"I have yet to see any signs that such changes are in the works."

That's fair enough.

Well, certainly state authority (and Stalin and Hitler's willingness to kill dissenters) makes it hard for the average citizen to tell the difference.

But that, and this is the point I've been arguing with Jonjon too, doesn't change what science *is*. Yes, attempts to grab credibility by people who will use the label 'science' to support their ideas are bad. This says nothing about science itself, only about the short sightedness of people. Hitler also grabbed the mantle of religion to drape his ideas in. Stalin co-opted Marx's social philosophies to justify his genocides as 'inevitable cultural evolution'.

But a true Marxist will rightly argue that Stalinist Russia resembled the Marxist ideal almost not at all.

At the risk of a No True Scotsman fallacy, if someone or some organization defies the methodology of science in order to prop up an idea, then they are not doing science, no matter how many lab coats they wear.

Which is why, again, education is our best and only tool. When the Discovery Institute issues press releases claiming another victory for intelligent design, the answer is to educate people on why what the Discotute is doing is NOT science. Heck, if the particle physics lab at MIT claimed that they had created cold fusion, but it was their sekrit thing and everyone else would just have to take it on faith, then other scientists would have to expose them as frauds, regardless of how much good work they'd done in the past.

And we have many examples of this. We have brilliant but aging scientists making unfounded assertions outside of their area of expertise, and rather than go along with it out of awe, they are roundly and rightly attacked for making claims for which they have no basis.

And this is what I meant by self solving problems. Jonjon claims that problems don't solve themselves. But this is not true of systems that are built where self diagnostic and self repair are integral parts of that system. Science rewards (eventually) new ideas that displace old ones, and it punishes those that cling to ideas that no longer have merit. It's built that way. It can't NOT do that without a massive change to the very concept of scientific methodology. I have yet to see any signs that such changes are in the works.

A good point, but all the dissenters you mentioned were other scientists. The question remains, from the point of view of the society at large, how did the non-scientist majority view science during those periods?

I disagree. Even within Stalin's Soviet Union, and within Hitler's Germany, many many many scientists realized that the term science was being misused to lend credence to ideas that were flatly NOT scientific. Reading the writings of other biologists in the Soviet Union clearly shows that Lysenkism doesn't become 'science' just because the government says so. Lysenko was rightly reviled by his fellow biologists in the USSR and elsewhere. A few German true-believers may have drunk Hitler's racial purity cool-aid, but the vast majority did not, and some wrote scathing rebuttals of the so called 'scientific' work being done. Many scientists actually fled those countries if they could.

I know you like 'normative' definitions, but I resist the idea that things become something else just because a critical mass of people think so. Science, as a means of exploring reality, is a fairly well defined process. Just because Stalin declared Lysenkism as Soviet State Truth didn't make it science. No matter how many people thought so.

Well, yes...but...

The distinction is a fine one, but I would say that to the extent there is a normative definition of science (as, e.g. a specific method of empirical investigation), in those times and places where science was defined differently and horrifically (in terms of that normative definition) we can only assert that the definition is the true science and those manifestations are the counterfeit because we already assume before the argument that our point of view, about what science is, is correct. This is not an assumption that would be shared by a person inside the society that uses an alternative definition.

I guess what I'm saying is I don't think the sociological and process elements of what science is can be cleanly or easily segregated, and we only believe that they are because we stand in a society that has decided for itself to allow that separation to be made explicit.

That, as I believe you have pointed out, is not a flaw in science. It is a flaw in human nature, and white coats and scientific authority are just one of MANY ways humans attempt to legitimize their actions.

Blaming science for this is like blaming white sheet manufacturers for the Ku Klux Klan.

Science is not a title or an organization. It is a method of looking at the universe. It is the method that counts, not the bunsen burners or the white coats or the beakers and vials.

To be fair, it's not that science as a process is in danger of breeding dogmatism. It is that whatever happens to be called science sociologically (which, depending on your time and location, could be any number of things including the terrifying examples you listed) matters in a big way when it comes to people confronting the institution that that expression is built upon. In may not be particularly fair to science as a process, but the cloisters of science (the lab coats, etc.) have a profound psychological effect at lending legitimacy to any number of idiotic pseudoscientific approaches.

Jonjon, you are still not giving an example of this terrifying rise of dogma within science. So I will agree; a dogmatic worldview posing as science is a terrible thing. But, almost by definition, it is NOT science. It's just using the title as an authority grab. The Stalin era Lysenkism was not science, though it laid claim to that title. Hitler's racial purity experiments were not science, though the people doing them wore white coats. Science is not a title or an organization. It is a method of looking at the universe. It is the method that counts, not the bunsen burners or the white coats or the beakers and vials.

Doesn't compartmentalization lead to less communication? And less useful communication when there is any?

That's what makes it so damn useful. (I did my philosophy of science research paper in undergrad on the overdetermination of reality through the compartmentalization of science. :) The argument in a nutshell goes something like this.

In any discipline there is a natural tendency towards the eventual adoption of a single framework by which all the observations in the field are understood; call them Kuhn's paradigms, or perhaps even better Lakatos' "research programmes", but whatever they are essentially is the practical manifestation of the conceptual ossification you are talking about. When a field is fairly young, these programmes are fairly fragile in the sense that it doesn't take much in the way of observational anomalies to push them into a crisis mode and break the dominance of the framework. Eventually, though, the field will produce a paradigm of explanation that is *satisfactory* (though probably not optimal) to describe the vast majority of observations tolerably, such that the impetus to move into crisis will most likely never be reached.

If one starts with undifferentiated reality and broke it down into separate disciplines, one would perforce eventually discover that each magisterium overlaps significantly, because regardless of the frame you will always find particular entities that are convenient for conceptualization and functionality in more than one field. For example, the electron is an entity which has discrete definition in particle physics, chemistry, and electrical engineering. Critical to the thesis is the hypothesis that if one were to attempt to "stitch" undifferentiated reality back together from these individual paradigms, one would be left with considerably more than one started with, because the descriptions of the overlapping entities are always going to be at least slightly incompatible. Hence, reality being overdetermined by scientific balkanization.

The point for this particular problem is that since the same entities are described so differently and for generally different purposes in each field, there is no real commitment to each others' paradigm in describing the entity, there is no motivation for a worker in a neighboring field to adopt the suboptimal paradigm of the other in describing phenomena related to the shared object on their side of the line. Chemists don't generally give a damn that their empirical discoveries of the bond angles of electrons in certain compounds ends up casting considerable doubt on the latest quantum field equations; that's emphatically the physicists' problem. (Sure, they may be idly curious why they don't match, but without the existential commitment to the quantum field equations that the physicist might have, it's a fundamentally different orientation to the problem). Since the entity being discussed exists on both sides of the line, this is the portal through which novel conceptual frameworks and contrary data and observations can flow, guaranteeing the freshness of the paradigm through the injection of this new conceptual DNA from neighboring fields.

I honestly have no idea how to make a TL;DR out of that except "Science, it works, bitches!" :)

I don't think the structures of "science" and "religion" either generally or specifically matter nearly as much as their social roles. Being the ultimate authority over knowledge and knowing is more than enough.

I agree that the sociological orientation towards each episteme is incredibly important, but is really not a feature of science and religion per se, and more a feature of the society. The criticism is really a sociological criticism about scientism, which is a conceptual fault generally of people who are not scientists about science, and not one which scientists really have much role (or capacity) in solving.

Doesn't compartmentalization lead to less communication? And less useful communication when there is any? I don't think the structures of "science" and "religion" either generally or specifically matter nearly as much as their social roles. Being the ultimate authority over knowledge and knowing is more than enough.

I agree with you that science is capable of self-criticism, but I want to be careful about what exactly that means. Science is designed to criticize the things that it thinks are true. Science is not designed to criticize the process it uses to criticize the things that it thinks are true. Because that's a hellish sentence, I'll illustrate: A biologist is invested in finding errors in other people's work. His colleagues are similarly invested in his and others' work. Confirmation bias is helpfully eliminated by the way science is currently organized. Science criticizes its body of scientific knowledge basically non-stop, which, let's face it, is a really good system.

At the same time, though, science doesn't have nearly the level of interest in double checking how well, or whether, that system of self-criticism is working. I suppose there are some philosophers of science who are actively interested in holding the structure and methods of modern science to a standard of public criticism. The fact is, though, that that falls outside the umbrella of science. That same biologist is not only not interested in shooting down any false ideas that underlie the philosophical structure of science, he likely isn't capable of it. Not just because he isn't trained to do that (which I take as further proof that science leaves this aspect of self criticism mostly unexplored) but because he has spent his entire career working within that structure and only that structure. All of his training is from within, and there is no external context.

Now, there are some examples of science that worked differently. They are basically terrifying and fascistic (Hitler and Stalin's scientists, etc.) But those were sciences that introduced ideological ideas into their work and incorporated them enthusiastically. Science is not likely to be harmed in such a manner by *more* criticism of itself. Since the area of science which is conceptually the most likely to prevent its manipulation by ideology is not actually practiced as a part of science, I have to wonder why.

Now, I know that really anyone who does this kind of criticism is a philosopher. But philosophers are very strange and usually ignored (often for very good reason.) But why shouldn't science include "meta-science" for lack of a better word? And heck, in some cases science does this too: Mr. Popper revolutionized science, and everyone knows his name. The thing is, though, that people today are not trained to criticize Karl Popper. Partially that's because his ideas have been pretty well tested in the course of everyday science, but partially it's because a successful attack on the ideological foundations of science can destabilize science.

Look, maybe I'm completely off-base, and science as we know it right this very minute is basically it. In that case, congrats, we've arrived. Might as well not worry about improving this awesome system we have. It looks like it maintains itself, and we get a lot of use out of it, and if it ain't broke we shouldn't fix it. I don't think this is true. But I've been wrong before (often.) If science looks like it does now in a couple of hundred years, I'll be shocked. But maybe it will.

Edit: I forgot to ask whether you think complete epistemic closure is necessary for dogmatic thought. That seems unlikely to me, especially in light of the fact that a common response to being proven wrong is to yell louder and believe harder.

What I'm talking about are the ways in which I observe science eerily matching the development of organized religions. Unless you think that an institutionalized science is somehow miraculously immune to authoritative fiat. Or social evolution.

There are some striking parallels between how our society reacts to and has intercourse with science and scientific institutions and how society does the same with religion and religious institutions, but I'm not sure that reflects anything substantial about underlying similarities in the structure of science and religion. I tend to think it is more a function of the fact that they play similar social roles, both being custodians of methods of knowing and generally being tasked with conceptually ordering the world.

As far as internal structure goes, however, they bear little similarity. Even as I touched earlier upon the ossified power structures of scientific institutions, how those structural facts bear out in actual effects could not be more different. Part of the genius of the scientific method (and a concomitant weakness of the religious method) is that it is capable of radical self-criticism. The capacity for religious self-criticism is a great deal more measured, to say the least.

One of the practical ways in which the scientific edifice is strikingly not like the Catholic church in particular is the fact that science as an institution is compartmentalized. It is fruitful to move away from the generic reference and analyze at the level of individual disciplines; this is an additional bulwark against ossification because to the extent that scientists develop cultural or ideological cul-de-sacs, each tends not to extend beyond their immediate disciplines, and so it is comparatively easy to inject some novelty into any given field simply by importing the findings of a partially related field. These "multiple personalities of science" I suppose you could call them, make complete epistemic closure all but impossible.

"What I'm talking about are the ways in which I observe science eerily matching the development of organized religions. Unless you think that an institutionalized science is somehow miraculously immune to authoritative fiat."

I don't see this link at all, but perhaps I am not looking closely enough. Science shreds through ideas fairly rapidly - while this process is slower in the biological sciences, we can see it in physics nearly every day. Organized religion rarely adapts to new ideas and when they do it usually takes decades or even centuries for it to work.

"These are self solving problems."

Maybe this is our disconnect? I certainly don't think that there are very many such problems, if any at all. It is not in the nature of problems to sort themselves out without outside intervention.

I know you said that if a system doesn't do all the things science does, then it isn't science. I feel like you're leaning on this definition really hard. If science, as it is currently practiced, leads to a future in which science no longer resembles the science of today, and is therefore no longer "science" as you have been defining it, then isn't that a problem? While I don't believe in self-solving problems, I certainly do believe in self-defeating systems.

"Churches, as authority driven 'means of knowing' have nothing BUT dogma. Changes to that dogma come either out of social evolution or authoritative fiat. Our scientific understanding of the universe can change even when no one wants it to. Even when the old way made everyone happier. I read science blogs every day. I'm always astonished by how many articles begin, "Well, we have to rethink planetary formation modeling now, because so-and-so just found some shit that breaks the old model." Not a lot of dogma there."

What I'm talking about are the ways in which I observe science eerily matching the development of organized religions. Unless you think that an institutionalized science is somehow miraculously immune to authoritative fiat. Or social evolution. I agree there isn't *as much* dogma in the sciences as there is in religion, but why should that preclude me from being concerned about an uptick in the amount of dogmatic thought in either institution? As for there being no dogma in the sciences, I think that's a very noble view of human nature, but the humans I know pretty much hold to their ideas dogmatically. It's what we, as a species, do. So why is it bad to be concerned that what was, for a very long time, humanity's best method of avoiding dogmatic thought is resembling more and more its most dogmatic institutions?

You don't think that the speed of information promulgation also reduces the problem? It's a two edged sword.

Honestly I think it intensifies the problem, because it burdens the overall system with a higher noise-to-signal ratio.

You don't think that the speed of information promulgation also reduces the problem? It's a two edged sword.

Ty, you have to admit that the scientific process has been institutionalized in a fairly autocratic fashion; while that autocracy has meritocracy as a significant feature, it is clear that the actual institution (places in which science is done, money that pays for it, publications that validate its findings, and people who engage in its productive work) are fairly tightly knit and bear most if not all the standard sociological pitfalls of a hierarchical human structure.

Given that, seeing as how the problem lies not so much with the methodologies of science as with human nature and more specifically the common emergent features of any organization of humans, I don't see what could be done to alleviate those problems more than is already done while also maintaining the productivity of the scientific enterprise.

And your point that entrenched interests can block progress is true, but relatively trite. The answer is always "not for long".

I think this answer sufficed in the past because the relative productivity of science as an institution was parceled out slowly. With knowledge now growing on the upswing of the geometric curve, I think the entrenched interest problem will become intensified in turn.

I honestly have no idea what you are talking about. You seem to be using 'science' as a term to describe some monolithic entity.

I am using it to mean a process by which new information about the universe is gained.

Can science get better? Uh, yeah, that's pretty much the definition of what it does. It gets better. Do I think there is a better tool than skeptical inquiry? I certainly can't think of one.

I get this idea that you are arguing against a position no one actually holds.

The thing that I can't see getting better is the process of developing hypotheses, testing them to destruction, creating models that match the data, testing those models to destruction, developing a theory that accounts for the working models, then sending that theory out into the world to be tested by people other than the originator.

The mechanisms and cultures in which those things happen? Sure, that can always be improved. So can anything that involves humans.

And your point that entrenched interests can block progress is true, but relatively trite. The answer is always "not for long". As soon as the scent of blood is in the water, the entrenched interest will be ripped to shreds by sharks looking to make their bones at the old guard's expense. These are self solving problems.

Short form, can the method by which we gain information about the universe be better? I can't think of a way. Can the institutions that purport to use that method be better? Sure.

And the church analogy is very flawed. Churches, as authority driven 'means of knowing' have nothing BUT dogma. Changes to that dogma come either out of social evolution or authoritative fiat. Our scientific understanding of the universe can change even when no one wants it to. Even when the old way made everyone happier. I read science blogs every day. I'm always astonished by how many articles begin, "Well, we have to rethink planetary formation modeling now, because so-and-so just found some shit that breaks the old model." Not a lot of dogma there.

"You keep saying, "science could be better." Honestly, what does that 'better' science look like to you? What differentiates it from how it's done today?"

Well, I keep gesturing towards it, if not actually describing it, although I have been trying to do that. Are you saying that science couldn't be better? I keep hearing you say things very close to this, and it disturbs me. If people who are firm advocates of the usefulness of science don't admit that science could be improved, then it won't be. This is what I meant by comparing science to Catholicism. Science is clearly big and institutionalized. It is becoming bigger and more institutionalized. The only thing keeping it from approaching "scary" status in my book is the fact that right now it doesn't hold to its methods as dogmatically as the Church does, and it still reacts to new information much faster than the Church.

As soon as you say science can't be improved, though, you open the door for people to dogmatically assert that science must be "x". And as soon as big, institutionalized science becomes too entrenched to adapt to changes (i.e. "slow") and becomes an environment where dogmatically held beliefs can live relatively unmolested, then you've opened the door for new ideas to be treated as heresy.

This isn't our attitude toward the medical profession, it isn't our attitude toward academia at large, it isn't our attitude towards the legal system, and it certainly isn't our attitude toward religion and politics. In all of these cases I can think of ways to improve. So can, presumably, the people who work in those fields. I'm throwing out possible ideas of how science can improve. Those are secondary to my point; my argument is not that science is too mean. My point is that being unable to imagine (or admit) ways that science could be improved is not only hubris, but historically a really clear pattern: institutions that acquire power and get bigger, but don't change their methods when such change is necessary, become obsolete.

When an institution becomes bigger and stronger and slower, it can skew all the rules in its favor. In fact, it has to in order to compete with upstarts. "Careers are made by proving everyone else wrong." That's true. But if my research company is pulling down $100 million a year in grant money and "Crackpot Bob" proves that our research is a dead end, I have a problem. At some point, my dilemma will boil down to whether the importance of my research, or the importance of my colleagues' prestige/employment, outweighs my sense of professional ethics. By the way, those professional ethics have been tuned to squash people who haven't made significant contributions to science, and ignore their results-- especially if those results don't line up with the results obtained by "real" scientists. You know, the ones who belong to my research group. Even if, deep down, I know that Bob got really lucky and figured out that I'm pursuing a dead end, I could pretty easily fight for my own research. And I could pretty easily lean on people to ignore Bob, or laugh at him, or blacklist him, or whatever.

I'm done with hypotheticals now. I'm worried that you can't think of ways that science could improve. I think that's short-sighted and dangerous. I also think it historically precedes dogma. Tell my why I shouldn't be worried about that.

"The culture that disincentivizes scientific study for those who aren't in the upper 90th percentile of intelligence. "

On another note, is your argument that we should throw money at anyone who wants to 'do science' regardless of their ability? Money is the only incentive there, and it is a finite resource. The 'disincentive' that you speak of is merely the people with the purse strings deciding who gets the financing based on perceived merit. Anyone anywhere can do any 'science' they want. What they can't do is demand that someone else pay for it unless they can demonstrate the merit of their ideas. This is a bad thing, why?

"I don't think science should be the next world-wide cultural institution that gets too big, too slow, too conservative, and too institutionalized to survive. "

If you can show any evidence that science is becoming any of those things, then maybe you have a point. Your entire argument seems to boil down to "science is mean!" I gotta say, I don't find that persuasive at all. Especially not when people who are utterly outside of the ivory tower are still making groundbreaking discoveries and are folded into the general understanding without much fuss.

"Sorry to harp on this, but just because you haven't seen science do anything different does not mean that a different scientific culture is impossible."

What culture? The culture that ideas are going to be attacked? That generally only smart people wind up being able to do pure research? Until you can demonstrate that either of those is a net negative, I really don't understand your point at all.

You seem to be arguing that science would be better served by being less competitive. I don't see that at all.

And as far as entrenched ideas go, the biggest one in science is that being first is how you win the prize. So, even if every other scientist in the world is clinging to idea A with both hands and screaming at anyone that gets near it, the first person to come along and prove that idea B is actually better WINS. Careers are made by proving everyone else wrong. That's an idea that I'm glad is 'entrenched'.

You keep saying, "science could be better." Honestly, what does that 'better' science look like to you? What differentiates it from how it's done today?

"I mean, what else can you do?"

*ahem* You could change the culture that science currently uses to get its job done. The culture that disincentivizes scientific study for those who aren't in the upper 90th percentile of intelligence.

Sorry to harp on this, but just because you haven't seen science do anything different does not mean that a different scientific culture is impossible. From the fact that you haven't seen science work any way but the way it currently works, it doesn't even follow that the best way to do science is the way its currently being done.

If you find it impossible to conceive of a science that works better than the science we have today, then I sincerely hope some scientists in the world disagree with you. Otherwise science will never get any better. Entrenched cultures protect themselves from threats like innovation, even though those threats are actually the only thing that can keep them from becoming obsolete. A great example is Catholicism; serviceable examples are most other conservative religious groups. I don't think science should be the next world-wide cultural institution that gets too big, too slow, too conservative, and too institutionalized to survive.

Stem cell research is legal in quite a few countries, especially in Asia.
Cloning is in flux, though. Don't know what's going to happen there.

While I am a great fan of Tyson, I don't think he makes a good Sagan substitute. He lacks Sagan's lyricism and ability to convey a sense of wonder.

The legality of human cloning is probably going to be in limbo for the next century or so.

That's why we need more Sagans.

Neil deGrasse Tyson has comfortably slipped into his shoes.

Alas, human cloning is illegal.

Not for long.

Alas, human cloning is illegal.

The only answer to that is patiently educating the public. I mean, what else can you do?

That's why we need more Sagans.

I'm not sure that elitism is the real problem. Outreach to the public is very, very difficult in a country where 99.9% of the population lacks a basic education in logic, critical thinking, and the mathematics of probability. If you do not grasp these things, then if you hear of a scientific study whose results conflict (or agree) with your prior assumptions and prejudices, you lack the intellectual tools to evaluate the claim on its own merits. Ergo, you will accept or reject its validity for reasons that have nothing to do with the actual data. This is why sound scientific findings are often ridiculed, and pseudoscience is often popularly acclaimed.

"Let me ask a slightly different question: if Science hired you to be a PR guy, what would you say needed to be changed about the way science presented itself to the world? If Science hired you to take a look at their "mission statement" and figure out what they could focus less heavily on and what there needs to be more of, what would you point out?"

More Carl Sagans, please. The problem is not wit how science is done. The problem is in how it is presented to the public. Less elitism, more outreach.

And I agree with Ursa. The major changes coming in the next fifty years will be in how it is funded, not in the process itself.

I think in the coming decades, the way we do science is going to follow the trajectory that it has been on for a while. More and more taxpayer funding, more and more government control over what is funded, more and more restrictions on what subjects may be researched (e.g., the embryonic stem cell controversy).

In my professional lifetime, science has devolved into an endless scramble for public money. People choose research topics, and even build whole careers, based on what they think they can get funded, or what is a hot funding area at the moment. In the not-so-distant future, I predict that if your study subject isn't intrinsically "sexy", or if Fox News is not talking it up, it won't stand a chance of being funded.

This state of affairs does not change the fundamental paradigm of science- hypothesize, test, revise. Indeed, that fundamental paradigm cannot change, or the activity ceases to be science. In that sense I think it's fair to say that science at the lab bench is not going to change. The reason that we go to the lab bench, and how we get there, are what is subject to change.

"The fact that someone might be unhappy because any new idea isn't automatically welcomed with warm hugs bothers me not at all. Individual happiness is not the issue."

Well, we agree on that, at least. But I'm not talking about credulity. I'm talking about not training literally every scientist in the world (through actual experience if not actual pedagogy) that their job is to demolish new ideas. I think you are envisioning this as some kind of namby-pamby weaksauce science. Frankly, I can see how you make the leap, but the two things are distinct. A culture of criticism is not the same thing as a culture of constructive criticism. Neither is a culture of constructive criticism the same thing as "setting the bar too low" (or an excess of warm hugs.)

Let me ask a slightly different question: if Science hired you to be a PR guy, what would you say needed to be changed about the way science presented itself to the world? If Science hired you to take a look at their "mission statement" and figure out what they could focus less heavily on and what there needs to be more of, what would you point out?

I'm actually interested in the answer to those questions, but I think these kinds of questions could be productive more generally. Do you think that thirty years from now science will operate on basically the same principles and cultivate the same attitudes? Fifty years? I submit that the prediction that things will *not* change in the future is, historically, one of the least accurate predictions you could possibly make about human society. So how do you think science will change, and while you're speculating, what would be an improvement on the way that science operates today. I will respectfully laugh at your answer if it is "basically, science will do what it's doing right now for basically forever." You're allowed to think that, but I don't think that opinion is well justified by human history.