Stephen Meyer on the Crisis of Trust in Science

[00:00:04] Speaker A: Id the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design. [00:00:11] Speaker B: Is modern science a search for truth or a search for power? How can we restore public trust in the scientific enterprise? Welcome to ID the future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Today we're pleased to share a recent conversation between bioethicist Wesley J. Smith and philosopher of science Dr. Stephen Meyer about the crisis of trust in science today. This interview originally aired on human Eyes, a production of the Discovery Institute's center on human exceptionalism. In an exchange that lasts just over an hour, Smith and Meyer touch on a variety of topics relevant to the public's view and confidence in the scientific enterprise. Meyer explains why he helped found the Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture in the 1990s and how scientific materialism came to dominate modern science after Darwin. Meyer shows that the argument for intelligent design comes from open inquiry and a careful evaluation of all the possibilities. He explains why openness and competition are essential to scientific progress. Then the conversation turns to how recent developments have eroded public trust in science. Meyer explains the potential pitfalls of both consensus science and peer review, as well as the need for quality control in science that is fair and balanced. We have two different concepts of science in play today, says Meyer. Science as consensus, science as settled, science as a consensus view of a particularly privileged group of elites, versus science as open inquiry as a dynamic enterprise that is openly evaluating the best evidence that we have that version of science is what we need to be supporting. Here now is humanize host Wesley J. Smith and Dr. Stephen Seymeyer. [00:02:07] Speaker C: Welcome to Humanize from Discovery Institute's center on Human Exceptionalism, where human rights meet human responsibilities. We speak with writers, thinkers, and newsmakers on the controversial issues of human life and human thriving that impact our daily lives. We are exceptional as creatures in the cosmos, as equal members of the human family, and as ethical beings. Humanize explores some of the fundamental questions. How do we thrive? How do we live well and care for what we've inherited? How do we act responsibly with one another and in the wider world? And how do we conserve the good things of this life for the future? We matter. Our actions matter. Let's get into it. I'm Wesley J. Smith, and this is humanize. No secret that most of society's critical institutions are suffering from a cris of trust. One of these is science, which heretofore enjoyed the confidence of the vast majority of the american people. To learn what happened, whether the loss of confidence is deserved, and what can be done about it, I asked the director of Discovery Institute center for Science and Culture to join us for a second time on human eyes. Stephen P. Meyer received his PhD in the philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge and is a former geophysicist and college professor. He authored the books Signature in the Cell, which was named a book of the Year for 2009 by the Times of London, the New York Times bestseller Darwin's doubt, and most recently, the Return of the God Hypothesis. Meyer has also published editorials in national newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the National Post of Canada, the Daily Telegraph of London, and the Los Angeles Times. He has appeared on national television and radio programs such as NBC Nightly News, ABC Nightly News, CBS Sunday Morning, Nightline, Fox News Live, Good Morning America, and was recently heard by millions of viewers in an extended interview on the Joe Rogan podcast. He has also been featured in two New York Times front page stories and has garnered attention in other top national media. In 2008, he appeared with Ben Stein in the theatrically released documentary expelled no intelligence allowed. He has also been featured prominently in the science documentary's Icons of Evolution, the Case for a creator, and Darwin's dilemma, which aired on PBS and which Meyer co wrote with producer lad Allen. He also may be the most intelligent person I know. Steve, welcome back to humanize. [00:05:13] Speaker A: Well, that's a hard introduction to follow, but thank you. Wesley. [00:05:16] Speaker C: It's good to be with know you spent your entire education and career in the sciences. Why did you choose that field of work? [00:05:23] Speaker A: Well, I've always been interested in the natural world. When I was a little kid, I had the typical four year old fascination with dinosaurs. My sister loves to tell the story of me burying chicken bones and then going and digging them up again just to pretend that I was a paleontologist. But I've also been very interested in the questions that are at the intersection between science and philosophy, which I think explains my eventual choice to go into the field of philosophy of science from physics and geophysics, where I started. [00:05:57] Speaker C: You did major in the philosophy of science. What is the philosophy of science? Because one doesn't necessarily think about science and philosophy being together. And what are its major tenets? [00:06:09] Speaker A: Well, the philosophy of science addresses questions that are, in a sense, at the edge of scientific investigation, questions about the nature of science itself, questions about the methods that scientists use, questions about the metaphysical implications of scientific theories. And those have been a particular interest of mine, looking at questions about the origin of the universe and the origin of life, which have a strong scientific dimension, but in each case raise fundamental questions about what philosophers sometimes call the prime reality, the thing from which everything else came, will be no doubt aware that in the history of science, science was initially called natural philosophy. It wasn't until the 1840s or 50s when William Hewell coined the term scientist. So right from the beginning, scientists that people we call scientists today, like Kepler and Boyle and Newton, thought that they were philosophizing about how nature works. So philosophy is good thinking, and science is the study of the natural world. So it's really quite natural to combine the two. Do good thinking about the natural world. [00:07:24] Speaker C: Before we get into the nitty gritty and the heart of the matter. Describe the work of the center for Science and Culture. And why did you help found it? [00:07:32] Speaker A: Well, the center was founded in 1996. The center was founded with the express idea of challenging one particular metaphysical interpretation that has drawn support from science, or you might say, is the philosophical framework in which much of modern science has been done. And that philosophical framework is sometimes called materialism or naturalism, the idea that the natural world of matter and energy are all that exists, and that the universe, therefore, is eternal and self existent and self organizing and self creating. And so this is a kind of worldview extension of much current scientific thinking. It's not actually required by the scientific thinking. In fact, we've argued just the opposite. But since the late 19th century, the theistic view that gave rise to modern science in the period of the scientific revolution in the 16th and 17th century has been supplanted by a more materialistic perspective. In the late 19th century, you had Darwin's theory of the origin of new forms of life. You had Huxley's ideas about the origin of the first life. Going back further, Laplace attempted to explain the origin of the solar system by purely undirected physical forces. So you had this kind of seamless origin story that could be told by the late 19th century, where everything from the origin of the solar system to the origin of the first life to the origin of new forms of life to origin of even human beings, could be told as the result of slow, gradual, undirected processes. And the combination of those theories ended up generating a kind of comprehensive worldview that suggested that the universe is eternal, self existent, self creating, and self organizing. Then you had other extensions of that into social sciences. Freud developed a psychology that was essentially materialistic and attempted to explain what to do about the human condition, what to do about our guilt. And you had, with Marx, a materialist, utopian vision of the future. So if you just think of those three great materialist figures of the late 19th century, early 20th. Darwin tells us where we're going. Darwin tells us where we came from. Marx tells us where we're going. Freud tells us what to do about our guilt and the human condition. And so between the three and other related thinkers, we end up with a kind of comprehensive worldview known as scientific materialism that answers the basic questions that Judeo christian religion had always answered. And so scientific materialism, or scientific naturalism, supplants judeochristian theism as the dominant worldview among elite intellectuals and has had a huge impact on our culture since then. If we look at the law schools, the media, the courts, the science laboratories, the universities, this worldview is sort of the default way of thinking, and it claims to be supported by science, and that's what we wanted to challenge. We don't think it is supported by science. If anything, science is actually, again, supporting the theistic perspective that gave rise to it in the first place. [00:11:03] Speaker C: This is very interesting. It sounds to me like you're saying that for, would it be safe to say, ideological reasons, that science or the pursuit of science took out certain aspects of what a full pursuit of truth might look like? So science can't look at anything that doesn't have a natural explanation, in the sense of, we understand natural. And so it's really kind of, you might say, corralled itself into a partial worldview. Would that be accurate? [00:11:37] Speaker A: That's a very good way of, well, it's a worldview, but it's a worldview that excludes, by definition of science, by the contemporary definition of science, consideration of anything which challenge that worldview. So in the period of Kepler, Boyle, Newton, Hoygen, all the great early scientists, they were developing science in a theistic, and indeed, for many of them, overtly Christian or judeo christian milieu. And science arose for explicitly theistic reasons. One of the key ideas that gave rise to modern science was the idea of intelligibility, that nature is intelligible. It can be understood because it's the product of a rational mind, namely God, the creator. And because that same God has endowed us with rationality, we can understand the rationality, the order, the design that he's placed into nature, and that gave people confidence that the systematic study of nature would reveal secrets, would reveal insights and patterns and order that could be described eventually, mathematically. And so there was a tight correlation between, or a tight connection between the theological ideas that were in the minds of the early founders of science, and the confidence they had in doing science, their reasons for pursuing it, and the way they ended up doing it. But by the late 19th century, we got this shift, and the shift came about because of specific theories that were developed that allowed scientists to portray the universe in a different way as the consequence of undirected, unguided material processes only. But that shift also ended up codifying an approach to the scientific method. And you see this already in an incipient or a nascent form. In the origin of species, there's a particular phenomenon that Darwin is interested in. It's called homology, that you have similar bone structures in very different animals. And he attributes that to the idea that the animals had a common ancestry. Well, there was a well established alternative explanation for that similarity among the biologists who were his contemporaries and who had been working in the preceding generations. And that was the idea of a common design plan. Now, it happens that both common design and common descent can explain that similarity equally well. But Darwin in the origin. And Darwin acknowledged this alternative explanation in the origin. But he said, quote, but that's not a scientific explanation. So he defined out of existence or out of relevance or out of consideration, out of the realm of consideration, an alternative explanation that involved the action of a designing mind. And that move became codified. And by the end of the 19th century, coming into. [00:14:40] Speaker C: What do you mean it became codified? [00:14:42] Speaker A: Well, there's actually a principle that scientists, a normative principle of method, or a principle of method that scientists regard as normative that they call methodological naturalism. And that's the idea that if you're going to be a scientist, you must explain all phenomena, all events, by reference to strictly materialistic or naturalistic processes. And you may not consider creative intelligence as part of the explanation for how things came to be or why they work the way they do. And this was a dramatic departure from the thinking of the early scientists. In Newton's general Scolium, which was the epilogue to the principia, he made very explicit design arguments. He famously said, speaking of the planetary bodies, he said, this most beautiful system of sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the council and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being. And so he made an argument that was essentially a fine tuning argument. In the epilogue to the Principia, arguably the greatest work of physics ever written in the optics, he made design arguments about the eye. Robert Boyle made design arguments. So this was part of the inspiration for science, and also it flowed out of scientific investigation until the late 19th century. Things began to shift. [00:16:05] Speaker C: So you're saying that some of the original discoveries would not be permitted under the current reign of scientific materialism. [00:16:17] Speaker A: Exactly. And moreover, some of the more recent discoveries have implications that cannot be considered under this same regime, if you will, of methodological naturalism viewing. There's a lot to say about this, but in my work in the philosophy of science, I discovered that a very powerful method of scientific reasoning has a name. It's called inference to the best explanation. That's the idea that if you have a body of facts, you want to consider all the possible explanations and then evaluate them based on our knowledge of cause and effect, to see which best explains the phenomenon in question. And what's happening in the debate about biological and cosmological, well, especially biological origins, is that you have a range of possible explanations, a number of different types of evolutionary theories invoking different materialistic mechanisms. But you also have distinctive indicators of intelligence in life, such as the digital code that's present in the DNA. And people will say, well, we can't consider intelligent design as an explanation. And so, rather than infer to the best explanation among all the possibilities, we are now in a period of science where scientists want to restrict the inferences that are allowable. And so you can only infer to the best explanation among an artificially limited set of options. [00:17:44] Speaker C: Why do they want us? So if the point of science is to find the truth, why restrict it in any way? [00:17:52] Speaker A: Well, that's our question to them. We're challenging not only in my work, I've developed positive arguments for intelligent design as the best explanation for, say, the digital code and DNA, or the complex information storage, transmission and processing system that you find in cells, or the circuitry that's at work in guiding animal development, or the miniature machines that Michael Behe has made famous in his work Darwin's black box. There's many phenomena in living systems that display attributes or features which in any other realm of experience would make us immediately aware of a designing agent behind them, of an engineer of some kind. But that's a forbidden inference in the minds of many scientists. And so we've not only been making the argument that design better explains some of these phenomena, but also we've been challenging this artificial rule of method that restricts the intellectual freedom of the scientists to consider that hypothesis. And on exactly the grounds you indicate. Isn't the real point of science. Isn't the ultimate goal of science to find the truth, irrespective of our philosophical predilections that we bring to the inquiry? Otherwise we'll have an historical biology where we're looking at natural history, trying to figure out what happened, and we're going to say, well, we can't consider the idea that a mind played a role. You've got two basic possibilities, and they go back to the ancient Greeks. Is life the result of unguided, undirected material processes, or did it arise as the result of an intelligence playing a role in configuring matter in some way? If you decide from the outset that one of those two answers cannot be considered, then you're going to have a less than fully rational form of inquiry as you address that question, because are. [00:19:57] Speaker C: You guilty of the same exclusion where you want to pursue an hypothesis, let's say, that says it is directed in some fashion to the exclusion of an undirected natural. Do you engage in kind of the same prejudice from the other end? [00:20:15] Speaker A: Well, if you read my books, you'd say no, because I end up, they're long and ponderous in some ways, because I address all comers and look at all the different explanations that are on the table. I use the method of inference to the best explanation to make my case for intelligent design, which means, for example, in my book on the origin of life, I had to address theories, and there were several, that attempt to explain the origin of life as a result of natural laws or what are called self organizational processes. I had to address other naturalistic theories that rely heavily on chance or random processes. I had to address other theories that combine the two, the lawlike and the random. Together, we've very self consciously attempted to evaluate in making our case, all the relevant hypotheses. And moreover, we acknowledge that there are real natural processes that have causal powers. We think, for example, we ID proponents think that natural selection is a real process that can do real things. It has certain generative powers, but not others. We like to say we have more tricks in our explanatory toolbox. If the data warrants an inference to intelligence, we're willing to make it. If it doesn't, if it warrants an inference to the effect of natural processes, we'll make that inference. And that's the way science used to be pursued. [00:21:48] Speaker C: Well, that's how it should be pursued. [00:21:51] Speaker A: Well, we think so. And you find this kind of exclusionary logic in other controversial subjects. It may not be a philosophical reason for excluding a given hypothesis. It may be a political one, or it may be a personal, prejudicial one. But I think the scientific method, first of all, there are many scientific methods, but good method requires an openness to all relevant hypotheses and not closing down inquiry and excluding some possible explanations before you've even evaluated the evidence. [00:22:26] Speaker C: So the scientific method is the means by which the natural world is explored. Just real quickly, because this isn't a course in science. [00:22:36] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. [00:22:38] Speaker C: What are some of the tools that scientists use to do these investigations? [00:22:44] Speaker A: Well, there's a textbook version of the scientific method that is a nice approximation of what many scientists do. But one of the things that I explained in signature in the cell is that there are many different scientific methods depending on the nature of the thing being studied. There are some scientists who use the standard method that you learn in the textbooks. They generate a hypothesis. They set up a controlled laboratory experiment. They then run the experiment, and they see if their hypothesis, the hypothesis that they formulated, matches what actually happens under those controlled laboratory experiments. So they make a prediction and see if the prediction comes true. But there are also historical scientific questions. What caused life to arise? How did the trilobites emerge in the cambrian period? How did the universe begin? What were the ancestors of human beings like? Any number of archaeological, anthropological, cosmological, biological questions that are essentially historical in nature. And it turns out that prediction plays much less of a role in that sort of inquiry. And instead, typically, historical theories are evaluated by comparing their explanatory power with respect to facts we already have. We don't go and run experiments. We gather data, observe things, and then try to explain it after the fact. There's also scientific fields that are involved with classification. They don't really make predictions, they make careful observations, and they do a lot of comparing and contrasting, and on and on it goes. So we have this idea that there is one scientific method, and that's been used, somewhat mischievously, the stereotyped view of science, to exclude questions that we might not want to consider or answers that we might not want to consider. So oftentimes, the theory of intelligent design is said to not qualify as a scientific theory because it doesn't use the same method that you use at the bench in the laboratory, the same method of science that is used there. But it does use the exact same method that Charles Darwin used in developing his case in the origin of species. In fact, I modeled my case for intelligent design and signature in the cell in Darwin's doubt on the method of reasoning that I studied in my PhD, years of historical scientific reasoning that Darwin used. So sometimes, not recognizing the diversity of methods that scientists use, can be used pejoratively to try to stigmatize an idea you don't like. And this is sometimes called the demarcation problem. You define science in a very rigid, narrow way, and then you say, well, our opponents don't use that particular method of reasoning, therefore, they're not scientific. But typically, there's double standards applied in that type of reasoning. [00:26:01] Speaker C: And now we're moving into the loss of trust in science. And I think that's a natural segue, because this is beginning to look not so much in the sense you just described as a search for truth, but as a search for power. [00:26:16] Speaker A: It can be. That's the danger. The reason it's a danger is that science, like anything else, is a human enterprise. [00:26:24] Speaker C: Sure. [00:26:25] Speaker A: And human beings can apply standards selectively to favor one idea over another. They can exclude ideas they don't like on grounds that are specious and so on. So just as the founders establish checks and balances in our system, we need some checks and balances. And often one of the best is competition. One of the problems with big science funded by big government is that typically the faction that gains traction or power will ensure that all the research funding goes to one particular perspective as opposed to another. And then whoever gets the grant in that case is likely going to be able to decide the theory, decide what's best. [00:27:23] Speaker C: And they try to stifle people who might question that. Correct. [00:27:26] Speaker A: We've seen this with the climate change debate and many other things, but that is our debate about Darwinism. I mean, you can't get funding from normal NSF or NIH type federal science funding agencies to investigate the evidence of design in nature, even though understanding the design of living organisms can lead to discoveries that have medical benefit or deeper understanding of biology. But we've seen it. There are many politicized scientific debates where one faction will gain a monopoly, access to the funding sources, and then it becomes very difficult for a different theoretical perspective to compete on equal footing, I think does a disservice to science. There's a wonderful italian. [00:28:18] Speaker C: I would say it's anti science. It's anti science because science is supposed to have that dynamic exchange. Isn't it wonderful? [00:28:26] Speaker A: Italian philosopher of science, Marcello Pera. He's not irish. There's a pause between the O and the pera. And he argues that there must be a rhetorical dimension to science that science advances as scientists argue about how to interpret the evidence. And you can see how that dovetails with my interest in inference to the best explanation as a very effective and powerful scientific method. There's inherent in the idea of best a competition. There's a competition to interpret the evidence in the best way possible. Consistent with our knowledge of our background, knowledge about how the world works, consistent with our knowledge of cause and effect, consistent with our best observations of the phenomena, etc. And so science has historically advanced through controversy. When Newton established his theory of universal gravity, universal gravitation, he did so by vanquishing, in the intellectual sense, a prior view of gravity that was formulated by people called the mechanical philosophers. So the first line of his book was, the theory of vortices is beset by problems on many sides. That was the preceding theory. So he starts out making an argument against a previous way of looking at things. Darwin, in the Origin of Species, characterized his book as one long argument for the idea of descent with modification by natural selection. So scientists, we have this stereotype view of scientists who are in the lab in white coats. They make some observations, and the theory just jumps off the page as a fate accompli. And there's no need for any further discussion or argument. It's self evidently obvious to anyone who's made the observations how to interpret the observations. That's not the way it works. And good science will allow competing arguments to participate. They're necessary to the evaluation process that gets us closer and closer to the truth over time. If you have a monopoly, just as in the free market, if you have a monopoly of one theoretical perspective that has gained dominance not by theoretical competition, but because of access to power or money, then that ends up corrupting the process. And it means that the dominant theory may not be the best theory. [00:30:59] Speaker C: In fact, yeah, I participated in the embryonic stem cell debate to a very large extent during the George W. Bush administration. And I saw what you're talking about play out very vividly because one of the reasons, anyway, that the science establishment was so angry at Bush was because he limited, not even to a great degree, but funding for embryonic stem cell research. And he said, I also want to have an opening for what he considered more ethical approaches, because science and ethics are different things, which actually led to a Nobel peace, not a Nobel Peace prize, but a Nobel prize for a sinus named Yamanaka, who developed the ability to create pluripotent stem cells from normal skin cells. And why did he do that? Why did he do that? He did that because he said, I was in a lab, I looked at an embryo, and it made me think of my daughters. And I want to find a way to do this in a way that is what he considered ethical. And I always said during that debate, the stem cell debate isn't a science debate. No one's disputing what pluripotent stem cells are. That's what science can tell us. It's an ethics debate, whether it is appropriate and ethical and moral to destroy embryos in the pursuit of these cells. And yet the people who wanted that funding limitation destroyed wielded an epithet called anti science. You're anti science. [00:32:41] Speaker A: Right. [00:32:42] Speaker C: And it seems to me that that is, at least in my lifetime, the beginning of this division and almost ideological or political attempt to exclude certain people from the scientific enterprise, or at least respectability in science. [00:33:03] Speaker A: Well, and you know much more about this than I do, Wesley, but wasn't it also the case that there was a scientific dimension to this in determining whether or not somatic cells opposed to embryonic cells could be used to develop stem cells? [00:33:16] Speaker C: Yeah, the induced pluripotent stem cell using somatic cells, which is like normal skin cells. And there was a debate about whether adult stem cells could provide these treatments better than embryonic. So that was a scientific dimension. By the way, guess what? There's not one single FDA approved embryonic stem cell treatment. Today, 20 years after that debate, and adult stem cells are being used in medical treatments and induced pluripotent stem cells are being used in excellent research. So the people who were supposedly, quote, anti science actually were more right than the scientists saying that it has to be embryonic, and they tried to exclude that side from the discussion. [00:34:10] Speaker A: That's the kind of dynamic that we hope will, that we mean to challenge. This is not good for science. We've seen this in the climate change debate. We saw it in the debate over the public health response to COVID. We've seen it in our debate about Darwinism. I'm told that the debate about the ESG regulations by people challenging some of the attempts to prevent people from using fertilizers and things like this are also that the people on the left in the ESG debate are invoking consensus science to shut down that debate. And then in medicine, I have a number of good friends and colleagues who are med school professors, and there are so many debates in medicine about the facts of the matter and what treatments follow from them. And if you shut down those debates, you'll prevent the advance of science and the ethical use of science or the cultural or economic use of science, the technological development of it. [00:35:18] Speaker C: Well, isn't the concept of science is what the consensus says it is? Isn't that an anti science approach? [00:35:25] Speaker A: Well, I think so. I always tell people that if somebody is appealing to a consensus to settle an argument in science, that's a sure sign that there isn't a consensus. When there really is a consensus, nobody invokes it. You don't have to say, well, there's a consensus that the formula for water is H 20. No, there really is a consensus around that in chemistry. So nobody has to invoke consensus. You only invoke consensus when you're trying to shut somebody else up who has a dissenting voice. And so the use of that tactic is almost a sure sign that there is a genuine controversy afoot among scientists. [00:36:05] Speaker C: It's interesting. People sometimes will say to me, well, why did people trust science when the sock vaccine for polio came out? And yet they don't trust science now for the COVID vaccines. And my reply has always been, well, Jonas Sock wasn't trying to change the culture. Jonah Sock was simply trying to cure polio. And he would not have been offended by a different approach to that great task that was actually accomplished by he and Saban. Whereas today, when people like Jay Bhattacharya wrote the great Barrington Declaration, who, by the way, full disclosure, is a friend of mine and was attacked for having a different perspective than Francis Collins did and Anthony Fauci, there's a huge difference in the approach to somebody who might have a heterodox hypothesis. [00:37:01] Speaker A: Well, he was called a fringe epidemiologist by Collins and Fauci, neither of whom are actually epidemiologists. And Jay is. And he also, by the way, was not questioning the use of vaccines, of the vaccine for all people. But he had done some careful analysis of the efficacy of the vaccine and risks benefit calculations by age cohorts. So he was concerned about it being used for young men under 20, but very much an advocate of it for people over 50. And then case by case analysis in between, as I recall. So that's a kind of nuanced form of scientific analysis that should have been part of the discussion. I have no idea whether he was right or his opponents were right, but as a philosopher of science, that debate should have proceeded openly in the public sphere without him being stigmatized with epithets and pejoratives. And I think that's one of the reasons that the public lost some confidence in the public health response to COVID, because very prominent people, Jay Badacharya, Martin Koldarf, their colleague from Oxford, the professor Gupta, these were very prominent people who were behind the Great Barrington Declaration. And they weren't saying that COVID wasn't a real thing. They had a different idea about how to respond to it. They wanted most vulnerable, as opposed to a blanket response. Shutting down the whole of the economy. [00:38:36] Speaker C: Right. It was before the vaccines came out and it was. The idea is, well, you know what? Shutting down everything is going to cause more harm than good. That should have been part of the public discussion, instead of being stifled. [00:38:52] Speaker A: Right. And having one side say, we represent the science and then calling the other side fringe. That kind of tactic is anti intellectual. [00:39:02] Speaker C: It'S antiscientific, and it leads to distrust because you're basically excluding people who might think, well, that makes sense to me. And then they're being told, well, you're an idiot, it's anti science. And it becomes very acutely political in a very politicized age. And science should actually try to avoid that. [00:39:25] Speaker A: Well, and let's not forget, the people who were expressing these dissenting opinions were highly qualified. [00:39:32] Speaker C: Yes. [00:39:33] Speaker A: Dr. Bhattachary is a med school professor at Stanford. He did the first studies on the infection fatality rate for COVID. And the numbers that he got from his study were showing that it was about an order of magnitude or more less than the initial reported infection fatality rate, which was the basis for all the draconian lockdowns. But he was at Stanford. His colleague Koldorf was at Harvard, is at Harvard. Professor Gupta was at Oxford. And there was know you had Marty McCarry, who was at Johns Hopkins. I mean, a number of the people that were speaking out, challenging the supposed consensus response were very prestigious institutions, but they were getting tarred with these anti science kind of labels. And that did the debate and the culture no good service. [00:40:28] Speaker C: And it did a disservice to science because it seems to me that the Fauci Collins who approach was science as consensus, while the Jbodacharya Great Barrington Declaration and other approaches was science as open inquiry. Would you think that would be accurate? [00:40:49] Speaker A: I love that exact distinction you're making because it applies to many of these controversies that make it into the public arena. We have two different concepts of science in play today. Science as consensus, science as settled, science as the consensus view of a particularly privileged group of elites, versus science as open inquiry, as a dynamic enterprise that is openly, in an ongoing way, evaluating the best evidence that we have. That version of science is what we need to be supporting. Science as consensus, or as settled or as elite. Opinion is, I think, dangerous because it can lead us far astray from the truth. And it does absolutely undermine public trust in the idea of science, the enterprise of science. [00:41:47] Speaker C: And that's really dangerous because science is an urgent aspect of modern life. We need science, we need exploration, and. [00:41:57] Speaker A: We need trust in it, because there's an opposite extreme as well. There's not just the prematurely settled consensus that's enforced by elites, but there's also a lot of wacky stuff out there where quality control is needed. And you have people posting all kinds of things on the Internet about modifying your bodies or ways of treating various conditions. And a lot of this stuff, it doesn't get vetted, it's not based on any kind of rigorous study. You'll notice I don't think peer review is always the best way of doing quality control, because if the peer group is controlled by an ideological faction, then that means that can freeze ideas out. But rigorous studies where you're isolating variables, all of those kind of good methods that have been developed in science need to be done. And you need to have scientists argue about whether the studies were valid or invalid, or whether the evidence is good, whether it can be replicated, all those sorts of things to do quality control. And so we have a lot of junk science out there, as well as consensus science where the consensus may not be well grounded. So you may have very prestigious people supporting a consensus view that's not well grounded. You may have a lot of other people with no qualifications in sciences at all pushing a lot of wacky stuff. And that's another consequence of the loss of trust in science. People don't know who to trust. So we've got to get back to people that are properly trained, operating in an open environment where they can really argue things out and where dissenting opinions are welcome and evaluated. And so it's not easy, but we've got a scenic of all this. A necessary condition of good science is the openness of inquiry. We've got to get back to that. [00:44:04] Speaker C: And I've heard people who, let's say, support the consensus science or what the establishment says should be promoted basically saying, well, people won't understand this dynamic argumentation that you're talking about and it will confuse people. But it seems to me you're correct that by stifling that, you open the door to pure crackery and that just leads to a cacophony of voices and people don't know who to believe. [00:44:35] Speaker A: People just shut down. Then there are some cost benefit analyses that needed to be done on the COVID vaccine, especially apparently for younger athletic men. But people shutting down those legitimate concerns about the vaccine has led to a lot of people saying, I'm not doing any vaccines at all, I'm just antivaxxing I'm completely against vaccines altogether. Well, I have an uncle who was a polio victim as a child, and the polio vaccine has been a great benefit to the human race. The loss of trust, I think, in science is a huge concern, and it's really important to find the middle of the fairway. So we keep the debate open, because I keep thinking keeping the debate open, especially to well qualified voices across the spectrum of opinion, means that the public is going to have more trust in the outcomes of those debates once they. [00:45:37] Speaker C: Happen, is part of the problem that science has almost become a form of entertainment in the media, that the idea, know who's going to be the one? What's his name? The science guy who's actually an engineer. Bill Nye the science guy is actually an these. Carl Sagan was another example, although I think he was certainly more responsible. But that the idea that science has become celebrity science and whether you make the big contracts and all of that stuff, as opposed to it's a slow process of finding the facts and the truth. [00:46:22] Speaker A: Well, and there's often a great disparity between the presentation of the consensus view to the public and what's actually going on in peer reviewed technical journals. For example, in the debate about darwinian evolution, we have. Well, I'll give you a very specific example. In 2009, I presented to the Texas State Board of Education about, in support of a provision they were considering to allow teachers to teach the strengths and weaknesses of competing scientific theories, including controversial theories such as darwinian evolution and anthropogenic global warming. And they name some others. I presented to the board explained that there was a genuine controversy going on in science about the, for example, creative power of the natural selection random mutation mechanism that's invoked by evolutionary biologists. My opposite number at that hearing, a woman named Eugenie Scott for the National center for Science Education was quoted in the Dallas Morning News before her testimony as saying that this provision in the Texas State Board of Education standards should be opposed. It was not necessary because, she said, because there are no scientific challenges to Darwinism. Now you go to the scientific literature, and you find that you have. For example, in 2016, major conference at the Royal Society convened by a group of third way evolutionists who are calling for a new theory of evolution because they think that the standard neo darwinian theory that we all learn in the textbooks doesn't work, and that natural selection and random mutation, the main driver of the evolutionary process, has very limited creative power. It does a nice job of explaining small scale variations like finch beaks getting a little bigger or smaller, but it doesn't explain where birds or moths or animals come from in the first place. And so in my book Darwin's doubt, I just described this dynamic and I argued that we've never actually seen a theory where there is such a great disparity between how it's being presented to the public and what's going on and what's being discussed in the relevant peer reviewed literature. As far back as 1980, Stephen J. Gould said that neo Darwinism was effectively dead except as textbook orthodoxy. We're 40 some odd years on from that. That textbook orthodoxy still persists in the media, in the textbooks, in statements by science organizations. But when you look at what's going on in the peer reviewed literature, you have people proposed it's a wild, wild West. I described eight new theories of evolution in my book Darwin's doubt that have been proposed post neo Darwinian. Simon Conway Morris, the great paleontologist from Cambridge, says, we're in a post darwinian era, but there's not a whisper of that in textbooks. So you can get this big disparity. The celebrity scientists, I call them Darwin's public defenders. Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, Eugenie Scott until her retirement, Ken Miller. These folks are presenting one image of darwinian evolution to the public that's starkly at ODs with what you're finding in the technical biological literature, even in the subdiscipline of evolutionary biology, where the neo darwinian view is being challenged. That dynamic takes place in other fields. [00:50:09] Speaker C: As well, which raises the issue of peer review, which you mentioned briefly. Ideally, how is peer review supposed to further science? And what has gone wrong with peer review? [00:50:21] Speaker A: If anything, peer review is really an institution that was only established after World War II as a way of introducing quality control as a check on the use of the federal funding of science. Newton's principia was not peer reviewed. Darwin's the Origin of species was not peer reviewed. The breakthroughs that gave rise to the quantum and relativistic revolutions in physics were largely not peer reviewed. So peer review is a fairly recent institution. It was developed with the original idea of having peers check the factual accuracy and rigor of experimental methods used by the scientists submitting the papers. It was not meant to enforce a consensus in a given field, especially not an ideologically driven consensus. But unfortunately, that's increasingly the way peer review has functioned, and that has meant that it's kept good ideas out rather than keeping bad ideas from getting in. And it can keep bad ideas from getting in, but it has kept a lot of good ideas from consideration. [00:51:53] Speaker C: So to be really simplistic here, if I wrote a scientific paper that said two plus two is five, then the peer review is supposed to say, wait a second, that's an error. And that calls into question the validity of the study and the paper and. [00:52:12] Speaker A: The scientist judgment, et cetera. Exactly. [00:52:15] Speaker C: But if I submit a paper that says there's a different reason for warming temperatures, the sun is increasing its intensity, and we see that because Mars, and I don't know whether this is true or not, I'm just spouting here, Mars ICE caps are shrinking. That might be kept out of the peer reviewed literature because it went against the narrative of the alleged consensus, right? The consensus that climate change or global warming is being caused by human beings. So one would be a proper use of peer review and the other would be an improper. Would that be an accurate way to put it? [00:53:00] Speaker A: That's a good way of making the analytical cut. Now, it's not always clear as to the difference whether you're looking at a factual error or a difference in theoretical perspective. Sometimes you can have disputes in science about what the facts of the matter are. [00:53:20] Speaker C: Sure. [00:53:20] Speaker A: So that can blur things a bit. But just to use the climate change debate as an example, you again have some very prominent scientists. Richard Lindsen, who holds an endowed chair in atmospheric physics and climate studies at MIT, will happer at Princeton, Roy Spencer at NASA. These are some very prominent scientists who have raised questions about the anthropogenic human caused global warming hypothesis. And the media completely ignores their voices. There's a website via scientist who I think operates out of Portland. He's got over 30,000 scientists who have signed a statement of dissent against that dominant narrative saying, we are skeptical about anthropogenic global warming, and they have PhDs in relevant fields. So what kind of a consensus is it that says 30,000 scientists who disagree don't exist? You have these cases where ideology is trumping an open discussion, which leads to distrust, distrust in the institution of science, right? [00:54:32] Speaker C: Yeah. And that is actually harmful to science, whereas allowing the papers to know, let's say, my Mars illustration. Well, okay, then there could be a paper that would say, wait a second, this is a cause for the shrinkage in Mars or the ICE cap isn't really shrinking and so forth. And that's the role. Isn't that the proper role of the scientific journals where peer review generally occurs? [00:54:59] Speaker A: Open that up and let the argument take place. Point counterpoint, argument, counterargument. And it's a bit like democracy. It's messy, it takes time, but it's a lot better than an authoritarian science that does not permit or Brook dissent. [00:55:19] Speaker C: And authoritarian science can lead us down very terrible places, be used to support. [00:55:26] Speaker A: Authoritarian forms of government. And as you said, the Soviet Union was famous for its authoritarian scientific pronouncements that were then used to support soviet ideology. [00:55:39] Speaker C: Well, you don't have to go to the Soviet Union. You go to eugenics here in the United States and in the UK and Canada and so forth, where the science was supposedly settled, that there was a distinction to be made between the fit and the unfit among humans, and that led to a terrible tragedy of involuntary sterilizations. And in Germany during World War II, the Holocaust. [00:56:04] Speaker A: Right. We were Holocaust anyway, with respect to involuntary sterilization and so called. What's the two names of the different types of eugenics? [00:56:15] Speaker C: Positive and negative eugenics. [00:56:17] Speaker A: We were doing positive eugenics in this country up until the camps were discovered. At the end of World War II, the death camps were discovered, and then there was a kind of horror, and a lot of that stopped here in this country. And this was being done in the name of darwinian biology as well. It was the evolutionary biologists, many at Ivy League schools, who were promoting the eugenics program in the United States. [00:56:41] Speaker C: So this was negative eugenics is what led to the sterilizations. This was to prevent people who were considered unfit from procreating. And when one challenged that, one was accused of being a religious fanatic and this kind of thing. [00:57:00] Speaker A: Right. [00:57:01] Speaker C: So, I mean, everything old is new again, like we. [00:57:04] Speaker A: Stem cell debate. [00:57:05] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. It's the same thing. I think another issue that we're beginning to see, very disturbing issue that causes distrust in science is the proliferation of fraudulent papers. Just the other day, and we're recording this, in early February, the Guardian newspaper, which is a very left wing newspaper from the UK, reported that there are now more than 10,000 retracted research papers annually. That means something has really gone wrong in science and in the peer review process, it seems to me. [00:57:38] Speaker A: Yes, it's quite common. There's also been articles about the replication crisis that people will report. [00:57:48] Speaker C: Explain what that means. [00:57:49] Speaker A: Well, especially in laboratory science, a standard of good method is that the experiment that you performed can be replicated by other researchers. And so many times a dramatic result is reported on the basis of an experiment, and then other people try to do the experiment, and they can't replicate the dramatic result. Then this is becoming more and more common, and it often is a consequence of fraud. People wanting to get the result, to get the grant. There's so much pressure. Publish or perish, publish or don't get the money. Pressure on scientists that because it's a human enterprise, this kind of thing can happen. So, again, you need those checks and balances. Replication. The standard of replication for laboratory work is one of those checks. There have been a number of articles about the problem of papers that cannot be replicated. That is often the reason that papers. [00:58:52] Speaker C: Are then withdrawn, and people are beginning to, I think even laypeople are noticing that crisis. There's also, I think, the issue of ethics. [00:59:03] Speaker A: Wesley, I have a colleague who was in a very prestigious lab, who was asked by the supervisor in the lab to attempt a replication of a dramatic result that had been performed by a young PhD or postdoc, I can't remember, and the paper had been submitted and accepted at nature with the imprimatur of the lab director on the paper. And then the younger person who had done the work left the lab, went back to her home country in an unexplained way, which raised suspicion when the experiment that was then replicated, the results could not be replicated, and the lab director had to write nature top journal in the world and withdraw the paper. One of the scientists who works at Discovery Institute was in that lab and was actually asked to perform some of the replication work and couldn't do it. So we have some firsthand knowledge of how that dynamic has played out. In some cases, somewhat tragically. [01:00:10] Speaker C: I'd like to do a full program one time on the ethics of science, because that's a whole different field. But I think people are beginning to worry, particularly with biotech and so forth, biotechnology, which is, I think, the most powerful technology since the splitting of the atom, and perhaps more powerful because you can change any life form, any cell, with some of these things, like CRISPR, that can genetically edit, modify the DNA. [01:00:44] Speaker A: Right. [01:00:44] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:00:47] Speaker A: There's those sorts of ethical considerations about what we should allow ourselves to do or what experiments we should allow ourselves to conduct. But then there's also really basic ethical things about the importance of telling the truth. [01:01:02] Speaker C: Yes. [01:01:02] Speaker A: And some of the fraudulent things also, not using power to stifle dissent. I mean, that's an ethical issue, I think, in some way, I think it's. [01:01:12] Speaker C: A very major ethical issue, as well. [01:01:15] Speaker A: As a methodological one. Right. [01:01:16] Speaker C: Yeah. All of these things that we're addressing here, people may not think of them ABCD, but eventually it just becomes this idea. Well, how can I trust anything yeah. [01:01:32] Speaker A: And we don't want people to get to that point. Right. Science is a great enterprise, and it's brought huge benefit to the human race, and we want it to flourish. So the antiscience epithet is not only unfair, it's really damaging, because if you call people anti science who simply want to question an idea using data they've derived from a scientific experiment or study, that's doing a disservice to science. Hey, can I tell. I forgot. I was going to tell you a story that illustrates this problem with peer review that might. [01:02:08] Speaker C: Sure, go ahead. [01:02:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Of interest. I thought of it, and then it slipped my mind when we got onto another direction in the conversation. Early on in our work on intelligent design, the wrap on our perspective was that we didn't have any peer reviewed scientific papers. The first two books that were published on intelligent design were both peer reviewed. One was the design Inference, published by William Dempsky at the Cambridge University Press. The other was Michael Behee's book Darwin's Black Box that was published at a trade press, the Free Press, but it was also peer reviewed. But nevertheless, people were saying, well, but there's not been any peer reviewed papers in a reputable scientific journal, so therefore it can't be considered science. All right, so in 2004, I submitted, and after a couple of rounds of peer review, had accepted for publication a technical paper advancing the theory of intelligent design as the best explanation for the information needed to build new forms of animals. And the paper was published at the proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, which was a peer reviewed journal, actually, I think the oldest peer reviewed journal in America, and it's published out of the Smithsonian Institution. The editor of the journal, Richard Sternberg, was a kind of open minded Darwin skeptic who thought that the debate about intelligent design needed to get out of the newspapers and into the scientific journals. And so after sending it out for peer review, after I made corrections to a first round of the paper, which satisfied the peer reviewers, published the paper, it was quiet for about a week, and then all hell broke loose, and the Smithsonian was. The journal was mailed out to smithsonian scientists and members. They started getting all kinds of complaints and angry letters, and then there was media attention, and Sternberg was immediately censored. He was locked out of his office. His keys were taken away. He was transferred to an office next door to the smithsonian administrators so they could keep an eye on him. There was a meeting called by the society that oversaw the publication of the journal, and he, as the editor, was disinvited to that meeting discussing the controversy about the paper because the president of the Journal of the society told him that he couldn't guarantee his personal safety, that tempers were running so high that he had allowed a paper discussing intelligent design into their august and prestigious journal. [01:04:50] Speaker C: Well, let me interrupt you real quick, and then you can finish the story. It wasn't that he published something that nobody thought was properly framed or written. In fact, you said you made some changes based on criticisms. It's that he did publish something that had actually gone through that process that upset them. [01:05:13] Speaker A: Exactly. And he sent it out to. I had four different peer reviewers representing different fields. It was quite a rigorous process, and it was either accepted contingent upon making changes or it was rejected with the option to make changes that would satisfy the reviewers. But I had to get through two rounds to get it published. And eventually, actually, there were some scientists from the Smithsonian who went to the NIH where Sternberg had a joint appointment, and they tried to get him fired. And it took the intervention of a U. S. Senator to save his job at the NIH. I mean, it was really nasty stuff. And the controversy was written up in the. Was in. He went on the O'Reilly Factor. NPR had something on it. I mean, it was very hot at the time. What was interesting, though, to me as a philosopher of science, was that they were arguing, on the one hand, intelligent design isn't science because it hasn't been published in a peer reviewed journal. Then once it was published in a peer reviewed journal or an article advancing, it was published. Then the argument shifted and it became, well, it shouldn't be published because it's not science. So it's not science because it hasn't been published in a peer reviewed journal. It shouldn't be published in a peer reviewed journal because it's not science. You had this perfectly circular form of reasoning that was exclusionary, which meant that you never would, never could be science because it wasn't going to be allowed. So now we're 20 years on from that, and we're over 200 peer reviewed scientific articles that have advanced theory of intelligent design. And so that log jam has broken. But it was a very tough nut to crack initially, and it shows you how peer review can be very prejudicial and exclusionary. [01:07:21] Speaker C: It can be used as a cudgel instead of a way to validate accuracy. [01:07:26] Speaker A: Yeah. Or open a debate that needs to happen. [01:07:30] Speaker C: Yeah. We're almost out of time. I have so many other questions to ask you, but one of the last areas that I think is beginning to really infect science are things that are not about science. I'm thinking of Dei diversity, equity, and inclusion that the sciences seem to be falling for. This idea that we have to take into account sociological issues in terms of our findings and in terms of who does the science, as opposed to pure merit or pure objective, the best you can, objective truth. Do you think that's becoming a problem for science? [01:08:10] Speaker A: Well, I suppose the DEI agenda is affecting pretty much every american institution. And these words are, know, we're all for equality, we're all for inclusion. Diversity is a good thing, but what's typically meant is that we want an equality of outcome, not an equality of opportunity. We want diversity of incidental attributes rather than a diversity of thought. I think the openness to a diversity of ideas is good for science. Openness to a diversity of people is good, provided the people are qualified. [01:08:58] Speaker C: Right. [01:09:02] Speaker A: I think devaluing merit as a standard is affecting every american institution in a deleterious way. [01:09:09] Speaker C: I had a conversation. [01:09:11] Speaker A: No favors to the people that are allegedly being advanced because of whatever incidental attributes they may possess, rather than relevant attributes to the field in which they're going to participate. I don't think that does those groups any favors, because then when people get jobs, people wonder, well, did you get it because you were an affirmative action hire or because you're really good? And I believe that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. And talent is widely distributed to all groups. So let's let objective standard of merit evaluate talent, and eventually the disparities in representation will work themselves out in a way that doesn't damage science, the economy, corporations, universities, et cetera. [01:10:01] Speaker C: Yeah, I had a conversation just last week with a very prominent neurosurgeon, head of a medical department at a medical school, neurosurgical department at a medical school. And he told me that he had been pressured that there are 10%, approximately, of the residents in neurosurgery are women, and he'd been told to bring it up to 50%. And he said he was appalled by that. Not that he didn't want women to be neurosurgeons, of course, but that if you bring them up to 50% because they're women and you're excluding other people who might be better neurosurgeons, eventually neurosurgery itself will be deleteriously impacted because you won't have the same kind of excellence you might have otherwise had. And it seems to me that can also destroy trust in science. [01:10:55] Speaker A: I think anything that leads to a lessening of standards will do that. [01:11:02] Speaker C: Well, I wanted to get into the distinction between science and scientism, but we're out of time. So let me ask real quickly, what next for Stephen Meyer and the center for Science and Culture? [01:11:15] Speaker A: Well, I have completed three books in a big trilogy, one on the origin of life, one on the origin of animals and new forms of life, and then one on the origin of the universe. And it's fine tuning, the last one being the return of the God hypothesis. And I have some other book ideas for the future. But this summer I'm going to be doing some teaching. We have a summer program at a new study center that we're founding in Cambridge, England, and I'm very excited about that. So we've got an all star lineup of scientists and scholars who will be looking at these important issues at the intersection between science and philosophy, science and religious belief. That's one of the things on my upcoming schedule. [01:12:06] Speaker C: And part of that would be hopefully to help restore the trust in science. Correct. [01:12:10] Speaker A: Restore the trust of science, and also restore people's confidence that if they have religious belief, that science is not the foe or the enemy of such belief, but rather actually, as the early scientists thought, that the scientific enterprise is something that can be pursued for the glory of God. And I quote there a title by the famous historian of science, Rodney Stark, who had a wonderful book at Princeton University Press titled the Glory of God, which was the history of the scientific revolution, where the glory of God, he believed, was the reason that those scientists were doing science in the first place. They wanted to display the order, the design, the rationality of the natural world as a product of the divine mind that brought all things into existence. [01:12:58] Speaker C: Well, Steve, thank you very much, and I hope we'll talk again. [01:13:01] Speaker A: Thank you. Wonderful discussion. [01:13:04] Speaker C: Thanks for listening to Humanize from Discovery Institute's center on Human Exceptionalism, where human rights meet human responsibilities. Discover all the good work of the center on human exceptionalism by visiting discovery human. We can only do this work speaking on behalf of human life, human thriving, and our exceptional place in this world and our cosmos. With your support, we invite you to make a one time gift today and to consider starting a monthly gift to support the center on human exceptionalism and this show. Wherever you're listening to humanize, please take a moment to rate and review the show. You matter, your actions matter. Be bold, be exceptional, and be back soon. [01:13:49] Speaker B: That was bioethicist and author Wesley J. Smith in conversation with philosopher of science and fellow author Stephen C. Meyer on the crisis of trust in science. If you enjoyed this chat, the good news is that there's plenty more where that came from. For more conversations about where human rights meet human responsibilities, check out the Humanize podcast, available at Humanize today and all major podcasting platforms. And for more from Dr. Stephen Meyer, get more of his articles, books and [email protected]. For idthefuture, I'm Andrew Mcdermott. Thanks for listening. [01:14:30] Speaker A: Visit [email protected] and intelligentdesign.org. This program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.