House of Eratosthenes

People we like to call “scientists,” or whom we insist on embracing the belief that they have something to do with what we call “science,” are voting in groups on what to allow and what not to allow. I have a rather eccentric, and lonely, idea of what a “scientist” is, and the group-thing doesn’t have much to do with it. I notice I don’t owe very much to groups of scientists; groups of anybody, for that matter. I’ve got all these useful things sitting around me as I type this that I got because of science. A flatscreen computer monitor, a coffeemaker that grinds my beans fresh at a pre-selected time-of-day, a hot plate that keeps the coffee cup hot and fresh as I type away. These things were not developed because groups of people voted on what worked and what did not work. These things came about because somewhere, an individual fiddled around with something until it became something else, and started doing something.

This is how we get things. Everything we use, I daresay. Groups vote here & there on what to do with these things, and maybe, to take credit for the things coming into existence; they do not actually make the things. It’s up to individuals to do that. Go on, try and find an exception. If you think you’ve found one, you probably got snookered.

And so, when a scientist — what I think of as a scientist — sits in a room full of other scientists voting on something, I expect he or she is usually going to be a wallflower, waiting for the proceedings to be over so that some research in an empty room or cubicle somewhere can be resumed. The guy that’s doing the talking, or holding court, or trying to get some kind of coup going against some hated morsel of existing policy or what-not…that isn’t a scientist. That’s a politician. Credentials or not, that’s a politician wearing a scientist’s coat. To put it simply, trying to get a group to approve or deny something, is not scientific work. Science is the study of nature, and nature is going to do what it damn well wants.

Science often goes and stops according to the presence or absence of funds; sadly, where those funds go, is a question often put before large groups. And so, you see, if I’m wrong about science being dead — I’m certainly correct about it being subordinated to other things. Other things that are anti-science. Call it “Cinderella science,” something forced to mend dresses and sweep floors for ugly stepsisters.

I was given cause to think about this about a month ago when Mary Cheney, the homosexual daughter of our current Vice President, announced her pregnancy.

No Republican in Washington is more beloved by social conservatives than Vice President Dick Cheney, who with his wife, Lynne, has backed and breathed every issue dear to them for six tumultuous years.

News that Cheney’s lesbian daughter, Mary, is pregnant has therefore touched a raw nerve, as advocates for conservative family values struggle to reconcile their loyalty to the Cheneys with their visceral opposition to same-sex relationships — and particularly to raising a child without a father.

Credit goes to blogger friend James Bostwick for sniffing out the first piece of bull poo in this mini-essay. Do you know any “social conservatives”? Quick, think of five…five, who hold Vice President Cheney in affectionate esteem above & before any other public figure. Aw hell, just think of one. Know anybody like that? While it’s fair to say some conservatives don’t despise Mr. Cheney quite as much as the average left-wing liberal, I can’t think of anyone who regards the veep as “beloved” because of his social positions. Whatever the position on social issues, the conservative viewpoint is invariably that Vice President Cheney is some kind of traitor — in one direction, or in another. The SFGate writer has erected a straw-man argument, to lend importance to her article that doesn’t really exist.

But the fireworks were just starting. I had a fascinating off-line dialog with John Rambo for the last month or so about this one. “JohnJ” is a featured writer at Bullwinkle Blog and blogs his own stuff at Right Linx, both of which are excellent resources worth your time to peruse here & there. Like a handful of other folks who are sufficiently self-disciplined to pay attention to things that don’t fit on MTV, Rambo has developed a curiosity about my still-natally-developed “Yin and Yang” theory and recalled the essentials of it after James Dobson’s guest column appeared in Time Magazine.

And this is where the phony science comes in. It’s fascinating watching what happens from this point; almost like a chemical reaction. Try to leave the emotion-charged social issues out of it, and focus on the thought process…as any decent scientist would.

In the December 13 column, Dobson starts out…

A number of social conservatives, myself included, have recently been asked to respond to the news that Mary Cheney, the Vice President’s daughter, is pregnant with a child she intends to raise with her lesbian partner. Implicit in this issue is an effort to get us to criticize the Bush Administration or the Cheney family. But the concern here has nothing to do with politics. It is about what kind of family environment is best for the health and development of children, and, by extension, the nation at large.

With all due respect to Cheney and her partner, Heather Poe, the majority of more than 30 years of social-science evidence indicates that children do best on every measure of well-being when raised by their married mother and father. That is not to say Cheney and Poe will not love their child. But love alone is not enough to guarantee healthy growth and development. The two most loving women in the world cannot provide a daddy for a little boy–any more than the two most loving men can be complete role models for a little girl.

Dobson is saying, here, that the child will be raised without a father. Is that scientific? Maybe yes, maybe no…but does it even have to be? Unless there’s something else going on that we haven’t been told, it looks like the matter is settled. There is Mary, there is Heather…no male influence in sight, and certainly no need to have such a figure present in the essentials of upbringing. Dobson seeks to examine how this will affect the child at the developmental stages, and this is the part that touches on Yin & Yang — and it also gets him in no small measure of hot water with the community of what we have come to call “scientists.”

The unique value of fathers has been explained by Dr. Kyle Pruett of Yale Medical School in his book Fatherneed: Why Father Care Is as Essential as Mother Care for Your Child. Pruett says dads are critically important simply because “fathers do not mother.” Psychology Today explained in 1996 that “fatherhood turns out to be a complex and unique phenomenon with huge consequences for the emotional and intellectual growth of children.” A father, as a male parent, makes unique contributions to the task of parenting that a mother cannot emulate, and vice versa.

According to educational psychologist Carol Gilligan, mothers tend to stress sympathy, grace and care to their children, while fathers accent justice, fairness and duty. Moms give a child a sense of hopefulness; dads provide a sense of right and wrong and its consequences.

And, almost as if you’d been hearing a dull shrieking noise overhead for a few seconds, there emerges a thunderous BOOM. Dr. Pruett would like to say something about this.

“Time Magazine should take Dobson’s article off the web and pledge that they will never again use his group as a source on family issues,” said Wayne Besen, Executive Director of Truth Wins Out. “Focus on the Family has damaged its credibility and should stop misleading Americans by misquoting respected researchers.”

TODAY, Pruett wrote the following letter:

Dr. Dobson, I was startled and disappointed to see my work referenced in the current Time Magazine piece in which you opined that social science, such as mine, supports your convictions opposing lesbian and gay parenthood. I write now to insist that you not quote from my research in your media campaigns, personal or corporate, without previously securing my permission. You cherry-picked a phrase to shore up highly (in my view) discriminatory purposes. This practice is condemned in real science, common though it may be in pseudo-science circles. There is nothing in my longitudinal research or any of my writings to support such conclusions. On page 134 of the book you cite in your piece, I wrote, “What we do know is that there is no reason for concern about the development or psychological competence of children living with gay fathers. It is love that binds relationships, not sex.” Kyle Pruett, M.D. Yale School of Medicine.

What of the other researcher? Dr. Gilligan is similarly agitated and has a similar beef:

The issue has to do with distorting the findings of science and distorting the conclusions of research. These meaningful words are used in the video, above, over and over again. Shame on Dr. Dobson.

Now, take a look at what we got going on here.

EVERYTHING is orchestrated by this “Truth Wins Out” outfit, which appears to have been acting in a way similar to Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead. Hey, Dr. Pruett and Dr. Gilligan, did you know your work is being cited this way? Do you know what kind of parties you won’t be invited to because of this? If you like, we can produce a video for you…

Is that science?

How about guitar music playing in the background of the video? Is that what we call “research”? How about the heavy implications that Dr. Dobson is engaged in some kind of a pattern of falsification going back-a-ways — but, if you listen to the words, you see this all comes from the single piece in Time Magazine about the Cheney pregnancy? Science has a lot to do with identifying trends and patterns of things. Was that done accurately here, or was this implication done to appeal to people’s emotions? Is it scientific to appeal to emotions?

How about Dr. Gilligan’s use of the actual word in the video? You might want to watch it again; she uses it several times. Is she referring to a discipline where you prove and/or refute things by means of research and experimentation? It does not appear so. In fact, I’ve noticed James Dobson’s guest column simply prints two short sentences each dealing with the two disaffected docs. He does not say Dr. Pruett is opposed to homosexual marriages or non-traditional families. He does not say this about Dr. Gilligan. He does not say a single word about what the researchers have concluded from their research. If he did, why would I care about that? No, he simply reports what they have learned.

Pruett and Gilligan angrily retort that he has “cherry-picked” and “distorted” their research. Listen and read very, very carefully. They could have said Dobson’s article is wrong. They could have said NO. Dr. Pruett’s research was “distorted” as saying “fathers do not mother.” Pruett could have said “my research indicates that fathers DO mother.” Or, he could have said “my research has no indication on whether fathers are capable of mothering, or not.” Gilligan’s research was “distorted” with the summary that “mothers tend to stress sympathy, grace and care to their children, while fathers accent justice, fairness and duty.” Again, Dr. Gilligan could have said NO. She could have said this directly contradicts facts. Why not? She’s accusing Dobson of distortion…show us a concrete distortion. She could have said mothers and fathers share completely interchangeable roles. Or, that she doesn’t know — jury’s still out on that.

No, it seems — at the behest of this TruthOut outfit — Drs. Pruett and Gilligan object to the conclusions drawn from their research, which, on its own, was reported accurately.

Science is getting into the opinion biz. People throw the S-word around…and they aren’t really talking about “science” anymore. Look at Dr. Gilligan’s video one more time. What she calls science, is not a process but a simple exercise of argumentum ad authoritarian fallacy. Dr. Gilligan does not oppose gay marriage. Her research shows that fathers and mothers tend to contribute different things to a child’s upbringing, but you are not to use this in advancing an argument hostile to gay marriage. If you try to do this, she will stop you. She says so.

I don’t want to be too hard on the scientists, I’m sure they’ve got “reputations” to worry about. As I said at the beginning of this posts, scientists decide things in groups nowadays; that’s what creates the problem with calling them “scientists.” And I’m sure when Dobson comes to a conclusion out-of-favor with the scientific peerage, and he uses the work of “respected” (read: accepted into the clan) researchers, to them it feels like slander. So on an emotional level, I suppose you can’t slight them for wanting to treat it that way.

But based on what he wrote that I read, their objections are just plain silly. He’s taken what they said — and he’s reached conclusions, based on what they said, that they don’t like. And so they’re insisting on playing traffic-cop, with their scientific credentials, on the conclusions to be reached from the work they did. According to what we used to call “science,” that’s utterly invalid.

It’s like me agreeing to the terms of a credit card, charging things up on that card, and then objecting to the balance on my bill at the end of the month. Hey, it’s a conclusion drawn from your research; it’s not the research itself. You don’t have to like it, and if your reputation is being somehow tarnished because of the conclusion someone else drew from your work, it shouldn’t be. And if your invitation to a cocktail party somewhere has been withdrawn, or your grant money for some project is no longer forthcoming, well you know what? That’s just tough. It says more about the person who made the decision to withdraw or revoke than it does about James Dobson.

Update 1/5/07: Additional contribution from Rambo, George H. Taylor speaking on “consensus science”. Must-see.

You really should read this Is Psychology a Science? by Paul Lutus

Lutus, I believe, is a brilliant man and understands the meaning of the word “Science” (as well as a great many other words).

Anyway, you’re right on with the “you can’t use my research except to support thesis’ I agree with” bit.
- philmon | 01/04/2007 @ 17:43
Great contribution, Phil. I like the guy’s comments and I even like what I see of the HTML editor.

This is why I write the monotonous beefy stuff. Well, that and insomnia…
- mkfreeberg | 01/05/2007 @ 01:58
[…] There is a problem with “Science”. It has to do with two definitions for the word, one of which is more reasonable but falling out of favor, the other of which is counterproductive but rapidly achieving complete dominance. […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 01/19/2007 @ 10:33
[…] Here we come to another baffling thing about Medicators: They have their own brand of science which works more-or-less in reverse polarity from what we classically understand that word to describe. Theirs is a sort of anti-science, a negative science — it works, not by way of the continuous accumulation of information, but by getting rid of it. I’ve now and then used the metaphor of the sculptor, asked how he goes about carving such beautiful statues of horses, responds with something like “I start with a block of marble and I get rid of everything that doesn’t look like a horse.” That’s very much how the Medicators achieve their agreement; it reveals how this is done at the expense of clarity. And, I suppose that’s why people are disinvited from so-called “meetings.” You start with all the opinions, and you get rid of anything that doesn’t look like the one you want. […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 07/21/2013 @ 13:19
[…] Here we come to another baffling thing about Medicators: They have their own brand of science which works more-or-less in reverse polarity from what we classically understand that word to describe. Theirs is a sort of anti-science, a negative science — it works, not by way of the continuous accumulation of information, but by getting rid of it. I’ve now and then used the metaphor of the sculptor, asked how he goes about carving such beautiful statues of horses, responds with something like “I start with a block of marble and I get rid of everything that doesn’t look like a horse.” That’s very much how the Medicators achieve their agreement; it reveals how this is done at the expense of clarity. And, I suppose that’s why people are disinvited from so-called “meetings.” You start with all the opinions, and you get rid of anything that doesn’t look like the one you want. […]
- Memo For File CLXXXII | Rotten Chestnuts | 07/21/2013 @ 14:26
[…] Around the time of entering those glossary items, I wrote: […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 09/28/2013 @ 08:26
[…] Around the time of entering those glossary items, I wrote: […]
- The Chinese Dragon Dance of “Science” | Rotten Chestnuts | 09/28/2013 @ 08:43

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On What We Call “Science”Thursday, January 4th, 2007

On What We Call “Science”
Thursday, January 4th, 2007