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Yves here. KLG looks at where “science” is today, using philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright as a point of departure. She has focused on how scientists actually do science, with “science” being a body of methods and knowledge that seeks to produce reliable results, as opposed to an abstract truth. KLG then considers the much-bemoaned replication crisis and efforts to address it.
By KLG, who has held research and academic positions in three US medical schools since 1995 and is currently Professor of Biochemistry and Associate Dean. He has performed and directed research on protein structure, function, and evolution; cell adhesion and motility; the mechanism of viral fusion proteins; and assembly of the vertebrate heart. He has served on national review panels of both public and private funding agencies, and his research and that of his students has been funded by the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and National Institutes of Health.
Science is losing (has lost?) its authority, and as someone whose professional life has been devoted to the study of biology, from the early evolution of animals to assembly of the vertebrate heart, this has been a continuing source of concern, perhaps bordering on angst at times. And I tend not have an angst-ridden personality – if uncertain outcomes are too scary, then one does not have the temperament to devote a life to attempting to discover what is unknown, however small the question. There is not a scientist alive who is not at least momentarily afraid to look at a final result after days, weeks, months, years of work. As it turns out, with a proper foundation, valid scientific approach, focus, and attention to detail, the answer is a happy event much more often than otherwise.
But many scientists and their various scientific establishments have lost the plot. What are we doing and why has this happened? Our plaint has been addressed by analysts of modern science such as Naomi Oreskes, much of which has been covered here before. Meanwhile, the people at large have lost their respect for a broad scientific view of the world, while the scientific established has doubled down on its view of what science is and, more importantly, what it should be used for. COVID-19 has certainly exacerbated this, but the problems are long standing, going back at least to the 1950s when a group of physicists or physics-adjacent activists began tunneling beneath the foundations (Oreskes). There can be no single “start date” for the effacement of science as a reliable, objective, and productive way of understanding the natural world, but I agree with the consensus the descent became unstoppable after the Powell Memo, when the future Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Lewis Powell wrote confidentially to the United States Chamber of Commerce about the perceived “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System.” As a result, it is not an exaggeration to note that any scientific result in conflict with the imperatives of the so-called “the market” has been rendered essentially illegitimate for more than 50 years. Philip Mirowski has covered this neoliberalization of science very well.
But there is more to this than the neoliberalization of science from the outside. Scientists have also internalized these lessons and have in the process forgotten what their profession can do. And more importantly, what it cannot do. Why? Scientists generally have an allergic reaction to the philosophy of science. And this is quite understandable. Most philosophy of science has been “philosophy of physics” and most of it has been written in the absence of the experience of actually doing science. I am looking at my copy of The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934/1959) by Karl Popper (1902-1994). The book is well-known for the idea of “falsifiability” as the test of whether a scientific notion is scientific or not [1]. Yes. But all this really means in action is that unless a scientist can come up with good positive and negative controls for any theory, experiment, conjecture, model, or hypothesis, the question is one of metaphysics rather than science. Metaphysical questions are useful and important, although something for which the typical scientist has little use. But this might have been covered in less than 480 pages in English translation, including the index. Still, until statistics and probability take over, The Logic of Scientific Discovery is a very good read, as is most of Popper. Whether one agrees with him or not, he is clear and was open to argument in his long and productive life.
But more recently several philosophical approaches to science have been more useful. For me this began with the work of Mary Midgley (1919-2018), who has illuminated the often-rampant scientism of science since the middle of the 20thcentury. Two recent collective biographies place her work in context, here and here. She remains in print and a favorite short work is Are You an Illusion? An outstanding current treatment of science from an explicitly philosophical perspective is A Philosopher Looks at Science (2022) by Nancy Cartwright [2]. As she notes, the title of the book is not “Philosophers Look at Science” or “Philosophy Looks at Science.” Here, the perspective of one philosopher who has delved deeply into the practice of science throughout her career is most useful.
The common view of science shared by philosophers, scientists, and the people can be described as follows:
Science = theory + experiment
It’s all physics really.
Science is deterministic: it says that what happens next follows inexorably from what happened before.
This tripartite scheme seems about right in the conventional understanding of science, but Nancy Cartwright has the much better view, one that is more congenial to the practicing scientist who is paying attention. In her view, “theory and experiment do not a science make.” Yes, science can and has produced remarkable outputs that can be very reliable (the goal of science), “not primarily by ingenious experiments and brilliant theory…(but)…rather by learning, painstakingly on each occasion how to discover or create and then deploy…different kinds of highly specific scientific products to get the job done. Every product of science – whether a piece of technology, a theory in physics, a model of the economy, or a method for field research – depends on huge networks of other products to make sense of it and support it. Each takes imagination, finesse and attention to detail, and each must be done with care, to the very highest scientific standards…because so much else in science depends on it. There is no hierarchy of significance here. All of these matter; each labour is indeed worthy of its hire.”
This is refreshing and I anticipate this perspective will provide a path out of the several dead ends modern science seems to have reached. Contrary to the conceit of too many scientists, the goal of science is not to produce truth. The goal of science is to produce reliable products that can used to interpret the natural world and react to it as needed, for example, during a worldwide pandemic. This can be done only by appreciating the granularity of the natural world.
And in this, “theory is pointless if it cannot connect with the world.” Which leads directly to the correct notion that physics is not the queen of science. The “unity of science” based on physics has been a chimera from the beginning (e.g., William H. Whewell and consilience) , despite this (still common) trope from 1958 [3] on “the working hypothesis of the unity of science” as follows:
6…Social Groups
5…Multicellular living things
4…Cells
3…Molecules
2…Atoms
1…Elementary particles
Each level is related as parts (below) to wholes (immediately above), with ‘micro-reductions’ hypothesized to obtain between theories explaining phenomena at a lower and immediately higher level.
No. There is absolutely no evidence that physics can do anything of the sort. Science as it actually happens is not the “outcome of imaginative speculation about what it would be” if only we had enough computer power, including so-called AI in the 21st century, to answer the questions. Such naïve reductionism will get us precisely nowhere. It is scientism at its best, or worst. But still, too many scientists, and economists, think this way, and their poor thinking has consequences. Homo economicus does not exist except in the fever dreams of conventional economists. Social groups are in no way reducible individuals and then to multicellular organisms any more than cells can be reduced to molecules that can be reduced to atoms that can be reduced to elementary particles. Different physical and biological phenomena are subject to distinct integrative levels. Emergence is real and cannot be predicted from the “lower” to “higher” level [4]. And what has come before does not necessarily determine what comes after.
If we are going to apprehend the world in a truly scientific manner, we must transcend the traditional mechanical model of the natural world going back at least to Descartes in which politics and biology are epiphonema of quarks, atoms, molecules, and cells. Nancy Cartwright has called this The Dappled World (1999), the title taken from the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem “Pied Beauty”:
Glory be to God for dappled things —
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced — fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
This is the proper representation of the natural world, which is not deterministic. Nor is the role of science to make it so. Which brings us to a second book from 2022 by Nancy Cartwright and four coauthors: The Tangle of Science: Reliability Beyond Method, Rigour, and Objectivity (2022). Here is a brief summary of science as a tangle [5] which will raise hackles throughout the world of science, to the extent anyone consumed with rolling the grant boulder uphill will notice:
There is no scientific method [6]. Anything general enough to cover the vast array of what is normally categorized as science is too vague to do serious work (this has often been noted)…Demarcating what is and is not scientific method or marking out sets of peculiarly scientific methods is a mistake, contrary to the openness of inquiry that makes for credibility and scientific advance. Worse, the hunt for scientific method is…tied to the task of theory confirmation, ignoring how the reliability of all other products essential to science is to be secured.
Rigor is altogether the wrong notion. It is a virtue but it cannot deliver much. What can be established rigorously is narrow in scope. Nor do heaps of rigorous results add up to solid support, as many hope (in the case RCTs – randomized control trials – for example).
The usual notion of objectivity – the correct application of pre-agreed procedures for pre-agreed ends – is not good enough for science. The kind of objectivity that is needed requires that both the right procedures and the right ends be found – in tandem, case-by-case. (emphases in the original)
Although different responses to these tenets are certainly reasonable, the working scientist can have little with which to disagree here, especially considering RCTs. As stated in The Tangle of Science, “rigor is a good thing, it makes for greater security. But what it secures is generally of very little use.” And that “of very little use” extends to what are called evidence-based policy (EBP) and evidence-based medicine (EBM). The latter has been covered here before through the work of Jon Jureidini and Leamon B. McHenry (Evidence-based medicine, July 2022) and Alexander Zaitchik (Biomedicine, July 2023) and Yaneer Bar-Yam and Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Cochrane Reviews of COVID-19 physical interventions, November 2023), so there is no reason to belabor the point that RCTs have taken modern biomedical science straight into the scientific cul de sac that is biomedicine. They are practically and philosophically the wrong path to understanding the dappled world in which we live, which is not the linear, determined, mechanical world specified by physics or scientific approaches based on physics envy.
This brings us to consideration of the work of two scientists who are exemplars of our time. The first is Barbara McClintock, who looked at the natural world and saw its dappled surface in multicolored corn kernels and the dappled genetics that underlay them (see the photograph at the link to A Feeling for the Organism at the link above). As an aside, it was my privilege to meet Barbara McClintock at an international scientific meeting in Savannah a few years after she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983 for her discovery of “mobile genetic elements.” She was an interesting study for an apprentice scientist, especially one who views science from an oblique angle. When teaching genetics to graduate students I have used her research as a case study for those who want to actually discover something rather than add one more brick to the wall. The latter is the better career strategy, but with less satisfaction.
Barbara McClintock definitely went her own way as a geneticist, and by doing so she discovered “jumping genes in ‘higher’ organisms.” Conventional genetics had no answer for this at the time, but the field is now mature. Transposable elements are known to transmit antibiotic resistance between bacterial species and to cause cancer when genes jump in human cells. She saw that something unusual was responsible for changing the colors of individual kernels of corn in her experimental garden on Long Island. He unique view of genetics allowed her to go where her data and their implications took her. She opened a new world of genetics because she saw further than others, which was especially remarkable during the ascent of the spectacularly productive but largely reductionist discipline of molecular biology.
The other scientist is Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is somewhat more well known. Forty years ago as the incoming Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Fauci was a leader in the initial responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. AIDS was something new under the sun in the early-1980s, a fatal disease that in the Global North relentlessly struck down healthy young men. No treatment or cure was forthcoming and few were even imaginable at the time. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the epidemic Dr. Fauci maintained that the old way of proceeding was the correct way:
“At first, Fauci held to the standard NIH line that research need not focus on the immediate welfare of patients…it was clear…that Fauci was inclined to enforce the paternalistic medical tradition in which he had trained (keyword): Doctors and scientists were unquestioned authorities, and drug development had to follow a rigid process that included animal testing and rigorous clinical trials. Otherwise, the benefits and the risks of these drugs could not be adequately assessed…‘There was a feeling in science that doctors know best, scientists know best,’ Fauci said. ‘We love our patients, but they don’t really know what is best for them…’”
The point here is that in the face of a horrific pandemic Dr. Anthony Fauci heeded the call of AIDS activists to view clinical infectious disease as the “dappled world” it is rather than the traditional and conventional work-by-rote-RCT world that Dr. Fauci had been trained (keyword) to expect. Contrary to convention, Dr. Anthony Fauci:
“became convinced that expanded access (to novel treatments) would not compromise the integrity of the (RCTs) if the parallel track was limited to those who could not otherwise participate in a clinical trial…the activists knew they were facing a mercilessly lethal disease…Fauci, too, came to understand the severity of the crisis…‘everyone died…I was used to treating people who had little hope and then saving their lives…but with AIDS in those days I saved no one. It was the darkest time of my life’…faced with mounting evidence that his cautious approach made no sense, he did something few public officials do: he reversed himself. Fauci transformed from a conventional bench scientist into a public-health activist who happened to work for the federal government.”
In 2024 during another pandemic one can only ask, “What happened?” The Dr. Anthony Fauci who appreciated the responses required for the initial confrontation of the “dappled world” of HIV/AIDS had changed back to his former self nearly 40 years later when confronted, this time as the longtime Director of NIAID – America’s Doctor according to the New Yorker – with COVID-19. Instead of recommending the use of every avenue at our scientific and clinical disposal in an all-hands-on-deck public health emergency, we were flatly informed that we must “Trust the science!” This is not the place to re-argue the origins of SARS-CoV-2 or our ongoing responses to the current pandemic. The problem with this command is that there was very little foundation to the “science of SARS-CoV-2,” despite the large scientific literature devoted to COVID-19. A current analysis of the COVID-19 scientific literature is here [7; thanks to LS for the link]. As expected, the COVID-19 literature is quite the mess, and then some, also covered here in a short commentary. This was never true of the HIV/AIDS literature, and unless and until the biomedical community regains its footing nothing will change.
But there was a foundation in Big Pharma for a response that was unlikely to work from the very beginning. The short RCTs for the two initial mRNA vaccines claimed effectiveness in the 90%+ range. They were nothing of the sort, based on how the people understand “90-95% effective.” This means in the common understanding, “If I get these two shots, then I have a 95% chance of not getting COVID-19.” Would that be so, the pandemic could be largely a memory. We can leave aside, for the time being, that lasting immunity to coronaviruses through vaccination or previous exposure has always been a chimera.
Thus, in one of the most pressing and frightening pandemics in a very long time, we are experiencing the loss of science to an all-knowing and all-consuming scientism, which is all that “Trust the science!” really means. But there will be time and opportunity to change our approach to COVID-19 and any number of problems we face, when we once again support and practice science as it should be done, one problem at a time with great care while using a “nest” of approaches, techniques, and conjectures while not expecting a predetermined result. Nancy Cartwright and her coauthors point the way if our scientists and, probably more important, our scientific establishments will pay attention.
Notes
[1] I read Popper after my first course in Evolutionary Biology, during which my teacher, now a longtime member of the National Academy of Sciences who has made seminal contributions to the practice of evolutionary biology and to evolutionary theory, seemed to emphasize the fact that evolution was “falsifiable” every other day in a class that met five times a week. In retrospect this could have been due to the then, and continuing, controversy surrounding the teaching of biological evolution in the United States. On that, one can dispense with all arguments regarding the scientific nature of evolutionary biology by reciting this statement from Theodosius Dobzhansky: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” My teacher was in the second or third generation in the Dobzhansky lineage. Theodosius Dobzhansky and a half-dozen others were responsible for the Modern Synthesis of Evolutionary Biology. Emphases and perspectives have changed, but biologists are still riding on their coattails.
[2] Regular readers may remember this is a title in the Cambridge series that includes A Philosopher Looks at Work, considered here previously.
[3] Paul Oppenheim and Hilary Putnam (1958). Unity of science as a working hypothesis. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 2: 3-36.
[4] Digression: I once did not get a grant funded (well, this was not the only reason but it was a highlight, or lowlight, of the NSF verdict) because I referred to a paper published by A.B. Novikoff, who was a pioneering cell biologist before the discipline even had a name. The paper was entitled “The concept of integrative levels and biology,” published in Science in 1945. An anonymous reviewer was unimpressed that something so old would appear in a bibliography 68 years later, even if it was directly on point in a proposal to study the origins of animal multicellularity using model organisms existing at least 1.8 billion years after our earliest multicellular ancestor. Seems funny now, but it was not ten years ago. My average at NSF will remain below the Mendoza Line during this lifetime.
[5] The African jacana builds its floating nest from a carefully constructed tangle of leaves and branches.
[6] This does not imply that Paul Feyerbend’s epistemological anarchist approach in Against Method necessarily follows.
[7] As of 27 February 2024, PubMed has 408,186 hits using “Covid” (case insensitive) as the query in the short four years since November 2019. “HIV AIDS” returns 179,394 entries over the past 40 years. Thus is the way of pay-to-publish scientism, but not to condemn open-access, which all scientific literature should be. In the posthumously edited and published Dialectics of Nature, Friedrich Engels noted that quantitative change eventually results in a qualitative change. This qualitative change in scientific publishing has been thoroughly deleterious to science. Peer review has been the subject of numerous critiques; an example by Stuart Macdonald is reviewed here.
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