Dr Chuck Pearson

« Two notes on general mental health issues | Main | Highly shallow formatting question »

August 20, 2005

How to send me running into the waiting arms of the Discovery Institute, part II

Why, yes, the only newspaper I read is the Washington Post.

Why, do you ask?

Because even when I get all bent out of shape with the direction that their editoral content takes, they can put out some awfully good journalism. And, in so doing, take what had been a raging he-said-she-said controversy out of the realm of he-said-she-said and into the realm of fact.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg made a fateful decision a year ago.

As editor of the hitherto obscure Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Sternberg decided to publish a paper making the case for "intelligent design," a controversial theory that holds that the machinery of life is so complex as to require the hand -- subtle or not -- of an intelligent creator.

Within hours of publication, senior scientists at the Smithsonian Institution -- which has helped fund and run the journal -- lashed out at Sternberg as a shoddy scientist and a closet Bible thumper...

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which was established to protect federal employees from reprisals, examined e-mail traffic from these scientists and noted that "retaliation came in many forms...misinformation was disseminated through the Smithsonian Institution and to outside sources. The allegations against you were later determined to be false."

"The rumor mill became so infected," James McVay, the principal legal adviser in the Office of Special Counsel, wrote to Sternberg, "that one of your colleagues had to circulate [your résumé] simply to dispel the rumor that you were not a scientist..."

McVay, who is a political appointee of the Bush administration, acknowledged in the report that a fuller response from the Smithsonian might have tempered his conclusions. As Sternberg is not a Smithsonian employee -- the National Institutes of Health pays his salary -- the special counsel lacks the power to impose a legal remedy.

So, here's the story: We have a small-fry journal editor who makes the ultimate decision, after following a peer-review process, to publish a article friendly to intelligent design. The guy is then harrassed, rumors are spread about him, every single association the guy takes is questioned to high heaven and investigated as clues to "what he really believes", and hounded out of effectiveness in his current job, possibly hounded out of a scientific career in the process.

Yeah, that really makes me believe that the Smithsonian (or any government scientific body, for that matter) practices unbiased science.

Unfortunately, just about everything else you read online about Sternberg (or is it von Sternberg? what about decent reporting on what we call the guy? I've seen it both ways on the Google searches) enters very rapidly into the realm of he-said-he-said. The closest you get to half-decent reporting is this David Klinghoffer piece from the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal site, and while I'm quite frankly sympathetic to the biases woven into the piece, they're still biases and they don't give you much insight into other plausible explanations as to why Sternberg would claim to be so comprehensively harassed as to make his position untenable. The closest I got on the Technorati searches to a decent criticism of the WashPo piece was this blog post which speaks far more clearly to the blogger's internal issues than to the actual question of whether a practicing scientist who followed his best instincts in a publication decision was persecuted for that.

In other words, I'm not generally happy with the level of discussion that's going on here, with people being more wrapped up in their political or religious biases than the facts at hand. Big surprise there, hrm?

With all that said, let me make three points:

• Since the publication of the paper itself was a watershed (and surely in no way related to the fact that its author turns out to be a Discovery Institute bigwig), the offending paper, "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories" by Stephen Meyer, gets the full treatment on the Discovery Institute's website. It's worth a read if you can stomach the scientific writing. Quite frankly, given the way the paper is put together - putting a good many eggs into this "Cambrian explosion" basket that argues that there is a point in history where the number of species on the planet, and therefore the amount of biological information on the planet, exploded - and given the background of the guy writing it, I probably wouldn't have accepted the paper, were I in Sternberg's shoes, unless I was absolutely intent on causing trouble. The guy simply HAD to know how rank and file biologists, let alone influential evolutionary biologists, would respond to it.
  


• Another blogger makes the point that by and large, all the reporting on the scientific issues here isn't any good. The problem is, of course, that none of the scientists in question here is capable of writing a straight explanatory paragraph. Let's throw out two key examples of this, first from the introduction to the Meyer article itself:

  In a recent volume of the Vienna Series in a Theoretical Biology (2003), Gerd B. Muller and Stuart Newman argue that what they call the “origination of organismal form” remains an unsolved problem. In making this claim, Muller and Newman (2003:3-10) distinguish two distinct issues, namely, (1) the causes of form generation in the individual organism during embryological development and (2) the causes responsible for the production of novel organismal forms in the first place during the history of life. To distinguish the latter case (phylogeny) from the former (ontogeny), Muller and Newman use the term “origination” to designate the causal processes by which biological form first arose during the evolution of life. They insist that “the molecular mechanisms that bring about biological form in modern day embryos should not be confused” with the causes responsible for the origin (or “origination”) of novel biological forms during the history of life (p.3). They further argue that we know more about the causes of ontogenesis, due to advances in molecular biology, molecular genetics and developmental biology, than we do about the causes of phylogenesis--the ultimate origination of new biological forms during the remote past.

  Now, from Sternberg's own website, explaining why he really doesn't fall into the Darwinist or Intelligent Design camps:

  I subscribe to a school of biological thought often termed “process structuralism.” Process or biological structuralism is concerned with understanding the formal, generative rules underlying organic forms, and focuses on the system architectures of organisms and their interrelationships. Structuralist analysis is generally ahistorical, systems-oriented, and non-evolutionary (not anti-evolutionary). Both creationism and neo-Darwinism are, in contrast, emphatically historicist with one positing extreme polyphyly (de novo creation of species) and the other radical monophyly (common descent). Since the structuralist perspective runs somewhat perpendicular to the origins debate, creationists and evolutionists tend to see it as inimical to their positions. The truth is structuralism has little at stake in the origins issue, leaving a person like myself free to dialogue with all parties. For this reason, I frequently discourse with ultra-Darwinians, macromutationists, self-organization theorists, complexity theorists, intelligent design advocates, theistic evolutionists, and young-earth creationists without necessarily agreeing with any of their views.

  And your response, like mine, is probably: what the blue blazes? Yes, if I was willing to read determinedly and patiently, I could make head or tail out of all of that. But why? Why can't Sternberg just say "Look, I'm interested in how organisms are put together, and their similarities and differences. I don't have any interest in the origins stories, either the evolution or the creation ones, and quite frankly I think you do the scientific process more harm that good by obsessing on them." (Because if he'd say that, I just might find myself agreeing with him.)

  Now, if anybody can figure out Meyer's opening paragraph and what it has to do with anything, let me know.
  



• So, Sternberg can't write for beans, Meyer writes even worse, and I don't think Sternberg did himself any favors accepting Meyer's paper for publication. None of this should take away from the fact that I now officially never want to work for the government doing science. Ever. The simple fact that Sternberg was subject to this level of harassment over an editorial decision - over an ever-loving scientific opinion - frightens me to high heaven, way more than a certain religious body coming into my school frightens me.

  Maybe that's a statement of my own bias, I don't know.

I'll freely take any other takes. I fear this post is more scattered than usual, and I'm still trying to read the relevant documents and understand what's gone down.

UPDATE: This is why Jeff is the king:

Jeff: Fascinating stuff. I think the distinction between 'structuralist' and 'historicist' is a fascinating one...
ShorterPearson: ...and one that the culprits in general need to put into words of one syllable.
ShorterPearson: Because the populace at large doesn't understand it.
Jeff: Yea, there is that. Hiding behind rhetorical smoke is a symptom of a heated debate landscape.
Jeff: Indeed.
ShorterPearson: Buddy, you're about to get yourself quoted. :-)

And, indeed, he has.

Posted by Chuck at August 20, 2005 02:21 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.chuck-pearson.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/112

Comments

Posted by: Peter at August 21, 2005 10:05 PM

Posted by: Dr Chuck Pearson at August 21, 2005 11:11 PM