Our institutions are instrumental in shaping society and ultimately our history. But how trustworthy are the proclamations? Can we trust "The Science"?
Notes From The Past is interested in the psychology of the characters who shape our history. Occasionally we will present you with "Notes On The Mind" to present some of what goes on in the collective and individual minds of history makers. Kicking it off with this exploration of institution's claims on truth, primarily sourced from the book, The Matter With Things1, by Iain McGilchrist (a highly recommended read).
How do our great institutions discover truth and present that truth to the broader public? What influences are at play in our scientific communities and how reliable are the findings so often reported in the media? These are important questions to explore as the insights and answers will help us have a more nuanced understanding of how our society has been, and continues, to be shaped.
Iain McGilchrist, in his remarkable book, “The Master and His Emissary”, details the very different characteristics of the brain’s left and right hemispheres. They have quite different perspectives on the world, yet wonderfully complement each other, when in right relationship. The right hemisphere is adept at broad attention, is good at making connections so that we can appreciate the wholeness of dynamic structures and relationships that change over time, it is attuned to emotion, is empathic, intuitive and moral. In contrast, the left hemisphere has narrow attention, is good at deconstructing things into parts, and has an affinity for the static, decontextualized, inanimate and abstraction. Iain McGilchrist summarizes the two worlds of the hemispheres this way:
The brain has to attend to the world in two completely different ways, and in so doing to bring two different worlds into being. In the one [that of the right hemisphere], we experience the live, complex, embodied world of individual, always unique beings, forever in flux, a net of interdependencies, forming and re-forming wholes, a world with which we are deeply connected. In the other [that of the left hemisphere] we “experience” our experience in a special way: a “re-presented” version of it, containing now static, separable, bounded, but essentially fragmented entities, grouped into classes, on which predictions can be based. This kind of attention isolates, fixes, and makes each thing explicit by bringing it under the spotlight of attention. In doing so it renders things inert, mechanical, lifeless. But it also enables us for the first time to know, and consequently to learn and to make things. This gives us power. (McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, p.30)
The thesis McGilchrist proposes, based on this understanding of the hemispheres, is that the Western world has become increasingly biased toward the left hemisphere’s perception of reality. In other words, we are increasingly seeing the world in disconnected, decontextualized abstractions of a mechanical nature. A world ideal for a technologically driven bureaucracy, but little room for the broad experiential knowledge of individuals and certainly no room for ambiguity or the metaphysical.
If this is true, then we should see the characteristics of the left hemisphere’s perception in our society and very much in our institutions. And indeed, McGilchrist has compelling arguments that our education, our governments, and even our science, is increasingly biased toward the left hemisphere’s take on reality. In a world where science is held up as the great authority, it behoves us to examine the institutions of science and what they are presenting to the public as ‘the truth’.
Today, science is a vast and complex cultural activity involving many individuals, groups, and institutions with a multitude of influential factors and motivations. Sometimes these motivations are in the best interests of large corporations, governments, or whoever is funding the research.
When someone says, “science teaches that…”, or “Science says…”, they are referring to the authority of the published literature. All of the claims made in the literature rest on the authority of previously published literature, which in turn rests on even earlier authority, and so on. The publisher of a scientific finding is relying of the authority of others to build a case and present a ’truth’ – a pronouncement that has been curated by review, cultural norms and expectations, (and even financial interests) within the field. Science argues from authority. But how reliable is that authority?
One of the difficulties facing the scientific endeavours today is the highly specialised nature of each field. Often, scientists work in narrow sub-fields, many isolated and unaware of the broader picture of their overarching filed, or indeed the broad understanding of ‘the way things are’. This specialisation is a feature of the left hemisphere’s bureaucratic and myopic ordering of things and does little to nurture creative and new ideas. On this topic, polymath Arnold Toynbee calls for the demolition of the ‘interdisciplinary dividing walls’ and to be replaced by a structure
…not like a Western house, but like a Japanese house, in which the internal arrangements can be given any number of alternative configurations, interchangeable at a moment’s notice, because the interior is divided up by movable screens, not by walls that are ‘permanent fixtures.. (Toynbee, 1961, quoted in McGilchrist, 2021, p. 503)
Toynbee argues that both the specialist’s perspective and the broader bird’s-eye view are essential, complimentary and need to be in an open relationship of interdisciplinary conversation. McGilchrist really brings this point home:
In an era where not just every organ, but every organelle, has its journal, and in which the jargon of each speciality becomes increasingly intimidating to outsiders, there is little incentive to look beyond the boundaries of your own ever narrower specialism. Indeed, the way to get on is to dig deeper in the hole you are already in, not to look around you to work out what all this spadework is about. For that way lies career death: you will cease to be an expert – one who has been defined as knowing more and more about less and less. (McGilchrist, 2021, p.503)
This continual drilling down, becoming more fine-grained in technical descriptions of a narrow field, does little to reveal new truths and possibilities. It may refine and extend technique, and for the left hemisphere of the brain, this is an end in itself, but it is not necessarily advancing understanding and wisdom. In the scientific establishment, the audacious outsider, with an imagination and new theory or explanation, is unlikely to be accepted, even if a broader perspective is desperately needed. We have a lot of knowledge about things and increasing power to control things, but we seem to be lacking a corresponding wisdom about those very same things. Erwin Chargaff, who was a distinguished professor of biochemistry at Columbia and who’s research helped Crick and Watson discover the structure of DNA, says:
The World of science was open before us to a degree that has become inconceivable now, when pages and pages of application papers must justify the plan of investigating, ‘in depth’, the thirty-fifth foot of the centipede; and one is judged by a jury of one’s peers who are all centipedists or molecular podiatrists. I would say that most of the great scientists of the past could not have arisen, that, in fact, most sciences could not have been founded, if the present utility-drunk and goal-directed attitude had prevailed. (Chargaff, 1978, quoted in McGilchrist, 2021, p.505)
The ‘utility-drunk’ attitude is that of the left hemisphere – everything is about utility, but not necessarily directed by wisdom. Certainly not from a broad and creative perspective, but from this deterministic, narrow, goal-directed, utilitarian mindset for the sake of manipulation and control. Many scientists today have been reduced to technical specialists, dedicated to cataloguing tiny fragmented pieces of nature with increasing magnification.
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McGilchrist makes an interesting observation about the nature of academic institutions and their demands for scientific papers over other expositions of ideas like lectures and books. A paper is suited to the dissemination of data whereas a book, or a series of lectures, are better suited to the exposition of seminal ideas. The influence of most of the intellectual greats of the past have come through books where ideas can be properly developed, put in a broader context, and address a broader audience than the scientific paper. But for the career scientist books have little value. The scientific paper is the vehicle for advancing one’s career and so books, which take much time and effort to write, are not considered by most. In fact, studies can be conducted for no other reason than for promotion and tenure at universities – breakthrough results in a prestigious journal can lead to extremely attractive packages at universities. It is not scientific problems and solutions that is the goal, but data mining statistics to get significant results for a successful submission, review, and publication of a paper. Fraud in this context is rife in the ever-competitive world of academia. The ‘publish or perish’ pressure is incompatible with free thinking in what should be a creative pursuit for wisdom and understanding. Ideas and results get crystallised too early, there is no time to go both deeper and broader, there is no time to evolve the ideas – an emerging Gestalt easily evaporates.
This was not always the case and earlier scientific literature, both books and papers, were often written with both detailed information and broader understanding that any ‘laity’ could understand, for the sake of understanding, not a university tenure. There was the time and space to evolve ideas, to establish new paradigms. However, since the turn of the Century, this has, for the most part, been lost. Now, if you attempt to read a research paper that is not in your narrow field, you are presented with an intimidating wall of jargon, impenetrable to anyone but those in the inner circle. This ‘drift toward inaccessibility’ has been verified in studies on language used in scientific fields. But again, before this century, it was not like this. Scientific American held a vocabulary at, or slightly below, the level of a modern newspaper for 125 years (from 1845 to 1970) and before that time you did not need to be trained in science to read the contents. Now there is no real openness to outside examination and appraisal, the language barrier is that prohibitive.
A left hemisphere talent is the capacity to isolate a subject from its context and make assumptions about this object with total disregard to any contextual understanding. In a world where relationship and connection is as important, if not more so, than divisible ‘bits’, this decontextualising of things is problematic, to put it mildly. McGilchrist talks about neuroimaging in this regard. The experimental science of neuroimaging will often take the subject, the person, out of a usual context, do a scan, and then make generalisations based on that data. What is going on in a subject’s head at the moment of scanning may not be the same as when the subject is in a more natural environment. To make matters worse, functional imaging has the attractive capacity to localise brain activity and able to drill down to discrete areas of activity. However, the brain does not function in local modules but in widely distributed networks. Indeed, it is vitally connected and modulated by the entire nervous system and other connected systems which is difficult, if not impossible, to fragment in any meaningful way. The uncertainties multiply due to the complexity of the brain under observation. That is not to say we should give up on the endeavour altogether, but our interpretation of the data should be held loosely when trying to be definitive about an incredibly complex system like a human brain.
Can It Reproduce?
One of the supposed powers of the scientific method, and science in general, is the ability to replicate results. However, replication of results is not nearly precise as you may suppose.
Two of the best-known analyses, from psychology and cancer biology, found reproducibility rates of around 40% and 10%, respectively. A survey of 1,576 researchers across scientific disciplines published in Nature revealed that more than 70% of researchers had tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than half had failed to reproduce their own experiment. In fact, more than half thought there was a significant crisis in research reproducibility and only 3% thought there wasn’t a crisis at all. Yet 73% nonetheless went on to say that they thought that at least half of the papers in their field could be trusted, with physicists and chemists generally showing the most confidence. And although the vast majority of respondents had failed to reproduce an experiment, less than 20% said that they had ever been contacted by another researcher unable to reproduce their work. (McGilchrist, 2021, pp. 513-514)
Reproduction of results is not the only problem in the authority of scientific papers. It’s the pressure to cut through the ‘tediously luxuriant thicket of science publishing’ to find a place to be noticed and to get ever higher ‘impact factors’. Cambridge biologist, Peter Lawrence, suggests what you need to do to succeed is to
hype your work, slice the findings up as much as possible (four papers good, two papers bad), compress the results (most top journals have little space, a typical Nature letter now has the density of a black hole), simplify your conclusions but complexify the material (more difficult for reviewers to fault it!)…
The impact factor (IF) leads to unethical behaviour, there are several ways to artificially inflate the number, it’s one of those darlings of the left hemisphere where things are boiled down to a single number – high means the study is good and worthwhile, a low number means the study is not worth much. That isn’t the philosophy behind IF but that’s certainly how it pans out. The result is that the literature becomes impoverished of those papers that do not lend themselves to a high IF value (for example case studies in medicine) to the already saturated areas of science. And it’s also true that a paper being cited does not necessarily correlate with the paper being read. Under the great pressure to publish a lot of material means citations are not always verified – it has been estimated that only 20% of cited papers in the medical literature have been read! Amusingly McGilchrist reassures us that he did read the papers explaining the low percentage rates of cited papers have been read by the authors.
In the case of ‘open access’ journals the financial burden is put on the institutions submitting the papers and not on the reader. When authors are paying the bill, there is a new level of unreliability that comes into focus. Declining a paper is to decline a financial opportunity – so what is a for-profit publication to do? Publish! That’s what they do. In China, and possibly other places, you can even, for a fee, have your name on someone else’s paper!
Academic librarian at the University of Colorado, Jeffrey Beall, has been highlighting the problem when it comes to such commercial arrangements, listing 1,155 publishing houses being unethical and even predatory. His blog was closed down in 2017…
Facing intense pressure from my employer, the University of Colorado Denver, and fearing for my job, I shut down the blog… I think that since the advent of predatory publishing, there have been tens of thousands of researchers who have earned Masters and PhD degrees, been awarded other credentials and certifications, received tenure and promotion, and gotten employment – that they otherwise would not have been able to achieve – all because of the easy article acceptance that the pay-to-publish journals offer… Universities in the United States are far along in the process of corporatizing themselves and, in doing so, their public relations departments prefer that all university output be positive and aimed at attracting new customers, tuition-paying students. So if you are faculty member at a university and you publish a blacklist, you will likely face much opposition and even harassment from the university, despite assurances of academic freedom… Over the five years I tracked and listed predatory publishers and journals, those who attacked me the most were other academic librarians. The attacks were often personal and unrelated to the ideas I was sharing or to the discoveries I was making about predatory publishers… Librarianship slavishly follows political correctness and trendiness…
So how reliable is the authority of institutional science, and subsequently, how reliable is public policy that rests on such authority? It seems the authority of institutional science, that the general public has put so much faith in, could be overestimated by a large degree.
Since science is actually carried out by real people with all their complicated motivations, it is subject to all those human fallibilities, hardly peculiar to science, but from which science is not exempt. It would be kind, but wrong, to assume that no axes are being ground, and there’s no boss to please, no prestigious grant to justify, no publication dependent on the outcome and no previously published views to vindicate. The fiercely competitive empires of ambitious academics involve huge grants on which they, their acolytes, and often whole universities depend for prestige and income. Only a very brave foolish person will sacrifice a lucrative career by saying something unorthodox merely for the sake of scientific progress.
Such human corruption has nothing to do with the hemisphere hypothesis. But narrowness of vision, lack of creative and imagination, excessive confidence in one’s position and a tendency to get fixed in set ways of thinking potentially do – along with anger and denial when challenged.
McGilchrist, I. (2021). The matter with things: Our brins, our delusions, and the unmaking of the world. London: Perspectiva Press
McGilchrist, I. (2021). The matter with things: Our brins, our delusions, and the unmaking of the world. London: Perspectiva Press
Institutional Truth