Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

The stigmatization of science is also jeopardizing the progress of science itself. Today anyone who wants to do research on human beings, even an interview on political opinions or a questionnaire about irregular verbs, must prove to a committee that he or she is not Josef Mengele. Though research subjects obviously must be protected from exploitation and harm, the institutional review bureaucracy has swollen far beyond this mission. Critics have pointed out that it has become a menace to free speech, a weapon that fanatics can use to shut up people whose opinions they don’t like, and a red-tape dispenser which bogs down research while failing to protect, and sometimes harming, patients and research subjects.⁴² Jonathan Moss, a medical researcher who had developed a new class of drugs and was drafted into chairing the research review board at the University of Chicago, said in a convocation address, “I ask you to consider three medical miracles we take for granted: X-rays, cardiac catheterization, and general anesthesia. I contend all three would be stillborn if we tried to deliver them in 2005.”⁴³ (The same observation has been made about insulin, burn treatments, and other lifesavers.) The social sciences face similar hurdles. Anyone who talks to a human being with the intent of gaining generalizable knowledge must obtain prior permission from these committees, almost certainly in violation of the First Amendment. Anthropologists are forbidden to speak with illiterate peasants who cannot sign a consent form, or interview would-be suicide bombers on the off chance that they might blurt out information that puts them in jeopardy.⁴⁴

The hobbling of research is not just a symptom of bureaucratic mission creep. It is actually rationalized by many academics in a field called bioethics. These theoreticians think up reasons why informed and consenting adults should be forbidden to take part in treatments that help them and others while harming no one, using nebulous rubrics like “dignity,” “sacredness,” and “social justice.” They try to sow panic about advances in biomedical research using far-fetched analogies with nuclear weapons and Nazi atrocities, science-fiction dystopias like Brave New World and Gattaca, and freak-show scenarios like armies of cloned Hitlers, people selling their eyeballs on eBay, or warehouses of zombies to supply people with spare organs. The moral philosopher Julian Savulescu has exposed the low standards of reasoning behind these arguments and has pointed out why “bioethical” obstructionism can be unethical: “To delay by 1 year the development of a treatment that cures a lethal disease that kills 100,000 people per year is to be responsible for the deaths of those 100,000 people, even if you never see them.”⁴⁵

Ultimately the greatest payoff of instilling an appreciation of science is for everyone to think more scientifically. We saw in the preceding chapter that humans are vulnerable to cognitive biases and fallacies. Though scientific literacy itself is not a cure for fallacious reasoning when it comes to politicized identity badges, most issues don’t start out that way, and everyone would be better off if they could think about them more scientifically. Movements that aim to spread scientific sophistication such as data journalism, Bayesian forecasting, evidence-based medicine and policy, real-time violence monitoring, and effective altruism have a vast potential to enhance human welfare. But an appreciation of their value has been slow to penetrate the culture.⁴⁶

I asked my doctor whether the nutritional supplement he had recommended for my knee pain would really be effective. He replied, “Some of my patients say it works for them.” A business-school colleague shared this assessment of the corporate world: “I have observed many smart people who have little idea of how to logically think through a problem, who infer causation from a correlation, and who use anecdotes as evidence far beyond the predictability warranted.” Another colleague who quantifies war, peace, and human security describes the United Nations as an “evidence-free zone”:

The higher reaches of the UN are not unlike anti-science humanities programs. Most people at the top are lawyers and liberal arts graduates. The only parts of the Secretariat that have anything resembling a research culture have little prestige or influence. Few of the top officials in the UN understood qualifying statements as basic as “on average and other things being equal.” So if we were talking about risk probabilities for conflict onsets you could be sure that Sir Archibald Prendergast III or some other luminary would offer a dismissive, “It’s not like that in Burkina Faso, y’know.”