My mother the corporate lawyer, when I told her I was about to marry a guy whose
parents were Catholic, asked, alarmed: "Do they believe in Darwin?" And she wasn't aware that the question was, um, funny.
The Origin of Species was to Mother what The Holy Bible is to so many: she never read the whole thing, but accepted every word of it as true, while looking askance at doubters. ("Looking askance" here means "thoroughly despising.") So I understand why many creationists falsely view evolution as a rival version of fundamentalism: at the lay level it often is.
But even professional stewards of the scientific method share a particular vice with creationists: a secret addiction to certainty. Like crack, certainty is something our minds are designed to enjoy and ill-equipped to resist, even when it leads us down dark paths. Scientific fundamentalism -- certainty addiction at its most paradoxical -- claims that all science is based on solid proofs, on hard facts, or at least on the best available knowledge of the moment. But science itself tells us that this isn't exactly or always true, and is, in the un-fuzzy language of formal logic, "false."
Peer reviewers at scientific journals, the gatekeepers of best available knowledge in their fields, are as human as my mother, and humans are not only biased in all sorts of ways, but, cognitively speaking, unconsciously biased, biased in ways they haven't even thought of, purveyors of jokes they don't get. We run on snap judgments.
A recent study
described in Science News showed that, despite their pledges of neutrality, peer reviewers presented with two nearly identical papers approved "positive" results (results that showed that a new drug worked better than the old one) over neutral ones (in which the two
drugs did equally well). Worse, reviewers rated the methodology in the positive-results paper higher, and missed more (pre-planted) errors in it, even though, like I said, the papers were in all other ways twins. (1)
At the meeting where these results were presented, a former editor in chief of the Danish Medical Journal reminded attendees of a study he did nearly 20 years ago showing that peer reviewers favored papers in English over identical ones in their own Scandinavian languages.
Back in 1977, Michael J. Mahoney reported that peer reviewers had a "conformational" bias for papers whose conclusions matched their own, whereas science is committed to explore any and all contradictory evidence or explanations. (2)
Our certainty habit is not the fault of either science or religion. If those two strange bedmates teach nothing else, it is that reality in its largest sense is beyond our ken. But our minds are designed to forage and to slay gazelles; to survive we need to lock quickly onto hypotheses as if they were givens, to act without thinking. We need snap judgments: strange red berry=danger; gazelles better than no gazelles; medicine dance broke my fever; positive results get research grants.
Perhaps it is because decisiveness is so adaptive that our brains reinforce it. In any case, feeling sure of something is gratifying. We experience certainty as a high, a lever we want to keep pushing. Even after we undergo the shock therapy of contradictory data and get clean for awhile, we'll tend to wander back to our old haunts and habit. (3)
Religious certainty is based, proudly, on faith, on the devotee's commitment to keep pushing the same certainty lever no matter what, while my mother's Darwinian bible is by now encrusted with enough credible evidence to support the spine of its argument unaided by individual belief. But precisely because, as Darwin intuited, our brains are evolved structures, not divine gems, the quality of scientific evidence we amass varies widely in angle and rigor.
Even skeptics long to be certain that published studies, "scientific findings" represent our best understanding of the world as it is. But if you can control your own most insidious addiction to certainty, you might, as Darwin did, find a strange and astounding world on the other side of what everyone is so terribly sure about. (4)
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Notes (the fun part)
(1) Science News described the two-drug study as showing that peer reviewers prefer "novelty," but, as if to prove the article's point about preconceptions, the study doesn't necessarily show that. It can as easily show that reviewers prefer results showing a clear result or a result that promises "progress" over a null result. Null results ("no evidence found for . . .") are notoriously under-reported in the popular press as well.
(2) Here's one snippet of an amazing screed by Michael J. Mahoney (Cognitive Therapy and Research, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1977, PP. 161-1 75) that you can read in full here.
"One study found that the vast majority of scientists drawn from a national sample showed a strong preference for "confirmatory" experiments (Mahoney & Kimper, 1976). Over half of these scientists did not even recognize disconfirmation (modus tollens) as a valid reasoning form! In another study the logical reasoning skills of 30 scientists were compared to those of 15 relatively uneducated Protestant ministers (Mahoney & DeMonbreun, 1977). Where there were performance differences, they tended to favor the ministers. Confirmatory bias was prevalent in both groups, but the ministers used disconfirmatory logic almost twice as often as the scientists did."
(3) One of the clearest cases of knee-jerk bias in popular science reporting was the 1985 Newsweek "Marriage Crunch" article stating that "women over 40 have as much chance of getting married as of being killed by a terrorist." This sloppy thesis, rescinded by Newsweek 20 years later was the progenitor of a kind of fake "study" on successful women's unhappiness that is still fertile today. (See feminists whale on this trend here.)
(4) P.S. I married at 37, once my chances of marrying were less than my chances of being impaled by a unicorn. My husband's parents'views on Darwin, whatever they are, have happily been a null factor in our relationship. My mother died of something science was, to her horror, unable to diagnose, but, though her faith in medical science was shaken, she remained an avid Darwinist to the end.
