Cold Fusion and ARPA-E

According to it’s mission statement, the Advanced Research Project Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) is supposed to have more or less the same role within the Department of Energy as DARPA has for the Department of Defense. Quoting from the statement:

ARPA-E focuses exclusively on high risk, high payoff concepts – technologies promising genuine transformation in the ways we generate, store and utilize energy.

A statement of objectives on the ARPA-E website elaborates on this theme:

To focus on creative “out-of-the-box” transformational energy research that industry by itself cannot or will not support due to its high risk but where success would provide dramatic benefits for the nation.

Apparently the source selection guys who picked the first round of 37 projects to be funded by the new office never got the word. Read over the list, and you’ll find they have a distinctly incremental, chewed over flavor.   There are projects to train bacteria to produce biofuels, projects to make better batteries, projects to do a better job of removing CO2 from flue gas, etc.  All very interesting, but the chances that any of this stuff will be “transformational” are vanishingly small.  One project area that really is “high risk, high payoff” and potentially transformational is remarkable by its absence – cold fusion.

They’re taking a very dim view of the situation at the website of Cold Fusion Times. Their take:

Corrupt individuals within the US Patent Office and elsewhere continue to cover up cold fusion applications and other alternative energy inventions. ARPA-E and the DOE tricked scores of cold fusioneers to waste their time on proposals that went into the waste basket. For what reason? It is unethical that this has continued from the crash of the Exxon Valdez through the present disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. People around the world now believe that those involved in this coverup festering since 1989 should finally be held accountable.

I can understand the frustration, but that sort of hyperbole is both counterproductive and wrong.  I have seen no evidence that any of the individuals involved in the selection process are corrupt, or that there has been a “cover up.”  Orthodox energy scientists and bureaucrats would have nothing to “cover up,” because they simply don’t believe in cold fusion.  There was no attempt to “trick” anyone.

What we are really seeing at ARPA-E is hidebound conservatism, ignorance of what has been going on in the cold fusion community, and the time-honored reticence of bureaucrats in all ages to stick their necks out and risk ridicule by supporting anything unconventional.  I wouldn’t describe ARPA-E’s failure to fund a single one of the many cold fusion proposals it received, and its singularly bland choice of awards, as “corrupt” or ”trickery.”  A more appropriate adjective that comes to mind might be “pathetic.”  These people have utterly and completely failed to grasp exactly what it is their organization is supposed to be doing. 

“High risk, high payoff?”  Get real!  Let’s hope they do better next time.

2009 Colloquium on Lattice-Assisted Nuclear Reactions (LANR) at MIT

The “Reconciliation” of Stalin and Trotsky

Trotsky was perhaps the brightest, and certainly the most readable, of the old Bolsheviks. However, unlike Bukharin and several other former comrades, he has never been formally rehabilitated, perhaps because he was never tried, but simply murdered at the behest of Stalin. According to an article that just appeared in The Moscow News, at least a part of the Russian left is now considering a “reconciliation” between the two. It quotes Darya Mitina, one of the leaders of the Russian Communist Youth and a former State Duma deputy to the effect that,

It is my dream to once see a memorial in a quiet part of Moscow, depicting Trotsky and Stalin sitting across from each other.

That would certainly justify a famous remark by Karl Marx,

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

The proponents of such a “rehabilitation” would do well to actually read Trotsky, starting, perhaps, with “The Stalin School of Falsification.” Sometimes he could be remarkably prophetic. Here’s what he had to say about the historical fate of Communism in “In Defense of Marxism,” a collection of his letters and articles published shortly after he was murdered by Stalin in 1940.

If, however, it is conceded that the present war (WWII) will provoke not revolution but a decline of the proletariat, then there remains another alternative: the further decay of monopoly capitalism, its further fusion with the state and the replacement of democracy wherever it still remained by a totalitarian regime. The inability of the proletariat to take into its hands the leadership of society could actually lead under these conditions to the growth of a new exploiting class from the Bonapartist fascist bureaucracy. This would be, according to all indications, a regime of decline, signalizing the eclipse of civilisation.

Then it would be necessary in retrospect to establish that in its fundamental traits the present USSR was the precursor of a new exploiting regime on an international scale.

If (this) prognosis proves to be correct, then, of course, the bureaucracy will become a new exploiting class. However onerous this perspective may be, if the world proletariat should actually prove incapable of fulfilling the mission placed upon it by the course of development, nothing else would remain except only to recognize that the socialist program, based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society, ended as a Utopia.

“Ended in a Utopia” could be said of many revolutions, and Stalin was not unique.  Revolutionary euphoria is a perfect vehicle to power for unscrupulous leaders who care more about personal aggrandizement than noble ideals.  You say you want a revolution?  Be careful who you pick to lead it.

The Edge Conference on the New Science of Morality, III

This post is a continuation of my comments on the talks of the nine keynote speakers at the Edge Conference on The New Science of Morality.  In the last episode, I discussed the first of the speakers, psychologist Jonathan Haidt, noting that, while he described morality as a “consensual illusion,” he nevertheless revealed a belief in an objective, transcendental good, legitimate in itself.  That belief was implicit in comments such as the suggestion that we should  

… study moralities that aren’t our own, to consider, to empathize, to think about them as possibly coherent systems of beliefs and values that could be related to coherent, and even humane, human ways of living and flourishing,

Haidt’s attachment to the “true good” of “human ways of living and flourishing” is entirely emotional, is reinforced by the assumption that his listeners feel the same way, and is left to float in logical thin air.  Indeed, of all the speakers, only neuroscientist Sam Harris seems to be aware that he has bought into the notion of “objective good.”  As we shall see, his attempts to establish a rational basis for his belief is itself based on emotional appeals.  However, before moving on to Harris, let’s consider how the same phenomenon manifests itself in the remarks of two of the other speakers, Joshua Greene and Marc Hauser.

Greene opens his comments with the intriguing comment that, “…my real, core interest is in this relationship between the ‘is’ of moral psychology, the ‘is’ of science, and the ‘ought’ of morality.”  Referring to Haidt’s theory of moral “taste receptors,” he remarks,

I think, really, the biggest question is, are we going to rely on our intuitions, on our instincts, on our taste receptors? Or are we going to do something else? Now, some people might deny that there really is a “something else” that we can do. I disagree. I think we can.

This begs the question of what goal, exactly, it is that we are pursuing that we are to rely on either our intuitions or “something else” to achieve, and why should we care to reach that goal.  In any case, Greene then develops his camera analogy of moral behavior, according to which we can sometimes operate in “automatic mode,” allowing our “taste receptors” to do the work, but must sometimes switch to “manual mode,” to achieve a “good” outcome.  Again, if Greene thinks there is any reason to establish exactly why it is that this “good” outcome is really good, he doesn’t reveal it in his talk.  According to Greene, “manual mode” will become increasingly necessary to achieve a “good” outcome.  By “manual mode,” he means “…careful, controlled, moral reasoning,” noting that, “…moving forward, and dealing with the unique modern problems that we face, I think moral reasoning is likely to be very important.” 

An obvious problem here is that “moral reasoning” is an oxymoron.  Morality is the expression of innate behavioral traits that evolved in times completely unlike the present.  Those traits are fundamentally emotional in nature.  As the Communists and many others have discovered to their cost, they can’t be “trained” with “reason” to reach some arbitrary goal.  Their expression can have a significant dependence on culture and experience, but the basic emotional substrate will not change, and is anything but infinitely malleable.  Rationally, there can be no justification for even dragging morality into the mix in solving complex problems regarding how to achieve commonly agreed on goals in the modern world.  The only explanation for the fact that we continue to do so is that we “feel” that we “should.”  Greene has no problem grasping the fact that, “…we’re too quick to use our point-and-shoot morality to deal with complicated problems that it wasn’t designed, in any sense, to handle.”  However, like all the others, he balks at the next logical step.  He can’t bear to detach himself from morality entirely, even to solve “unique modern problems.”  It would shake his entire world view, with its implicit assumption of moral superiority, to its foundations. 

He must hold on to “the good” at all odds.  We know that Greene has grasped some obvious truths about the relevance and legitimacy of morality in the modern world from comments such as,

I think that rights are actually just a cognitive, manual mode front for our automatic settings. And that they have no real independent reality. This is obviously a controversial claim

and,

The way I like to put it is that, it would be a kind of cognitive miracle if our instincts were able to handle these problems.

No matter, in the end, “the good” still beckons.  His final sentence reads,

And a better future may lie in a kind of geeky, detached, non-intuitive moral thinking, that no one finds particularly comfortable, but that we’re all capable of doing, regardless of where we come from.

A “better future?”  By what standard is one future “better” than another?  Greene doesn’t explain.  He assumes his audience “feels” the same way he does about a “better future,” and he is probably right. 

We find the same artifacts of the “true good” in the remarks of evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser.  Like Greene, he cites the significance of the distinction between “is” and “ought”;

I think that a lot of us who have been working in this area are interested in the connection between the is and the ought.

That may be, but almost none of them, including Hauser, dare to touch the subject more than superficially.  Instead, like many of the others, he spends most of his time discussing examples of moral behavior, either anecdotal, or based on his own or others’ research results.  No matter, manifestations of his faith in the “true good” aren’t hard to find.  He tells us that, “Many of us do all sorts of things that are at least somewhat morally wrong.”  (by what standard?)  In a discussion of environmental manipulations for children he says,

But here again, we are uncovering these mechanisms which are, in many ways, pushing us towards very significant ethical/legal issues, where the findings are pushing up on the doorsteps of what we should do, what we ought to do, and how can the information discovered be integrated into these ethical issues?

If there is no “true good,” and no objectively legitimate morality, the above statement is meaningless, because there can be no standard upon which to base such decisions.  Hauser does not claim he knows what the standard is, but, to make such a statement, he must have faith that it exists.

So far, then, all the speakers have revealed an implicit faith in the “true good,” but none of them have seriously attempted to establish why the “true good” is valid and legitimate.  All of them suggest that we must construct some kind of a moral system for making complex decisions affecting large numbers of people, but none of them seriously attempts to explain why, given what we know about morality, it should play any role at all.  As we shall see in our next episode, Sam Harris is the only one who does, in a rather revealing way.

The Edge Conference on the New Science of Morality, II

As mentioned in an earlier post, the recent Edge conference on The New Science of Morality was addressed by nine eminent speakers who together represent a reasonable sample of current thinking on the subject in scientific and academic circles. Their remarks reveal a fact that has been abundantly obvious for some time; that the ideologically driven orthodoxy of the “Not in our Genes” school admirably described by Steven Pinker in his book, “The Blank Slate,” has been largely abandoned in favor of general acceptance of innate or “hard-wired” human nature, including human moral behavior.

By its own account this milieu is primarily to the left of center and “progressive” in its political outlook. Their conservative and religious critics have had no difficulty grasping an obvious implication of these recent adjustments to their world view; these self-described “secular liberals” have abandoned any rational claim to the objective legitimacy of moral distinctions, or on the existence of good and evil as other than subjective constructs of individual human minds. I might add that they have never had a basis for such a claim, even in the heyday of the “blank slate.” Now, however, it’s more obvious than ever. Regardless, as we shall see, in every case their remarks reveal an implicit belief in an objectively valid and legitimate morality. This faith of theirs in something for which there can be no rational justification is a remarkable demonstration of the power of innately driven and fundamentally emotional moral judgments over the human consciousness.

To study the phenomenon in action, let’s begin dissecting the remarks of the nine speakers. The first was University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Like many of the speakers who followed him, Haidt discussed his own scientific work, centered around what he calls Moral Foundations Theory, which “specifies a small set of social receptors that are the beginnings of moral judgment.” He likens these to taste receptors for sweet, sour, bitter, etc., and identifies the five most important of them as “care/harm, fairness/cheating, group loyalty and betrayal, authority and subversion, and sanctity and degradation.” I will leave it to future generations of geneticists to document where, if at all, these “moral receptors” appear in the human genome. In developing his taste metaphor, Haidt cites a variety of famous thinkers and authorities from days gone by. In doing so, he sticks to the most sound and approved remarks of the most sound and approved thinkers, a pattern that will repeat itself with the remaining speakers. It is essential to establish and maintain academic gravitas in this milieu, and novelty or wandering off the reservation in the choice of authorities is therefore assiduously avoided. In Haidt’s case, the list includes Mencius, unlikely to raise any eyebrows outside of China, and David Hume, currently in high fashion as an early proponent of innate human nature.

Haidt goes further than any of the other speakers in explicitly recognizing the consequences of morality understood as the manifestation of evolved, hard-wired behavioral traits. In his words,

So, as I said, morality is like the Matrix. It’s a consensual hallucination. And if we only hang out with people who share our matrix, then we can be quite certain that, together, we will find a lot of evidence to support our matrix, and to condemn members of other matrices… I believe that morality has to be understood as a largely tribal phenomenon, at least in its origins. By its very nature, morality binds us into groups, in order to compete with other groups.

But wait! Before you conclude that Haidt “get’s it,” and has managed to get his mind around the reality that morality is the manifestation of evolved traits that exist because they promoted our survival under conditions that existed in the misty realms of our prehistory, read on. Without missing a beat, Haidt goes on to discuss the possibility that the various types of morality may be “right” or “wrong,” and concludes,

And as I said before, nearly all of us doing this work are secular Liberals. And that means that we’re at very high risk of misunderstanding those moralities that are not our own. If we were judges working on a case, we’d pretty much all have to recuse ourselves. But we’re not going to do that, so we’ve got to just be extra careful to seek out critical views, to study moralities that aren’t our own, to consider, to empathize, to think about them as possibly coherent systems of beliefs and values that could be related to coherent, and even humane, human ways of living and flourishing.

And so Haidt wanders back off into the swamp in search of the “true good,” which, although none of mankind’s greatest thinkers has quite managed to capture it yet, in spite of thousands of years of trying, is apparently “coherent, humane” (whatever that means), and promotes what I suppose we are to understand as the objectively justifiable “goods” of “living and flourishing.” As we shall see, Haidt is not unique in attaching transcendental moral significance to such vague notions as “living and flourishing,” nor is he unique in never cutting to the chase and explaining why we should take his word for it that such things are “legitimately good.” It is just one of those things that are “intuitively obvious to the casual observer.”

In later posts we will examine further artifacts of this implicit belief in the “true good” among the remarks of the remaining speakers, and consider the future ramifications thereof in our quest to better understand ourselves.

Internet Bias and the Amity/Enmity Complex

Articles about the tendency of ideologues to gravitate to like-minded sites on the Internet, creating a bubble around themselves that shuts out alternative points of view, have been popular of late. As noted in this example by educator Gregory Ferenstein, the residents of these bubbles tend to evince a high level of hostility towards outsiders. Recent examples cited in the article include Sarah Palin (no kiddin’?) and Andrew Breitbart. The phenomenon is certainly real, as any habitué of the Internet can attest, and is an excellent example of the Amity/Enmity Complex in action. Unfortunately, to see the connection, you have to be willing to admit the possibility that such a thing as the Amity/Enmity Complex actually exists. It does exist, as all human history demonstrates, but, for all the progress we’ve made recently in demonstrating the innate origins of human morality, that blatantly obvious fact is one that the current generation of scientific and academic experts continues to studiously ignore. By and large, they are believers, either implicitly or explicitly, in the “moral progress” of mankind, hoping against hope that the atavistic behavioral traits associated with the expression of morality in humans can be successfully tricked into guiding us all to a brave new world of “human flourishing.” It ain’t gonna happen, the Amity/Enmity Complex is one of the primary reasons why. They can continue to ignore it, but it isn’t going anywhere.

Let’s assume we all agreed to establish “human flourishing” as a common goal. To achieve that goal, wouldn’t a useful preliminary step be to acquire understanding of ourselves as we really are, and not as we want ourselves to be in an ideal world? The Complex has induced us to fight countless irrational wars in the past. It may induce our self-destruction in the future. Would it not be useful to at least make a serious attempt to study the phenomenon? If it’s not there, what do we have to fear by looking for it?

The “Limits of Reason” Meme

A number of papers have turned up in the scientific literature lately concerning innate aspects of human mental processes that can impair our ability to discover truth, such as this one by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. Not unpredictably, the human mental processes described in these papers have been conflated with “reason,” spawning a meme about the limits thereof. A representative artifact of the phenomena recently appeared in Newsweek, entitled “Limits of Reason.” Expect more of the same. No matter that there are obvious differences between “reason” defined as a systematic method for discovering truth and “reason” defined as a mental process specific to human beings, the notion that there are “limits to reason” is so seductive that many people are unlikely to notice. For example, blind religious faith becomes more justifiable if “reason” is useless. Moral biases of every stripe can be fobbed off as “legitimate” if the power of “reason” to challenge them is denied. The “Age of Reason” itself can be dismissed with a hand wave as an effort in futility.

Well, memes eventually run their course, and I doubt this one will be any different. Meanwhile, I will continue to favor reason as the most effective, albeit occasionally flawed, means of discovering truth. So far no one has come up with anything that is demonstrably better.

The Armed Citizen: Bloggers in a Land Without Justice

We live in a country where anyone can be destroyed at any time by a spurious lawsuit. The costs of litigation are such that it is absurd to speak of “winning” a defensive lawsuit. Is it “just” to force people who are entirely innocent of any wrongdoing to hand over thousands of dollars to lawyers? That is the outcome whether they “win” or not. We live in a land without justice, exploited by a dysfunctional legal system of our own making.

As noted by Insty, the latest victims of our system of “justice” are the authors of a little blog, The Armed Citizen, who are being sued for “copyright infringement” for quoting a few lines from a newspaper. In their words,

On July 21st, The Armed Citizen received an indirect and informal notice of a lawsuit against this website and its owners, David Burnett and Clayton Cramer.

The suit, reportedly filed in US District Court on July 20th, alleges that The Armed Citizen and its owners “willfully copied” and infringed on original source content from the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

According to news reports, Righthaven LLC has filed lawsuits against no less than 80 other political websites and individual blogs for “infringement.”

Righthaven has offered no prior contact, cease-and-desist warnings or any attempt at good-faith resolution whatsoever.

To the best of our knowledge, statutory damages can only be awarded if the plaintiff owns copyright on the articles in question. Righthaven sought and received a copyright on at least one of the articles in question on July 6…several months after the alleged offense. Clearly, this group is interested in money, not resolution.

In other words, the lawyers have now come up with a mesothelioma scam just for bloggers.  It’s surprising to me that the citizens of this country have so supinely accepted a dysfunctional system that enables massive exploitation by legal parasites.  Apparently most of us somehow assume it will always happen to the other guy, and not to us – until it does happen to us.  If ever a system deserved to be smashed, our legal system is it.  If ever a profession deserved to be nationalized, our legal profession is it.

China’s Demise; is it Really Just Around the Corner?

Predictions of China’s implosion keep turning up on a regular basis, usually with the assurance that it’s just around the corner. Well, to celebrate her rise to spot number two among the world’s strongest economies, here’s yet another demonstration that, because a =b, and b=c, her collapse is a foregone conclusion. Wishful thinking? That’s what it’s always turned out to be in the past. It better happen pretty soon, or Gordon Chang, the prophet of doom who penned the article, will have egg on his face. He published a whole book on the subject back in 2001 promising that China would go belly up by 2011. He probably should have cut himself a bit more slack.

About that “Killer Ape Theory”…

I wouldn’t count it out too fast. According to an article in the Grey Lady’s Science section,

As early as 3.4 million years ago, some individuals with a taste for meat and marrow — presumably members of the species best known for the skeleton called Lucy — apparently butchered with sharp and heavy stones two large animals on the shore of a shallow lake in what is now Ethiopia.

Far be it for me to issue any pronunciamientos about the scavenger vs hunter debate on my little blog, but, to judge from this article, the preponderance of evidence is inclining to the latter side. For example, the author suggests that early hominids had “a taste for meat and marrow,” not just a taste for marrow. Primary predators and more efficient scavengers than the australopithecines would have accounted for virtually 100% of the meat, so the only way they could have tasted meat in significant amounts is by hunting it. The large animals were “butchered,” which also implies predation.

Indeed, any number of proponents of the scavenger hypothesis seem to be getting wobbly as evidence like this keeps accumulating.  Even the formerly orthodox scavengerite NPR is starting to cave, as attested by this article whose title proclaims, “Meat-based Diet made us Smarter.” (Check out the comments. The article appears to have inspired a good deal of frothing at the mouth among NPR’s loyal vegan fans.) Can you say, “Hunting Hypothesis,” anyone?

One can find the same paradigm shift in the scientific literature. Signs thereof began turning up in increasing numbers about a decade ago.  For example, as noted by  an article published in the Journal of World Prehistory in 2002 by paleontologist Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo,

During the last 25 years, there has been a shift towards the belief that early humans were scavengers instead of hunters. This revisionist interpretation has brought a reconciliation with the Darwinian paradigm of gradual progressive evolution that has traditionally guided (and very often, misled) an important part of anthropological thinking. However, empirical support for the scavenging hypothesis is still lacking. Recent data based on bone surface modifications from archaeological faunas suggest, in contrast, that hominids were primary agents of carcass exploitation. Meat seems to have been an important part of Plio-Pleistocene hominid diets. Passive scavenging scenarios show that this kind of opportunistic strategy cannot afford significant meat yields. Therefore, the hunting hypothesis has not yet been disproved. This makes the hunting-and-scavenging issue more controversial than before, and calls for a revision of the current interpretive frameworks and ideas about early human behavior.

To get a firsthand glimpse of what the author is talking about, go to Google Scholar and check out the latest by paleontologist C. K. Brain, one of the pioneers of the emerging field of taphonomy and an expert on the evolution of predatory animals. In 1969 Brain published an article claiming that fellow South African Raymond Dart had been wrong in his assertion, based on statistical analysis, that an assemblage of fossil bones discovered at the Swartkrans limestone cave formation demonstrated predation by early australopithecines.  Basing his conclusion on tooth marks apparently left on the bones by leopards, Brain concluded that the early hominids, had been the prey, not the predators.  However, his more recent publications (see, for example, here, here and here) evince a distinct tacking in the direction of early hominid predation.  Perhaps Brain has noticed the increasingly detailed observations of predatory behavior by chimpanzees, including kills of animals as large as wild pigs and small antelopes.

The debate about the role of predation during the evolutionary transition from ape to man is far from over, and skepticism is in order about any pronouncements that it has been “proved” one way or the other.  Confirmation bias is bound to play as big a role in the future as it has in the past in controversies touching on human origins, because the topic is ideologically loaded.  For example, in an article published in the Sunday Times in 1997, journalist Brian Deer wrote,

Dart, an Australian working in Johannesburg, made his name during apartheid’s construction. The Leakeys have been prime exponents of white settlers controlling the sites. Even American expeditions in Ethiopia have had a peculiarly imperialist feel. The killer ape narrative appealed to such folk, for whom the most sophisticated scientific techniques were deployed on fixing their beloved Land Rovers.

 Even before Dart’s message became entrenched as orthodoxy, Louis Leakey had in 1957 installed Jane Goodall, a 23-year-old secretary from England, to report on the common chimpanzee population at Gombe River – maybe a day’s drive to my south-west, near Lake Tanganyika. In what was considered science for the period, the former waitress had arrived at Gombe, ordered the grass cut and dumped vast quantities of trucked-in bananas, before documenting a fractious pandemonium of the apes. Soon she was writing about vicious hunting parties in which our cheery cousins trapped colubus monkeys and ripped them to bits, just for fun.

One can find many similar political rants in the writings of both specialists and lay commenters on the left.  Of course, their own narrative features them as disinterested seekers after truth, who are combating the lies and distortions of “conservative ideologues.”  These “conservative ideologues” were supposed to have come out of the woodwork in droves in the 60′s and 70′s after Dart published his papers and his work was popularized by Robert Ardrey, Desmond Morris, and several others.  My question is, who were they?  I consider myself reasonably well read, but I am not aware of a single “conservative ideologue” of any intellectual heft who was ever relied heavily on the works of the likes of Dart and Ardrey in defense of some recognizably conservative premise, other than, perhaps, the rather self-evident premise that Communism doesn’t work.  I would be more than happy to believe in their existence if someone could tell me who they were.

There is no reason to fear the results of continued scientific research and discovery regarding human origins, unless we fear the truth.  What we do need to fear is the suppression and distortion of the results of research and investigation by ideologues.  It should never be forgotten how effectively they were able to suppress any discussion of innate human behavior for several decades in fields such as psychology and anthropology, replacing science with quasi-religious “blank slate” orthodoxies, and shouting down anyone who objected as “Nazis” and “fascists.”  The same thing could easily happen again in this era of rampant political demonization and villification.  As we expand our understanding of human nature, we had best not forget that it is also important to understand how whole fields of science could have been hijacked by ideologues in these “enlightened” times.  Otherwise the pattern will surely repeat itself.

Sad News from Academia; Harvard Questions Marc Hauser’s Research

Hauser is an eminent and very public expert in evolutionary biology, specializing in the origins of morality. The news that Harvard has opened an inquiry about the credibility of his research is distressing, to say the least, in view of the overriding significance of his field of study, and the remarkable and exciting work and smashing of old orthodoxies that have been going on there lately. Hauser was one of the nine keynote speakers at the recent Edge conference on the Science of Morality that I mentioned in an earlier post, and one can only hope that the inquiry will turn up nothing more serious than a case of confirmation bias.

Affairs like this are saddening, but not surprising. Academics today are under overwhelming pressure to publish, and the quality of their work is bound to suffer as a result. That’s particularly true of the young associate professors who are still fighting for tenure. I don’t want to single any of them out, but the CV’s of most of them who work at top universities are online. Look at a few of them, and you’ll see how unbelievably competitive they have to be to survive. If they don’t include literally scores of publications in research journals and peer-reviewed conferences, not to mention a boatload of awards, honors, and research grants, they’re not even in the running. In view of the amount of time they must spend writing papers and research proposals, not to mention teaching, public service, and all the rest of the stuff they need to pack into a credible resume, it’s a wonder any of them have any time left for serious research. The “publish or perish” thing has been a problem for a long time, and it degrades the quality of scientific work in many fields. It would be nice if we could finally find a solution.