The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine

On the Margins of Science

book review by Michael Shermer

As the editor of Skeptic magazine and a monthly columnist for Scientific American I am often sent self-published books and manuscripts that I store in a box labeled “Theories of Everything.” These are mostly attempts at constructing all-encompassing explanatory theories claiming to have disproven Newton, Einstein, and Hawking, and that in 10 or 100 pages sans equations or references the secrets of the cosmos are revealed. One is entitled “Introduction to the Unified Field Theory,” in which the author boasts, “I have discovered the previously unknown invisible particle that fully explains light and all forms of energy. I call it the froton particle. Einstein didn’t know about the froton particle—but you will.” A manuscript entitled Infinite Dynamics goes “beyond Einstein,” and represents “an historic, classical, artistic, scientific, philosophical paradigm shift.” Another called Photonics promises “Einstein’s unified-field theory now complete, all forces finally unified,” and as a bonus, “fundamental cause of gravity found.” Another proclaimed that his “is the first consistent theory of anti-gravity in the history of mankind,” revealing the secrets to “time warp interstellar travel, wormhole engineering and Dipole Antigravity Drive, gravitational free energy, and alien visitation.”

I admit that I have not given these ideas much credence, but what if one of them turns out to be right, or at least has something of value to offer to society? For the past 15 years the acclaimed science writer Margaret Wertheim (Pythagoras’ Trousers, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace) has been collecting the works of such hermit scientists, or what she calls “outsider physicists,” and with the patience of Job has undertaken the scientifically thankless task of carefully reading as many “theories of everything” as she could get her hands on to give them a fair hearing, and more. In Physics on the Fringe Wertheim presents these ideas with an eye toward challenging our preconceptions of what science is, how it works, and who it is for. The book is so well-written, entertaining, and enlightening that I read it straight through in one sunny day at the beach. Only later did I realize that Wertheim has also taken on one of the knottiest conundrums in the philosophy of science called the demarcation problem, or finding criteria to define the boundary between science and pseudoscience. It’s not as easy as it sounds.

As a professional debunker I feel like I know bunk when I see it, and Wertheim has well captured the genre: “In all likelihood there will be an abundant use of CAPITAL LETTERS and exclamation points!!! Important sections will be underlined or bolded, or circled, for emphasis. Frequently the author will have seen fit to ease the professor’s path toward understanding by writing helpful comments in the margins of the paper or by highlighting critical passages with brightly colored felt-tip pens… The text itself will almost certainly herald its revolutionary nature in its opening paragraphs, claiming to reinvent if not the whole of physics…then at least substantial parts of it. At a minimum, the author will be proposing something radically new and often as not will have harsh words for the twin pillars of twentieth-century physics—relativity and quantum theory.”

Outward appearances aside, Wertheim has convinced me that I may be too hasty in dismissing outsiders a priori, most notably the central character of her story—a man she calls the Einstein of outsiders, Jim Carter, who has developed his own complete theory of matter, energy, and gravity that he demonstrates by experiments in his backyard with DIY contraptions involving garbage cans and a disco fog machine, from which he makes smoke rings to test his ideas about atoms, which he believes are constructed of “circlons,” or “Hollow, ring-shaped mechanical particles that are held together within the nucleus by their physical shapes,” as seen in Figure 1 (below), and in representing the helium atom in Figure 2, the 2^nd simplest element made up of two circlons. His circlon theory allows him to tie together both quantum mechanics and the special and general theories of relativity, and his explanation for gravity is unorthodox to say the least: “if the earth’s surface is constantly moving away from its center, we must conclude that the earth, as well as all other matter, is constantly expanding in size; and it is this expansion that causes the phenomenon we know as gravity.”

Figure 1: The Circlon (courtesy of Jim Carter). See also Jim Carter’s Circlon Model of Nulcear Structure (PDF, copyright 1993).

Figure 2: The Helium Atom Circlon (courtesy of Jim Carter). See the Physics on the Fringe website for more information about Jim Carter’s physics, including links to photos and videos.

Before you laugh (especially at the neologism), as I initially did, Wertheim points out that string theory—touted regularly on science documentaries as the ultimate theory of everything endorsed by prominent scientists the world over—has not a shred of empirical evidence in its favor and is, in reality, nothing more than a mathematically elegant construct. If Carter’s circlon theory is pseudoscience, why isn’t string theory? For example, Wertheim describes a meeting she attended of the Natural Philosophy Alliance, a group devoted to challenging mainstream physics. The eccentric event played host to no fewer than 121 fringe theories of the universe, “each claiming to present a key to Ultimate Reality,” Wertheim recalled. It reminded her of the book The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, the story of three schizophrenic patients in a room together at the Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan, all of whom thought they were Jesus (each of whom ultimatey decided that the other two were imposters). At this conference, she recounted, “Everybody had the Answer. Everybody was the One.” There was bewilderment amongst the participants: “How exactly is a person supposed to respond to someone else’s harebrained theory when each person has his or her own Solution?”

Wertheim goes on to contrast the NPA gathering with a meeting of string theorists she attended in which such scientific supernovae as Stephen Hawking, Lisa Randall and Brian Greene spoke seriously about 11-dimensional universes, multiverses, parallel universes, and even the possibility of there being at least 10⁵⁰⁰ variants of string cosmologies, including one proffered by Stanford’s Leonard Susskind in which every universe that can exist does exist in a superuniversal space. When Wertheim asked the organizer of the insiders conference his opinion of one particularly dazzling talk, he enthused “Utterly splendid. Of course there’s not a shred of evidence for anything the fellow said.” As Wertheim recalled, “Whoever I talked with assured me that everybody else’s theories were unsupported by evidence and based entirely on arbitrary assumptions. None of this was driven by physical discoveries.”

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What, then, are we to do with outsiders’ contributions to science? When they are contrasted with equally baseless theories, says Wertheim, listen to them. “In the final analysis Jim’s circlon-shaped particles may also be seen as manifestations of a string theory, for his subatomic springs are also coils of some minutely thin, ‘stuff.’ Jim came to the string concept more than thirty years ago, and the fact that this idea is now being embraced by the mainstream suggests to him that his other ideas will one day be vindicated too.”

Will they? Maybe. Or perhaps both circlon theory and string theory will go the way of phlogiston and phrenology on the scrapheap of science history. Time and observation will tell, for as the great astrophysicist who confirmed Einstein’s theory of relativity, Arthur Stanley Eddington, noted: “For the truth of the conclusions of science, observation is the supreme court of appeal.” In the meantime, let’s not dismiss outsiders before giving them their day in court. Margaret Wertheim has done just that in this splendid book.

As Far As Her Eyes Can See

book review by Michael Shermer

Lisa Randall has been justly appraised by Time magazine as one of the “100 most influential people in the world” for her work in theoretical particle physics. From her position at Harvard University, she often travels: to the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CERN, in Switzerland, where her theories are being put to the test in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC); to speaking engagements with professional and public audiences about her work in particular and the awe and wonder of science in general; and to rock formations where her chalked fingers can find ways to defy gravity. On the side, she writes popular books, such as her acclaimed Warped Passages¹.

In Knocking on Heaven’s Door, Randall picks up the story from where she left off when the LHC was years away from first collision, expanding her horizon from, as she poetically puts it, “what’s so small to you is so large to me” to “what’s so large to you is so small to me.” In other words, the book ranges from the smallest known particles to the entire bubble universe, from 10⁻³⁵ meters (the Planck length, where quantum gravity rules) to 10²⁷ meters (the entire visible universe, 100 billion light-years across, where dark matter and dark energy dominate), a stunning 62 orders of magnitude. (Randall correctly notes the age of the universe at 13.75 billion years, clarifying her apparently paradoxical figure of 100 billion light-years thusly: “The reason the universe as a whole is bigger than the distance a signal could have traveled given its age is that space itself has expanded.” She unpacks that sentence in the book.)

At the time of this writing, eBooks occupy about 20 percent of sales space; that is, one out of every five books sold has no cover or binding save the faux effects offered digitally by the various eBook readers. Of late, however, a tiny and growing sliver of the pie is being carved out by audio books (primarily through Audible.com and iTunes), most unabridged and read by professional actors and readers. These provide a welcome alternative to those of us yoked to our iPods and MP3 players inside cars and gyms or on bicycles and hiking trails. Since fumbling around with cassette tapes and Sony Walkmans in the early 1980s, I have consumed on the order of 500- plus nonfiction audio books, so a measure of an author’s skill to communicate complex material clear enough to penetrate a multitasking cortex has become a mark of quality (or lack thereof). Many are called. Few are chosen. Randall’s explanatory prose places her among the elect. She is not alone, but she is rare among the many who have attempted the herculean task of explaining to us uninitiated the daunting science of theoretical particle physics. She devotes most of Knocking on Heaven’s Door to covering this science, along the way offering fascinating accounts of how the LHC was built, how the experiments are run, and, most notably, the engineering prestidigitation involved in teasing out nature’s secrets via energies never before witnessed on Earth.

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The book’s subtitle hints that it may be yet another long and tiresome treatise on science and religion, with either convoluted (and ultimately failed) attempts at conciliation or pugnacious left hooks and fast jabs at the faithful. Neither are Randall’s modus operandi. She states her case succinctly and moves on. Stephen Jay Gould’s “nonoverlapping magisteria,” for example, would work if only religions would stick to doing what they do best (providing aid and comfort to the poor and needy). However, conflicts arise the moment “religions attempt to address the external reality of the universe.” When they do, Randall notes, “[t]his leaves religious views open to falsification. When science encroaches on domains of knowledge that religion attempts to explain, disagreements are bound to arise.” As science expands its realm, the magisteria are becoming ever more overlapping. The deeper problem, however, is that if divine providence were on the offing, “it is inconceivable from a scientific perspective that God could continue to intervene without introducing some material trace of his actions.” In other words, if God did act in the world scientists would want to know how he did it. “Did He apply a force or transfer energy?” Randall asks rhetorically. “Is God manipulating electrical processes in our brains? … On a larger level, if God gives purpose to the universe, how does He apply His will?” Inquiring minds want to know. Religion has no answer. I know because I have asked many times.

Another myth Randall thankfully busts is the notion of truth and beauty in science. What can a “beautiful truth” in science possibly mean? Take a look at a page of equations and formulas from a recent theoretical physics paper. Mind-boggling to the untrained maybe, complicated and detailed undoubtedly, surprising or inspiring occasionally, but beautiful? “Beauty is often agreed on only a posteriori,” Randall explains, although she adds the proviso “even though aesthetic criteria for science might be poorly defined, they are nonetheless useful and omnipresent. They help guide our research, even if they provide no guarantee of success or truth.” Considering weak interactions, which violate parity symmetry, she remarks, “The breaking of such a fundamental symmetry as left-right equivalence seems innately disturbing and unattractive. Yet this very asymmetry is what is responsible for the range of masses we see in the world, which is in turn necessary for structure and life.”

Knocking on Heaven’s Door came out before the faster-than-light neutrino experiment was announced² and paraded through the press as an ostensible refutation of Einstein, implying in some circles that science is nothing more than one failed theory after another. Why thence should we believe anything scientists say about evolution, global warming, or vaccines? Randall ends her book with a thoughtful discussion of how science really works to resolve anomalies unexplained by the prevailing paradigm. Einstein did not overturn Newton; he just expanded on the physical properties of the universe at high speed and large scale. If you want to get a spacecraft to the moon, Newton will take you there. As flawed as it sometimes can be, science is still the most reliable tool ever devised for understanding the world. Few have captured this essence better than Randall in Knocking on Heaven’s Door.

Making Room for Religion

by Paul J. Cech

In Science and Spirituality, Michael Ruse offers believers (especially Christians) the possibility that their beliefs can coexist with science as they contemplate ideas “that go beyond the reach of science (233).” He simultaneously offers scientists and scholars an historic and liberal view of a world where science and human values help us to increase our understanding and strengthen our respect for those who see things differently. He also offers interested general readers a readable, rational account of the history and philosophy of evolution.

The first four chapters are a detailed historical account of scientific thought in Western civilizations. Ruse provides perspectives on organic and mechanical metaphors, as he methodically explains their details in a manner that will not only refresh or enhance the understanding of scientists and other learned scholars, but in a way that provides background information for students and general readers to refer to as they delve into the analysis that is the focus of subsequent chapters. In the Introduction, Ruse provides information on the players in the discussion about religion and science. Among them are: Steven Weinberg, Sir John Polkinghorne, Francis Crick, James Watson, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Arthur Peacocke, and Stephen Jay Gould.

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Chapter One, The World as an Organism, covers the Greek perspective, and the use of metaphor in science. Chapter Two, The World as a Machine, focuses on the development of science “from Copernicus to Newton.” It concludes with more details about the machine metaphor: “The world as a machine is not something discovered…It is something we create in conjunction with nature” (52). In Chapter Three, Organisms as Machines, the focus is on philosophy. The reader is offered greater details about the machine metaphor and various philosophical perspectives on organisms, mechanisms, and evolution. This is the point where I had to get my copy of Samir Okasha’s Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2002) down from the shelf and placed nearby for comfort. The ideas of several philosophers were presented, among them Kant and Descartes. There are also ideas from scientists and thinkers such as: Heinrich Gustav Magnus, Edward Franklin, Charles Darwin, T.H. Huxley, and Richard Dawkins. With Chapter Four, Thinking Machines, I returned to a more comfortable arena. Here one finds the ideas of William James, Noam Chomsky, Edward O. Wilson, Stephen Pinker, and Paul Thagard. I was even pleasantly surprised by references to Viktor Frankl and Rollo May (104). The ideas presented in the first four chapters cover questions and ideas related to the history of scientific thought and they prepare the reader for the analysis that follows. In Chapter Five, Unasked Questions, Unsolved Problems, includes discussion of origins, morality, minds, and purpose. The ideas of various thinkers are used to explore the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The ideas related to morality had me returning to the my bookshelf to get an old, well-worn copy of Jacob Bronowski’s Science and Human Values (Harper Colophon Books, 1975), in which civilization asks science and Nagasaki, which is described as an “industrial slum”, the question: Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby? It dawned on me while reading this chapter that as civilized individuals, as scientists and scholars asking questions about origins, morality, minds and purpose, is there really room for faith in this scientific age? This thought remained with me as I made my way through the remaining chapters. Chapter Six, Organicism, addresses a call for the return to the organic metaphor from the machine metaphor. Ruse presents detailed information about Naturphilosphie and other developments, as well as emergence, Gaia and ecofeminism, and he provides a summary of organicism. In the final two chapters on God and Morality, Souls, Eternity, Mystery, Ruse presents the theological foundations of faith for Christians, especially as they relate to the idea of God. Ruse aims not to prove “the truth of Christianity but to make room for it in the face of science” (193). A key point here is the rejection of theological concepts or ideas rooted in faith if they cannot hold up to the light of modern science.

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In his Conclusion, Ruse states that he hopes that the “ideas and conclusions” found in Science and Spirituality will “inspire” others to join him in making room for faith in an age of science. I think it will. How? Early in the book, Ruse quotes the New York Times science writer Natalie Angier saying that science “has made it possible for people not to be religious.” I like that. Religion in general—more specifically, belief in god—comes with mixed blessings. I wholeheartedly agree that theology needs to be aligned with the findings of modern science. Theology needs to adapt. Religious beliefs need to be revised. Social Sciences have also shown us that religion has a purpose in society; it helps to reinforce norms that I hope are in step with modern science, and religion helps to alleviate anxiety, something that may be necessary for pious folk who truly believe as they face numerous concerns on a daily basis. Ruse wrote Science and Spirituality to help believers, especially Christians, to see that their beliefs can co-exist with science. But he also makes it possible for scientists and scholars to see the possibility of science that coexists with the humanities. This unification may help us all to accept and understand each other a little better. It may also help us to be better prepared if civilization has a need to ask science, is you is or is you ain’t my baby?

About the Author

Where the Substance Really Isn’t

by Tim Callahan

Alvin Plantinga, O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, seems adept at talking philosophy around issues of science without ever grappling with anything concrete. Despite the length of this book I waded through its often impenetrably dense verbiage, searching in vain for much real substance. The author’s basic assertion is that, while there is superficial conflict between. science and religion (particularly Christianity), there is, in fact, a deep concord between the two. At the same time, he argues, there is a superficial concord between science and naturalism, but in reality, a deep conflict between them. Naturally, the supposed conflict between science and theism centers on evolution, and Plantinga takes atheist spokesmen—particularly the “four horsemen of the new atheism,” Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens—to task for asserting that evolution is directionless and unguided:

In this chapter and the one previous, we have been looking into the claim that current scientific evolutionary theory is incompatible with Christian belief. This claim, as we saw, is false. The scientific theory of evolution is not incompatible with Christian belief; what is incompatible with it is the idea that evolution, natural selection, is unguided. But that idea isn’t part of evolutionary theory as such; it’s instead a metaphysical or theological addition. (p. 65)

While it’s true that the theory of evolution per se doesn’t preclude a creator deity, the fossil record, to which Plantinga never refers or alludes, would seem devoid of any teleological pattern.

Consider the basic thesis of a God with whom evolution is compatible. This is the God of teleological arguments, the God who creates life and spurs it on with mutations and natural selection, who goads it forward with the eventual goal of creating beings who, like Him (or Her), are sentient and self-aware. Across the vast panorama of deep time, the creator’s work stretches from the simplest life forms to the sentient apex of his grand design: namely, us. This is certainly the God I believed in when I was a theist, and, given the upward course of evolution, it did seem to me then to have a discernible pattern and a grand design.

The great curse on this picture, glaringly revealed in the fossil record, is the haphazard nature of mass extinctions. If humans were God’s goal, then the rise of mammals to dominance would have to be integral to that goal. By the end of the Permian Period, about 248 million years ago, the mammal-like reptiles were the dominant mega-fauna, and were poised to evolve into dominant mammals. Then the Permian-Triassic extinction wiped out up to 96% of all marine species and 70% of all terrestrial vertebrate species. Among those groups hard hit by this greatest of all mass extinctions were the synapsids, the mammal-like reptiles, which were almost entirely wiped out. As a result, while the few surviving synapsids did evolve into mammals, these were not the dominant mega-fauna. Rather, they were small furtive creatures that eked out a living under the feet of the dinosaurs for about 185 million years, only gaining dominance when another mass extinction annihilated those great beasts 65 million years ago. This begs the question: Why the 185 million-year detour? Were we to compare a creator who dealt thus with his creation to a gardener trimming a hedge, this gardener would have to be incompetent indeed. His hacking away with capricious mass killings would make the tree of life resemble an asymmetrical topiary shaped by a mad-man.

Another seeming pattern I used to accept when I was young was that of “orthogenesis,” a seeming straight line of evolution, which, again, showed a striking pattern and demonstrated a goal. Orthogenesis, or “straight line” evolution, often less elegantly referred to as the “hat-rack” model, depicted the evolution of the horse as proceeding from Eohippus (now called Hyracotherium, a loss, to my way of thinking) to Equus, with only a few, quickly pruned, side branches. It was a grand triumph, a great success story, a valiant journey from little Eohippus to magnificent Equus, a great demonstration of the Creator at work. The problem with this picture is that, aside from beginning with Eohippus / Hyracotherium, and ending with Equus, nothing in this epic tale is true. Far from being a great success story, it is one of wretched bare survival. A lone genus of an entire family, out of a many-branched line, escaped extinction. Far from looking like a hat-rack, the phylogenetic tee of the Equidae, like that of life in general, resembles an ill-trimmed bush.

The late Stephen Jay Gould noted another example of evolution’s randomness in his popular book about the Burgess Shale fauna, Wonderful Life. Most of the bizarre phyla dominating this Cambrian deposit went extinct, and the survival of one insignificant genus, Pikeia, probable ancestor to all vertebrates, would seem to be a matter of chance and contingency. This is not to say, of course, that natural selection doesn’t impose an iron law of survival on chance mutations, or that there isn’t a general upward flow of increasing complexity to be found in the fossil record, only that the creator’s stamp is missing.

Plantinga fails to consider this body of evidence—that of mass extinctions, bare survival and random contingency—upon which Richard Dawkins and others base their assertion that evolution is unguided. He fails to consider it, because, in a book that deals with the issue of whether science in general, and evolution in particular, supports a theistic view or naturalism, he fails to even mention the fossil record—and with it, its implications.

In the process of arguing that naturalism is irrational, Plantinga attacks evolutionary psychology. As an example of its failure and the failure of sociobiology to provide a sound basis for ethics and morality, he quotes Michael Ruse and E.O. Wilson as saying in a paper entitled “The Evolution of Ethics” (reprinted in the 1993 volume Religion and the Natural Sciences, edited by James Hutchinson, published by Harcourt, Brace), “ethics is an illusion fobbed off on us by our own genes to get us to cooperate; thus morality ultimately seems to be about self-interest.” Did Ruse and Wilson actually say that ethics is an illusion and morality is just about self-interest? Sort of. The quote is only small part of the original section from which the quote was taken. Let us restore it to its original context with Plantinga’s quote in boldface.

The time has come to take seriously the fact that we humans are modified monkeys, not the favored Creation of a Benevolent God on the Sixth Day. In particular, we must recognize our biological past in trying to understand our interactions with others. We must think again especially about our so-called ‘ethical principles’. The question is not whether biology—specifically, our evolution—is connected with ethics, but how. As evolutionists, we see that no justification of the traditional kind is possible. Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends. Hence the basis of ethics does not lie in God’s will—or in the metaphorical roots of evolution or any other part of the framework of the Universe. In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding. Ethics is produced by evolution but is not justified by it because, like Macbeth’s dagger, it serves a powerful purpose without existing in substance. … Unlike Macbeth’s dagger, ethics is a shared illusion of the human race. Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. This is the crux of the biological position. Once it is grasped, everything falls into place.

It is apparent that not only has Plantinga failed to install an ellipsis between “ethics” and “is an illusion” and that “ethics as we understand it is an illusion,” is a considerably less provocative statement than Plantinga’s quote, but that placed in its original context it is a much different statement than it is in Plantinga’s portrayal of it. The statement that morality is about self-interest would seem to be from another paragraph altogether. This is, of course, a tactic with which we skeptics are all too familiar, having seen so often dishonestly employed by creationists. It is extremely disappointing to see it thus used by someone of Dr. Plantinga’s stature. What is implied by the cherry-picked quote, taken out of context, is that Ruse and Wilson, seeing ethics and morality as illusory, would also see it as something to be dispensed with. Of course, that’s not at all what they are saying. Rather, they argue that ethics and morality are not God-given, but rooted biologically in our nature.

In yet another attack on the rationality of naturalism and as an example of the innate agreement between science and theism, the author raises the argument of the fine-tuning of the universe. Here we see the sad spectacle of a philosopher seizing on a scientific concept he truly doesn’t understand and using it to make a philosophical point. He writes:

For example, if the force of gravity were even slightly stronger, all stars would be blue giants; if even slightly weaker, all would be red dwarfs; in neither case would life have developed. The same goes for the weak and strong nuclear forces; if either had been slightly different, life, at any rate life even remotely similar to the sort we have, could probably not have developed. (p. 199)

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A number of physicists, among them Victor Stenger, have pointed out many of the fallacies of this argument. For example, in his book Just Six Numbers (often cited by fine-tuning advocates) Martin Rees says that the gravitational constant would have to increase by a factor of 3000 to preclude the formation of stars. This doesn’t sound that fine-tuned. As to the fine-tuning of the strong force, consider the mass of the proton. Is it that fine tuned? In his article “Rough-Tuned Universe” (Skeptic vol. 16, no. 4 2011, p. 51) Christopher Sirola notes:

Change something as simple as the mass of a proton, it is said, and nuclear fusion no longer works. The physicist Victor Stegner created a simple computer program to refute such charges, and on his web site one can alter a star’s parameters. I tried doubling the mass of the proton—fairly important since stars generate energy by turning protons into larger nuclei—and while the star’s lifetime was cut roughly in half, it still had hundreds of millions of years to live. The “fundamental” constants of the universe, it seems, aren’t so fundamental after all.

Take the force of gravity. The fine-tuning argument says it had to be precisely what it is in order for the universe to expand as it did after the Big Bang. Too strong and the universe would collapse back to a singularity. Too weak and the universe would expand too rapidly. This doesn’t seem to depend on other parameters. So doesn’t the exactness of gravity alone imply design?

No. If you’re going to circumvent Stenger’s argument by focusing on a single value, gravity is the wrong one to pick because it didn’t have to be all that exact. In Rees’ book he finds that the gravitational constant would have to increase by a factor of 3000 to preclude the formation of stars. (I’ve never seen anyone use the same approach on another constant, so I suspect none of the others have similarly obvious independent significance.)

Plantinga quotes Stephen Hawking from “The Anisotropy of the Universe at Large Times” (in Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data M.S. Longair ed. 1973): “reduction of the rate of expansion by one part in 10¹² at the time when the temperature of the Universe was 10¹⁰K would have resulted in the Universe starting to recollapse when it radius was only 1/3000 of and the temperature was still 10,000 degrees.” But on p. 128 of A Brief History of Time, Hawking says: “The rate of expansion of the universe [in the inflationary model] would automatically become very close to the critical rate determined by the energy density of the universe. This could then explain why the rate of expansion is still so close to the critical rate, without having to assume that the initial rate of expansion of the universe was very carefully chosen.”

The final chapter of Plantinga’s book is an exercise in symbolic logic. It would seem that what is first needed to decipher this chapter is a translation into English. Here’s an example:

That’s how things stand for nonreductive naturalism: P(R/N&E&nonreductive materialism) is low. We can deal more briefly with P(R/N&E&reductive materialism), the probability of R given naturalism and evolution and reductive materialism. On reductive materialism, mental properties are complex combinations of physical properties; more briefly, taking complex combinations of physical properties to be themselves physical properties, mental properties just are physical properties. What is the probability of R on N&E and reductive materialism? (p. 343)

Here is a key to the letters in the quasi-mathematical formulae above:

P is probability. R is the proposition that our cognitive faculties are reliable. N is naturalism, and E is the proposition that our cognitive faculties came about through evolution.

So, I guess what Plantinga is saying that P(R/N&E&nonreductive materialism) is low, is this: The probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable based on evolution, naturalism and non-reductive materialism is low. I must confess that, having read what led up to this conclusion, I really can’t figure out how he came to it. However, it all seems to go back to this statement on p. 326: “Nietzche, Nagel, Stroud, Churchland, and Darwin, nontheists all, seem to concur: (naturalistic) evolution gives one a reason to doubt that human cognitive faculties produce for the most part true beliefs.”

So, out of this doubt, which Plantinga boils down to the phrase “Darwin’s doubt,” he manufactures the bold statement that our cognitive faculties—which can be anything from a belief that movement in the tall grasses may be a lion stalking us, to the belief that lightning is being hurled at the earth by an angry god—cannot be considered reliable based on naturalism. Since our cognitive faculties are, at least to some degree reliable, naturalism contradicts science. Or, am I missing something here?

It also occurs to me that many fallacious ideas, such as that lighting is being hurled at the earth by an angry god, are in no way detrimental to survival in a primitive state—that of hunter-gatherer, a subsistence farmer or a herdsman. These occupations being the state of most of the human race for most of its existence means that only recently has our innate non-rational nature become a problem. It’s much like our cravings for sugar, salt and fats, all of which were aids to survival in the general scarcity of salt, immediate sources of energy (sugar) and long range, high energy storage foods (fats). Only recently did these cravings become detrimental.

The idea that our cognitive faculties are, in the raw, reliable in the concrete and near term, yet initially (i.e. without training) unreliable in the abstract, seems to be an alternative Plantinga hasn’t explored. Yet, the scientific method is an elaborate means by which to overcome the naturally subjective and essentially irrational nature of the human mind. Thus, the existence of the discipline we call science would seem to undercut Plantinga’s argument that naturalism and science are in conflict.

Antioxidants? It’s a Bit More Complicated

by Harriet Hall, M.D. (a.k.a. the SkepDoc)

I am getting very annoyed with antioxidants. Like Pavlov’s dogs, I’m becoming conditioned to flinch when I hear the word “antioxidant” because it is so often followed by oversimplifications, distortions, and partial truths. The hype is everywhere, in magazines, on the Internet, on the radio, in books, in stores. Antioxidants promise to prevent heart disease, cancer, cataracts, Alzheimer’s, and even wrinkles; they will make you live longer and keep your mind sharp, along with making you feel young again. Well who wouldn’t want that? Every day I am bombarded with recommendations for foods, supplements, and skin creams that are “a good source of antioxidants,” “high in antioxidants,” or “anti-aging” products. Everyone knows antioxidants are wonderful. Everyone except for skeptical scientists who realize it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Antioxidants prevent oxidation. Oxidation is the process whereby oxygen atoms combine with other substances. When oxygen combines with iron, we call it rust. So what is “rusting” in our bodies? Free radicals or reactive oxygen species (ROS) are molecules or ions that have an unpaired electron that is desperately seeking to complete a pair. Normal metabolism creates free radicals like superoxide and hydroxyl radicals. They are necessary for life; we need them for killing bacteria, for cell signaling processes, and other functions. But since free radicals will react indiscriminately with anything, they can also cause damage, for instance by reacting with DNA to cause mutations. Oxidative stress (an excess of free radicals) has been linked to cancer, heart disease, and many other disorders; but it’s not always entirely clear whether it is a cause, a result, or an innocent bystander that just came along for the ride. Some people think it is accumulated damage from free radicals that makes us grow old and die prematurely; they assume that suppressing the damage with antioxidants would increase our life span.

We need a few free radicals to function properly, but an excess of them can wreak havoc. Our bodies know better than to let havoc reign unchecked. They produce neutralizing enzymes like superoxide dismutase, catalase, and peroxidases to keep the free radical population under control. They make use of the antioxidant vitamins A, C, and E in our food, and they produce metabolites like bilirubin and uric acid with antioxidant properties.

We can do our part to maintain our bodies’ defenses by insuring an adequate dietary intake of nutrients. But can we, should we, do more? How much is enough? Should we take supplements? It’s seductive to think we could improve on nature and prolong our lives. If antioxidants are good, wouldn’t more antioxidants necessarily be better?

Unfortunately, it’s a bit more complicated than that. As Ben Goldacre explains in his book Bad Science,

Human biochemistry is a vast interlocking web. An intervention in one place can have quite unexpected consequences; there are feedback mechanisms, compensatory mechanisms. Rates of change in one localized area can be limited by quite unexpected factors that are entirely remote from what you are altering, and excesses of one thing in one place can distort the usual pathways and flows, to give counterintuitive results.

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Darn! Pseudoscience and marketing are so easy and straightforward and black and white; why does real science have to be so difficult?

What happens when we ingest more antioxidants than we need? Is the excess excreted? Does it just sit there doing nothing? Does it do something we didn’t intend? It would be nice to know.

There is good evidence that people who eat more fruits and vegetables are less likely to develop cancer, heart disease, and other ailments—and are likely to live longer. It’s easy to assume that the antioxidants in fruits and vegetables are responsible, but that might not be true. Other components of these foods (such as flavonoids) or the mixture of components in the diet might be responsible. Or maybe people who eat less fruit and vegetables are eating more of something else that causes those diseases.

If antioxidants in food do reduce the incidence of those diseases, it’s only logical to think that antioxidant supplements would reduce the incidence even more. Unfortunately, controlled studies have consistently shown that they either have no effect or make things worse. It’s not the first time reality has rudely intervened to spoil a great idea. Study after study has shown no benefit of antioxidants for heart disease, cancer, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, or longevity. One study did show that an antioxidant combination slowed the progression of established moderate-to-severe macular degeneration, but more research is needed to confirm those results.

Early observational studies suggested that vitamin E supplements reduced the risk of heart disease. I remember reading a report from a cardiologist back when the enthusiasm was at its height. He and his partners had been blithely prescribing high doses of vitamin E for their patients and taking it themselves. After they and many of their patients developed flu-like symptoms, it finally dawned on them that they were experiencing toxic effects from vitamin E overdose. They cut back on the dosage, but kept using it. Subsequently, better studies showed harm rather than benefit. Subjects taking vitamin E supplements were more likely to develop heart failure.

Antioxidant supplements can cause damage. They can be toxic in high doses, can bind to minerals in the diet and prevent their absorption, and can increase the risk of lung cancer. One study was terminated early because of a 46% higher rate of lung cancer deaths in those taking beta-carotene. Post-menopausal women who took vitamin A supplements had more fractures. Some studies have shown an increase in colorectal adenomas. There are reasons to think antioxidants might interfere with some cancer treatments.

An analysis of 68 trials with a total of nearly a quarter of a million subjects found that antioxidant supplements increased the mortality rate. Some experts think that antioxidant supplements have been adequately tested and found not to help; believers argue that the studies may not have tested the right substances or used the optimal doses.

The “superfood” industry has capitalized on the antioxidant craze. The recipe is simple: Pick a fruit, preferably something exotic and tropical. Claim it is a superfood with unique benefits. Develop a concentrate, a pill, or a mixture with other special ingredients. Advertise it with claims that can sneak by FDA restrictions. Solicit testimonials; make them up if necessary. Get several of your friends to try it so you can claim it is “clinically tested.” Start a multilevel marketing company. Charge exorbitantly high prices. Make big bucks. Noni juice, açaí berry, mangosteen, goji, camu camu; even the less exotic green tea, blueberries and pomegranates have generated fortunes. The superfoods concept involves a fallacy. These fruits don’t offer any benefits that you can’t get from components of a normal healthy diet. The fact that they contain high levels of a nutrient is meaningless, since you can get the same amount by eating more of other foods that contain lower levels. One 650mg Tylenol doesn’t work any better than two 325mg pills.

All kinds of antioxidant supplement mixtures are sold. Each claims unique benefits but supports those claims with testimonials rather than with real evidence. Some depend on a gimmick such as a unique proprietary manufacturing process or better absorption. They may claim a synergistic effect from a certain combination of ingredients, but these claims are never supported by published studies. How did they decide to combine those specific ingredients? Did someone in the company employ intuition or use a dartboard?

One anti-aging product, Protandim, claims to act by a different approach. It “persuades your body to increase its own production of antioxidants” and is alleged to “help prevent free radical damage to your cells thousands of times more effectively than any conventional antioxidant therapy… slowing down the rate of cell aging to the level of a 20 year old.” What’s in it? Milk thistle, bacopa, ashwagandha, green tea extract and turmeric. Hmm…and how exactly does this particular combination persuade your body to increase its production of antioxidants?

How do they know it works? They have a grand total of one study in humans: it showed an increase in a TBARS (ThioBarbituric Acid Reactive Substances) blood test. They have one study showing that it reduced the incidence of skin cancers in mice. They have a couple of other studies in mice and in test tubes. They have zero evidence of clinical effects in humans, much less of extended life span. But they have lots of testimonials and you can sign up to become a distributor.

Be wary of claims based on improvements in lab tests. There are many of these, like TBARS and ORAC (Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity) scores; you can even buy a home urine test to measure lipid peroxide levels. The same substance may show either pro-oxidant or anti-oxidant effects, depending on which test you choose. The human body is a more complicated environment than a test tube. None of these in vitro tests have been validated as corresponding to in vivo antioxidant effects or to any clinical benefit. Products with high TBARS levels have not been shown to improve patient outcome by any objective measurements. Vitamin E, which we know is a powerful antioxidant in the body, has a very low ORAC score.

Antioxidants are important for health, but so are free radicals. We need to know a lot more before we can confidently recommend increased antioxidant intake for everyone. The American Heart Association doesn’t recommend taking antioxidant supplements; they’re waiting until better evidence becomes available. For now, they say what Mom said: “Eat your vegetables.” That’s prudent advice for other health reasons too; it’s a slam-dunk.

Science by Think Tank
The Rise of Think Tanks and
the Decline of Public Intellectuals

by Massimo Pigliucci

Are public intellectuals in the 21st century an endangered species or a thriving new breed? Before we can sensibly ask whether public intellectuals are on the ascent, the decline, or something entirely different, we need to agree on what exactly, or even approximately, constitutes a public intellectual. It turns out that this isn’t a simple task and that the picture one gets from the literature on intellectualism depends largely on what sort of people one counts as “public intellectuals,” or, for that matter, what sort of activities count as intellectual to begin with. Nonetheless, some people (usually intellectuals) have actually spent a good deal of time thinking about such matters and have come up with some useful suggestions. For example, in Public Intellectuals: An Endangered Species? Amitai Etzioni quotes the Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet to the effect that intellectuals are people who devote themselves to “the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them.”¹ Or perhaps one could go with the view of influential intellectual Edward Said, who said that intellectuals should “question patriotic nationalism, corporate thinking, and a sense of class, racial or gender privilege.”²

Should one feel less romantic (even a bit cynical, perhaps) about the whole idea, one might prefer instead Paul Johnson, who said that “a dozen people picked at random on the street are at least as likely to offer sensible views on moral and political matters as a cross-section of the intelligentsia.”³ Or go with David Carter, who wrote in the Australian Humanities Review that “public intellectuals might be defined as those who see a crisis where others see an event.”⁴

Regardless of how critical one is of the very idea of public intellectualism, everyone seems to agree that there are a few people out there who embody— for better or worse—what a public intellectual is supposed to be. By far the most often cited example is the controversial linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky. Indeed, his classic article “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” written in 1963 for the New York Review of Books, is a must-read by anyone interested in the topic, despite its specific focus on the Vietnam War (then again, some sections could have been written during the much more recent second Iraq War, almost without changing a word).⁵

For Chomsky the basic idea is relatively clear: “Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions…. It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.”⁶ Yet one could argue that it is the responsibility of any citizen in an open society to do just the sort of things that Chomsky says intellectuals ought to do, and indeed I doubt Chomsky would disagree. But he claims that intellectuals are in a special position to do what he suggests. How so? It is not that Chomsky is claiming that only genetically distinct subspecies of human beings possess special reasoning powers allowing them to be particularly incisive critics of social and political issues. Rather, it is that intellectuals—at their best—are more insightful in social criticism because they can afford to devote a lot of time to reading and discussing ideas—something that most people trying to make a living simply do not have the time or energy to do. Moreover, intellectuals have a duty to be so engaged with society because often their vantage point is the result of a privileged position granted them by society, most obviously in the case of academic intellectuals (but also journalists, some artists, and assorted others), who are somewhat shielded from most direct political influence or financial constraints, and whose professional ethos requires intellectual honesty and rigor. Of course, none of this guarantees that public intellectuals always get it right, or that they always further the welfare of society. The classic counter- example, mentioned by Chomsky himself, is the philosopher Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger is a controversial figure, to say the least, both academically and politically (not unlike Chomsky himself, though the similarity ends there). Some commentators consider him one of the greatest of modern philosophers; others think that his writings are full of obfuscatory language and sheer nonsense. He was the mentor of Leo Strauss—who in turn inspired the modern neoconservative movement—as well as the father of several movements that feature prominently in the “culture wars,” such as deconstructionism and postmodernism. At any rate, Heidegger was elected rector of the University of Freiburg in Germany in 1933, under the auspices of the Hitler regime. The inaugural address he delivered is in fact a good example of convoluted nonsense, and it just as clearly represents the exact antithesis of what a public intellectual should be.

After having waxed poetic about spiritual missions and the “essence” of German universities, Heidegger went on to say that “German students are on the march. And whom they are seeking are those leaders through whom they want to elevate their own purpose so that it becomes a grounded, knowing truth,” a rather ominous presage of things to come for the German youth. And he kept going: “Out of the resoluteness of the German students to stand their ground while German destiny is in its most extreme distress comes a will to the essence of the university…. The much-lauded ‘academic freedom’ will be expelled from the German university.”⁷ Heidegger’s connection with the Nazis will forever taint his legacy, making him a permanent warning to aspiring public intellectuals about what route not to follow.

Chomsky, on the other hand—in a prose infinitely clearer and more compelling than Heidegger’s —raises the question of what the duty of an intellectual ought to be, and answers that she has to be concerned with the creation and analysis of ideologies, including those endorsed or produced by intellectuals themselves. Since the public intellectual, according to Chomsky, has to insist on truth, she also has to see things in their historical perspective, truly to learn from history rather than be bound to repeat the same mistakes over and over. Of course, the whole concept of “truth,” and by implication the efficacy of both science and of intellectual discourse, has been questioned by those academic heirs of Heidegger known as postmodernists. Setting that aside for a moment, however, there are in fact other ways of being skeptical of the whole idea of public intellectualism, for example in the analysis of Richard Posner, author of Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline.⁸

Posner was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School and later became a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals (Seventh Circuit), to which he was nominated by President Reagan. By all accounts, Posner is considered a major and influential legal theorist. Despite being a highly regarded intellectual, his analysis of intellectuals as a breed is anything but sympathetic, although he makes several interesting points that we need to consider while attempting to put together a general picture of intellectualism and how it relates to public understanding of science. Posner, by his own account, wrote his book as a result of what he perceived as the low quality of public intellectuals’ commentaries in two high-profile cases in which he was involved: the impeachment hearings of President Clinton and the antitrust case against Microsoft. Posner’s thesis is that there has indeed been a decline of intellectuals in the United States, but that this isn’t a matter of fewer of them being around. On the contrary, the “market” for intellectualism has allegedly increased dramatically in recent years, but the quality of the individuals populating such a market has decreased sharply.

Posner accounts for this double trend (increase in quantity and decrease in quality) with an ingenious, if certainly debatable, analysis of some of the forces shaping both the supply of and the demand for public intellectuals. On the supply side, intellectuals are now almost exclusively an academic phenomenon. Gone are the days of Zola and (Anatole) France, when it was the independent artist or writer who was more likely to be outspoken about social matters. Instead, the rise of universities (in terms of both numbers and financial resources) after World War II has catalyzed a shift toward academic-type intellectuals. Academics are better positioned than independents to play a role in public discourse because they are more readily perceived as credentialed individuals, and they can afford to stick their neck out about controversial matters in the relative safety of a tenured position.

Not that all is good and well for academics who wish to venture in the public arena. As Posner points out, there are pros and cons that need to be carefully evaluated. On the side of incentives there is the possibility of monetary reward (academic salaries aren’t what they used to be), though it is fairly rare that an academic actually lands a major book contract or is in sufficient demand to command significant honoraria for speaking engagements.

On the side of disincentives, there are several, some potentially career-crippling. To begin with, the more time an academic devotes to speaking and writing for the public, the less time she has to engage in scholarship and research—and it is the latter that gets you tenure and promotions, which helps explain why most public academics are middle aged, post-tenure, and possibly past their intellectual prime. Moreover, the myth of the ivory tower is anything but a myth: despite occasional protestations to the contrary, most academics themselves see engaging the public as a somewhat inferior activity, sought after by people who are vain, in search of money, not particularly brilliant scholars, or all of the above. According to Amitai Etzioni, after his death astronomer and science writer Carl Sagan was referred to as a “cunning careerist” and a “compulsive popularizer”—not exactly encouraging words for other scientists considering following in his footsteps.⁹

Posner also turns his analysis to the other side of the coin, looking into what sort of demand there might be for public intellectuals. He suggests that there are at least three “goods” that public intellectuals may be “selling,” and that therefore influence the level of “demand” for intellectuals themselves. Besides the obvious one, that is, presumably authoritative opinions on current issues of general relevance, there are what Posner calls “entertainment” and “solidarity” values.

There is little question that we live in a society in which entertainment, broadly defined, reigns supreme. The nightly news, not to mention the 24- hour news channels, are increasingly less about serious journalism and more about sensationalism or soft news, so much so that one can make a not entirely preposterous argument that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is actually significantly more informative than the real news shows that it is meant to spoof. As biologist Richard Dawkins lamented,¹⁰ we think that our kids need to have “fun, fun, fun” rather than, say, experience wonder or interest (they are not the same thing) when going to school or a museum. It is therefore no surprise that even intellectuals have to possess an entertainment value of sorts, although it is of course difficult to quantify it and its effect, if any, on the demand for public intellectuals. Such effect will also depend greatly on the specific media outlet: while there are plenty of TV channels and newspapers for which the entertainment value is probably close to the top of priorities, there are still serious media outlets out there (BBC radio and TV, National Public Radio, Public Television, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Guardian, The Economist, Slate.com, and Salon.com come to mind, among many others) where the relevance and insight of what the intellectual has to say are paramount.

We come next to the concept of “solidarity value” proposed by Posner. This is often underestimated, but I suspect it does play an increasingly important (and, unfortunately, negative) role in public discourse. The idea is that many, perhaps most, people don’t actually want to be informed, and even less so challenged in their beliefs and worldview. Rather, they want to see a champion defending their preconceived view of the world, a sort of ideological knight in shining armor. Blatantly partisan outlets such as Fox News (on the right), Air America (on the left), and the countless number of Evangelical Christian radio stations are obvious examples of this phenomenon, but perhaps the most subtle and pernicious incarnations of it are all over the Internet. The characteristics of that medium are such that it is exceedingly easy to customize your access so that you will only read what people “on your side” are saying, never to be exposed to a single dissenting viewpoint. While blogs, for example, are indubitably a revolutionary and potentially very powerful way to expand social discourse, it is also very easy to bookmark or subscribe by feed to a subset selected in order to further entrench, rather than challenge, your opinions.

All things considered, Posner’s arguments point toward a level of supply and demand for public intellectuals that translates into a larger number of them than probably at any time in history. But, of course, quantity is rarely an indication of quality, which brings us to Posner’s contention that the decline of the intellectual is a matter of lowered quality. There are fundamentally three reasons for this conclusion, all of which are circumstantial, as it is very hard to assess the quality of public intellectual discourse in any objective and statistically quantifiable way. We have already seen the first reason: since intellectuals are sought after at least in part for their entertainment and solidarity values, and given that neither of these is presumably related at all to the degree of insight offered by the opinions being delivered, quality is liable to suffer.

The second reason advanced by Posner is the inevitable march of academia toward increased specialization of its scholars. Remember that most modern intellectuals are academics, and they are successful within academia because they specialize in incredibly narrow fields of scholarship and research— since most of the broad ones have already been covered exhaustively by their predecessors. For example, the joke used to be that philosophers are people who know nothing about everything (they are intellectual generalists), while scientists know everything about nothing (they are intellectual specialists). But in today’s universities, even philosophers are converging toward the stereotype of the scientist: I know colleagues in philosophy departments who spend a lifetime publishing analyses of the work of just one (usually long-dead) philosopher, and often not a major one at that. Similarly, some of my colleagues in science think it absolutely crucial to invest many hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless graduate-student years to figure out whether an obscure species of mushroom is by any chance found also in Antarctica. This is the way it must work if one wishes to contribute something truly novel to one’s field.

Finally, there is the failure of the so-called marketplace of ideas, which Posner is one of the few to keenly recognize. The phrase originated with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote the dissenting opinion in the infamous Abrams v. United States case argued in 1919 in front of the Supreme Court that was a test of a law passed the year before that made criticism of the U.S. government a criminal offense. The law was upheld, and the statute not invalidated until Brandenburg v. Ohio, during the Vietnam War. Holmes wrote passionately about the safeguard for freedom of speech enshrined in the American Constitution, arguing that “the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which [men’s] wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution.” Holmes was correct in suggesting that a necessary condition for maximizing our chances to find the truth about whatever subject matter or for reaching a consensus on moral and social issues is to allow ideas to “compete” for people’s minds and hearts.

Posner’s point is that this is by no means a sufficient condition. There is need of a second factor in addition to the free marketplace of ideas, and this is that for the best ideas to win the competition the judges must be, well, competent. But the judges here aren’t indisputable facts that can be verified by anyone; they are the opinions of a generally badly informed and undereducated (with respect to the relevant issues) public. This is a public that has little time for the sort of in-depth analyses and research that would allow it to actually assess the contributions of intellectuals on their merit. Ironically, this is precisely why Chomsky says that it is up to intellectuals, not the public, to do the hard work of research and documentation. The problem, Posner suggests, is that the public tends to go by much less reliable proxies of quality, such as credentials (but, really, it isn’t that difficult to get a Ph.D., even from a reputable university) and the rhetorical abilities of the intellectuals themselves.

There is much to be commended in Posner’s analysis of the decline of the modern intellectual, and yet one cannot help thinking that it is somewhat self-destructive for intellectuals such as Posner to be so critical of their own role in society. A good reality check is a positive and necessary part of public as well as academic discourse, but an exceedingly negative attitude soon breeds contempt for intellectual discourse itself and a nihilistic dismissal of it.

A more positive approach to the analysis of contemporary intellectualism is perhaps provided by Frank Furedi in his Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? which starts out not with self-criticism, but with ridiculing politicians in charge of public education, namely, the then Labour secretary of state for education in the UK, Charles Clarke. Clarke characterized the idea of education for its own sake—the very foundation of the so-called liberal educational approach common in modern universities—as “dodgy,” which can be interpreted to mean anything from dishonest and unreliable to potentially dangerous. Clarke’s opinion is that the government should not support “the medieval concept of a community of scholars seeking truth.”¹¹ Along similar lines, former U.S. President Ronald Reagan infamously said during his campaign for governor of California in the late 1960s that universities should not subsidize intellectual curiosity.

Of course Furedi is fully cognizant of the fact that a liberal education, just like the idea of a fearless public intellectual, is an ideal and has never corresponded to a historical reality at any point in the past. But it makes a big difference in terms of attitudes and motivations whether we consider an ideal a goal to strive for or we dismiss it as irrelevant, outdated, or even positively dangerous.

While Furedi devotes some space to blaming postmodernism for the decline of intellectualism, a more intriguing observation is that intellectualism is on the retreat just at the time we keep hearing of a “knowledge economy” and when bookstores, book clubs, poetry readings, museums, and galleries are doing increasingly well, to the point of having a single TV show in the United States (The Oprah Winfrey Show) determining which book will become the next overnight bestseller. Yet this apparent paradox is actually explainable by the same distinction that Posner made about intellectuals themselves: quantity does not necessarily translate into quality. While bookstores are increasingly popular, there are basically only two or three major chains left in most parts of the United States (and at least one of them is rumored to be close to bankruptcy), which means that a small number of individuals wields a huge amount of decision power when it comes to which books to promote and which to relegate to the back shelves or even keep out of the store (and, largely, off the market). Winfrey, to her credit, has almost singlehandedly made the rather esoteric and somewhat snobbish idea of a book club one of the most popular activities engaged in by scores of Americans. Then again, some of her picks have been embarrassing, as in the infamous case of James Frey (author of A Million Little Pieces), who turned out to have made up large parts of his allegedly autobiographical story (Winfrey eventually challenged him on her show, but her initial response was that he may have been telling a subjective truth—a perfect postmodernist and nonsensical way of saving face).

Furedi identifies another culprit in the ongoing quest for the disappearance of the public intellectual: the assault on meritocracy. Americans in particular have always had a rather bipolar attitude toward meritocracy: on the one hand, the United States was established by people whose very creed included the idea that it is merit, not birthright, that ought to determine one’s fortunes. American bookstores abound with large sections of books written by successful people telling others how to become successful, and American CEOs and sports figures are lionized because of their merits, not because of their family trees. Then again, one of the reasons Al Gore lost the 2000 presidential election against George W. Bush is because Gore was seen as an “egg-headed intellectual,” obviously an insult, not a compliment.

Furedi’s take is that over the past several decades the very conception of meritocracy has shifted from a powerful incentive paving the way to a fairer society to an intrinsically anti-egalitarian and undemocratic tool of oppression. The reasons for this are many and complex, and they include the rise of new philosophies of teaching within education departments at colleges throughout the nation, as well as the recognition of the sociological fact that certain minorities tend to be at a disadvantage in our meritocratic system as presently constituted (this is not, obviously, a point in favor of biological racism, but a concession to the real difficulties in overcoming cultural conditions and in creating a true level playing field).

Furedi proposes the bold thesis that the currently entrenched rejection of meritocracy is based on two mistaken ideas: first, that a large section of the population is somehow intrinsically incapable of achieving high academic standards; and second, that this failure leads to mental distress, and therefore it is appropriate to substitute “feeling good” for actual results. This is a recipe for disaster, because, as Furedi puts it, “Rewarding merit implies treating people as adults, whereas magicking away the sense of failure is motivated by the desire to treat them as children.”

Think-Tankery: From Intellectualism to Spindoctorism?

Think tanks are now pervasive worldwide: according to Diane Stone, as of the year 2000 there were 4,000 think tanks active in nations across the globe,¹² and that number—very likely a gross underestimation— has certainly gone up since. Despite their number and prominent daily presence in the news, there aren’t that many sociological studies of think tanks, and even fewer critical analyses of their role in shaping public opinion. Indeed, there is not much agreement on what, exactly, defines a think tank to begin with.

For the purposes of this discussion, I will use the term “think tank” to refer to a specific kind of organization, namely, a private group, usually but not always privately funded, producing arguments and data aimed at influencing specific sectors of public policy. This definition, therefore, does not apply to most advisory groups established by a given government, nor to university institutes or centers, nor to groups set up to resolve specific problems within the normal operation of a corporation. Although I am generally skeptical of think tanks as a concept, and very critical of the operation of specific ones, I do not mean to imply that all think tanks are useless or pernicious, nor that the general idea cannot in principle be pursued in an honest and constructive fashion. But I am struck by how little critical evaluation of the phenomenon there seems to be, both in the literature on think tanks and more importantly by the media and politicians who are the primary direct consumers of think tanks’ output.

Donald Abelson gives a useful historical perspective on think tanks.¹³ According to Abelson, the concept went through four relatively distinct phases since its inception about a century ago. The first generation of think tanks appeared in the early 1900s and was the product of the preoccupation of a small number of rich entrepreneurs concerned with the necessity of providing sound, rational advice to the government at a time of increasing complexity of both domestic and foreign policy problems. Thus, people like Carnegie and Rockefeller provided large permanent endowments to these groups, which made them essentially independent from government support (and, therefore, influence) as well as freed them from the necessity of continuously raising private money (again emancipating them from possible leverage by their donors).

That is how groups like the Brookings Institution and the Russell Sage Foundation came about. They operated according to a model of a “university without students,” attracting scholars from across the political spectrum, sharing the ideal (if not necessarily the practice) that reason reaches across ideologies. The results of these efforts were significant in shaping American society during most of the 20th Century, for example, producing a national budget system as well as studies on the causes of warfare.

The second phase of think tank history began after World War II, when the government realized the importance of supporting scientific research because of its obvious relevance to all things military. The National Science Foundation (not a think tank) was established then, and so were think tanks like the RAND (Research and Analysis) Corporation. This is the first worrisome development in the evolution of think-tankery, since it obviously created a direct link between the funding source (in this case the government) and the recipient of research outcomes and policy advice (also the government), thus violating the intentions of the people who established the first think tanks earlier in the century.

Be that as it may, a few decades later we witness another change in concept, with the appearance in the 1970s and 1980s of what Abelson calls “advocacy think tanks.” These are groups like the progressive Institute for Policy Studies and the Center for American Progress, the libertarian Cato Institute, and the conservative Heritage Foundation. These think tanks tend to be significantly smaller than their predecessors, are dependent on continuous support by a large number of relatively small donors, and, more importantly, they often (though not always) blatantly blur the lines between research and advocacy. It is hard to read a “report” from some of these outlets and not think that their “conclusions” were actually the premises from which the whole exercise started, a definite departure from the model of a university—with or without students.

This is apparently an open secret, as the director of a major policy institute told Abelson: “[Think tanks] are tax-exempt cowboys defying the sheriff with their political manipulations. They don’t want to stimulate public dialogue, they’re out to impose their own monologue.”¹⁴ Or as Leila Hudson put it: “These institutions have substituted strategy for discipline, ideological litmus tests for peer review, tactics and technology for cultures and history, policy for research and pedagogy, and hypotheticals for empiricals.”¹⁵ Another problem intrinsic to the modus operandi of think tanks was best summarized by an anonymous official quoted in an article entitled “On Mediators: Intellectuals and the Ideas Trade in the Knowledge Society,” by Thomas Osborne: “One of the dilemmas of think tankery is that you can either say something sensible, practical and useful and have six civil servants and their dog read it, or you can say something spectacularly silly and have the media cover it.”¹⁶ None of these quotes sounds exactly like ringing endorsements of the idea of think tanks.

The last development in think tank evolution is what Abelson calls “vanity think tanks.” These are even smaller and more ephemeral operations, often set up by individuals in pursuit of short-term political goals, like Ross Perot’s United We Stand or Newt Gingrich’s Progress and Freedom Foundation. I will not examine these any further because they are only marginally relevant to science, if at all, although they have demonstrated their ability to affect the outcome of elections, and therefore— indirectly—to influence science funding and education.

What has this to do with science? It is think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute that have the gall to bribe scientists so that they speak critically of reports about global warming, and it is the anti-evolution Discovery Institute, a think tank out of Seattle, that is guided by a mandate founded on “a belief in God-given reason and the permanency of human nature,” rather than on the serious examination of scientific theories such as evolution.

Alina Gildiner goes into some detail about how think-tankery concerning science dovetails into spindoctoring rather than rigorous analysis of the problem at hand.¹⁷ Gildiner quotes Laura Jones, whose edited book on risk management has been published by a think tank, the Fraser Institute, as stating—without any data to back the claim up— that “zealous anti-risk activists have heightened our intolerance for small risks,” such as the number of deaths resulting from wheels detaching from transport trucks that were poorly maintained (in Canada, government regulation lowered that number from 215 in 1997 to 86 in 2000, and of course the statistics do not include people who got injured, sometimes seriously, from collisions with the errant wheels). Another “exaggerated risk” discussed by Jones’s authors is the connection between secondhand smoking and cancer. Indeed, the spindoctoring goes so far as taking a judge’s decision to rescind the Environmental Protection Agency’s rule that acknowledged secondhand smoke as a carcinogen— a legalistic decision based on procedural matters— as “evidence” that the claim is scientifically unfounded.

While commenting on another book, written by authors Robert Lichter (president of the think tank Center for Media and Public Affairs and a paid consultant for Fox News) and Stanley Rothman (director of yet another think tank, the Center for the Study of Social and Political Change), Gildiner comments that one would look in vain for nuanced discussions about what should influence public policy. Rather, “what is to be found is a rhetorical, agenda-narrowing usage of scientific language and methods.”¹⁸ For example, Lichter and Rothman comment with an authoritative tone on the link between cancer and air and water pollutants, despite the fact that neither one is a scientist and that their sources were almost 20 years out of date. Science progresses; ideologies tend to linger unchanged (and often unquestioned).

One doesn’t really need to read technical articles about think tanks to get a good idea of what many (again, not all) of them are about. Take a look at the Web site of, for example, the Cato Institute (cato.org) and examine their timeline of actions and publications; it speaks for itself. In 1992 they published Sound and Fury: The Science and Politics of Global Warming, in which they state that “there is neither theoretical nor empirical evidence for a catastrophic greenhouse effect and thus no case for what Vice President Al Gore calls a ‘wrenching transformation’ of the American economy.” The following year, they produced Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse and Apocalypse Not: Science, Economics, and Environmentalism. Jump to 2000 and you will find The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air about Global Warming. Is there a common thread here?

Or visit the even more obviously slanted site of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which the Wall Street Journal named (without a trace of irony) “the best environmental think tank in the country.” One of their “scholars,” Robert J. Smith, proudly proposed the rather questionable concept of “free-market environmentalism,” and accordingly CEI was among the first organizations to criticize, back in 1990, the Clean Air Act amendments because they would “impose a new regulatory burden that would lead to higher energy prices” (perhaps, but would they make our air cleaner and our quality of life better?). There is more: CEI in 1992 “advised” the Food and Drug Administration to approve recombinant bovine somatotropin, which is a bioengineered growth hormone. Now surely such a recommendation would be accompanied by the further suggestion of labeling the resulting products so that consumer choice—that ultimate driver of market forces— could be openly exercised? Think again: the CEI argued that mandatory labeling of dairy products is “inappropriate” because it violates the First Amendment (which includes the right to free speech—of the cows?).

In 1996 the CEI folks outdid themselves, launching their Communications Project “with the aim of showing how ‘values-based’ communications strategies can help claim the moral high-ground for our side, by making the case that capitalism is not only efficient, but also fair and moral.”¹⁹ If this isn’t a frank admission that the CEI isn’t at all in the business of research but squarely in that of advocacy, it’s hard to imagine what is. Moreover, in 1999 CEI published a monograph arguing that the dumping (not their term) of trash in low-income rural communities in Virginia is actually good for those communities’ economies. One wonders how many fellows of the Competitive Enterprise Institute live in such communities. As recently as 2001 CEI helped persuade the Bush administration (which surely did not need much convincing on this issue) not to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, despite the fact that the gas is universally recognized by scientists as the major contributor to the greenhouse effect. In 2002, CEI won a lawsuit against the FDA in federal court, invalidating the 1998 Pediatric Rule requiring drug companies to test some drugs on children, instead of automatically approving them for use on children if they had passed tests on adults only. To CEI’s evident chagrin, Congress wrote the Pediatric Rule into law.

In this age of global economies, the actions of think tanks of this sort go well beyond national boundaries: in 2003 a CEI fellow sent a letter to the Philippine president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, advising her government to “disregard environmental alarmists and to continue allowing Filipino farmers to grow bioengineered corn.” Arroyo followed the suggestion, with apparently no input from her electorate and with predictable financial gains by the bioengineering firms that support CEI’s operations.

Back on national turf, in 2004 CEI exploited the usually high-quality television program Bullshit! with Penn and Teller, normally devoted to debunking the paranormal. The target? Mandatory recycling programs. In the same year, CEI associates argued that living on a McDonald’s diet is good for your cholesterol and that there really is no reason to panic if one finds high levels of lead in one’s water supply (as recently happened in Washington DC).

In 2005 the Competitive Enterprise Institute pushed for opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration, which could cause a major environmental disaster with likely little impact on the economics of oil supply, a discussion that once again took front stage during the 2008 American presidential elections. In the same year, CEI filed a challenge to the constitutionality of the 1998 multistate tobacco settlement, while the following year they patted the back of the EPA for allowing human volunteers to be used in studies on the effects of pesticides. Finally, again in a spectacular admission that this think tank is simply not interested in serious research and scholarship, the CEI defended the right of op-ed columnists to be paid by interested parties for the spin they give to their pieces: “An opinion piece—whether an individual op-ed or a column—exists to promote a point of view by argument. It does not seek to establish a fact, but to win people over to a particular viewpoint or opinion.” Indeed, but the reader usually assumes—wrongly, as it turns out—that it is the author’s opinion that one is reading, not that of a government agency or of a private corporation that surreptitiously paid for what superficially looks to the reader like an independent assessment. Caveat emptor!

While there is clear and rather disturbing evidence of an increasing shift from research to advocacy in the sociopolitical phenomenon of think-tankery, how much influence do think tanks really have, and how do they exercise it? Abelson and other researchers have repeatedly pointed out that it is difficult to measure such an elusive property as political and social influence. Attempts have been made to compare one think tank to another based on quantifiable parameters such as the number of press releases they put out that are picked up by major news outlets; the number of media appearances, especially on television, of the think tank’s fellows; and even the number of cabinet-level positions filled by people associated with a given think tank. Of course this scratches only the surface, because political influence can go undetected when it manifests itself as indirectly shaping the views and policies of representatives and senators at both the state and federal levels. When social commentators such as Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly relate “facts” that they gleaned from thinktank press releases, millions of listeners or viewers will not know or remember the source, only the facts, which may or may not be true. How does one measure that type of think-tank influence?

Obviously, much more research on and critical evaluation of the entire think-tankery phenomenon is needed; meanwhile, the public needs to be wary of the opinions proffered by allegedly unbiased “experts” whose affiliation to think tanks is barely acknowledged by media outlets.

We have analyzed jointly the alleged decline of public intellectualism and the rise of think tanks not because the two are necessarily directly related (though to some extent they may be), but because they both affect the teaching and understanding of science in the public arena, and they both are at the very least symptoms of the kind of transformation of modern society that has had commentators from Postman to Chomsky worried for a long time. Scientists and people genuinely interested in science should be worried too.

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