Root Privileges

Science

Are major science prizes a form of philanthropy?
The Association for the Advancement of AI conferred its ‘Squirrel AI Award’ on Cynthia Rudin, and Duke University – her employer – published a press release celebrating it. Here’s one para from the release:

“Only world-renowned recognitions, such as the Nobel Prize and the A.M. Turing Award from the Association of Computing Machinery, carry monetary rewards at the million-dollar level,” said AAAI awards committee chair and past president Yolanda Gil.

The press release also had a curious headline:

Duke Computer Scientist Wins $1 Million Artificial Intelligence Prize, A ‘New Nobel’
1. If a prize carries a million-dollar purse, is it like the Nobel Prize? Follow-up: Being compared favourably to the Nobel Prize is one thing, but aren’t the ‘Squirrel AI Award’ folks offended that the virtues of their award aren’t being considered in their own right?
2. If the prize money is so important, why did the Duke University release’s headline not say “A New Templeton”? (The Templeton Prize is awarded to work that harnesses “the power of the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place and purpose within it.” Pertinently, the prize money was first set to be greater than the Nobel Prizes’ purse in order to grab the world’s attention. See Q. 6.)
3. Does a prize have to be ‘like’ the Nobel Prize to be taken seriously?
4. What is the greater cause célèbre – the prize or the work that wins it? (Ref. 1: Cynthia Rudin in the press release: “I want to thank AAAI and Squirrel AI for creating this award that I know will be a game-changer for the field. To have a ‘Nobel Prize’ for AI to help society makes it finally clear without a doubt that this topic – AI work for the benefit for society – is actually important.” Ref. 2: Piers Forster in The Conversation: “With a Nobel prize in physics under our discipline’s belt, it gives me and climate modelling colleagues the credibility and recognition we have yearned for: climate science is real science.”)
5. Does a recognition need to have a million-dollar purse to be “world-renowned”? Follow-up: What does that say about what the world’s people in general consider to be ‘renown’?
6. Does Yolanda Gil, the “awards committee chair”, expect the award to be Nobel-esque and/or renowned simply because her employers have attached a million-dollar purse to it? Follow-up: Does this mean the award has nothing else going for it?
7. While university press releases are infamous for their hype, Duke University and AAAI appear to be colluding here to hype up the prize. Is this ethical from a public communication point of view?
8. As I’ve written about the Infosys Prize, what is the point of giving a million dollars to one scientist who is already succeeding at their work? Follow-up: As with the Infosys Prize, is giving already-successful scientists a lot of money the conventional way to make the prize more prominent?
(One simple and entirely non-drastic solution to many of these problems is to decouple the prize-money from the prize itself: give deserving laureates medals and certificates, and split and distribute the money less according to achievement and more according to potential for achievement.)

§

Awards as philanthropy?

Bill Gates & co. have made a name for themselves through philanthropy, more precisely philanthrocapitalism. On October 9, Julieta Caldas wrote for Tribune magazine that philanthropists’ “brand of social justice … follows only the imperative for ruthless innovation,” that they “refer to the act of philanthropy using the euphemistic term ‘giving’, which both obviates the need to concretely mention money and stresses the generosity of donors,” that “the philanthropic system depends upon [the poor] remaining splintered and isolated as subjects” and “represents, at best, a capitalism generously willing to help alleviate the problems it causes,” and that “their justifications are cloaked in the language of collaboration and listening, but their guiding principles are nakedly technocratic”. She concludes in the headline itself that “philanthropy is a scam”. Now, with regard to the last question in the list above: are big-purse prizes a form of philanthropy?

Unlike billionaires and/or their estates/foundations, it is hard – if not impossible – to accuse the Nobel Prizes, the Infosys Prizes, the Breakthrough Prizes, the Templeton Prize or any others like them of furthering a technocratic agenda by giving away their money to scientists working in this or that field. In fact, they may not have any agenda at all except to abide by the broad terms of the prizes themselves – or so it would seem.

For example, the Nobel Prizes require their laureates’ work to have proved itself, so to speak, in some way in the real world, to have been of benefit of society. Here, society’s composition, needs and aspirations matter because they determine what scientific work is valourised, adopted, allowed to scale and ultimately become profitable (not just in terms of money, although that has often been a necessary condition). The Nobel Prizes are not outside society, much less beyond it, as its prize-giving body seems to believe: contrary to popular belief, they don’t have to be any kind of watermark on scientific achievement.

In this context, awarding a million dollars to the recipients, whose work has by definition matured in terms of its application and appreciation to a great degree, glamourises their particular fields of study as well as lines of work and inquiry. And just as philanthropy of the Bill Gates variety perpetuates wealth inequality and preserves the socio-economic status quo, showering money on work that has already proven itself may widen a respectability inequality in the sciences.

Of course, most – if not all – scientists who go on to win Nobel Prizes didn’t start their careers or their eventually award-winning work thinking they would win the prizes, ergo not pursuing one question over another based on the probability of a future laureateship. But on the flip side, scientific work until the 1980s or 1990s is not what it is now. There is an important truth to memes about how Peter Higgs or Albert Einstein may not have been able to produce their greatest work today because they wouldn’t have had jobs or brought in a large number of grants; both these tasks have become astoundingly more competitive today, accompanied by concomitantly less secure, more fluid terms of employment. As a result, the appetite for more exploratory and potentially riskier lines of inquiry are unlikely to be funded or supported beyond the best-funded research institutes.

There is already some evidence that if the exponent of one topic wins a prominent prize, other scientists working on the same topic tend to become more productive over the subsequent decade.

Our longitudinal analysis of nearly all recognized prizes worldwide and over 11,000 scientific topics from 19 disciplines indicates that topics associated with a scientific prize experience extraordinary growth in productivity, impact, and new entrants. Relative to matched non-prizewinning topics, prizewinning topics produce 40% more papers and 33% more citations, retain 55% more scientists, and gain 37 and 47% more new entrants and star scientists, respectively, in the first five-to-ten years after the prize. Funding do not account for a prizewinning topic’s growth. Rather, growth is positively related to the degree to which the prize is discipline-specific, conferred for recent research, or has prize money.
Brian Uzzi et al., ‘Scientific prizes and the extraordinary growth of scientific topics’, Nature Communications

This is just tremendous. The next time anyone from a Nobel Prize Committee blames society for preventing women from winning its exalted honours, someone tell them that whom they award their prizes to may just be influencing that field’s success, in turn influencing the scientific output and knowledge that is available for any society to make use of. But more importantly (for this post), it doesn’t seem to me to be hard to imagine that Big Prizes have an impact on society that is quite similar to the impact that philanthrocapitalism has on society: to extend the lifetime of what has already sunk deep roots, even if the resources it continues to demand are more in need elsewhere.
Oct 12, 2021
‘Real science’

From ‘The most influential climate science paper of all time’, The Conversation, October 8, 2021 (emphasis added):

Manabe, working with various colleagues, went on to write many more seminal climate modelling papers. He set the foundation for today’s global climate modelling efforts. The physics was beguilingly simple so his models could run on these early computers. Yet, by being simple, the results could be understood and tested. His application of these simple models to the pressing problems of today was insightful.
After graduating with a degree in physics over 30 years ago, I chose a career in atmospheric science over particle physics. I always worried about how my applied physics was viewed by mainstream physics colleagues. With a Nobel prize in physics under our discipline’s belt, it gives me and climate modelling colleagues the credibility and recognition we have yearned for: climate science is real science.

The author of the article is a Piers Forster, a professor of physical climate change at the University of Leeds. The part in bold is an unlikely comment from a ‘real scientist’, quite in the spirit of Elon Musk when the latter said in 2018 that nanotechnology is “bs”. But while it’s disappointing to read, considering how it equates scientific legitimacy with winning a Nobel Prize, it may be more useful to interpret the comment as a reflection of how science really works: not by the isolation of facts and discernment of principles alone but also through social acceptance and the (maximal) recognition of one’s peers.

Oct 12, 2021
India and the 2021 medicine Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for 2021 has been awarded to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for discovering the receptors in the human body responsible for our ability to feel heat and cold.

Science

Central to the discovery of how we sense temperature is a chemical compound called capsaicin. Its technical designation is 8-methyl-N-vanillyl-6-nonenamide. It looks like this:

The vertices and tips are carbon atoms, a single edge is a single bond and a double edge (the parallel lines) is a double bond. Capsaicin belongs to the vanilloid type of compounds. These compounds have a vanillyl group – the ringed structure on the left plus the OH and O–C ends. Many vanilloids, including capsaicin, bind to a receptor in the body called TRPV1.

It is somewhat common knowledge these days that the first step of the novel coronavirus hijacking a cell in the human body is to bind to a receptor on the cell’s surface, called ACE2. Not all cells express the ACE2 receptor on their surface, but those cells lining the human respiratory tract do. Similarly, capsaicin binds to a receptor called TRPV1, which is expressed by cells of the central nervous system. And once it does, it triggers a severe burning sensation.

The Nobel Foundation has credited David Julius with discovering that TRPV1 is the receptor – encoded by the TRPV1 gene (gene names are italicised by convention) – responsible for our bodies being able to sense acidity and heat, especially noxious heat, i.e. a temperature that could damage tissue. This also means these receptors are involved in our body’s ability to regulate its acidity and temperature levels.

Julius, and others, did this by studying capsaicin’s effects on the body. All cells in the body have proteins called ion channels. These proteins are porous, and produce small electric fields that allow some ions to pass through their pores and in quantities determined by the cells’ needs. According to the Nobel Prize website, Julius discovered that the receptor to which capsaicin binds is TRPV1 (which is an ion-channel-type receptor). Once it binds, TRPV1 allows positively charged ions, especially those of calcium, to pass through, producing an electric signal that travels through the nervous system to the brain.

Democracy

Capsaicin doesn’t actually burn or damage tissue. Its contact with TRPV1 simply prompts the brain to react as if the tissue is being burnt. Of course, this will be of little solace the next time you inadvertently bite into a chilli.

But this doesn’t mean capsaicin is harmless either. The burning sensation is still a real sensation, and India has some dubious connections with capsaicin that highlight this truth, which is unfortunate.

In 2014, the then Member of Parliament from Seemandhra, L. Rajagopal, was quite opposed to the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh, which had yet to occur. But hours after the Lok Sabha passed the controversial Bill, Rajagopal stood up in Parliament and released ‘pepper spray’ from a canister into the room, triggering a commotion and forcing his fellow lawmakers to scramble outside. The then Lok Sabha speaker Meira Kumar called the incident a “blot” on democracy.

Rajagopal’s canister didn’t contain pepper, or even chilli, powder. Instead, it held capsaicin that had been converted into a resin, emulsified with water and pressurised into the can. In 2014, Mohan Kameswaran, a senior ENT surgeon in Chennai, had told this correspondent that “the spray contains an irritant that doesn’t burn but causes a reaction like a burn”. It can’t be washed away with water either. Kameswaran also said that “in people with conditions like asthma or allergic conjunctivitis, [capsaicin exposure] could worsen the conditions and make them critical.”

Another way capsaicin hurts is by causing the brain to respond for too long to its effects, eventually desensitising TRPV1 to the presence of capsaicin. At this point, the ion channel closes and the body begins to stop being able to feel noxious pain. Since pain is often a signal to the body that it is doing something it shouldn’t be, it is easy to see how being unable to feel pain could be dangerous.

Violence

Capsaicin is available in significant quantities in fruits of plants of the genus Capsicum. These fruits include chillies. The spiciness of chillies is measured by Scoville heat units (SHUs). The modern way to measure the SHU of a chilli variety is to directly determine its capsaicin content (it helps that capsaicin glows in the dark). Pure capsaicin has an SHU of 16 million.

Famously, in 2007, a chilli called ghost pepper, a.k.a. ‘Naga chilli’, from Northeast India became the hottest known variety at the time: it had an SHU in excess of 1 million. Such varieties are called ‘super-hots’, and ghost pepper was among the first to be found. And in 2015, scientists from the US reported something unique about them. As Kendra Pierre-Louis wrote for The Atlantic: “Conventional wisdom holds that a pepper’s power is concentrated in the placenta – the central core of the fruit that contains the seeds, otherwise known as the pith – and the thick veins that attach the placenta to the pepper wall. Removing the seeds, then, usually results in removing the placenta and veins, thus cooling the fruit’s heat.” But the scientists found that ‘super-hots’ also contained capsaicin in their fleshy parts.

The ghost pepper was of course a non-violent connection between India and capsaicin, but the Indian military establishment saw differently.

Specifically, it saw an opportunity. In 2010, Col. R. Kalia told Associated Press that scientists at the Defence Research and Development Organisation had found a way to pack capsaicin into grenades. When tossed, these grenades would release the substance into the air and disperse rioters or flush out terrorists, as the case may be.

In 2016, after Indian security forces killed militant leader Burhan Wani in Anantnag, unrest erupted around the Kashmir Valley. The security forces responded, among other ways, by shooting protestors with pellet guns, wounding and maiming thousands for life. The use of these sub-lethal weapons came under criticism.

In response, Lt. Gen. D.S. Hooda said a committee appointed by the Centre to look into alternatives was also considering the ghost-pepper powered ‘chilli grenades’. The committee subsequently recommended the use of grenades loaded with a substance called nonivamide, technically pelargonic acid vanillylamide (PAVA; note the ‘vanillyl’). Research has shown that though both capsaicin and PAVA are naturally occurring capsaicinoids capable of ‘activating’ the TRPV1 receptor, PAVA could be less potent – but still more painful than CS gas, the principal component of tear gas.

Official bean counters are always asking “what is the use” of research. Nothing makes a scientist happier than for her discovery to be useful to people. But sometimes science also becomes complicit in the ill-treatment of human beings.

The Wire Science
October 4, 2021

Oct 10, 2021
The Nobel Prize, its men and climate change
The sciences part of this year’s Nobel Prize announcements have concluded. These are the new laureates:
- Physics – Syukuro Manabe 🇯🇵 🇺🇸, Klaus Hasselmann 🇩🇪 and Giorgio Parisi 🇮🇹
- Chemistry – Benjamin List 🇩🇪 and David W.C. MacMillan 🇬🇧
- Medicine/physiology – David Julius 🇺🇸 and Ardem Patapoutian 🇺🇸
I have yet to come across a more overt vestment of faith in the notions of prestige and genius whose increasingly unjust nature does little to diminish its value than the science Nobel Prizes. I seem to repeat this like clockwork every year but it bears repeating: few seem to care that the Nobel Prizes overlook the achievements of women (and people of other gender and racial identities) too often for them to be legitimate markers of achievement. Yet they continue to be so. This year, I have one more grouse… of sorts. It is at the least a sad irony at the centre of the 2021 physics and chemistry prizes. The citations for four of their recipients, out of five, connect their work to climate change directly or indirectly: Manabe and Hasselmann (“for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming”), and List and MacMillan (“for their development of a precise new tool for molecular construction [that] has had a great impact on pharmaceutical research, and has made chemistry greener”). By awarding its prizes for these citations to no one else, the Nobel Foundation has found one more way to exclude women and others from our narratives of climate change. This may seem like a roundabout concern, if not too tenuous to matter at all, but there is something to be said about justice here – especially what we deem to be steps too inconsequential to achieving it.

Beating climate change won’t just require us to lower our greenhouse-gas emissions. More fundamentally, it demands that we abandon modes of social and economic development that privilege wealth accumulation and gender stratification, among other things. However, the Nobel Prizes seem determined to gather white men at the centre of our conception of how science works and/or progresses (and thereon to how we can “develop” or “progress” as a nation), to the exclusion of people who, simply put, haven’t caught the prize-giving body’s attention by publishing in high-profile journals, by collaborating with notable researchers and/or at good universities, or simply by slipping past the surfeit of biases at research centres around the world – from who can win grants to whose work is appreciated, from who’s selected for lucrative jobs to who’s rejected on the basis of ‘fertility discrimination’. And when so many people, including most scientists, kneel at the altar of the Nobel Prizes, they help normalise the marginalisation of non-white (and non-trans) men from the public imagination of ‘important’ science and scientific achievements. This point of view obviously banks on the hope, however misguided, that the Nobel Foundation could become interested in wedding its considerable clout to an agenda to improve the fortunes of those who are held back by society’s prejudices – instead of simply continuing to treat scientific contributions to be wholly independent of the people who make them, and the social circumstances in which they do. This irrational division only entrenches science’s myth of objectivity, and supports fallacious claims that leaving out everyone but (non-trans) men doesn’t deprive science, and its application to human betterment, of novel, valuable and more just perspectives.* In fact, the Nobel Prizes must strive towards this agenda, to echo what I recently wrote about the Bhatnagar Prizes in India: that these prizes “will fall by the wayside if they continue to fail to provide society with a way to recognise its members’ achievements without conforming to a view of science that became dated decades ago.”

But of course, few care. 🙂

* Aside: The Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1938 comes to mind. The prize-giving committee awarded it to Richard Kuhn in spite of his ardent support for Nazism and his shameful conduct towards his Jewish colleagues two years earlier.

Featured image: Gösta Florman’s portrait of Alfred Nobel, late 19th century. Credit: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Oct 6, 2021
Making a good drug

Priyanka Pulla has a new blog, and in her first post, she writes about her report in Mint on nitrosamine contamination in some Indian drugs and answers two follow-up questions she received from readers. One of these answers contains the following portion, describing what exactly a drug-maker needs to do to ensure a drug in question doesn’t have any dimethylnitrosamine (also shortened as NDMA).

To do this, it must invest in expensive apparatuses – maybe a liquid chromatography-high resolution mass spectroscopy system (LC-HRMS) that costs up to Rs 2 crore. Then it must find a skilled professional to operate it, and that skilled professional must develop an appropriate method to test for NDMA in the drug. This is because a pharma company cannot directly copy publicly available testing methods: each drug and formulation requires a custom test.

This is such a good example of how lack of investment in R&D and of attention to problems in higher education can affect our research output. Many articles (including some of my own) allude to such connections but we don’t often come across such clear examples that explain how, say, not being able to access a chromatograph or mass-spectrometer in the classroom or not specifically training students to devise new solutions to new problems leads directly to low-quality drugs that endanger the lives of Indians. Priyanka’s article as well as her blog post touch on the fact that investing in an LC-HRMS device plus a suitable person to operate it will increase the price of the drug, which would be anathema in a highly price-sensitive market like India – so drug companies cut corners. But simply harping on keeping costs low doesn’t make sense when, as the nitrosamine story alone shows, there are at least two more things we can do but aren’t: a) encouraging local innovation on laboratory devices towards reducing their costs; and b) extending state subsidies to manufacturers and their quality control practices, in a way that will improve access to and affordability of high-quality drugs.

Sep 2, 2021
Railroad to zealotry

“It would not be unusual for finger-stick testing to be met with skepticism,” says a spokesman for Theranos. “Patents from that period explain Elizabeth’s ideas and were foundational for the company’s current technologies.”

Vanity Fair received this statement from Theranos, the company entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes founded claiming to revolutionise healthcare but ended up being sued by investors, employees and patients for fraud, in response to a query from the magazine presumably asking about how/why Holmes thought her idea would work despite many medical experts telling her it wouldn’t. The idea in question: to use just a pinprick of blood from each patient to check for more than 200 conditions/diseases/etc. using a portable machine. In effect, Holmes, and Theranos, were attempting to shrink the blood-testing process, make it cheaper and more automated. It would have revolutionised healthcare if it weren’t for two things: the machine didn’t work, and Holmes/Theranos raised capital and made promises to investors, patients and US government institutions to the effect that it did. Holmes founded the company in 2003, reached great (Silicon-Valley-esque) heights around 2014-2015, and was dissolved in September 2018. Holmes’s trial began on August 31, 2021, earlier this week. Her colleague Ramesh Balwani is also to stand trial, and that’s expected to begin early next year. In case you’d like to catch up too, I recommend watching the HBO documentary about Holmes and Theranos, The Inventor, and reading articles by John Carreyrou (Wall Street Journal) and Nick Bilton (Vanity Fair) published between 2015 and 2018.

Towards the end, The Inventor dwells for a bit on Holmes’s state of mind: at a time when Theranos was besieged by allegations of fraud, conspiracy and knowingly subjecting its customers (technically, patients) to dysfunctional medical tests that endangered their lives, and when nobody believed its blood-testing machine, called ‘Edison’, could ever work as promised, Holmes carried on as if nothing was wrong and, in fact, according to people still at Theranos at the time, she exuded hope and confidence that the company was on the verge of a turnaround. She was clearly swindling people – diverting the money they’d invested and paid into supporting a lavish lifestyle – but seemed to believe she wasn’t. The Inventor offers (only) one explanation, that Holmes was a zealot: “a person who is fanatical and uncompromising in pursuit of their … ideals”. Without knowing more about what went on inside Theranos, especially since it’s downfall began, it’s hard to dispute this characterisation. (However, CNBC reported on August 28: “In a bombshell revelation just days before her criminal fraud trial, defense attorneys for Elizabeth Holmes claim she’s suffered a ‘decade-long campaign of psychological abuse’ from her former boyfriend and business partner Ramesh Balwani.”)

Until the end of The Inventor, and the stories by Carreyrou and Bilton, Holmes holds her ground that Theranos’s revolutionisation of healthcare is only a day away. If we assumed for a moment that Holmes really didn’t believe, in any corner of her mind, that she’d knowingly cheated people and had known that ‘Edison’ and Theranos were both part of one big sham, we’re confronted with some discomfiting questions about how we define our successes. Did Theranos conflate scepticism with impossibility – i.e. “this can’t work because the laws of nature don’t allow it” versus “this can’t work because it is disruptive”?

The Theranos story is about many things — one of them is that it highlights a highway Silicon Valley has built to its arbitrarily defined form of success that starts from one of the same points from which many success stories in the rest of the world, the real world but especially the world of scientific research, begin: “I wonder why that doesn’t work”. So it’s easy to get confused – as many journalists, investors and Holmes’s fellow entrepreneurs did – and to believe that you’re taking one highway when you may just be starting on the other. And I wish I could say the rest of the real-world highway has some checks and balances to kill bad ideas, and these the Silicon Valley highway lacks. Problems in scientific publishing, including and leading up to the replication crisis across subjects, would prove me wrong; in fact, these parallels are quite important, if only for us to reflect on why reputation-based measures of success exist. One of my favourite examples in history is that of Dan Shechtman, described here. A common example from India would be any institute that attempts to evaluate scientists’ application for promotion based on the journals in which they’ve published their papers, instead of the papers’ contents. A common and more global example: ‘prestige’ journals’ historic preference for papers with sensational results (over all papers with reliable results). And a more recent example: the Australian Resarch Council’s announcement last week that it wouldn’t consider preprint papers towards scientists’ applications for many fellowships it funds.

According to one of Bilton’s articles: “On the Friday morning that they gathered in the war room, Holmes and her team of advisers had believed that there would be one negative story from the [Wall Street Journal], and that Holmes would be able to squash the controversy. Then it would be back to business as usual, telling her flawlessly curated story to investors, to the media, and now to patients who used her technology” (emphasis added). Such ‘curation’ had allowed Theranos to be valued at $9 billion (her stake at $4.5 billion), count Henry Kissinger as a board member, Walgreens as a partner, a prominent investment firm as an investor and Joe Biden as a supporter.

This said, there’s still one big difference between the two highways: one has a better, if still quite inchoate, understanding of failure. Failure in science comes in many forms, but I know of at least two ways in which the research enterprise often ‘moves on’. One of course is retractions — and there are more scientists today than there were in decades past who are coming on board the idea that retractions are a good thing, not something to be stigmatised. The other is an increasingly deeper understanding of research fraud, the different circumstances in which it manifests, and the steps scientists and science administrators must take to prevent them from recurring. For all its lucre, the Silicon Valley highway in Theranos’s case didn’t appear to offer Holmes the opportunity of a graceful exit, so much so that it wasn’t a highway to success so much as a railroad to zealotry. That even when your product fails, you haven’t failed until you can raise no more money, until you can keep up the appearance of being successful and have a shot at being actually successful. This is also why Carreyrou, among others, has said: “It’s going to be a wake-up call for venture capitalists and young entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. If you go too far, if you push the envelope and hype and exaggerate to the point of lying, it becomes securities fraud.” It fails to surprise me that even ‘pushing the envelope’ – presumably a euphemism for ‘smaller’ lies – is okay and that it becomes wrong/bad only when it grabs the SEC’s attention (even when most of us outside the American billionaire class aren’t likely to forget the house of cards that was the 2008 financial disaster).

Hopefully Holmes’s trial and eventual conviction will be the moment Silicon Valley stops stigmatising failure, begins to disconnect the appearance of success from success itself, and ultimately allows companies to fail without condemning their leaders at the same time. And yes, I know how ridiculous such hope sounds.

Featured image: Elizabeth Holmes in 2013. Credit: US Department of Defence, public domain.

Sep 2, 2021
Climate: The US needs to do more – and India needs to, too

Shortly after the IPCC published the first installment of its AR6 report, The Wire Science produced a short video explaining the report’s salient points. It swiftly met with some backlash from some scientists, who were miffed that the video spoke about India reducing its carbon dioxide emissions without emphasising that the US and many European nations needed to commit to greater reductions than others.

I’m wary that repeatedly stressing that point could lead to a mindset that if the US, the UK, Germany, etc. don’t reduce their emissions, India has a free-pass to not reduce its emissions either. From a bird’s eye view, this ‘free pass’ might seem like a distant possibility considering, according to Climate Action Tracker, India is on course to do its bit to keep the world’s average surface temperature increase below 2º C over pre-industrial levels – the Paris Agreement line. However, there are two issues here that should dispel this sense of satiation.

First, climate change will affect India more than it will affect most other countries, and what India needs to do to stave off the worst of these effects is not something Climate Action Tracker or any other global monitor measures. Second, ‘they are not doing it, so we won’t either’ is a not-so-distant possibility because it has already turned up in some narratives – but especially ones concerned with getting people out of poverty.

The latter, we are told, is a carbon-intensive exercise, but we must also consider how and to whom the benefits of such development accrue, considering arguments that India should be allowed to emit some more carbon dioxide for some more time typically emerge when a hydrocarbon extraction project in Tamil Nadu, a transshipment project in Nicobar, an iron-ore mine in Goa, a railway line in Maharashtra, an oil pipeline or sand-mine in Assam, a solar-power plant in Rajasthan or a diamond-mine in Bundelkhand is at stake.

As M. Rajshekhar has written in Seminar, one big difference between the UPA I/II and the BJP I/II governments is that the former was corrupt and sought profits, while the latter is corrupt and seeks rent. Under the BJP, Adani, Reliance, Essar and a few other corporate groups have benefited inordinately to the exclusion of most others, as a result oligopolising a swathe of the country’s natural resources, including forests, mountains, water bodies and non-agricultural land. This is not sustainable development and can’t possibly lead to it either.

In this sense, Rajshekhar wrote for CarbonCopy, “the country’s inability to lift its people out of poverty shouldn’t become an unlimited pass to pump greenhouse gases into the air.” That is, if eliminating poverty is taking the form of allowing Adani, Reliance, Essar, etc. to pad their bottom lines by building roads, airports and railway tracks (often to the rejection of all ecological wisdom), then the emissions resulting from these activities don’t deserve to be excused. And considering the incumbent government has made a habit of accelerating and approving such projects, the added pressure of having to cut emissions is a good thing.

On the first count, that climate change will affect India more than most: climate policy expert Kapil Subramanian broke down the IPCC report’s predictions in three different emissions scenarios for the South Asia region, and found that “the 1º C difference in warming in South Asia between the SSP 2-4.5 and the SSP 1-2.6 scenarios is more than worth fighting for.” (This is the difference between global mean surface temperature rise of 1.8º C and 2.7º C.)

As examples, he discusses projected weather patterns – which we ought to consider as conservative ‘estimates’ – over India corresponding to the scenarios: more days of extreme heat, more flood-causing rainfall and longer summer monsoons, and extreme events that happened once a year likely happening 4-6 times a year. Climate Action Tracker or any other similar entities that take a big-picture view of India’s actions are blind to these considerations, to which India alone can, and must, respond.

So while emphasising that the US and some European countries should do more at every turn is important in some fora, we don’t have to do it at every turn all the time. Instead, we need to flip our own demands, bearing in mind that ‘cutting emissions’ – i.e. mitigation – isn’t the full picture. India needs to cut its own emissions, irrespective of how much the US, the EU, etc. are cutting, while transitioning to sustainable development (long fricking shot but we must demand it), and, on a related note, make its adaptation policies better and more just.

The US needs to do more; India needs to do more as well.

Aug 31, 2021
They’re trying to build a telescope

If a telescope like the TMT and a big physics experiment like the INO are being stalled for failing to account for the interests and sensibilities of the people already living at or near their planned sites, what should scientists do when they set out to plan for the next big observatory or similar installation at a new site? A new paper published by Nature on August 18, by a bunch of researchers from China, describes in great detail their efforts to qualify a new “astronomical observing site”. “On Earth’s surface,” their paper begins, “there are only a handful of high-quality astronomical sites that meet the requirements for very large next-generation facilities. In the context of scientific opportunities in time-domain astronomy, a good site on the Tibetan Plateau will bridge the longitudinal gap between the known best sites (all in the Western Hemisphere). The Tibetan Plateau is the highest plateau on Earth, with an average elevation of over 4,000 metres, and thus potentially provides very good opportunities for astronomy and particle astrophysics.” In the paper, the researchers explain their estimates of the available observing time; seeing with a differential image motion monitor; and air stability and turbulence and water vapour over the site – near a town named Lenghu in the Qinghai province (central China).

Such exhaustive detail may be common when it comes to qualifying one astronomical observing spot over another, but information about the mountain, the town, the people who live there, how they use the land, the cultural significance of their natural surroundings and – given that Qinghao is on the Tibetan plateau – if the installation of a telescope, if and when that happens, will be perceived as yet another form of colonialism by the Chinese state are all conspicuous by absence. I’m sure most readers of this blog are familiar with the TMT – short for Thirty-Meter Telescope – story: residents of Mauna Kea, where the observatory is to be built, protested and stopped its construction in 2014. Work resumed only in 2019 after a series of interventions, one outcome of which was that the international astronomy community had to reckon with its colonial history and present. Let me quote at length from an article Nithyanand Rao wrote for The Wire Science in 2020, about the “shared history” of astronomy and colonialism:

[Leandra] Swanner finds that for native Hawaiians, “science has effectively become an agent of colonisation”, “fundamentally indistinguishable from earlier colonisation activities”. This puts astronomers in a difficult position. They see the economic benefits astronomy brings to Hawai’i – over a thousand jobs, business for local firms and services and, once the TMT comes online, a promise to pay $1 million in annual lease rent — and their own work as a noble pursuit of knowledge. However, they encounter opposition that has charged them with environmental and cultural destruction.
“Unfortunately for the astronomers involved in the TMT debate,” writes Swanner, “whether they identify as indigenous allies or neocolonialists ultimately matters less than whether they are perceived as practicing neocolonialist science” (emphasis in the original).
Astronomers have attempted a counter-narrative, linking the contemporary practice of astronomy to ancient Polynesian explorers and astronomers who navigated using the stars. A concrete outcome and centrepiece of this effort was a science education centre and planetarium that “links to early Polynesian navigation history and knowledge of the night skies, and today’s renaissance of Hawaiian culture and wayfinding with parallel growth of astronomy and scientific developments on Hawaii island.”
Swanner notes the unequal relationship – the centre “merely grafts Native Hawaiian culture onto the dominant culture of Western science … Astronomers do not look to traditional knowledge to carry out their observing runs, after all, but the observatories studding the summit physically deny access to sites of sacred importance.”

The story of the India-based Neutrino Observatory is equally cynical, and equally problematic in a different way. When I commissioned Rao, and Virat Markandeya, to investigate the INO’s ‘situation’ in 2016, some four years after the Indian government had permitted its constriction, for The Wire, I assumed that it was being held back by bureaucratic inefficiency, as is so common in India, and a mulch of pseudoscience and regional politics in Tamil Nadu. But when they were pursuing the story, I learnt of a small but interesting detail: since 2010, India has required any agency that prepares an environmental impact assessment report (for a project that might damage the environment) to be accredited by the Quality Council of India. The INO collaboration’s report had been prepared by an unaccredited body, and this presented a stumbling block. Members of the collaboration – physicists – thought this was okay, just a minor detail, but to the people protesting the project, it was one thorn among many that they’d come to identify with numerous projects that governments have approved in India and which have overlooked the rights of the people living near those projects. And in the INO’s case, the principal offenders have been the Department of Atomic Energy and the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board, helped along of late by the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change. It struck me that people overlooking the little things was, for many of those at the receiving end of the new India’s ‘acche din’, a perfectly legitimate reason to suspect something was up. I’m bummed that the INO isn’t being built (and in fact could be cancelled, if the state’s new chief minister M.K. Stalin has his way – although I was confused when he expressed his opposition to the INO but his government had, a month or so ago, allowed the embattled Sterlite copper-smelting unit in Thoothukudi to reopen) but I wouldn’t have the project’s still being stalled any other way.

The problem is what counts as due process, and who gets to decide. As Swanner has noted, a bunch of astronomers “grafting” one idea onto another was for them the right way to go – but it’s of little use to the people in Hawai’i who are afraid of losing access to what is to them a culturally and spiritually significant location, in exchange for something originally conceived to benefit other people. (It was also quite ironic when astronomers were pissed after SpaceX’s Starlink constellation satellites began to obstruct astronomical observations of the night sky, and began to complain that the sky is a global commons, etc. It’s perhaps a greater irony that India – which contributes to 10% of the TMT collaboration – wants the telescope to be shifted away from Mauna Kea, to a different site, because of the threat of future protests – the same India that has almost amended all the country’s environmental laws to include a ‘pay and pollute’ clause.) The INO outreach team has insisted that it conducted regular and effective outreach among the people of Theni, the district in which the INO’s site is located, but they may have overlooked the wider environment of cynicism and bureaucratic dishonesty in which their efforts, and the public perception of those efforts, was couched.

Environmental activist and writer (and my former teacher) Nityanand Jayaraman told me sometime between 2016 and 2020 that at no time did the governments of India and Tamil Nadu nor the INO collaboration give themselves or the people of Theni opposed to the project the option of moving the experiment to a different location. When the latter group did demand that the project be moved away, members of the INO collaboration and other scientists that Rao and Markandeya spoke to countered that the protestors’ reasons were pseudoscientific (most of them were pseudoscientific) – but this was hardly the point. The protestors had no need to be scientific any more than they had to be guaranteed their rights and other entitlements. (It nags me that ‘solving’ the latter is a much larger problem than the proponents of one project could accommodate, but I don’t know what else I’d advocate.)

And now, astronomers in China have published a paper expressing their excitement about having spotted a new location at which to mount a telescope, themselves overlooking considerations of whether the people who are already there might be okay with it. As a result they may have effectively shut one option out. This is an important factor because, as Rao has written (see excerpt below), many people seem to think that Hawaiians’ resistance to the TMT and others of its kind on the islands is fairly recent; this is not true. They expressed their opposition how they could; the rest of us didn’t pay attention. From Rao’s article:

For a historically informed understanding of the conflict, we have to go back much further, to Hawaii’s annexation by the US in 1898, following which land was ceded to the US government.
In 1959, these lands – including Mauna Kea – were in turn ceded by the US government to the State of Hawai’i, which held them “in trust” for native Hawaiians. The next year, a tsunami laid waste to the city of Hilo in Hawai’i, prompting its chamber of commerce to write to universities in the US and Japan suggesting that Mauna Kea might be useful for astronomical observatories. This event coincided with US astronomers’ interest in Hawai’i as well.
And so the conflict between native Hawaiians and the American astronomy community began in the 1960s, when the first of the 13 observatories was constructed on the mountain that the former consider to be “a place revered as a house of worship, an ancestor, and an elder sibling in the mo’okū’auhau (or genealogical succession) of all Hawaiians.”
At the time, writes [Iokepa] Casumbal-Salazar, “there was no public consultation, no clear management process and little governmental oversight.” Environmentalists soon began opposing further construction on the mountain, arguing that the existing telescopes had contaminated local aquifers and destroyed the habitat of a rare bug found only on the mountain’s summit. …
Contrary to the narrative that native Hawaiians did not oppose the first telescopes on Mauna Kea in the 1960s and 1970s, Casumbal-Salazar shows how they did indeed express their dissent “in the few public forums available, by writing newspaper editorials, publishing opinion pieces and speaking out at public events” while also fighting other battles, such as those to reclaim their rights to land, resources, cultural practices — even the right to teach their children in the Hawaiian language.
They were also fighting evictions and resettlements in the name of tourism development and decades of the US Navy’s use of an island as target practice for its bombs. At the same time, the state’s dependence on tourism and militarism resulted in income inequalities and emigration. …
Similarly, native communities and environmentalists opposed the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, concerned about the ecology and “spiritual integrity” of the mountain. At the time the new observatory was proposed, Kitt Peak was already host to two dozen telescopes.

Today, moving the TMT or any of the other observatories away will be no small feat: they draw hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants and investments every year, not to mention setting them up took decades of work. To echo Jayaraman, not having any observatories here is no longer an option. And this is the same future the new Chinese Nature paper seems to augur: pick a spot, plan a telescope, and then ask the locals if they’re okay with it. If they’re not, tough luck. To borrow a few words from the abstract of Casumbal-Salazar’s thesis, it will become another push for a telescope “realised through law and rationalised by science”.

(I’m not sure if a lot of people got the headline – a play on the name of a song by System of a Down.)

Rupavardhini B.R. read a draft of this post before it was published.

Aug 19, 2021
PeerJ’s peer-review problem

Of all the scientific journals in the wild, there are a few I keep a closer eye on: they publish interesting results but more importantly they have been forward-thinking on matters of scientific publishing and they’ve also displayed a tendency to think out loud (through blog posts, say) and actively consider public feedback. Reading what they publish in these posts, and following the discussions that envelope them, has given me many useful insights into how scientific publishing works and, perhaps more importantly, how the perceptions surrounding this enterprise are shaped and play out.

One such journal is eLife. All their papers are open access, and they also publish the papers’ authors’ notes and reviewers’ comments with each paper. They also have a lively ‘magazine’ section in which they publish articles and essays by working scientists – especially younger ones – relating to the extended social environments in which knowledge-work happens. Now, for some reason, I’d cast PeerJ in similarly progressive light, even though I hadn’t visited their website in a long time. But on August 16, PeerJ published the following tweet:

PeerJ on "Rethinking Sound Science"

Read more on the blog https://t.co/y00dUpeXVR pic.twitter.com/nz6C08ZaRy
— PeerJ Publishing (@thePeerJ) August 16, 2021

It struck me as a weird decision (not that anyone cares). Since the article explaining the journal’s decision appears to be available under a Creative Commons Attribution license, I’m reproducing it here in full so that I can annotate my way through it.

Since our launch, PeerJ has worked towards the goal of publishing all “Sound Science”, as cost effectively as possible, for the benefit of the scientific community and society. As a result we have, until now, evaluated articles based only on an objective determination of scientific and methodological soundness, not on subjective determinations of impact, novelty or interest.
At the same time, at the core of our mission has been a promise to give researchers more influence over the publishing process and to listen to community feedback over how peer review should work and how research should be assessed.

Great.

In recent months we have been thinking long and hard about feedback, from both our Editorial Board and Reviewers, that certain articles should no longer be considered as valid candidates for peer review or formal publication: that whilst the science they present may be “sound”, it is not of enough value to either the scientific record, the scientific community, or society, to justify being peer-reviewed or be considered for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Our Editorial Board Members have asked us that we do our best to identify such submissions before they enter peer review.

This is the confusing part. To the uninitiated: One type of the scientific publishing process involves scientists writing up a paper and submitting it to a journal for consideration. An editor, or editors, at the journal checks the paper and then commissions a group of independent experts on the same topic to review it. These experts are expected to provide comments to help the journal decide whether it should publish the paper, and if yes, if the paper can be improved. Note that they are usually not paid for their work or time.

Now, if PeerJ’s usual reviewers are unhappy with how many papers the journal’s asking them to review, how does it make sense to impose a new, arbitrary and honestly counterproductive sort of “value” on submissions instead of increasing the number of reviewers the journal works with?

I find the journal’s decision troublesome because some important details are missing – details that encompass borderline-unethical activities by some other journals that have only undermined the integrity and usefulness of the scientific literature. For example, the “high impact factor” journal Nature has asked its reviewers in the past to prioritise sensational results over glamorous ones, overlooking the fact that such results are also likelier to be wrong. For another example, the concept of pre-registration has started to become more recently simply because most journals used to refuse (and still do) negative results. That is, if a group of scientists set out to check if something was true – and it’d be amazing if it was true – and found that it was false instead, they’d have a tough time finding a journal willing to publish their paper.

And third, preprint papers have started to become an acceptable way of publishing research only in the last few years, and that too only in a few branches of science (especially physics). Most grant-giving and research institutions still prefer papers being published in journals, instead of being uploaded on preprint repositories, not to mention a dominant research culture in many countries – including India – still favouring arbitrarily defined “prestigious journals” over others when it comes to picking scientists for promotions, etc.

For these reasons, any decision by a journal that says sound science and methodological rigour alone won’t suffice to ‘admit’ a paper into their pages risks reinforcing – directly or indirectly – a bias in the scientific record that many scientists are working hard to move away from. For example, if PeerJ rejects a solid paper, to speak, because it ‘only’ confirms a previous discovery, improves its accuracy, etc. and doesn’t fill a knowledge gap, per se, in order to ease the burden on its reviewers, the scientific record still stands to lose out on an important submission. (It pays to review journals’ decisions assuming that each journal is the only one around – à la the categorical imperative – and that other journals don’t exist.)

So what are PeerJ‘s new criteria for rejecting papers?

As a result, we have been working with key stakeholders to develop new ways to evaluate submissions and are introducing new pre-review evaluation criteria, which we will initially apply to papers submitted to our new Medical Sections, followed soon after by all subject areas. These evaluation criteria will define clearer standards for the requirements of certain types of articles in those areas. For example, bioinformatic analyses of already published data sets will need to meet more stringent reporting and data analysis requirements, and will need to clearly demonstrate that they are addressing a meaningful knowledge gap in the literature.

We don’t know yet, it seems.

At some level, of course, this means that PeerJ is moving away from the concept of peer reviewing all sound science. To be absolutely clear, this does not mean we have an intention of becoming a highly-selective “glamour” journal publisher that publishes only the most novel breakthroughs. It also does not mean that we will stop publishing negative or null results. However, the feedback we have received is that the definition of what constitutes a valid candidate for publication needs to evolve.

To be honest, this is a laughable position. The journal admits in the first sentence of this paragraph that no matter where it goes from here, it will only recede from an ideal position. In the next sentence it denies (vehemently, considering in the article on its website, this sentence was in bold) its decision is a move that will transform it into a “glamour” journal – like Nature, Science, NEJM, etc. have been – nor, in the third sentence, that it will stop publishing “negative or null results”. Now I’m even more curious what these heuristics could be which specify that a) submissions have to have “sound science”, b) “address a meaningful knowledge gap”, and c) don’t exclude negative/null results. It’s possible to see some overlap between these requirements that some papers will occupy – but it’s also possible to see many papers that won’t tick all three boxes yet still deserve to be published. To echo PeerJ itself, being a “glamour” journal is only one way to be bad.

We are being influenced by the researchers who peer review our research articles. We have heard from so many of our editorial board members and reviewers that they feel swamped by peer review requests and that they – and the system more widely – are close to breaking point. We most regularly hear this frustration when papers that they are reviewing do not, in their expert opinion, make a meaningful contribution to the record and are destined to be rejected; and should, in their view, have been filtered out much sooner in the process.

If you ask me (as an editor), the first sentence’s syntax seems to suggest PeerJ is being forced by its reviewers, and not influenced. More importantly, I haven’t seen these bespoke problematic papers that are “sound” but at the same time don’t make a meaningful contribution. An expert’s opinion that a paper on some topic should be rejected (even though, again, it’s “sound science”) could be rooted either in an “arrogant gatekeeper” attitude or in valid reasons, and PeerJ‘s rules should be good enough to be able to differentiate between the two without simultaneously allowing ‘bad reviewers’ to over-“influence” the selection process.

More broadly, I’m a science journalist looking into science from the outside, seeing a colossal knowledge-producing machine that’s situated on the same continuum on which I see myself to be located. If I receive too many submissions at The Wire Science, I don’t make presumptuous comments about what I think should and shouldn’t belong in the public domain. Instead, I pitch my boss about hiring one more person on my team and, second, I’m honest with each submission’s author about why I’m rejecting it: “I’m sorry, I’m short on time.”

Such submissions, in turn, impact the peer review of articles that do make a very significant contribution to the literature, research and society – the congestion of the peer review process can mean assigning editors and finding peer reviewers takes more time, potentially delaying important additions to the scientific record.

Gatekeeping by another name?

Furthermore, because it can be difficult and in some cases impossible to assign an Academic Editor and/or reviewers, authors can be faced with frustratingly long waits only to receive the bad news that their article has been rejected or, in the worst cases, that we were unable to peer review their paper. We believe that by listening to this feedback from our communities and removing some of the congestion from the peer review process, we will provide a better, more efficient, experience for everyone.

Ultimately, it comes down to the rules by which PeerJ‘s editorial board is going to decide which papers are ‘worth it’ and which aren’t. And admittedly, without knowing these rules, it’s hard to judge PeerJ – except on one count: “sound science” is already a good enough rule by which to determine the quality of a scientist’s work. To say it doesn’t suffice for reasons unrelated to scientific publishing, and the publishing apparatus’s dangerous tendency to gatekeep based on factors that have little to do with science, sounds at least precarious.

Aug 18, 2021
Engels, Weinberg

Dialectics of Nature, Friedrich Engels, 1883 (ed. 1976):

… an acquaintance with the historical course of evolution of human thought, with the views on the general inter-connections in the external world expressed at various times, is required by theoretical natural science for the additional reason that it furnishes a criterion of the theories propounded by this science itself. Here, however, lack acquaintance with the history of philosophy is fairly frequently and glaringly displayed. Propositions which were advanced in philosophy centuries ago, which often enough have long been disposed of philosophically, are frequently put forward by theorising natural scientists as brand-new wisdom and even become fashionable for a while. It is certainly a great achievement of the mechanical theory of heat that it strengthened the principle of the theory of heat that it strengthened the principle of the conservation of energy by means of fresh proofs and put it once more in the forefront; but could this principle have appeared on the scene as something so absolutely new if the worthy physicists had remembered that it had already been formulated by Descartes? Science physics and chemistry once more operate almost exclusively with molecules and atoms, the atomic philosophy of ancient Greece has of necessity come to the fore again. But how superficially it is treated even by the best of natural scientists! Thus Kekulé tells us … that Democritus, instead of Leucippus, originated it, and he maintains that Dalton was the first to assume the existence of qualitatively different elementary atoms and was the first to ascribe to them different weights characteristic of the different elements. Yet anyone can read in Diogenes Laertius that already Epicurus had ascribed to atoms differences not only of magnitude and form but also of weight, that is, he was already acquanited in his own way with atomic weight and atomic volume.
The year 1848, which otherwise brought nothing to a conclusion in Germany, accomplished a complete revolution only in the sphere of philosophy. By throwing itself into the field of the practical, here setting up the beginnings of modern industry and swindling, there initiating the mighty advance which natural science has since experienced in Germany and which was inaugurated by the caricature-like itinerant preachers Vogt, Büchner, etc., the nation resolutely turned its back on classical German philosophy that had lost itself in the sands of Berlin Old-Hegelianism. Berlin Old-Hegelianism had richly deserved that. But a national that wants to climb the pinnacles of science cannot possibly manage without theoretical thought. Not only Hegelianism but dialectics too was thrown overboard—and that just at the moment when the dialectical character of natural processes irresistibly forced itself upon the mind, when therefore only dialectics could be of assistance to natural science in negotiating the mountain of theory—and so there was a helpless relapse into the old metaphysics. What prevailed among the public since then were, on the one hand, the vapid reflections of Schopenhauer, which were fashioned to fit the philistines, and later even those of Hartmann, and, on the other hand, the vulgar itinerant-preacher materialism of a Vogt and a Büchner. At the universities the most diverse varieties of eclecticism competed with one another and had only one thing in common, namely, that they were concocted from nothing but remnants of old philosophies and were all equally metaphysics. All that was saved from the remnants of classical philosophy was a certain neo-Kantianism, whose last word was the eternally unknowable thing-in-itself, that is, the bit of Kant that least merited preservation. The final result was the incoherence and confusion of theoretical thought now prevalent.
One can scarcely pick up a theoretical book on natural science without getting the impression that natural scientists themselves feel how much they are dominated by this incoherence and confusion, and that the so-called philosophy now current offers them absolutely no way out. And here there really is no other way out, no possibility of achieving clarity, than by a return, in one form of another, from metaphysical to dialectical thinking.

Dreams of a Final Theory, Steven Weinberg, 1992:

Even where philosophical doctrines have in the past been useful to scientists, they have generally lingered on too long, becoming of more harm than ever they were of use. Take, for example, the venerable doctrine of “mechanism,” the idea that nature operates through pushes and pulls of material particles or fluids. In the ancient world no doctrine could have been more progressive. Ever since the pre-Socratic philosophers Democritus and Leucippus began to speculate about atoms, the idea that natural phenomena have mechanical causes has stood in opposition to popular beliefs in gods and demons. The Hellenistic cult leader Epicurus brought a mechanical worldview into his creed specifically as an antidote to belief in the Olympian gods. When Rene Descartes set out in the 1630s on his great attempt to understand the world in rational terms, it was natural that he should describe physical forces like gravitation in a mechanical way, in terms of vortices in a material fluid filling all space. The “mechanical philosophy” of Descartes had a powerful influence on Newton, not because it was right (Descartes did not seem to have the modern idea of testing theories quantitatively) but because it provided an example of the sort of mechanical theory that could make sense out of nature. Mechanism reached its zenith in the nineteenth century, with the brilliant explanation of chemistry and heat in terms of atoms. And even today mechanism seems to many to be simply the logical opposite to superstition. In the history of human thought the mechanical worldview has played a heroic role.
That is just the trouble. In science as in politics or economics we are in great danger from heroic ideas that have outlived their usefulness. The heroic past of mechanism gave it such prestige that the followers of Descartes had trouble accepting Newton’s theory of the solar system. How could a good Cartesian, believing that all natural phenomena could be reduced to the impact of material bodies or fluids on one another, accept Newton’s view that the sun exerts a force on the earth across 93 million miles of empty space? It was not until well into the eighteenth century that Continental philosophers began to feel comfortable with the idea of action at a distance. In the end Newton’s ideas did prevail on the Continent as well as in Britain, in Holland, Italy, France, and Germany (in that order) from 1720 on. To be sure, this was partly due to the influence of philosophers like Voltaire and Kant. But here again the service of philosophy was a negative one; it helped only to free science from the constraints of philosophy itself.

Aug 15, 2021