point... counterpoint cont'd

Dear Bruce,

Leave it to a right wing Neanderthal like me not to find the April Fool's article from Scientific American you passed along delightful. Or cute. Or funny. On the contrary, I found it smug, self-congratulatory and, in the final analysis, sad. Sad, because these people are supposed to be scientists.

(I feel a rant coming on. Sorry.)

Scientists are supposed to care about the facts more than they care about their faith. But whoever wrote this precious little parody cares more about their faith -- and there's no other good word for it -- than about the facts. The fact that their faith consists of an incoherent pastiche of sophomoric leftist inanities (corporations are bad, they're polluting our air, warming up the planet, building dumb anti-missile systems, blah blah blah) doesn't obscure the fact that these are all articles of faith. They can call it anything they want, but it's really their religion... And, as is the case with the most witless charismatic Christian living in Alabama, they won't let the actual facts get in their way.

Let's start with evolution. Like everybody with half a brain, I believe that the earth was created about 3.5 billion years ago, that the first life was single-celled organisms, that dinosaurs died out millions of years ago, and that homo sapiens evolved from earlier primates. The only people who don't believe that are the truly ignorant bible-thumpers like William Jennings Bryan (a Democrat, by the way, who ran for president a couple of times) who put the date of man's creation at 4004 B.C. by counting up the generations in Genesis. People like this are hardly a worthy foe for Scientific American, any more than I would be a worthy foe for Michael Jordan on the basketball court. And yet the writers seem supremely pleased with themselves for having dispatched such a ridiculous opponent. They then go on, very unscientifically, to lump the intelligent design folks -- like me, I guess -- in with the bible thumpers, completely misstating what it is we believe in, and then making fun of it.

If they'd been interested in the truth of what the intelligent designers actually believe in, they might have read a little G.K. Chesterton, who (back when Bryan was prosecuting Scopes) allowed as how a Catholic like him found it just another sign of god's amazing resourcefulness that he should have created men through such an intricately beautiful system as evolution. But of course, the people who wrote this article have never read Chesterton, or any of the other religious people who think Darwin was a genius, because Chesterton was a practicing, believing Catholic, and it is an article of faith to the folks at Scientific American that practicing Catholics must be intellectual morons, because religion is just so, well, dumb.

Then there's the little fun-poking at pollutants, etc, which is really just a cover for making fun of the anti-global-warming crowd. Once again, global warming is a matter of faith for them. There's no scientific evidence at all that gas-guzzling SUV's and smoke-belching power plants or any of the other stuff they hate are contributing, even marginally, to global warming. None. Zero. Zilch. Yet, like the bible-thumper who just knows in his heart that Jesus walked on water, the global warmers know, in their hearts, that our profligate use of energy must be contributing to global warming -- even though no measuring system known to man has ever established such a correlation. But for the true believer, faith becomes fact... And the real facts be damned.

And, in my mind at least, that's really a shame.

(I won't go on and on about the other straw men mentioned in the article, like the anti-missile defense system, except to say I’ve just finished working on a film about a NASA project in which hundreds of people working for five years have sent a contraption into space to hit a comet 90 million miles away that's traveling at 66,000 miles an hour; and they think they'll be able to hit it).

But I do want to make one final observation, which may help explain my truculence on this matter: back in 1970, when I went to graduate school in Madison, the people in my educational policies studies program were told that part of our duties as research assistants was to tabulate a bunch of statistics on a desegregation project in Richmond. To the professor who had conceived of the project, it was obvious (i.e., a matter of faith) that desegregation was a good thing for everyone involved, even when it involved busing large numbers of students to schools far away from their neighborhoods.

Anyway, a dozen of us were put to work tallying questionnaires to see how people were actually affected. On the very first day of my job there, I was told that I wasn't expected to actually tally the real answers people gave, because they were far more negative than the professor running the project had expected, and if the real facts fell into the hands of the enemy, they would be used against what was so obviously a good thing to do. In other words, I was told that the facts didn't matter. It was the faith that was important. So I was instructed to change the facts.

I said I couldn’t and wouldn’t do that... even though I believed then (and believe now) that desegregation was a good thing, no matter how many parents or students were inconvenienced. I just didn't see the point of changing the facts to suit the faith. Didn't see it then, and don't see it now.

And thus began my fall from grace... And my long conversion from being a good Minnesota liberal to whatever it is that I am now.

Whew!

I guess the article touched a nerve.

point... counterpoint

Today my cousin emailed me the following article, with this comment: "Look at the delightful piece Scientific American dished out!"

An editorial from Scientific American:

There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by their accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican.

But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.

In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it. Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence. Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists by lumping them in with creationists. Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that's a somewhat religious idea. But ID theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed super-powerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells. That's what makes ID such a superior scientific theory: it doesn't get bogged down in details.

Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong.

In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions. Get ready for a new Scientific American. No more discussions of how science should inform policy. If the government commits blindly to building an anti-ICBM defense system that can't work as promised, that will waste tens of billions of taxpayers dollars and imperil national security, you won't hear about it from us. If studies suggest that the administration's antipollution measures would actually increase the dangerous particulates that people breathe during the next two decades, that's not our concern. No more discussions of how policies affect science either. So what if the budget for the National Science Foundation is slashed? This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and balanced science, and not just the science that scientists say is science. And it will start on April Fools' Day.
-- THE EDITORS --

(from the 2005 April 1, April Fool's Day, issue of Scientific American)