Scientists may be ideological, but science is not

The comments on my last essay about science denialism suggest that in public discourse there continues to be a pervasive and unhelpful conflation of science and politics, which should always be kept separate. Unfortunately, this conflation is not restricted to the vocal lay public and politicians (from whom it might always be expected) but is also commonly perpetrated by well-meaning scientists who are passionate in their reasonable belief that science should inform policy.

Many commenters seemed to believe that I lament the fact that discourse about developing scientific theories is no longer (if it ever was) confined to the scientific community, but in fact I simply provided my interpretation of how the internet has affected the recent history of scientific consensus. My argument is that scientists need to recognize the reality of the eavesdropping of laypeople (and the subsequent manipulation of what they believe they heard), and realize that they must hold themselves to a high standard in what sort of public face they put on science, because vocal nonscientists are affecting policy apparently more successfully than science is.

We can no longer wave off science denialism as a quirk of uneducated publicity hounds and ignore its importance, because this common response to denialism is somewhat justifiably viewed as arrogant; in truth the burden is squarely on the shoulders of scientists to address this growing problem. More than two years ago I argued here that the scientific community itself is largely responsible for poor scientific understanding by the public, because of the tendency of scientists to try and make their work sound more important by the common use of jargon and self-important language that by objective standards demonstrate extremely poor communication skills.

The lack of interest that most of us seem to have in properly communicating what we do to nonscientists has disastrously combined with the thoughtless conflation by scientists of science with policy. Scientists as a community continue to struggle with the idea of whether or not they should be advocates of particular policy positions related to their scientific fields, as evidenced by a recent editorial [Lymn, N and S. Silver (2010) A fine dividing line. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 8(1):3] in the journal of the Ecological Society of America (ESA), Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment (excerpted here):

One of the thorniest debates among ecologists is whether they should become involved in policy making and politics…there has always been some tension between ESA members who believe ecologists should focus solely on their research and those who assert that they and their colleagues should engage in policy outreach, making ecological knowledge relevant to decision makers.

The reason this debate occurs is because scientists so often make a botch of their advocacy. There are two main problems. The first is that many scientists do not make clear to their audiences, both intended and inadvertant, that the process of science is free from ideological advocacy, and that their own advocacy is completely separate from their work as scientists. This is hard to do, of course, which is why some scientists feel strongly that advocacy should be left to nonscientists (e.g., Al Gore), so as not to give the mistaken impression that advocates are representing science itself, which properly has no ideology.

This is the key to a lot of the anti-science vitriol: scientists are becoming increasingly viewed by many as some sort of political interest group equal to all the ideologically based lobbyists, and thus science itself is questioned and assumed to be opinion-based, because scientists are not properly separating their advocacy from their work. It should be noted that ESA as an organization takes great pains to show that their only function in policy is as a resource to which policy makers can turn when they want to know what the science objectively states:

ESA is one of hundreds of organizations with a presence in Washington, DC. As a scientific society, what distinguishes it from advocacy organizations is that the Society works to inform decision makers, based on the ecological expertise of its 10 000 members. In contrast to advocacy organizations, ESA doesn’t make the policy decisions in advance and then lobby policy makers to act accordingly. Instead, through congressional briefings, position statements, and one-on-one meetings, the Society lays out a menu of options – based on the best available science – for decision makers to consider.

Part of the reason that people view the concept of “scientific consensus” suspiciously (if not downright hostilely on these and other pages) is that scientists are lousy at explaining how scientific consensus is reached. Here is one scientist’s attempt to do do:

While anyone can see that throughout history ideology has certainly affected what sort of studies certain scientists have done and how they have interpreted the results of those studies, the key here is that because real science is not ideological, ideologcially based “scientific” ideas will be fairly quickly weeded out from mainstream scientific consensus, because they will be shown to be unsupported when rigorous scientific methods are applied. Scientific consensus is not necessarily the truth (e.g. the best understanding people had of geological processes before plate tectonics), but as evidence accumulates, it will be altered if necessary. This is the important difference between ideology and science. A person’s ideology rarely changes in the face of facts that contradict that person’s world view. Scientific consensus absolutely does change all the time, as can be seen repeatedly over history, because it is based on data accumulated under very particular standards.

Yes, there is a lot of bad peer-reviewed science out there. Identifying bad science with the intention of steering it in a more rigorous direction is one of the primary functions of Bioblog. This type of recognition of bad methodology followed by research with better methodology is actually how scientists move any field along to better understanding.

So, my various commenters, you can’t pick and choose which science you “agree” with and which you don’t, as if the science itself were a policy position. The scientific consensus in any field is the best we can say about that field at this time, and it is always evolving, but when 98% percent of scientists in a field agree on the general conclusions, you can bet that the data are pretty solid. Yes, conclusions can change when valid new data are introduced into the mix. That’s what’s good about science, not what’s bad. Applying some sort of ideological test to scientific consensus simply makes no sense.

Scientists who decide to become policy advocates have been guilty of muddying the waters so that people equate science with ideology, because they have not made clear that their opinions regarding policy have nothing to do with the scientific consensus. There is another problem too: many advocates of what they might consider science-based policy do not at all understand the science that they use to support it, so they say stupid things that makes them sound like idiots, which the public interprets as weakness in the science, rather than foolishness of the messenger.

Although I am an ecologist, I am not comfortable explaining the science of climate change (rule of thumb: if you can’t teach an upper-level undergraduate course on the subject, you definitely don’t know enough to spout off to the public). Climate change is an incredibly complex field involving ecology, meteorology, chemistry, physics, oceanography, and probably other specialties. Thus it takes decades of work in the field for someone to be a true scientific authority on climate change. Even though the accumulated decades of data and conclusions supporting anthropogenic climate change satisfies my standards as a scientist, if I were out there trying to explain the science of climate change to laypeople in order to convince them to support a particular policy, I would not be at all effective, because my superficial understanding of the science would undermine it and make the evidence seem flimsy and unconvincing to nonscientists. (This is another reason that the mindless ideological rejection of a fact so clearly established as evolution has been elevated to a “debate” – unfortunately there are many well-meaning scientists who are not evolutionary biologists, but think wrongly that they understand and can explain the intricacies of a subject that people get doctorates in. You do not see this phenomenon with other scientific fields such as, say, particle physics.)

In the end, scientists will always have a difficult battle with ideology, because the playing field is not level. Denialists have a much easier time than scientists do in promoting their ideas, because by definition their pronouncements do not have to meet any minimum standard of rigorous evaluation (although they like to pretend that they do). But scientists need to start separating their political beliefs from their position as scientists, because when they try to exploit that position to add authority to their statements, they are more likely to undermine that authority – and science itself – because they just end up sounding like ideologues in their arguments. Civic-minded scientists who just can’t help themselves have an added and crucial responsibility to separate their advocacy from their work, even if they know the field backwards and forwards. Because science never advocates; it simply explicates. It is unfortunate that this is not more widely understood.

Tags: politics

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 21st, 2010 at 10:32 pm and is filed under bias, environment, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.