A link from Tyler Cowen led me to this long blog article by Razib Khan, discussing some recent genetic findings on human origins in the context of the past twenty-five years of research and popularization of science.
I don’t know much about human origins (beyond my ooh-that’s-cool reactions to exhibits at the Natural History Museum, my general statistician’s skepticism at various over-the-top claims I’ve heard over the years about “mitochondrial Eve” and the like, and various bits I’ve read over the years regarding when people came over to Australia, America, etc.), but what particularly interested me about Khan’s article was his discussion about the various controversies among scientists, his own reactions when reading and thinking about these issues as they were happening (Khan was a student at the time), and the interaction between science and political ideology.
There’s a limit to how far you can go with this sort of cultural criticism of science, and Khan realizes this: he goes back and forth between stories about scientists fighting each other, to his own reflections, to the scientific findings. I’m not personally so interested in the details of human origins, but these details are needed to back up Khan’s sociological comments.
It’s unsurprising that political ideology and personality clashes are inextricably woven into social science. Consider, for example, Krugman’s disparagements of Galbraith (see here for an example) or whatever people have been writing about John Dewey, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, etc. The most notorious bit might be journalist Paul Johnson’s book, several years ago, arguing that left-wing intellectuals (or, as Johnson called them, “intellectuals”) were all a bunch of perverts. Or pundits making oh-so-confident but data-free assertions, backed up by editors who don’t know any better.
But ideology comes up in biology as well (even beyond this sort of thing). I came across this a few years ago when reading a book, Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond, by Ullica Segerstrale, which had been recommended to me by statistician/biologist Bob O’Hara. My reaction to Segerstrale’s book was that her description of the interaction between science and political ideology represented only a small part of the story, even in biology. Her story was nature vs. nurture, or (in my words) “the IQ guys vs. Margaret Mead,” without noting everything else that was going on. (See here for my further comments on Segerstrale’s book.)
One might argue the writings of popular journalists should be irrelevant to our thoughts about science (or even social science), but, as Khan makes clear in his essay, all of us were nonspecialists at one time, and, in any case, researchers in one area of science will commonly rely on the popular or semi-popular press to learn about other fields. (To put it another way, lots more people are learning about statistics from this sort of article on Slate magazine than from the blog you’re reading right now.) Sometimes a field gets lucky in its popularizers–I’m pretty happy with the influence of Nate Silver on popular understanding of statistics and political science, for example–but in any case we can’t ignore them.
P.S. In the second paragraph above, I was about to write “fierce controversies,” but then I realized this would be ugly journalistese (along the lines of phrases such as “the lion’s share”)–the sort of thing that people write but would never say. “Fierce controversies” indeed. What was I thinking?? I’m glad I caught that one before it came out of my fingers.
We definetely write about and try to persuade toward the things we believe. The best researcher is the one who investigates what they don't understand or want to find true. There are two things that could happen during this research. We can find ways to defend or change our own beliefs.
The "nature/nurture" debate is the one I'm most familiar with, and I've always thought its importance was overblown. Not that the question isn't important, but most people who come at it from a scientific perspective would probably agree with the following – "for most characteristics of interest there is a complex interplay between nature and nurture, disentangling the relative impact is difficult, and because both sides are complex there may not even be a meaningful way to quantify the 'relative impact' except in very specific circumstances.
Where the debate seems to get polarized is (of course?) where power and money enter into it. Public educators want more money put toward education, which is clearly nurture, so there is a desire to see the characteristics they are paid to impact as infinitely malleable, if only enough of the right kind of nurture is applied.
[I don't mean to be cynical about that – doubtless many educators see specific ways that more money directed at education would help them improve outcomes for their students, and are not primarily concerned with increasing their own pay – but clearly there is a great deal of money directed at purportedly new and improved "nurture" techniques, and I don't believe in the perfect selflessness of any group – even public school teachers.]
On the other hand, opponents of "big government" spending on education have an interest in emphasizing relative immutability. Though they rarely, these days, would relate this back to "nature" – it would come across as (and might even be) eugenicist and racist, and so would be off limits even if the science clearly backed that position. Of course, given the complex relationship at play, things are rarely that clear anyway, so perhaps the point is moot.
In any case, the point I was making is that the "debate" seems to stem primarily from those with a vested interest in the extent to which policy-makers see one side or the other as being right, not the biologists, anthropologists, psychologists, statisticians, and so on actually grappling with the question.
That was a VERY long blog you were writting about! The cool thing about statisticians, most of us have very different backgrounds. Our contributions to the sciences must be as unbiased as possible. One of his graphs linking different varieties of hominids reminded me of a clustering/classification procedure in multidimensional statistics. I wonder if this was some type of nearest neighbors procedure?
I'm confused by the Krugman link. Lots of Paul's stuff is pure ideology, but his take on Galbraith seems pretty accurate to me. His first para seems pretty sensible (if you want to be liberal, don't be naive about it) and his suggestion that JKG is a little out of it is — what shall I say? — true. JKG was always more a journalist/writer than economist, which is fine, but to paraphrase one of your other comments, he's no Nate Silver.
See esp the alt-text:
http://xkcd.org/836/
Dkb:
I'm not saying Krugman's wrong (or right) in his critique of Galbraith, I'm just saying that political ideology and personality are woven into the critique. It wasn't enough for Krugman to simply disagree with Galbraith, he also had to put the guy down, to claim that Galbraith had "a deep-seated unwillingness to face up to uncomfortable reality" and to suggest the possibility that "this vision is typical of liberal intellectuals."
"His first para seems pretty sensible (if you want to be liberal, don't be naive about it)"
How about wanting to be a naive liberal? These politics as identity preferences seem arbitrary to me, although I'm sure they don't arise arbitrarily, they all seem removed from more reasonable systemic goals focused explicitly on persistence.