Sam Harris has a piece in The New York Times suggesting that Francis Collins' Christian views render him unsuited to serve as head of the National Institutes of Health. That is so, says Harris, even though Collins is a devoted Darwinist. Clearly Harris would like a sign that says "Only Atheists Need Apply" to hang over the NIH.
Only a couple of days ago Nicholas Wade wrote a blog for the The Times about Thomas Bouchard, Minnesota psychologist, who contends that science is damaged by conformism, just as economics and other fields are:
Researcher Condemns Conformity Among His Peers
By Nicholas Wade
"Academics, like teenagers, sometimes don't have any sense regarding the degree to which they are conformists."
So says Thomas Bouchard, the Minnesota psychologist known for his study of twins raised apart, in a retirement interview
Journalists, of course, are conformists too. So are most other professions. There's a powerful human urge to belong inside the group, to think like the majority, to lick the boss's shoes, and to win the group's approval by trashing dissenters.
The strength of this urge to conform can silence even those who have good reason to think the majority is wrong. You're an expert because all your peers recognize you as such. But if you start to get too far out of line with what your peers believe, they will look at you askance and start to withdraw the informal title of "expert" they have implicitly bestowed on you. Then you'll bear the less comfortable label of "maverick," which is only a few stops short of "scapegoat" or "pariah."
A remarkable first-hand description of this phenomenon was provided a few months ago by the economist Robert Shiller, co-inventor of the Case-Shiller house price index. Dr. Shiller was concerned about what he saw as an impending house price bubble when he served as an adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York up until 2004.
So why didn't he burst his lungs warning about the impending collapse of the housing market? "In my position on the panel, I felt the need to use restraint," he relates. "While I warned about the bubbles I believed were developing in the stock and housing markets, I did so very gently, and felt vulnerable expressing such quirky views. Deviating too far from consensus leaves one feeling potentially ostracized from the group, with the risk that one may be terminated
Conformity and group-think are attitudes of particular danger in science, an endeavor that is inherently revolutionary because progress often depends on overturning established wisdom. It's obvious that least 100 genes must be needed to convert a human or animal cell back to its embryonic state. Or at least it was obvious to almost everyone until Shinya Yamanaka
The academic monocultures referred to by Dr. Bouchard are the kind of thing that sabotages scientific creativity. Though they sprout up in every country, they may be a particular problem in Confucian-influenced cultures that prize conformity and respect for elders. It's curious that Japan, for example, despite having all the ingredients of a first rate scientific power -- a rich economy, heavy investment in R&D, a highly educated population and a talented scientific workforce -- has never posed a serious challenge to American scientific leadership. Young American scientists can make their name by showing their professor is dead wrong; in Tokyo or Kyoto, that's a little harder to do.
If the brightest minds on Wall Street got suckered by group-think into believing house prices would never fall, what other policies founded on consensus wisdom could be waiting to come unraveled? Global warming, you say? You mean it might be harder to model climate change 20 years ahead than house prices 5 years ahead? Surely not -- how could so many climatologists be wrong?
What's wrong with consensuses is not the establishment of a majority view, which is necessary and legitimate, but the silencing of skeptics. "We still have whole domains we can't talk about," Dr. Bouchard said, referring to the psychology of differences between races and sexes.
