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Balancing Science against nonscience

By Clark Nida

“Overstating the role that scientific evidence should have is most inappropriate when the stakes are highest”.
This Week: Editorials, Nature, vol 471, 10 March 2011, p136.

Does this admission herald the dawn of humility on the part of the scientific community as represented by the readership of Nature?

Doesn’t it rather counsel scientists to abdicate responsibility for presenting their findings with due cogency?

The editorial goes on to call for a balance of scientific evidence against nonscientific considerations when making policy decisions, as if the two are to be valued in the same coin. There is a distinct suggestion that scientific findings should carry less weight, not more, when there is more to lose, with application to the field of climate change.

An example is given: “It is legitimate [...] to acknowledge that man-made global warming is real, but argue that policies to cut emissions are too expensive to pursue. [...] When setting policies, there are limits to the role that evidence can have”.

Really?

Let us apply this conclusion to other domains...

Suppose a stretch of road is found by scientific investigation to be so deadly dangerous as to demand a compulsory speed limit of 15 mph. Are we then to concede the case for relaxing this limit for a sufficiently highly-placed company director, on the grounds of his urgent need to attend an important function?

And again...

What if I wake in the night to the smell of burning plastic? Am I to ignore it and go back to sleep, balancing the verifiable possibility of the kitchen being on fire against the pressing demands of a full night’s sleep in order to be fit for work the next day?

On the very same page I read about German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s condemnation by the scientific community for condoning plagiarism in his doctoral thesis by her colleague Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg. By saying she had “hired a politician, not a scientific assistant”, she made it abundantly clear that in her eyes a penchant for scientific dishonesty is no impediment to high office: quite the reverse.

Does she speak for all politicians?

Let me quote an eminent neurophysiologist, the late Professor Donald M MacKay, who may be said to speak for all scientists:

“No Hippocratic Oath may be required of entrants to the scientific profession; but among all good scientists there is a powerful sense of commitment to the supra-personal corporate aim of faithfulness in obedience to data. Members of the scientific community rely on one another to serve as trustworthy ’testers’ of their ideas. High ethical standards are inculcated in nearly all scientific laboratories, and unscrupulous go-getters, however successful by other criteria, are despised.”
D M MacKay (1987): Objectivity in Science. http://www.worldandi.com/specialreport/

In my day, the distinctive mark of a scientist was this: his evidence was based on observed fact, all others’ “evidence” arising from anecdote, opinion, commercial interests, greed, spite or sheer prejudice. These we may recognise as the non-scientific considerations in question. Let us collectively call them nonscience.

So when it comes to balancing nonscience against science, what rational grounds do we have for assigning the former a weighting factor of anything but zero?