Science in the Swamp

Retrospective thoughts on the sociology of science

Both public and private responses to my work on physics education research and on covid origins have provoked an uneasy feeling about the state of science. Here’s some tentative thoughts, more intended to provoke discussion than to be taken as compelling arguments.

What first prompted me to try to write a serious Bayesian analysis of Covid origins was a friendly exchange with a well-connected, well-meaning representative of the mainstream liberal media. I was taken aback at his sense that all the right people knew what the right answer had to be. His attitude was not idiosyncratic– the major media have been nearly unanimous in dismissing the idea of a lab leak as either a politicized conspiracy theory or as a bit of scientific esoterica of little interest to their viewers and readers. The attitude is too broadly held to be explained by a self-interested agreement among a few scientists. What accounts for that?

The zoonotic story has not just been pushed by a few virologists. It was the publishing giant Nature that pressured the Proximal Origins authors to make the unfounded claim that they had strong evidence against a lab origin. The other publishing giant,  Science, has consistently pushed the same story. The popular magazine, Scientific American, has insistently called any version of a lab leak account an unfounded conspiracy theory. I think this elite consensus is driven by a combination of the obvious base motives and more honorable ones, tied together by group conformism resting on a base of class identity.

The dominant elite theory of Covid origins is that, in the words of one prominent virologist,  “this is the big picture that is completely neglected. SC2 most likely emerged from a barbaric trade that smuggles, farms and sells live wildlife in unsanitary conditions”. The culprits would then be some backward Chinese peasants and shopkeepers. The main alternative account is that SC2 emerged by accident from a lab that used techniques developed by an international group of well-connected scientists funded by the world’s most powerful nations.

One does not need fancy social theory to guess which explanation of a devastating pandemic will feel more congenial and less threatening to most people from the professional classes.  It is hard for mainstream professionals to admit that others, perhaps ones they or their friends socialize with, accidentally killed more than 20 million people by doing government-funded scientific research. In contrast, it’s easy for those who hate governments for other reasons, often bad reasons, to think and say that some government scientists caused a disaster.

The leading orthodox spokespeople routinely label anyone who questions the zoonosis line as a dangerous enemy of science, in league with both conspiratorial fabulists and with vicious right-wingers looking for an excuse to start hanging scientists. As a general claim, that charge is  unjustified and unfair, since the core scientific criticisms come from traditional scientists trying to maintain scientific standards. It’s not the first time that the orthodox have thought that heresy or even mere doubt amounts to being in league with the devil.  

Still, opposition to the compact liberal consensus has unsurprisingly included more than its share of people disaffected from science for prior reasons. That includes many right-wingers who hate the clear scientific consensus that our large-scale fossil-fuel use will lead to enormous problems because that fact implies that collective action is needed to avoid catastrophe.  One need only read the Comments in any online article in conservative media to see that the threat is real. Just to pick one example, when the right-wing City Journal ran an article on some of the new lab-leak evidence a typical comment included “Democrats co-developed the bio weapon in secret with their CCP allies. Anyone who hasn't figured out that Democrats also intentionally arranged its release is simply incapable of connecting the dots.” Other commenters explicitly use the coverup as a reason to claim that global warming is a hoax.

The existence of a large vocal group of  deranged science haters must be part of the reason that  so many scientists refuse to consider even the obvious hypothesis that there was an ordinary leak from research described in a conventional grant proposal for risky experiments. It is not entirely clear that simple honesty will work better than stonewalling for holding off the barbarians.

In that context it’s worth thinking about why some scientists and others have fiercely, often abusively, defended the increasingly implausible market-origin hypothesis. Of course most people usually act out of not particularly noble motives- seeking status, sex, money, comfort, and fearing ridicule, isolation,  etc. but those are not always the whole story. I’ve tried to think about how conscientious scientists might end up persistently misleading people about the origin of a pandemic.

Proximal Origin lead author K.G. Andersen’s early remark to his colleagues may provide a hint:  “Destroy the world based on sequence data. Yay or nay?” Early in the pandemic any focus on who if anyone was to blame would have been a distraction from the effort to take measures against the disease. In most countries those efforts were feeble anyway, but focusing on blame wouldn’t have helped. The scientists who found themselves committed, sometimes under pressure, to the natural origin story would have had a hard time reversing course later.

Andersen was right that we don’t wish to destroy the world. With 8 billion people and several thousand nuclear weapons on a warming planet, abandoning science is not an option. Our dilemma is that we need science and some trust in science but science has created a catastrophe. Should our response stick with scientific ways of thinking or stick with loyalty to scientific institutions?

Science has succeeded. It has become “The Science”, a mutually dependent web of researchers, funders, journals, publicists, and bureaucrats, spread through interlocking public and for-profit enterprises. As with any Church or Party, the real existing social institution acquires characteristics that can be opposite to its initial vision. Science may be driven by curiosity and have little respect for authority. The institution The Science relies on respect for authority and cannot let curiosity undermine that. The Science is now in the swamp, its denizens securely “wrapt in the old miasmal mist”.

What should be done?

Should we try to drain the swamp? Some of the few scientists and journalists who have spoken out about the likelihood that Covid came from a lab have repeatedly called for harsh “accountability”. I don’t think that those calls are on the right track. They will not encourage reasonable uncommitted scientists to become more open and honest. One field that has an outstanding safety record (despite recent incidents), aviation, has not reached that by focusing on blame but by encouraging openness. Some sort of “truth and reconciliation” process has had some success in politically fraught situations, e.g. post-apartheid South Africa. For Covid no one seems to have deliberately caused any harm, so technical investigations of what went wrong trying to minimize the politics may be possible.

Some who have done good work in exposing the problems with the zoonotic stories have conflated the enormous harm done by Covid with the harm caused by the subsequent coverup. That makes it hard to take a congenial attitude. I have seen no plausible way in which the origins coverup contributed much to the scale of the pandemic, at least after the first few critical weeks in Wuhan. It might have made all the difference for the first few cases to have been tracked down and preventive measures taken before a pandemic started, but that would have required authorities in Wuhan to be more focused on future outcomes, not on personal accountability.

The problems with the coverup lie elsewhere. The most obvious problem is that it interferes with measures to prevent the next pandemic. Uselessly dangerous research must stop, but unless more scientists are honest about the origins of this pandemic it will be hard to build political support for that change. The advocates of sensible safety measures will mostly be right-wing zealots, handed a free pass to play sane.

There’s a broader problem as well. The habit of dishonesty is hard to break. I don’t think it will be confined to a narrow branch of virology. It has already spilled out to the big general-purpose science journals. I’ve run into it repeatedly in an entirely different field. The reputation for dishonesty is also hard to break. It’s not clear how much of the recent downturn in trust for science* would have been avoided by more candor, but the crudely arrogant dishonesty of many outspoken scientists cannot have helped. Neither does the passive conformity of most others. The swamp will never be drained but we don’t all have to live in it all the time.

*[3/26/2024 It turns out that I oversimplified about that downturn. Although one hears much more anti-science talk these days, that seems to be a symptom of increased polarization toward strong pro and con attitudes. According to one major recent survey there has been a major increase in strong distrust of science but there has been also been an increase in strong trust. The distrust has increased by a larger factor, but since it was smaller to begin with the trust has increased by a larger net number.]