How wrong theories can persist and do harm
The Eugenics Movement was based on the belief that (for instance) people of high IQ tend to have children with high IQ, while people of low IQ tend to have children of low IQ; more generally, on the theory that such behavioral traits as honesty or criminality, or traits that make for poverty or personality or character, are hereditary in some simple, straightforward fashion.
That theory flourished at least from the 1920s and led to the forcible sterilization of people regarded as having undesirable characteristics: tens of thousands of them in the United States as late as the 1980s [1]. Nazism assumed that the theory applied to whole human “races”.
Those historical facts offer several too-little-appreciated lessons:
1. Experts can be wrong. The majority consensus of an entire expert community may be wrong.
2. Public policies and actions can do much harm when based on expert advice that happens to be based on a mistaken theory.
3. Our legal system is incapable of detecting when the expert community happens to be wrong, let alone correcting for it.
4. There is no safeguard against tragedies like that caused by the faulty eugenics theory.
That story of eugenics is not widely known. It is far from the forefront of discourse in the “public square”. Rather, the public square is dominated by a mythology of science and expertise in which something like the eugenics movement does not appear as a possible scenario, let alone a plausible or likely one.
That mythology imagines that science is done by a scientific method which ensures that theories are accepted only on the basis of proper and sufficient evidence; and that temporary flaws in accepted theories are washed away over time — science supposedly corrects itself since its only aim supposedly is to arrive at true knowledge.
That mythology is far from true to today’s reality.
Science, like any other human activity, is carried on by imperfect and fallible people. The history of science shows that advances in true knowledge are typically disbelieved at first, and moreover are usually actively resisted by the contemporary consensus of the expert technical community [2]. As time goes on, even as experience accumulates that an accepted theory has undeniable flaws, that it is inadequate to explain what it pretends to explain, the contemporary technical community resists any change as long as possible; until eventually there comes the sort of inevitable change commonly described as a “scientific revolution” [3].
Of course, there is no guarantee that such a profound change will always eventuate. As Max Planck [4] put it, the truth does not win out by persuading the Old Guard: truth triumphs only after the old Guard has died out — science advances “funeral by funeral”.
The contemporary mythology of science originated in the tremendous advances in understanding that “modern” science achieved following “The Scientific Revolution” of the 15/16th centuries. But the nature of scientific activity — how science is done and who does it — is completely different now than during that Scientific Revolution and in the following more general 17/18th centuries “Enlightenment” which generalized the “scientific” principle that beliefs should be grounded in tangible evidence and logic.
At the beginnings of modern science, it could be described quite well as an activity by individual, independent intellectuals and practical-minded technical people who shared the aim of understanding how things work and then applying the knowledge usefully. They interacted and cooperated voluntarily and informally, before soon organizing associations and societies to share their achievements efficiently through meetings and publications and communications. If a theory became generally accepted, it was because most of those interested in the particular subject freely agreed. Those early natural philosophers, “scientists”, tinkerers, suffered almost no significant conflicts of interest to hinder their search for sound knowledge. One might describe early modern science as a free market of informally organized intellectual entrepreneurs seeking reliable truth; a sort of “cottage industry”.
Nowadays, science is an entirely different thing.
The popular mythology still thinks of scientists as exceptional people, rare geniuses like Galileo or Newton or Darwin or Einstein, doing their self-started individual things, independently and disinterestedly truth-seeking. But in reality, science is now being done by people no different from other intellectual and technical professionals: accountants, auditors, doctors, engineers, teachers; and, above all, they are anything but independent individuals, they are part of all sorts of institutions that expect or prescribe certain ways of doing things and that accept certain consensual axioms, beliefs, theories. While the work is certainly intended to produce sound results, the criteria of soundness are not just that they truly reflect the world’s realities: results are judged sound if they are consistent with the established axioms, beliefs, theories [5].
If it happens that someone comes across an apparent fact that is not in keeping with what the established view expects or believes to understand, that person suffers a serious conflict of interest and a dilemma. Taking the apparently anomalous, contrarian fact seriously and considering how to learn more about it entails a sneaking suspicion that the established views might need modifying. On the other hand, being faithful to the established order and one’s place in it is quite feasible: one simply regards the anomaly as the sort of chance, unimportant “outlier” often encountered in research, perhaps through some unknown instrumental or other flaw and therefore of no importance. The choice becomes whether or not to “rock the boat” and potentially become a whistleblower.
All the incentives nowadays are against rocking the boat or blowing a whistle.
For individuals wanting to set out on a career, it is important to have the right credentials, which includes recommendations and endorsements from people whose actions are influential within the established order because they represent it in some way, certainly by accepting the prevailing consensual beliefs. For fairly well-established people who want to extend and improve their career, favorable judgments by more senior individuals are again desirable.
Although one might imagine that researchers in academia are not so beholden to the established views, that is very far from the case. To achieve tenure, promotions, salary raises, one must perform impressively, which nowadays means consonant with the consensual beliefs and attracting substantial amounts of grant funds from sources outside academe; and publishing in impressive quantity. But applications for grant funds are judged by criteria governed by the established consensual beliefs; and potential publications are judged by editors and reviewers according to how well they conform to the established consensual beliefs. Those established beliefs effectively form hegemonic “knowledge monopolies” whose influence restricts the boundaries of the work being done into what could be described as research cartels [6].
The historical changes in the nature of scientific activity are particularly important when it comes to potentially needed changes of established theories. For early modern science, “self-correction” is not an inappropriate way of viewing the steadily achieved advances of knowledge and understanding. Nowadays, however, it is excruciatingly difficult to accomplish changes of established beliefs, for it is not independent, individual, intellectual entrepreneurs who need to agree that the evidence warrants change; rather, it is a whole host of institutions that are heavily vested in the status quo and have much to lose if that changes in significant ways: institutions that produce professional journals and other technical publications; professional associations like the American Chemical Society, the American Medical Association, etc.; officially accredited professional organizations like the National Academy of Sciences; governmental agencies that apply technical knowledge or regulate commercial activities, like the Food and Drug Administration or the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture, the National Institutes of Health, etc.; and all the analogous international institutions, typically or often under the aegis of the United Nations.
Under the conditions of classic (or “early”) modern science, which largely continued into the first half of the 20th century, changes in accepted, consensual scientific beliefs required the acquiescence of essentially only the individual specialist experts. Nowadays, any change in what is accepted by an essentially global consensus — say, the theory underlying global warming or climate change — requires that what “everyone knows” has to change; the whole society has to change what it believes: the popular media must change, and the non-profit organizations and philanthropies, as well as governmental agencies and international organizations.
Consider then how difficult — dare I say impossible? — it would be for such a change in a “scientific” theory or belief to eventuate on any topic that has been prominent in public discourse.
Here is a hypothetical thought experiment that might seem to many people farfetched, even impossible: imagine that impeccable evidence of some sort reveals that global warming and climate change are not caused primarily by human activities in releasing greenhouse gases by using fossil fuels.
To acknowledge the validity of that evidence would discredit the United Nation’s International Panel on Climate Change, and therby the United Nations itself, as well as the members of that panel, who would lose their prestige and status and high salaries and other benefits. It would discredit innumerable non-profit organizations, including such vaunted philanthropies as the Gates Foundation, and the many groups of environmental activists and their organizations; and the many leaders of the many “underdeveloped” countries who have asked or demanded compensation for their loss of land and energy-producing prospects because of the harm done by the First-World fossil-fuel exploiters. Innumerable physicists and other scientists would be discredited and have their careers badly damaged for having been mistaken, for wrong computer models and predictions and advice to governments. And so on. Belief in human-caused, greenhouse-gas-caused climate change is thoroughly institutionalized and universally accepted and one can hardly imagine that belief dying out or being deliberately discarded.
By contrast, the eugenics movement just petered out after a century or so. It ended “not with a bang, but a whimper”, as fewer and fewer influential people called for sterilizing some identified individuals. Such an end could not come concerning an institutionalized belief on such an important matter as, for example, human-caused climate change.
Human nature and institutional vested interests mean that every possible way will be sought to avoid recognizing that a long-established societal belief has been mistaken. That statement does not imply or intend to imply that the individuals or institutions defending the status quo are being dishonest. It is just that belief-change is hard and unpleasant. Human psychology, in order to avoid “cognitive dissonance” [7], has evolved mechanisms that make it easy not to notice things that contradict established beliefs, and to find ways of ignoring or discrediting “boat-rockers” who try to push acknowledgement of what “everyone knows” cannot be the case. Recall “Planck’s dictum”, that science advances only when the Old Guard is gone; how much less likely is change when the Old Guard is composed not merely of individuals but of institutions: national and international governments and their official agencies, as well as professional organizations, non-profit groups, and more.
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[1] Philip R. Reilly, Eugenics and involuntary sterilization: 1907-2015, Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, 16 (2015) 351-68;
Cera R. Lawrence, Oregon State Board of Eugenics, 3 May 2012; https://hpsrepository.asu.edu/handle/10776/5663
[2] Bernard Barber, “Resistance by scientists to scientific discovery”, Science, 134 (1961) 596–602
[3] Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press; 2nd ed., enlarged, 1970 (1st ed. 1962)
[4] Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, 1949; translated from German by Frank Gaynor, Greenwood Press, 1968
[5] Extended discussion of these points is in Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed, McFarland 2017
[6] Henry H. Bauer, Science in the 21st century: knowledge monopolies and research cartels, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 18 (2004) 643-60; Dogmatism in Science and Medicine: How dominant theories monopolize research and stifle the search for truth, McFarland, 2012
[7] Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, & Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social
and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World, University of Minnesota Press, 1956;
Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Stanford University Press, 1957