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Is academia becoming rattled?  Will the baby go out with the bathwater?
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220 114018 <3r54qp$3q4@kaleka.seanet.com> article
Path: ix.netcom.com!noc.netcom.net!news.sprintlink.net!kaleka.seanet.com!tadc
From: tadc@seanet.com (Tad Cook)
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic
Subject: Science & Pseudoscience
Date: 7 Jun 1995 21:14:01 GMT
Organization: Seanet Online Services, Seattle WA
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Scientists denounce pseudoscience, quackery, magic

(c) 1995 Copyright the News & Observer Publishing Co.
(c) 1995 N.Y. Times News Service


NEW YORK (Jun 5, 1995 - 18:54 EDT) -- Since at least the time of Archimedes,
the third-century B.C. Greek physicist who was slain by a Roman soldier,
scientists have occasionally had to defend themselves from forces anathema to
rational thought. Once again many scientists believe their backs are to the
wall, and participants at a meeting last week in New York resolved to start
fighting back.

There is growing danger, many said, that the fabric of reason is being ripped
asunder, and that if scientists and other thinkers continue to acquiesce in
the process, the hobbling of science and its hand-maidens -- medicine and
technology among them -- seems assured.

Moreover, many participants argued, the same cognitive disease afflicting
science in the United States and many other countries could eventually even
unravel democracy, which depends on the capacity of citizens to reach rational
estimates.

Some 200 worried scientists, doctors, philosophers, educators and thinkers
from around the country convened for a three-day meeting at the New York
Academy of Sciences to exchange views and plot strategy. Held under the rubric
"The Flight from Science and Reason," the meeting was organized as a call to
arms.

Defenders of scientific methodology were urged to counterattack against faith
healing, astrology, religious fundamentalism and paranormal charlatanism. But
beyond these threats to rational behavior, participants at the meeting aimed
their barbs at "post-modernist" critics of science who contend that truth in
science depends on one's point of view, not on any absolute content.

Participants deplored what they see as a growing trend toward the exploitation
of scientific ideas to attack science. They cited the physics of relativity
and quantum mechanics as pillars of 20th-century thought that are sometimes
distorted by critics of science into arguments that nothing in science is
certain and that mystery and magic have an equal claim to belief.

At risk is public trust in such scientific tools as statistical analysis,
controlled laboratory and clinical experiments, the rational analysis of
political oratory, and the study of history, anthropology and every other
field dependent on disciplined, rational thought.

Another weapon increasingly wielded by opponents of science, participants
warned, is the frequent allegation that fraud in scientific inquiry has become
so common that scientists cannot be trusted.

Dr. David L. Goodstein, a physicist and vice provost of the California
Institute of Technology, said that although fraud existed, it was not nearly
as common as critics of science contended. Goodstein, who has worked with
federal agencies in developing guidelines for defining misconduct in science,
said that from 1980 to 1987 only 26 cases of misconduct came to light --
involving some three ten-thousandths of 1 percent of all scientists receiving
research grants. (All but five of those cases involved doctors or biologists,
Goodstein said.) Excessive legal constraints on scientists, he asserted, can
"endanger the scientists' right to be wrong," hindering the scientific
process.

Although most medical schools discount the claims of chiropractors, faith
healers and practitioners of "alternative medicine," many medical schools lack
the courage to stand by their convictions, Dr. Gerald Weissmann, a doctor at
the New York University Medical Center, said.  "Silence is easier in
politically dangerous times," he said. "Medicine and science today are being
confronted by lunatics, fascists and the practitioners of bizarre magic."

Dr. Paul Kurtz, a professor of philosophy at the State University of New York
at Buffalo, contended that post-modernists of both the political left and
right denied that scientific knowledge was possible.  The result, he said, was
an "erosion of the cognitive process which may undermine democracy."

Americans have become fascinated by angels and "out of body" experiences, said
Dr. Wendy Kaminer of Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Mass., and seem to be
discarding the habit of critical thinking. It is in this environment that
irrational ideas take hold, she said, asserting, "They tell us, for instance,
that there is no death, only 'energy transformation,' and that science, born
out of speculation, cannot help us understand the spiritual world.

"The dissemination of pseudoscience, including such things as the fascination
with near-death experiences, the growing belief by Americans -- 34 percent of
them -- in reincarnation, and such books as the best seller 'Abduction: Human
Encounters with Aliens' by Harvard University's John E. Mack, are dangerous.
They help to break down the standards of reason, and that can lead to such
vicious doctrines as Aryan theories of race, and Lysenkoism." The term is
named after Trofim D. Lysenko, an agronomist who erroneously believed that
acquired characteristics could be inherited, and nearly destroyed Soviet
agriculture.

Organizers of the meeting acknowledged that it was not structured to give
enemies of science equal time; the latter have ample opportunity to express
their positions on television talk shows, popular books and in the press, they
said.

Among the writers sharply criticized at the meeting but not present were
Shirley MacLaine, the actress who espouses the certainty of reincarnation;
Mack, the author of the book about alien abductions; Dr. Sandra Harding of the
University of Delaware, who has argued that "value-free research is a
delusion" and has compared traditional methods of science to "marital rape,
the husband as scientist forcing nature to his wishes;" and Betty J. Eadie and
Curtis Taylor, the authors of "Embraced by the Light," a book about near-death
experience.

But despite their unwillingness to transform the meeting into a debate,
speakers were subjected to some verbal brickbats from a few hecklers in the
audience.

His fists clenched, Dr. Daniel W. Miller, a Brooklyn psychologist, stepped to
the microphone to denounce one of the panels. "This is not an objective
platform, and I've heard nothing but vituperation from the scientific power
structure trying to reinforce its own image," he said.  "Your medicine and
science are based on your presuppositions. I don't deny the utility of
conventional medicine, but you refuse to acknowledge that alternative
therapies may also be useful."

Miller's business card describes his specialty as "Organic Process/Past Lives
Psychotherapy."

Just as serious a threat to rational inquiry as paranormal nostrums, according
to several participants, is ethnocentrism and efforts by various groups to
rewrite history in the interest of raising self-esteem.

Dr. Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, an anthropologist at Wayne State University
in Pleasant Ridge, Mich., who directs a program to recruit members of ethnic
minority groups into the sciences, assailed what he said was the distortion of
history to enhance ethnic pride.

"A teaching aid widely distributed among teachers of African-American studies
asserts that African science developed along different and superior lines," he
said, in which the ancient Egyptians -- portrayed as the ancestors of modern
blacks -- supposedly led the way with their studies of "trans-material
causation," remote viewing, astrology and other forms of magic. Students may
leave such courses with the impression that ancient Egyptian theological
mysticism offers a more accurate view of the world than do the canons of
science.

But other speakers challenged the idea that education should take the blame
for superstition and belief in all that is supernatural or unreasonable.

"Take Russia and France," Weissmann said. "Both countries educate their young
people in science far better than we do. But the belief in magic and the
supernatural is certainly more widespread in France and Russia than it is in
the United States."

Dr. Dudley R. Herschbach of Harvard University, winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize
in Chemistry, spoke wistfully about opportunities lost in a series of
documentary programs broadcast recently by the Public Broadcasting System. Dr.
Herschbach and two other Nobel winners, Dr. Leon M. Lederman and Dr. J.
Michael Bishop, were the subjects of these three programs, called "The Nobel
Legacy," broadcast in April and May.

The three scientists sought to convey to the audience a sense of the beauty
and excitement of scientific inquiry, but in the broadcast programs, the
producers inserted frequent interjections by Dr. Anne Carson, a professor of
classics at Emory and McGill Universities who is a harsh critic of many of the
principles of science.

"I never met her, and I was sorry I couldn't engage her in a dialogue,"
Herschbach said.

Dr. Saul Green, who for many years was a biochemist at Memorial Sloan-
Kettering Cancer Institute in New York, declared that "it's time to get nasty
-- to launch a crusade against quackery." Patent medicines that claim to
"stimulate the immune system," for example, couch their advertisements in
pseudoscientific terms, he said, that impress buyers who are educationally ill
qualified to detect such fraud.

Dr. Gerald Holton, a physics professor at Harvard University, warned that if
science did not take some determined steps to protect itself, it would succumb
to the powerful social and political forces arrayed against it.

Referring to the government hearings during the Communist-hunting McCarthy era
that deprived Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer of the security clearances he needed
to continue as leader of nuclear weapons research, Holton said: "Oppenheimer
acquiesced in his own destruction. He said later that during the hearings 'I
had very little sense of self.' "

The lesson, Holton said, is that "the moral authority of science depends on
maintaining a good sense of self, and recognizing the need to act in self-
protection." The need for American scientists to act has become urgent, he
said.
--
Tad Cook         tadc@seanet.com  or  tad@ssc.com  or  3288544@mcimail.com
Seattle, WA
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