On the bias of science: part whatever

Okay, I hope I've swept away enough of the underbrush to get to the tall trees. The basic summary is that it can matter who's paying for research, and certainly if a corporate sponsor stands to benefit from a particular outcome a study is more likely to get that outcome. I should have mentioned that this is supported by head-to-head comparisons: evaluations of the same therapeutic modality tend to be more positive when sponsored by the manufacturer than by government. However, the way government funding works, government-sponsored investigators are independent and there is no discernible "government agenda" for research outcomes, although obviously there is an agenda for research questions.

But. Decisions about government funding are made by members of the same community of scientists who receive said funding; and priorities about what questions to ask, what theoretical frameworks and methods to use, and what results are considered plausible, are made within communities that tend to have a shared set of beliefs, interests, and epistemological philosophy. I say communities, plural, because there are many different scientific disciplines and while they have fuzzy boundaries and some broad commonalities there are also distinctive qualities of the various sectors. It's complicated.

 

People who study human evolution, cosmic history, superconductors, terrestrial climate, and the pathology of fibromyalgia are not usually collaborating a whole lot, nor are they sharing data or methods. (Human evolution and climate science do make contact, but don't evidently influence each other.) The issues are largely different in different fields.

 

Let's start with what is the simplest in some ways, and maybe the most complicated in others: basic physics and chemistry. I'll include cosmology because it's largely inseparable from physics. (Chemistry is about manifestations of physics, but it deals with emergent phenomena that cannot yet be fully predicted from known physics.) This is a realm in which any possible social implications of findings are largely unknowable at the time the are made. 

 

Einstein's theory of the equivalence of mass and energy absolutely for sure wound up having immense implications for humanity, but he had not idea of it at the time nor did anyone who evaluated his theories. His theory of gravity really didn't have any practical implications for almost a century, although now it is essential for accurate functioning of the global positioning system. The quantum theory he developed along with others including Niels Bohr also didn't have any practical implications until the development of micro-electronics. Whether Newton was actually inspired by seeing an apple fall we don't know, but Einstein found Newton's theories unsatisfying in part because they described gravity, but couldn't explain it. He was really inspired by thought experiments to pursue his own theories.

At the time, not many people could understand them and a lot of physicists just thought they were malarkey. But they were susceptible to observational and experimental proof, which kept confirming them, so eventually the physics community had to accept them. Combined with ongoing advances in telescopic observation, experimental exploration of the atomic and subatomic realm, and experiments with electromagnetic radiation, they became essential to a revolution in our understanding of the cosmos and our place in it.

The only people who had a stake in all this beyond, perhaps, other physicists who hoped that they would prove the greater genius -- and or course none did -- were preachers. It was bad enough that scientists had displaced the earth from the center of the universe, but the immensity, age and history of the cosmos that emerged in the 20th Century blew the Bible to dust, along with all other religious accounts of creation and cosmic history. So why are there still preachers? Why do people still revere the Bible? I can't entirely account for that, but I can tell you that is not a problem for physicists. 

I said that the problem of bias in this field is straightforward. There isn't much of one other than some scientists who, like preachers, are reluctant to give up old ideas. Accordingly, the culture of physics has converged on demanding a very high standard of proof for novel discoveries. But there is definitely a problem in that the overwhelming majority of humanity cannot really understand this stuff, let alone evaluate the evidence for it. For many of them, the preacher offers more comfort.