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The strange rituals of scientists and other shamans

Text: The strange rituals of scientists and other shamans

from Peter Ravenscroft, 22.12.09

Image: Spot the scientist

I will here try to address a few of the curious beliefs and rituals of a great church, Science.

This is a long ramble. You have been warned.

Central to science is the claim that scientists know or are seeking some elusive intellectual holy grail called the truth, and that they never deviate from this selfless quest. Or at least, should not.

But you get problems. In geology for instance, the most famous dictum, for about 180 years was, “The present is the key to the past.” Which is just fine, if in your field season there are earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, gamma ray bursts, magnetic pole reversals, and the landing, with thumps, of large meteorites. It would help too if the Mediterranean or the Black Sea were to breach when you have your geopick in one hand and a camera in the other. And then if, not being in a hurry to get home to tea, you did not mind waiting a while to see the trilobites go extinct. As they are extinct, your tea might get a bit cold while you wait. They will have to re-evolve first, and the gods seem to have mislaid the plans

This science thing is not based on logic. It is based on empirical observation, that is, on looking closely at what is going on or has gone on, as best you can guess, and then trying to understand and describe it. It is entirely a matter of faith to scientists that events will repeat, so that for instance the sun will come up in the east more or less, and not in the west. It seems to work. The problem comes when you observe something that is not easy to describe or understand. Then you guess wildly but do not admit you are guessing. When someone else looks at the same information and guesses quite differently, that is when the trouble starts. Who is right and how do you decide? Roughly, the side with the most money for advertising gets to win.

The adverts are put into what are called peer-review papers, and are printed in approved journals, which print them for the advertisers for free, and make their money by selling the original journal and all the reprints of the papers. The journals demand to own the copyright, an sell these papers back to anyone at about $30 each. As that is a lot of money for what may be splendid information but is more likely meaningless waffle, most of humanity has never seen a peer-reviewed paper and never will. Not that the public does not pay for them. The public pays twice. First it pays the salary and research expenses of the scientist, generally. Some work for private institutions and lots work for nothing and get no pay and live on hope and the smell of passing oily rags, but most are on the public screw. Then the public pays a second time, for the journals to go into the university libraries or researchers files and the reprints ditto. Where, after few years, they are turfed out into the waste paper bin. I is an elegant roundabout and employs hundreds of thousands in good jobs. It keeps librarians and scholars from joining bikie gangs or signing up with the US Marines or the Taliban, so we should not knock it

The word science comes from the Latin word 'scio,” which means “I know.” Most explanations say it means “to know” or “to understand,” but the “o” on the end of “scio” says it is the first person singular. If the source word is “scio” with that “o” the claim then is, ”I know” or “I understand” not “it is known” or “it is understood.” So we are off to a very bad start, at square one.

Who says you know, mate? God? Been there, done that, fact is you are just guessing. And if 3,000 of you lot all say the same, as say with the IPCC shamans in the present spat, you are merely singing a hymn in concert and you are still guessing. All of you. And the opposition, ditto. Perhaps we should not be too hard on folk who call themselves “knowers,” as Latin has no other close word for knowing, according to Google. And given how much Google knows, that is a serious opinion.

But what if what you know is dead wrong? Or sort of wrong? Or irrelevant? Or if someone else knows, with equal certainty the exact opposite? As with AGW? How do you get to find out what the score really is? Answer is, you never do know what the real score is, and cannot.

By the rituals of science shamans, you have to put up what you say you know, as if you are absolutely sure of it, in what is called a peer-review paper. If it gets past the censorship. You are not allowed to say, “Hey, Here is a neat wild guess, what do you guys think?” If you did that a few times, and you were a senior shaman or professor, most of whom have chairs to prove it, you would be tipped out of your chair pretty quickly, and it would be given to a more sober lass or lad. You are also not supposed to put up a whole long list of possible explanations for something, and then let the reader pick and choose.

Consider this one. For the big initial ritual to become a Shaman First Class, for your ticket to be a Doctor of Thinking or of Philosophy, same thing, you have to put up some idea in a very long-winded way, on paper, and then “defend” it. It is not at all OK, a few minutes into your defence of your thesis, to say “Hey, that was a pretty good question, and it clearly makes nonsense of my last three years of guesswork, but look, I did all that work, and can I be a doctor of thinking anyway?” You have to go on defending what you now know perfectly well is nonsense. So, it is not smart to tackle a major and controversial field, and then have someone who really knows it backwards or thinks he or she does, and perhaps worse yet can't stand the sight of this new upstart, sitting in when you are defending your thesis. Solution, study something utterly obscure and uncontroversial. Result, many universities are populated by large tribes of intellectual mice.

Which is why with say, AGW, people with doctorates are the worst possible judges of when an idea is a dead duck and should be thrown on the barbecue and polished off with gusto. They will defend that duck's right to roam the skies for the next few decades and will draw all the graphs needed to make its flights safe and comfortable. Just as they defended their Ph.D. thesis. What you train for is what you get.

They will simply not see that both wings have fallen off their pet duck, even if you put one on top of a long pole and the other in a glass case. They will carefully look in every direction but those. As with AGW, where the ideas-doctoring classes absolutely refuse to look at the satellite maps for such things as CO2, geomagnetics, gravity, temperature, winds and ocean currents. You start off believing those things are irrelevant to climate change and you stay with that belief till you collect your pension. What computer-modelling climatologist knows the first thing about thermal pluming, plate tectonics or geomagnetics? So, the fiendish complexities of those are easily dealt with in the new general circulation model – you simply omit them entirely.

Are governments ever going to hear the senior tenured classes tell them that they do not have the expertise that is needed to understand the issue? When those people were promoted, as in this case, because they were experts in, not atmospheric CO2 levels, but say the effect of temperature changes on beet crops in Belgium? What Ph.D. holder now advising say the Australian government, is competent to say that, having closely considered all the available data, he or she thinks some part of it is not relevant to climate change? Not one, is my guess, And if I am wrong and there are some, they will be drowned out and sidelined by the massed ranks of those who, though they know zip about ice ages, just know that CO2 is driving climate change? Since none of us know what is driving the ice ages, it is not at all difficult to be that ignorant, on the ice part.

The core of the problem is that scientists are under huge pressure from both their own internal culture, and from the one that surrounds them, to pretend to be experts and to understand things fully. In my own experience in geology, the more knowledgeable a man sounded in a boardroom, when talking about say an exploration target still to be tested, the thicker he turned out to be over time. Or the worse the shaman school he just came from. That because the more you know and can think about rocks, the more complex possibilities you can envisage when you only have scant data. It is a wry truism that if you ask two geologists for their opinion on anything, you will get at least three answers. Only three, If they are preoccupied an not really thinking about your question.

The reason for the profound geological ignorance of us monkeys is basically that we have short lives but planetary crusts have slightly longer ones. Also, the the geological record is very fragmented but it is mind-bogglingly huge and also expensive to access, even in tiny pieces. Like drill cores. And, it is the end result of hugely complex processes. So any new data coming in may overturn your entire picture or guess or hypothesis (pick your preferred term), as to what went on in the past.

The current ice ages are a perfect
example. Every new deep drill hole hugely complicates the picture. But who wants to know? A fair number of people have heard of the Vostok drill hole, because its core results or rather, the first guesses about them, became an IPCC icon. Added to the deeper Dome C core data, they were interpreted to mean that CO2 levels in the atmosphere are the highest in 750,000 years. That is a dubious proposition at best. But, who is interested in the fact that those two cores don't match too well, unless you fudge it? And who has ever heard of the Dome Fuji ice ore, that went deeper and does not match too well either? Or that the set shows no ice older than the last magnetic pole reversal? And that none of them match the Greenland ice cores, however much you fudge it?

Why do these things not get pounced on and studied immediately by scientists?

Because scientists almost all come out of universities, and the most senior of those were all, and in most cases in part still are, theological colleges. All the old European ones, all the old British ones, and many of the American ones. They strive for and teach consensus politics, not doubt and scepticism. This particular school of thought believes such and such, that one believes something marginally different. If you wish to differ fundamentally, conform or leave. As I found with the god legend outlined below, with the geology of Mars, and with an undergrad essay I wrote on granites. That got a grudging just-above-fail mark, but a decade later, and quite independently, was a major paper in Scientific American, an accepted and respectable science journal. And then I found, just this year, that the exact same notion is explained in a text-book that was printed long before I came up with my stroke of “independent genius” and that I may very well have read before I did my version.

People do not like new ideas. And scientists are not just people, they are people who have invested huge amounts of their time and often their own money also, in getting to learn all they can about the old idea you just offered to throw in the rubbish bin. If they are senior scientists, they will also have invested huge mounts of other people's time and huge amounts of very scarce community research money into the same ideas that you now wish to trash. And, if they are senior academics with teaching roles in universities, they will also have told hundreds of students how true the old idea was and why it has their stamp of approval. 

And we expect these people not to be extreme intellectual conservatives? That is most unfair.

The radical thinking has to come from the independents, and it does not matter if they have any sort of formal ticket or not, now. The Internet is one vast library, far bigger than any in any university, so you can educate yourself to any level you choose, now. And the more the merrier.In a hugely complex field like climate change (merely a small part of geology)  the new ideas generally come from the older independents. Anything over 21 will do, but to a point, the more of the real world (and of monkey tricks) you have seen, the better. The natural sciences are not like maths - child prodigies are as scarce as hens' teeth, and even scarcer in fields where you need a bit of knowledge about a lot of complex things that take time to grasp and often are being taught nowhere, because they have not been identified as discrete fields of thought. Charlie Darwin did not study Darwinism at uni. And, though he was a young fella when he hitch-hiked on the Beagle, he was an old fella by the time he published On The Origin of Species. Charlie had money, from inheriting the Wedgewood pottery fortune. So he did not give a rats for the intellectual fashions swirling about in zoology in universities, between his voyage in 1831 and publication of The Origin in 1859. Had he been a salaried zoology professor, there would have been 28 years of distractions and requisite intellectual conformism to attend to. He might not have made it, as his health was never the best.

Twenty eight years from now, someone will surface from a secure country retreat somewhere and elegantly explain what is driving the ice ages and hence shorter-term climate changes also. Meanwhile, there are merely us frenetic carbon sceptics.

Professors are much like bishops – they have their parishioners and their clergymen to worry about , in a world where competition for funds is savage. So, they will defend AGW, not till is has merely died or fossilized, but until it is totally petrified. 

Have fun, all.

Peter.

PS. Some trivial background stuff.  Many in this climate change debate wants to play the man and not the ball. OK, not my preference, but they should be accommodated, from principles of tolerance and expansion o fthe culture of science. As I have had a go at describing the social anthropology of scientists as shamans, these are my personal and tribal biases and this is where I am coming from.

I did some training at a few shaman training camps, otherwise known as universities. First, three years to become a junior scientific shaman, a Bachelor of Science ( I just found I cannot spell the first bit of that, without help from my spellchecker) Nevertheless, I became licensed to talk about rocks for money, which has worked quite well, over the years. Then and with some time overlap but separately academically, I did some of the rituals to also become a shaman who studies other cultures and other shamans, of the brand called a social anthropologist, now quite rare. I did four years of that formally, did a test that said I had “majored” in it , and later spent about a decade, on and off, considering Australian aboriginal shamans (bunyips and their cousins) on my own, as a sort of shaman-hermit. Then I went to another shaman college, but left in disgust after another year. I thought I had found something mildly interesting, to wit where the whole daft god legend had started and why, but they wanted all that censored out. They said I could have their ticket for the rest of my work, which was about perfectly ordinary seals wandering way inland and at times over the Great Dividing Range. That great range degenerates to being a set of at least seven flat swamps draining both ways, actually, and the seals chase the eels and the fish over them when it is very wet. But they said I could have their ticket, only if I dropped the stuff about the origin of the legend of god. So, with some volume as I went down the corridor, I told them up which jumper to stick their censorship and we have not spoken since. Later the college library bought all the god legend stuff (uncensored) anyway, to our mutual delight. I don't think the librarians much admired the section of the priesthood I had got
entangled with.

Re tribal biases, I should perhaps mention that my granddad's brother was the Imperial Grand Archdruid of England during WW2, that my aunt, his wife, found it hugely amusing, and that I am on her side. Mostly it was a big charity thing, looking after war orphans and such, so don't be too hard on my great-uncle. The rest of the family where Church of England, but that is only marginally a religion, as it is mostly just about tea and scones and naked power. Most of the Anglican laity and many our the priests have never believed in God at all. I am myself of the atheist wing of the church. It is a broad church and that wing is as old and well-supported as any other. We just believed, at start-up, that the monasteries had some very good fields that were up for grabs. As you can imagine, the folk from the old faith, or lack of it, were quite pleased with Henry the Eighth and the great land grab, round whatever it was.

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