Is Truth Absolutely Necessary for Science?
These days, corporate entities are increasingly dominating research in basic science. This essay looks into how this will change the most cherised convention of science.
Researchers follow many conventions. In the short term, graduate students learn these conventions from their seniors and follow them without question. Over time, those students grow up as senior researchers and modify the conventions to the needs of their days. For example, merely 10 years back, biologists strongly rejected the suggestion of submitting papers to preprint servers. They used to say - “Your ideas will get scooped”. “The Science and Nature editors will reject your paper outright if you post it online.” Those arguments are less common these days.
As a more long-term example, “plagiarism” historically meant stealing of ideas. When Newton accused Leibniz of plagiarism, he did not suggest that Leibniz copied a bunch of lines from his precious essays. That definition changed after the corporate entities took over scientific publication. Copying text is protected by the copyright laws and so the definition of plagiarism morphed accordingly. Now we have “self-plagiarism”, which would mean stealing one’s own ideas by the old definition. Stealing one’s own underwear would be the only thing more ridiculous.
With corporations dominating research in basic science, do we expect more conventions to change? Let us investigate the most sacred rule of science, which is that the scientists always stand for truth. Is it foundational to science or another convention subject to amendment?
Feynman’s Caltech Speech
In his famous speech titled “Cargo Cult Science”, physicist Richard Feynman argued that scientists always needed to stand for a higher order of truth than general conversations.
I would like to add something that’s not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you’re talking as a scientist. I’m not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you’re not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We’ll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, that you ought to do when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.
What did he mean by higher order of truth or “extra type of integrity”? Feynman made a distinction with corporate advertising -
For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of this work were. “Well,” I said, “there aren’t any.” He said, “Yes, but then we won’t get support for more research of this kind.” I think that’s kind of dishonest. If you’re representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you’re doing—and if they don’t want to support you under those circumstances, then that’s their decision.”
In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.
The easiest way to explain this idea is to contrast it, for example, with advertising. Last night I heard that Wesson Oil doesn’t soak through food. Well, that’s true. It’s not dishonest; but the thing I’m talking about is not just a matter of not being dishonest, it’s a matter of scientific integrity, which is another level. The fact that should be added to that advertising statement is that no oils soak through food, if operated at a certain temperature. If operated at another temperature, they all will—including Wesson Oil. So it’s the implication which has been conveyed, not the fact, which is true, and the difference is what we have to deal with.
To many older scientists, Feyman’s words are final and the case is closed. Here I will argue that other accomplished scientists do not agree with him, and, more importantly, scientists pursuing and speaking truth had been a convention that changes over time.
Why do Scientists Search for Truth?
How did searching for truth historically become so important in science? To know that, we need to go back to 1650s, when intellectual activies exploded in the Northern or, more specifically, Protestant Europe. After a long war ending in treaty of Westphalia (1648), Catholic church agreed not to interfere in the political affairs of the Protestant states. That was a political decision however. Entire Europe was still Christian, and seeking truth was foundational to Christianity. Finding truth and natural laws using reason predates the modern scientific era as you can see from this essay on Thomas Aquinas -
Aquinas came to think that one should believe only what is self-evident (e.g., human beings use reason) or can be deduced from self-evident propositions (e.g., human reason can discover truth).
Aquinas wrote most extensively about natural law. He stated, “the light of reason is placed by nature [and thus by God] in every man to guide him in his acts.” Therefore, human beings, alone among God’s creatures, use reason to lead their lives. This is natural law.
The master principle of natural law, wrote Aquinas, was that “good is to be done and pursued and evil avoided.” Aquinas stated that reason reveals particular natural laws that are good for humans such as self-preservation, marriage and family, and the desire to know God. Reason, he taught, also enables humans to understand things that are evil such as adultery, suicide, and lying.
Scientists of 17th and 18th century (Enlightenment era) argued that their way of reasoning was better to get to the truth. In other words, truth came before science and not the other way.
As science continued to grow in the 19th century, the religious intellectuals got replaced by a secular intellectuals known as philosophers. Science was part of natural philosophy.
Science Moved to US after WWII
Two major changes, one good and one bad, took place after WWII. First, many European scientists migrated to USA to build the foundation of US science. They brought their European traditions, and that was the good part. On the bad side, US got attracted to science as a tool to fight war after the success of Manhattan project. Therefore it funded the development of science primarily from the military budget. Even when science was not funded by the military, it was promoted as war. For example, the major NIH effort to find cure for cancer was named the “war on cancer”.
What was the downside of seeing all intellectual activities as wars? Every kind of scholar got imported from Europe except the philosophers. Priests and Philosophers are nuisances to the military. As a result, philosophers do not play any significant role in US science unlike in 19th century Germany. For a while, however, the norms of 19th century European philosophy dominated the thinking of scientists here as you can see from Feynman’s speech. I would highly recommend Chargaff’s book to understand this profound change, because Chargaff was an established scientist and phisopher in Europe before he moved to USA at age 40.
What next?
I hope I managed to convince you that seeking and representing truth (or “extra type of integrity” described by Feynman) has been just a convention. Let me briefly recap the history to explain where science is heading next. At first, finding truth by reason was important for the Christian society, and the 17th and 18th century scientists came up with a better way of reasoning to seek truth in nature. Over time, this made the society secural, with gradual replacement of priests by philosophers in the 19th century. Science remained subordinate to philosophy. Now the philosophers are gone, and the scientists are the judges, juries and executioners of the entire enterprise.
But what motivates the scientists with the disappearance of the higher rung? Well, commerce of course. That brings us to the new era, where truth is optional and every “scientific statement” appears like a youtube thumbnail. To find evidence, you need to go to nowhere other than the website of Google’s Deepmind. You find the text “Alphafold solved 50 year old protein folding problem” pasted everywhere. Scientific American tells us that Alphafold correctly predicts the structure of every known protein, and you see that repeated everywhere. Correctly predicts the structure of every known protein??? That is truth-optional corporate marketing speech.
I have been following the field of protein-folding since my early bioinformatics days. The solution of “50 year old protein folding problem”, in my understanding, would be some kind of rules to explain the structures of proteins from their sequences, just like “solution of Fermat’s last theorem” would mean a set of definite mathematical steps to show that a^n + b^n cannot be c^n for any n>2 (a, b, c integers). If someone builds a simulator to show the validity of Fermat’s last theorem for up to some really large n (maybe googol, that is a commendable advance but still not a “solution of 500 year old theorem by Fermat”. I asked a friend about what was going on, and he said that Google, as the owner of the largest marketing organization in the world (namely how people seek information), could define truth.
P. S. Here is a homework for those trying to learn science. Please rewrite the title and abstract for these three papers to bring them up to the new standards.
