This weekend has been stressful. The worst part of it is that it was the *least* stressful part of the past week, and the coming weeks are forecast to be quite a bit worse (partly nutty with a chance of insanity). I can summarize why in one word: ICHEP. Well, it’s not really a word… it’s an abbreviation, and it stands for the International Conference on High Energy Physics. Whether you’re shooting for it, or specifically avoiding it, ICHEP is a source of immense stress on the particle physics community.
For my part, I’ve been working with my co-convener to help shepherd leptonic analyses through various stages of review, struggle to do my own work, and also make sure I spend enough time with my own group (mostly students), whose presence at SLAC is growing larger by the week. This weekend had the promise of some review, some analysis, some deadlines, and a lot of quiet time between those things. Jodi and I took advantage of that to go for a walk in the Stanford hills, hit a few cafes (we’re at CoHo at Stanford right now), and catch up on some TV and movies.
While on one of our cafe excursions this weekend, we hit Borders and browsed the new books by the front door. One thing that immediately caught our eyes was Ann Coulter’s new book, “Godless – The church of liberalism”. Coulter is a conservative columnist who’s published more than a few of her opinions. In this book, she takes on the “godless” nature of the Democratic Party. She even devotes three whole chapters to attacking science and evolution (which she claims has little or no evidence which supports it).
Coulter is not a scientist, but she remembers her days in college and recalls that most of the chemical engineers she knew were Republicans, while all the liberals took French. Jodi remarked in our discussions about this that chemical engineers are not strictly involved in basic research – chemical engineering is an applied science – and her own experience with engineers is that because they’re in a discipline that makes money (in principle), they naturally tie themselves to the party devoted to keeping “big government” off of one’s own personal wealth.
But that’s neither here nor there when it comes to science – the choice of an engineer, a physicist, or a French major to ally oneself with one party or another is largely independent of the scientific endeavor itself (unless there happens to be a party called the *anti-science party*, in which case I guess it would have few scientists as members). One of Coulter’s recurring themes appears to be that, in her judgement, real scientists can’t be “liberals” because science demands rigor, and only a conservative mind could apply such standards. A liberal mind, accepting of anything, is unscientific.
I take issue with labels on science and scientists, especially as a whole. This tactic she uses here – attacking the person rather than the argument – is one of Carl Sagan’s cautionary flags in detecting baloney. Needless to say, the balonometer went *ding ding* as I scanned more of Coulter’s chapters on science. Tacking labels on scientists – liberal, or conservative, godless, etc. – is just a ploy to distract people away from the process that is science.
Science cannot be labeled as liberal or conservative, since it embodies the best qualities of both philosophies. When it comes to posing questions, the liberal mind is favored. You have to be open to possibilities; when data steers away from mainsteam convictions, you have to be willing to go where it leads you. That means being liberal, and willing to troubleshoot and produce ideas that could explain the phenomena. However, it is at the next stage that the scientist benefits from the conservative philosophy.
Not every idea can be right, or useful. The scientific method is a rigorous framework for testing ideas, and weeding the useless ones from the pack. Rigorous application of the method, and a willingness to accept the defeat of a beautiful idea in the face of an ugly fact, is critical to the process. The conservative mindset works here, putting up the wall of skepticism and clinging to what we know works in the face of a radical new idea. Together in the mind of the scientist, the liberal and the conservative mix.
Another way to look at this is to see scientists as embodying the very thing that gave humans an edge over their primate cousins: a willingness to adapt any useful tidbit into a tool needed for solving a problem. Need to move a heavy object over a great distance? Wedge logs underneath it in sequence, forming a “conveyor belt” that moves with the load and makes much easier its motion over terrain. Have data that veers from the accepted and well-tested scientific theory? Posit a radical idea, and put it to work making predictions so that experiments can be used to check its validity. Faced with a barrage of wild ideas? Apply the time-worn rigor of the scientific method to weed the useless ideas, leaving the survivors behind to predict another day.
I know a lot of people (like Coulter, I guess) think “intelligent design” is a beautiful idea, in many cases because it puts biological development comfortably in line with literal Biblical scripture. However, a beautiful idea is only one which can produce predictions (e.g. because the bacteria flagellum is intelligently designed, we will find that X is true) and then be tested by experiment (if the bacteria flagellum is “intelligently designed”, removing part Y will turn it into a component which is no longer a flagellum, and can serve no other biological purpose from which it might have originally adapted into the flagellum). However, wishing “intelligent design” to be a widely adopted scientific theory doesn’t make it so. It is merely one more hypothesis that fails to make predictions that we can test, and thereby falls outside of science, never to be taught in science class.
Coulter seems to have missed the point entirely. Science is not beholden to the liberal, nor the conservative. Those approaches serve science. Science rises above political label, and is a thing apart. Like politics it is a human endeavor. Unlike politics, it is a framework that allows us to differentiate between applicable notions and fanciful ones. It is to the benefit of opiners like Coulter to consider for a moment that science is not a tool to be bent by the crest of the next political wave; it is itself a human process that stands apart, a means by which the mechanics of the political philosophy can be turned into tools that solve problems, or stored away for another day.
