Dean's World

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist recently came out in favor of expanding Federal funding for stem cell research. This caused some Republicans to brand him a "traitor" (absurd) and to be shamelessly pandering to the New York Times (as if they had any clout with Republican primary voters). INDC Journal has a pretty good analysis of why this hyperbolic hyperventilating is silly.

That said: I'm not sure why more people aren't asking whether Federal funding of stem cell research is a good idea in the first place.

I'm no doctrinaire libertarian, but I know more than one scientist who has a pretty dim view of the enetire Federal research grant process. Whether they work in major research areas like cancer or AIDS, or minor obscure areas no one's heard of, the complaint is the same: politicians and government bureaucrats are generally scientifically stupid and don't understand the issues they're funding research for. They thus usually wind up giving control of all spending priorities to small cliques of researchers who effectively control all the grant money--and fully credentialed, credible scientists who question the reigning hypotheses or want to take a new approach to the subject are frequently frozen completely out.

If private industry is unreliable because they are obsessed with the profit motive, government-funded research is obsessed with scientific fads, and with research that sounds exciting but may be bogus. Look at the ridiculous amount of money that was spent in government grants to study whether low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets would prevent heart disease. Researchers who questioned this hypothesis rarely received any funding at all, and were routinely treated as dangerous lunatics. In the late 1990s two British scientists finally burst the bubble and proved that despite two decades and billions in research, not one study had ever shown that these diets reduced heart disease mortality or overall mortality (see The Low-Fat, Low-Cholesterol Diet Is Ineffective by L.A. Corr & M.F. Oliver)--and yet still researchers who want to research the "benefits" of low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets often get grant money, and scientists who want to study radically different approaches to human nutrition have a hard time landing any grant money at all.

Worse, because of the entire system of government grants, universities which used to value basic research, and treasure scientists based on their accomplishments in the field, have in recent decades grown more and more obsessed with money--specifically, government money. Scientists who can land fat grants from the government get tenure, respect, and lab space. Those who can't wind up treated with contempt.

Which leads to the other problem with the system today: the tendency to treat scientists like stars, as opposed to treating them like scientists. Or, worse then treating them as stars, they often get treated like members of a priestly class. All based on this holy halo of "researcher working for the good of humanity." Never mind questioning whether what they're researching is particularly valuable, or whether their methodologies are sound, or whether their results are solid, or whether their rivals might have better ideas.

The presumption many people work under is that private industry will not fund so-called "blue sky" research. My own view is that private industry often fails to fund it simply because they know they can depend on the government to do it for them. Meanwhile, the environment that used to be hospitable to the researcher who didn't care about money--the university--has become every bit as money-obsessed as any other large corporation.

I understand why some people have moral qualms about Federal funding for stem cell research. They're not qualms I share, simply because I don't believe a fertilized egg or an embryonic cluster of a few dozen cells is a human being. Sorry, I don't. But I do wonder who's going to get this money, and whether it's honestly going to be put to good use. I don't think that's an unreasonable question, especially considering how rarely anybody asks it of any federal funding of research. The working assumption: "Government money for research is good. Opposing it is bad." All thought stops there.

I look at all the posturing about all the miracle cures that stem cell research is supposed to provide, and I also wonder: if they fail to produce such results, will those who claimed that this funding was vital even notice? Will there ever come a point where they decide it was a waste of time? Will there ever come a point where they wonder, "Hmm, what other research would have been worth funding instead of all this?"

Like it or not, these people aren't going away. Have a look at this:

"We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged."

Scary? Consider the fact that they got over 400 working scientists to sign that, including scientists from Princeton, Cornell, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Ohio State University, Purdue, University of Washington, and Moscow State University, among others.

I'm always a bit hesitant to talk about the Intelligent Design theorists since it seems no matter how many times I repeat myself, someone usually mischaracterizes my opinion and/or feels the need to hurl personal abuse at me. I suppose I should get used to it--to a certain extent, it's just a part of life if you're an opinionated weblogger--but it gets annoying.

1) I don't believe in God.
2) I believe evolution is sufficient to explain everything we see in life on Earth.
3) I think creationists are kind of silly but mostly harmless.
4) I think the Intelligent Design people have some arguments that deserve examination for what they are rather than mischaracterizing and distorting them.
5) I think calling them names, behaving as if they are a huge threat to scientific freedom, and distorting their position does more harm than good.

Having looked over the Intelligent Design people's literature, I find that they do not suggest that the Earth is 10,000 years old, they do not suggest that a Great Flood wiped out the dinosaurs, they do not suggest that God comes down and creates new species, or any of that. They suggest that at a molecular level certain features of life on Earth show signs of having been engineered rather than simply evolving.

Are they wrong about that? Probably. But to treat them like pariahs for wanting to examine the question? This is hardly rational.

On my home PC, 24 hours a day, I run Berkeley's SETI@HOME, a distributed processing system that scans the skies looking through the random cosmological noise for anything that shows signs of being generated by sentient beings. To fulminate that looking for signs of intelligence behind a phenomenon is "unscientific" is to brand the entire SETI project "unscientific."

To say that it is "unscientific" to look for signs of engineering is also to suggest that no scientist can look at Mt. Rushmore and tell you whether humans carved it or if it was simply the product of erosion. It is to suggest that if paleontologists uncover a 50,000 year old stone hearth with cooking utensils they cannot possibly tell you whether those were the product of natural forces or if people put them together.

All those geologists who claim they can tell the difference between an arrowhead and a funny-shaped rock must not be scientists either, eh?

The oddest criticism I've seen of the Intelligent Design people, though, is that somehow just by looking for evidence of a creator, free inquiry will be stopped. How do people come to believe this strange non-sequitur? If the ID people design testable and falsifiable hypotheses--which as it happens they have done (more here)--how is free inquiry or the persuit of science harmed? If they're proven wrong, then doesn't that just strengthen Darwinism?

Furthermore, how is it "science" to declare that there is no creator and therefore one shouldn't bother to look for evidence of one?

For people who claim to care about free inquiry, I've never seen a group who acts more like William Jennings Bryan than the "evolutionists" who angrily fulminate that the very question of the possibility of design should never be allowed anywhere outside of a church.

Oh, and by the way: I keep seeing reference to something called The Wedge Document that somehow proves the Intelligent Design people are sinister and have evil hidden movies. What those who point to this document never seem to mention, however, is The Wedge Document: So What?, available right off the Discovery Institute's pages. So apparently it's okay to attack these people but not to actually allow them to answer their critics.

From where I sit, I see no reason to believe that natural selection by itself is insufficient to explain life. But that's not a religious committment for me the way it is for some others. If some scientists want to look for evidence of engineering in life, let them. I fail--utterly--to see how science will be destroyed by allowing these questions.

The Discovery Institute's blog has a lot more to say. So here's a thought: try reading what they have to say some time.

Everybody knows this: the eye is drawn to the unusual and unexpected. Your eyes brush right over most things in your environment, but if it's odd or out of place, you tend to notice it pretty quickly--a banana in the middle of your floor, or a grimy handprint on an otherwise clean wall.

Interestingly, researchers at Harvard have found that this may not just be how your brain processes information, but that the eyeball itself may play a role in noticing the unusual: the retina seems to do some visual processing before it sends anything to the brain. Quoth the study's director: "Our eyes report the visual world to the brain, but not very faithfully. Instead, the retina creates a cartoonist's sketch of the visual scene, highlighting key features while suppressing the less interesting regions."

Fascinating. This probably explains why my wife often thinks the house is hideously messy when there are only a few odd things lying around that need a quick cleanup. :-)