Re: [asa] Scientists, Religion, and Politics

Don, I think you and I are essentially in agreement. It's just that I'm not writing very clearly. Let me try one final attempt to make my point.

In their vocation, scientists must necessarily display a blend of conservatism and liberalism, where these terms mean, respectively, clinging to established views and adopting new ideas. A scientist is motivated to pursue new ideas for the purpose of understanding parts of nature that have not yet been understood, or are only partially understood. This calls for a high degree of novelty in one's work. At the same time a scientist is also motivated to retain all that has already been understood. For one thing, there is no need to change it and for another, it forms the basis for advancing knowledge into new directions. Changing what has been demonstrated in the past to work well, is resisted by any scientist, unless it can be shown that the new solution continues to retain the understanding of the past while solving additional problems.

Enough said.

Randy
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Don Winterstein
  To: asa
  Sent: Thursday, July 16, 2009 2:32 AM
  Subject: Re: [asa] Scientists, Religion, and Politics

  To me yours is a novel meaning of "conservatism," one not consistent with my dictionary definitions. What you're describing is simply the standard conscientious way of doing experiments. Experiments should be done conscientiously and carefully, but not necessarily conservatively. If one is a real scientist, one does experiments in the way you call conservative. Sloppy is not science.

  The work of a scientist is anything but conservative as I use the word, because it's nearly always attempting to find something new and by implication overthrow or at least require reinterpretation or readaptation of something old. Upsetting the worldview applecart is what science and scientists love to do and historically have done over and over.

  Conservatism: "tendency to oppose change in institutions and methods." - Webster's New World College Dictionary, 1999. Experimental scientists definitely don't oppose change in methods but are always on the lookout for new and better ways.

  Don

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: Randy Isaac
    To: asa@calvin.edu
    Sent: Wednesday, July 15, 2009 6:08 PM
    Subject: Re: [asa] Scientists, Religion, and Politics

    That's fair enough, Don, as far as it goes, but I think we need a more complete picture to understand what this person was saying about conservatism in scientists. Indeed, breaking new ground and having innovative ideas is the essence of science. That's just the ticket to get in and play. Conservatism is not rejecting new ideas, it is the rigorous and strict adherence to the discipline of scientific methodology. In other words, coming up with new ideas isn't the hardest part, it's figuring out which new idea correctly explains the world around us and convincing the scientific community that this new idea is right. That takes a heap of hard-core conservatism--how you carefully prepared your samples according to time-tested methods, how you meticulously avoided all contamination, how you set up the experiment to differentiate all other possibilities, etc., etc. And until you convince the community that you did it all correctly, and they independently reproduce it all, it's just another firecracker in the air.

    Unfortunately, too often the innovative spirits who claim to have better knowledge than the broader scientific community--be it the young age of the earth, opposition to global warming, the shortcomings of evolution, or whatever--forget the core conservatism that makes science work. One must do the hard work of sound scientific methodology and convince the scientific community that it was done it correctly. Until then, those ideas are wannabe's. They may be right in the long run and, if so, the scientific community will figure it out sooner or later, but it is highly unlikely. No, claiming that the scientific community is biased and simply refuses to listen to these superior ideas doesn't wash. That's a copout and a refusal to do the really hard and thorough scientific work.

    Conservatism in science means having clear, core values and rigorous methodology for accepting new ideas into the scientific community.

    Randy

      ----- Original Message -----
      From: Don Winterstein
      To: asa
      Sent: Wednesday, July 15, 2009 12:26 AM
      Subject: Re: [asa] Scientists, Religion, and Politics

      My two cents' worth:

      The very nature of scientists' work is to challenge authority, the received "truth," and replace it with deductions from carefully measured data. One of a scientist's joys is proving an accepted theory incomplete or wrong.

      The root meaning of conservatism has to do with opposing change and preserving the ways of the past. Religions also impose from on high, declare truth on the basis of "authority."

      Hence a scientist who's immersed in his work and allows its methods to reach into the rest of his life will tend to challenge and oppose both standard versions of religious truth and conventional ways of living and governing.

      The fact that scientists as kids often don't fit in probably contributes to the phenomenon.

      Don

        ----- Original Message -----
        From: Randy Isaac
        To: asa@calvin.edu
        Sent: Tuesday, July 14, 2009 9:01 AM
        Subject: Re: [asa] Scientists, Religion, and Politics

        I recall that when I was in graduate school, oh so long ago, someone on the
        faculty made the comment that scientists tended to be more liberal in
        politics to counter their need to be so conservative in their science. I'm
        not sure if there's any evidence for a human being to need a balance of
        liberalism and conservatism in one's life, but it's an observation that
        stuck with me.

        Randy

        ----- Original Message -----
        From: "Ted Davis" <TDavis@messiah.edu>
        To: "asa" <asa@calvin.edu>; "Merv Bitikofer" <mrb22667@kansas.net>;
        "Nucacids" <nucacids@wowway.com>
        Sent: Tuesday, July 14, 2009 11:17 AM
        Subject: Re: [asa] Scientists, Religion, and Politics

> Polls of this sort are never easy to interpret with much confidence. What
> polls have shown consistently for many years is that academics (including
> scientists) are far more "liberal" both politically and religiously than
> the general American population. That is a generalization, obviously, and
> any given academic or scientist can be a right-wing atheist, a left-wing
> Christian, or any other combination you can imagine.
>
> The reasons for this are not really clear to me, but even 60 years ago it
> was probably true that a large majority of leading physicists (confining
> my comments to physicists, since they are based on what I know anecdotally
> about the Manhattan Project) were very liberal politically and mainly
> irreligious. Some, like Oppenheimer, had considered Communism very
> seriously (his wife was the genuine article), and a few even worked
> covertly for the Soviets (American versions of Klaus Fuchs), as documented
> extensively by the new book, "Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in
> America," based mainly on Soviet archives that became available briefly
> several years ago.
>
> I won't try even to guess at the reasons for this type of demographic, but
> I think it would not be too hard to refute a trivial conclusion that
> intelligence results in liberal political views and religious scepticism.
> Plenty of corporate executives, attorneys, and other folk are also highly
> intelligent, and the demographics among them are probably not similar to
> those among academics and scientists. People in all walks of life tend to
> encourage and empower people who think similarly to themselves, and
> similarities of beliefs in these areas are surely part of that. As
> someone from a top research university once said to me, "places like [the
> university of X] don't hire people from places like Messiah."
>
> Ted
>
>
>
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Received on Thu Jul 16 15:40:37 2009