Resisted Science

Key Lessons from Old Controversies

All too often in the history of science, theories that enjoyed overwhelming scholarly consensus have turned out to be false, while those who challenged these theories were scorned. The case of the Copernican Revolution is well known. Copernicus himself delayed the publication of his defense of heliocentrism until just prior to his death for fear of ridicule. Enduring persecution in defending the theory was mainly left to Galileo, who, with the emergence of better telescopes, was able to make many astronomical discoveries that refuted the reigning Aristotelian cosmology.

This rankled his scientific contemporaries and Catholic Church authorities, who were thoroughly invested in Aristotelian geocentrism. When challenged by the Grand Duchess of Florence, who said his heliocentrism contradicted Scripture, Galileo denied any inconsistency between science and the Bible. This prompted the charge that he was proposing a heretical interpretation of Scripture, and he was ordered by Pope Paul  V to abandon heliocentrism and refrain from teaching or defending it.

Galileo laid low for many years, but with the 1632 publication of his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which displayed the errors of geocentrism, he was brought before the church Inquisition and declared a “suspect” of heresy. He was placed under house arrest, and his book was banned. Galileo finally recanted under pressure, but he is also reported to have said regarding the Earth, “and yet it moves”—an indication that despite being compelled to disavow his theory verbally, his mind had not changed.

A more tragic story involves the nineteenth-century Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis. While working at a hospital in Vienna, Semmelweis inquired into mortality rates of infants and their mothers. There were two obstetric clinics, one served by medical students and the other by midwives. Curiously, the mortality rate in the former was inordinately high, as much as six times higher than in the latter.

Semmelweis learned that the medical students also dissected cadavers, and he theorized that they unknowingly transported contaminants from the cadavers to the women. He proposed that physicians wash their hands and instruments, and when his counsel was followed, the mortality rate in the physicians’ clinic immediately dropped to the same level as that of the midwives.

Despite these clearly beneficial results, his methods were resisted by most of his peers. It seems they could not accept the possibility that they had been inadvertently causing the deaths of women and babies. Even after similar successes with handwashing at other hospitals, Semmelweis remained an object of scorn and eventually succumbed to chronic depression. He was committed to an asylum, where he died at age 47.

Not Anomalies

These are just two of many cases in the history of science where significant insights were resisted and defenders were persecuted for challenging the status quo. Although Western science is heralded as a paragon of rational enterprise, such stories remind us that while a given methodology of empirical inquiry might be ideally rigorous, those who apply that methodology are fallible.

Twentieth-century philosophers of science have shown that objectivity in science is a mythical distortion and that scientific communities are as fraught with non-rational influences as any other human network. For all the emphasis on empirical evidence in science, theoretical paradigms have often been selected and preserved for non-rational motivations, whether psychological, social, economic, political, or even religious.

The cases of Galileo and Semmelweis vividly illustrate this, as they both had to contend with forces contaminating the scientific inquiries at issue. We dismiss their stories as anomalies to our peril. Indeed, Santayana’s warning regarding the failure to learn from history applies here as much as anywhere. If we do not humbly recognize the susceptibility of our own scientific communities to corrupting influences, we are bound to repeat the errors of the past.

Potentially Corrupting Influences

It would seem, then, that the history of science should inspire restraint toward what we regard as uncontroversial scientific fact, especially when it comes to “follow the science” pronouncements. How might this apply to some of our contemporary controversies?

Consider the climate change debate. Like all scientific inquiries addressing issues impacted by human behavior, climate science is fraught with tenuous elements. Among these are causal claims that aim to explain why global temperatures are on the rise. But the correlation between rising global temperatures and carbon-emitting industrial technologies does not by itself prove that global warming is solely human caused. As the adage goes, correlation does not imply causation.

Furthermore, climate scientists’ predictive claims about what the future will bring if we pursue a given course are also tenuous, due in part to the contingency of the causal issue: if the rise in temperatures is not mainly due to human activity, then we cannot reliably predict continued increases based solely on levels of human-caused carbon emissions.

But setting these issues aside, consider some of the ways that climate science might be contaminated by non-scientific influences. One of these is financial, as the pursuit of research advancing the climate change agenda provides significant opportunities for receiving federal grants. Another potentially corrupting influence, which many have argued is the most fundamental driver of environmental alarmism, is politics. Globalists could use the warming scare to serve their agenda of restraining capitalism and advancing socialism.

While these are certainly possible corrupting influences on climate science, are they real? Many have argued they are, and every year books and articles are published presenting scientific arguments reinforcing this skepticism. Michael Shellenberger’s recent Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All is a significant example.

Another issue to consider in this context is the Covid-19 pandemic. The claim that responses were purely scientific ignores the fact that they were actually a consequence of multi-factor risk assessments. Because public policies regarding masks, social distancing, quarantining, and vaccine mandates imposed limitations on human freedom, they necessarily involved more than scientific reasoning. They were the consequence of prudential judgments about what degree of risk to public safety warranted restrictions on personal autonomy.

These judgments also entailed prior judgments about what sacrifices we should be willing to make as a society regarding commerce, education, and even mental health, all of which were significantly impacted by quarantines, lockdowns, and mask mandates. While informed by scientific data, such judgments were inevitably underdetermined by that data. This is because empirical data only tells us what is the case and cannot by itself tell us how we ought to respond to a given phenomenon. Non-scientific judgments necessarily figure into public policies regarding such phenomena. These factors include the psychology of fear, public perception, and financial and political interests.

In both cases—climate change and pandemic responses—public policy could be driven by non-scientific factors hiding behind a “follow the science” mask. But as history has shown, we should not be surprised if this is so. Galileo and Semmelweis could just as easily have been shouted down with the “follow the science” meme of their day, despite the now-obvious fact that they were the ones who were most rigorous in their scientific thinking. Their persecution in the name of science could not have been more tragically ironic. Might we be witnessing something similar today?