSI (Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) which is a subsidiary of the Center for Inquiry (CFI) whose dogmatic adherence to contemporary scientific theories and secular humanism is obvious on its website.

I think human beings long for a sense of certainty about ultimate matters; many plunk for a traditional religion, many others for scientism, especially given the various ways in which traditional Western religions have had a hard time adapting sensibly to scientific discoveries about the natural world.

Scientism might be described as a cancer of science. Left unchecked, it could kill science, because continuing progress in understanding the natural world requires open discussion and disagreement — history teaches that major scientific advances come from overturning earlier theories. Scientism takes contemporary theories as proven facts, an attitude that is inimical to progress.

I guess that some human beings have a distinct tendency to dogmatism, if not genetically then from an early age, so one sees the same personality attributes in political ideologues, religious fanatics, and advocates of scientism. Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett are close psychological kin, in my view, to TV evangelists and Islamic jihadists. Some evidence for this psychological interpretation is that when dogmatists lose their faith they typically do not become moderate and rational, they fly to the other extreme. Whittaker Chambers and Arthur Koestler became virulent anti-Communists after shedding Communism. Many members of CSICOP are former religious believers who lost their faith.

So I think scientism came about, continues to come about, because of human psychology under historical circumstances of startling scientific progress.


JS: So some people have transferred a blind faith in religion to a blind faith in what they understand to be science. Do you think "Climategate" was a watershed moment? I don't mean that any true believers' faith was necessarily shaken by it, but in the sense that now it's suddenly not quite so easy to label everyone who doubts or raises questions as a fringe conspiracy theorist and heretic.


HB: I wish I thought Climategate was any sort of turning point. But a piece in the LA Times pretty close to when the hacking of emails was revealed said it wouldn't make a bit of difference, because everyone knew that global warming — meaning of course HUMAN-CAUSED global warming — was real.

Of course no "true believer's" faith was shaken, but I don't know that anyone else's faith was shaken either. Some of the folks who write and talk about scientific literacy use the term "attentive public" for those who actually take an interest in science in the public arena. I think that's a very small number of people. I think it's quite rare that anyone actually tries to gather lots of evidence before making up their mind. The people to whom Climategate seemed most important were those who were already skeptics or "denialists," and who hoped beyond hope that such obviously disgraceful and inexcusable behavior would surely arouse the media that would in turn arouse the public. No such luck. The big media are beholden to the authorities, because those are their prime sources. Question the mainstream orthodoxy and you get shut out, you get on an "enemy's list." Robert Gallo and Tony Fauci were quite explicit about that, toward anyone questioning  HIV as cause of AIDS. Celia knows more than a bit about this.

When I was thinking about science and pseudoscience some time ago, it occurred to me that the skeptics' usual question about pseudoscience — the rhetorical question, "How could anyone believe that?" — was really the wrong question. We're trained from babyhood on to believe what we're told, by our parents and then our teachers. Human beings are natural believers. The real question is, "How or why do some people start to examine and question their beliefs? How does it come about that some people some of the time are able to form opinions based pretty well on the actual evidence?"


JS: In the popular imagination — fueled I'm sure by pop culture — the figure of the Scientist, whether it's the Hero Scientist who saves the world or the Evil Madman Scientist who wants to destroy it, is always a brave, independent mind, toiling away alone in his remote lab, at odds with his colleagues. In reality, most scientists seem like most of the rest of us: trend-following, groupthinking members of the tribe, nodding their heads to keep their jobs, their funding and their professional status. The odd duck who bucks the consensus, whether it's String Theory or manmade Global Warming or flu vaccines or whatever, is ridiculed, ostracized, cut off from funding, etc.

You're unusually open-minded about all sorts of topics most of your colleagues shy away from — Velikovsky, Loch Ness, UFOs, Global Warming, AIDS, et al. How have your colleagues treated you as a result? What sorts of effects has your open-mindedness had on your life and career?


HB: In the first part of my career, I was teaching and doing research in chemistry, so my interest in Nessies wasn't seen as having anything to do with my professional career. Even though I gave talks about how Nessies are real,  people just took it as a hobby. Biologists who took the same sort of interest as I did, in Nessies, found their careers badly damaged. One fellow lost his job at the British Museum, another was blocked from advancement at an American university and became an administrator.

I wanted to really try to understand why science can be so closed-minded, and I decided to switch from chemistry to history-philosophy of science. To do that, I needed time to learn about those things, and I couldn't do that and remain a productive chemist, getting grants, etc., so I looked for a job in academic administration. As Dean of Arts & Sciences at Virginia Tech, I was able to gather a group pf philosophers and sociologists and historians and scientists and engineers and others who were really interested in understanding the interactions of science and the wider society, and so I had lots of mentors and a really good education in what's nowadays called "science studies" or "science and technology studies." So I was able to learn about and write about and talk about unorthodoxies in science as a scholarly venture. So long as I was being fair about the evidence, and not being an activist trying to have everybody come to my conclusion, I could legitimately voice minority, unpopular opinions.

I suppose it's helped me that one of the things I learned early on was that even when I'm most sure that I'm right, in actual fact I might still be wrong, and I think that helped me avoid becoming an obnoxious fanatic who gets people's goats. I learned that strange thing through the Society for Scientific Exploration. There I met and came to respect and to like intelligent, accomplished people who take seriously some things that I thought weren't worth thinking about, and I realized that they looked at me in the same way: "Here's this accomplished chemist and scholar of science studies, intelligent, well-read, and yet he takes seriously the absurd idea that there really are Loch Ness monsters!"

So maybe they're right about their pet subjects while I'm wrong; and — though I really don't see how — perhaps I'm wrong about Nessies.

I suspect that I'm not too uncomfortable being in a small minority because that's what my early experience was, as a kid of Jewish ancestry in Austria in the 1930s. My paternal grandfather was an assimilationist, and his children were christened Lutherans, as I was, so there was nothing Jewish in my upbringing. But after the Nazis took over in 1939, everyone with a once-Jewish grandparent was classed as a Jew. So I was kicked out of school, and my family was lucky enough to be able to emigrate to Australia, where I was looked at as a Jewish refugee. But I'd never had reason to feel Jewish before. So I was an outsider from the view of Austria, and again from the viewpoint of the Jewish community in Australia, didn't feel I belonged to any group, and I suspect that has remained with me, that I feel like an outsider no matter how others don't perceive me that way.

In more practical terms, I was a pretty good chemist, I did all the right things in grant-getting and publishing, and I did OK as an administrator, so I had established a secure enough academic position that people couldn't really do me any significant damage, even if they wanted to, just because I had some oddball ideas. I sometimes meet young budding academics who want to jump in and prove HIV/AIDS theory is wrong, or want to study psychic phenomena, or something like that, and I always advise them to keep their unorthodox ideas to themselves until they've established a career and gotten tenure.

HIV/AIDS is really the first time I've become quite activist about a minority position — in science, that is. I did go public against political correctness when that came to our campus in the late 1980s, and that gave me good practice at  ignoring some of the insults that occasionally came my way. But on HIV/AIDS,  it happens that I didn't become convinced about the scientific aspects until I was already retired from the university. So the goons and vigilantes haven't been able to do to me what they've done to several people whose careers were ruined. In fact I've rather enjoyed poking fun at some of them on my blog. And I've found it rather easier simply to ignore what most of them say most of the time — I don't think they are influential in any wider sphere than their own little group, and anyone who knows me and who I respect wouldn't listen to them anyway. There are all sorts of annoyance about growing older, memory becoming useless, less useful thinking time in a day, having to spend loads of time exercising, etc., but it also makes it much easier not to give a damn about what despicable people say about you.

HB: I'm pretty sure there is, or must be — but I wouldn't care to say where that point is until I'd really looked into the evidence put forward by the believers, or those who take the possibility seriously. I  know more about Nessies than most people do. There's lots of good evidence. The best is Tim Dinsdale's film, which shows that — at least in 1960 — there was a big, fast animal in Loch Ness, bigger than anything known to be there; not a seal or an otter or an eel or a sturgeon. Then there are a few underwater photos from the 1970s of what look like big flippers or paddles -- several feet long! And there have been loads of contacts made by sonar with underwater objects, most of them moving, fairly often from the late 1950s up to now.

One trouble is that it takes so much time to look at the evidence, because on these topics it's not neatly organized anywhere and it takes a  lot of digging to know what evidence exists and how to get it. So in a lifetime, you can't really look properly into more than a handful of such things, so you have to decide who to believe, and most of the time it makes sense to believe "what everyone knows," the conventional wisdom, the mainstream view. I was interested professionally in scientific unorthodoxies and could look into them as part of my "work," but I managed what you'd call proper case studies of only three (Velikovsky, Loch Ness, HIV/AIDS). I've got a pretty good understanding of several more: cold fusion (partly because I used to do electrochemistry); global warming, because it's so easy to find strong evidence for doubting that the mainstream has any significant evidence; Big-Bang cosmology. But most people haven't looked at detailed evidence of ANY of these sorts of things and juts accept what's said by people who claim to be speaking for "science."

When you say "a lot of what does get presented in public as evidence looks like complete hokum to me," I would agree with you, because what's presented in public is typically presented by journalists in mainstream media who have no time or inclination to dig into the best evidence. It's much easier, and more "human interest" — and fit for the low level of perceptiveness that the media seem to ascribe to "the public" — to poke fun at "psychics" who claim successes they've never had, or people who believe in "pyramid power." And it's awfully easy to list things like alchemy and astrology and then say UFOs and Nessies and psychic phenomena are just like that. But you have no right, intellectually speaking, to say two things are like one another unless you take the time and effort to explain exactly in what way they are alike. What gets dismissed as hokum, pseudoscience, etc., is bound together by only the one thing, that the conventional wisdom, mainstream science, regards it as hokum. Well, we know that mainstream science can be wrong; perhaps especially on the most unexpected or unlikely things.

Conspiring with the uninformed journalists are the many real kooks who flock to topics like UFOs,etc. If you get seriously interested in Nessies, say, like I did, there's no way you can separate yourself in the public view from those like Erik Beckjord who publish ridiculous photos and insist that Nessies and Bigfoot are psychic apparitions. You can't separate yourself in the public view from people like Frank Searle, who set up shop at Loch Ness for many years and produced a few dozen faked photos that took in lots of naive visitors. When you get involved in some counter-mainstream approach, there's really no way you can avoid being in the company of crackpots, and what's more you can't avoid behaving yourself like something of a crackpot, as I describe in my essay, "Confession  of An  'Aids  Denialist' — How I Became a Crank Because We’re Being Lied to About HIV/AIDS," published in the book You Are STILL Being Lied To (Disinformation Company, 2009).


JS: I love the phrase "how I became a crank because we’re being lied to." It strikes me that cranks and conspiracy theorists may often be wrong in their specific beliefs, but they're surely right in their general apprehension that we are routinely lied to, misinformed and misdirected. Also, visionaries and pioneers are quite often labeled cranks and kooks until the rest of their profession and the rest of society catches up to their ideas. Then everyone acts like they agreed with them all along.

That brings me back to "scientific consensus," which true believers always use as a bludgeon against doubters, questioners and heretics. Scientific knowledge isn't carved in stone like the Ten Commandments. It's always evolving and changing. Today's overwhelming scientific consensus is often obsolete and discarded tomorrow, right?


HB: I like to point out that science would never have progressed if it hadn't rejected theories all the time and kept developing new ones.

A lot of people will talk about Thomas Kuhn and "scientific revolutions," but they misunderstand, they interpret this as continual revolutionary scientific progress. But what the term means is OVERTURNING whatever the current idea or belief is and replacing it with something that earlier was pooh-poohed because it contradicted or didn't conform to the "scientific consensus."

Scientists as well as others are simply ignorant about the history and philosophy and sociology of science. Most scientists think they're being objective by using the scientific method, but actually there are few if any cases where what's usually called the scientific method is actually used. Scientists do whatever they think will bring answers to the things they're interested in. Often it's a matter of having hunches, or just exploring.

A scientific consensus is really just like any other consensus: It just represents what an effectively dominant group believes. Bernard Barber, a sociologist, wrote in Science fifty years ago about "resistance by scientists to scientific discovery," with DOZENS of examples of people we now praise as heroes of scientific advance but who were fiercely resisted at the time. Gunther Stent wrote about "premature discoveries," ahead of their time, like Mendel's quantitative laws of heredity and Wegener's evidence for continental drift, both of them ignored or laughed at and dismissed for something like forty years before they were rediscovered and became the new dogma. And they are dogmas: Quite a few geologists have been trying to get the mainstream consensus to recognize many phenomena that continental drift (or plate tectonics, the new name for it) cannot explain.

What's certain about any scientific consensus is that it will be found wanting and will change. The only question is, when.


JS: Along the same lines: Peer review has lately come into some question. Ideally, having a committee of expert, nonbiased colleagues review one's work before it goes public seems like a logical quality-control process. In practice, it sounds like peer panels are all too human, inevitably letting their own personal biases and professional agendas influence what ideas and data they promote and what they suppress. In an era when science has become increasingly politicized and advocacy-oriented — climate change and AIDS being just two of the most obvious examples — has peer review become yet another tool for reinforcing consensus and punishing alternative or conflicting ideas?


HB: Peer review has ALWAYS been a reinforcer of whatever the current consensus is. How could it be otherwise? The people who are chosen as reviewers are the ones known for their accomplishments, which means accomplishments under whatever the present consensus happens to be.

Any halfway productive and innovative researcher will have a drawer full of rejections. It's easy to get something published that just OKs the prevailing theory. Try to publish anything else and you have loads of trouble, always have had. Read the rejection letters and you'll note that they typically don't really speak to the evidence for the new claim, they just express disbelief because it contradicts "what everyone knows." Unfortunately people don't like to make their rejections public, so examples are not part of the conventional wisdom, but talk with individuals who've experienced it and you learn that it's a common phenomenon: rejection on the basis of theory and not evidence.

It's the same with grants as with publications. All researchers know that they can't get grants for genuinely groundbreaking attempts. You get a grant by writing up banal projects that fit nicely into what everyone believes. Then, if you're so inclined, you bootleg as much as you can of the funds to do what you think is really worth doing. Richard Muller was courageous enough to describe that when he was awarded a prize by the National Science Foundation long ago. A young researcher was so ill-advised as to write about the same thing in the Chronicle of Higher Education last year.

What's become much more troubling is that the consequences of admitting to alternative or conflicting ideas have become so much more catastrophic. The number of would-be researchers outstripped the available resources more and more over the last thirty years or so, and the competition is nothing short of cutthroat. When I started in the late 1960s at the University of Kentucky, we chemists were getting about one grant for every two that we asked for; by the time I left in 1978, we were getting only one for every nine proposals.

The cutthroat competition includes competition among universities. They expect all their researchers to get increasing amounts of grants all the time. To get appointed in the first place you have to show promise of doing that. So recommendations from the top people in the field are the most powerful, because those are also the people who populate and control advice to granting agencies. And the top people rather naturally think that their own opinions are the correct ones about the scientific questions. So orthodoxy is enforced far more rigorously nowadays than in the good old days, say up to World War II, when a lot of good research could be done in a lot of fields with very little money. Nowadays in more and more areas you need specialized equipment, and technicians to do all sorts of preparatory and routine and maintenance work, a whole organization with lots of overhead; expensive.

When the work you're interested in has any sort of public-policy impact, it's really a mess, because politicians and social activists will jump in to support whichever researchers seem likely to come to conclusions that are ideologically appealing. Once one group of scientists has captured the public imagination, it's very hard to see how that can be changed except by further POLITICAL action. And scientists aren't trained to do PR, so the "outs" flounder around ineffectively. With both human-caused global warming theory and HIV/AIDS theory, it turns out that what's said by the mainstream is very congenial to what I'll call, forgive the term, global do-gooders: cherishers of anyone who is hard done by, including the Earth that's been ravaged by greedy human beings. What's wrong is not the wanting to help those in need, or wanting a sensible sustainable way of using resources; what's wrong is that the do-gooders seize on INADEQUATE, SCIENTIFICALLY FLAWED OR WRONG theories as a way to getting where they want policy to go. So public actions tend to become counterproductive, but it could unfortunately take a very long time before the facts become so clear that not even the fanatics will be able to explain them away -- the Earth is warming up NOT because we're releasing carbon dioxide but because it's ALWAYS warmed up after an ice age, and we're a bare 10-20,000 years past the last ice age and they've been coming every 100,000-200,000 years -- or reasons we don't understand; if the future is at all like the past, we'll be warming up for another 50,000 years or more.

On HIV/AIDS theory, I think the collapse will come when a sufficiently large number of people have been found, beyond doubt, to have died from antiretroviral treatment. When that realization will come is anyone's guess, but the push to increase treatment in sub-Saharan Africa indicates that it might be "only" another few decades. AZT killed some hundreds of thousands of people, but the official agencies and mainstream researchers have managed to hide that from public view, so far.

That sort of political takeover of a scientific viewpoint has this awful consequence: If you question HIV/AIDS or global warming, you're immediately said to be a right-wing reactionary kook. It does happen that the people who are most likely to listen to counter-mainstream claims about anything are people who are naturally anti-Establishment, anti-government, libertarian. So as an HIV skeptic, an AIDS Rethinker, where can I get published or heard? In venues that are established by conservative organizations. So I do that, and that reinforces the charge that I'm myself a reactionary, and can therefore be discredited on that account -- in the eyes of the good folks who are progressives in everything. The argument gets shifted from the scientific issues to ideological ones, and guilt is invoked by association. So I find that those who will listen to my evidence-based views about science wouldn't agree with many of my social and political views, and those who think my social or political views are like theirs are horrified that I question HIV/AIDS and human-caused global warming. These controversies make for strange bedfellows.


JS: Years ago, Tiny Tim told me he believed everything he read in the supermarket tabloids, because sooner or later it all came true. In the movie Men in Black, the agents get all their breaking news from the tabloids. "Go ahead, read the New York Times if you want," one of them says. "They get lucky once in a while."

So will Nessie and Sasquatch finally be found? If so, will we read about it in the Times?


HB: A good friend tells me that it was National Enquirer that first broke the story that many ulcers are caused by bacteria.

But what I've seen of tabloid stories about Bigfoot, Nessies, UFOs, etc., has usually been rubbish. BTW, a delightful somewhat pertinent book (fiction, though) is Francine Prose's Bigfoot Dreams.

"Found"? The only real proof of existence would be a living or dead specimen. With Nessies, I think it's remotely possible that the US Navy could accomplish definitive location, by very high resolution sonar that would show shape and size; but even then, capture might not be possible of creatures that move at 10 mph or more in a lake that's 20+ miles long, 1 mile wide, and  >700 feet deep in several large basins.

Carcasses have been looked for by sonar, a few possible "humps" on the bottom have been detected, but no way to get specimens from 700 feet down have yet been successful with the very limited means available to private expeditions.

The bottom of the loch has lots of silt, no one really knows how rapidly a carcass might be covered up or eaten up by eels. The water is too cold for bacterial composition, generation of gas, and floating corpses.

With Bigfoot, aficionados point out that remains of many wild creatures are never found. I personally place a low probability on existence of Bigfoot. But my judgment is base on theoretical grounds, and I've come to learn that the very best theories can be demolished by just one fact.

A general point is that no matter how many hoaxes and fakes there may have been, that doesn't discount the possibility of existence. IF Bigfoot exists (or yeti, etc.), then of course there would be old legends and mythical tales about them, embellished over the ages and through being passed from person to person and modified along the way. BECAUSE Bigfoot and Nessie make news, people who like to play hoaxes will naturally do so about them. There's just no a priori way to make a good probability judgment about these things that's more than really a subjective guess.

For Bigfoot, we have no photos and just one controversial film. With Nessie, the Dinsdale film is incontrovertible, at least for one Nessie in 1960.

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