Please read: "THE TRUTH WEARS OFF" by Jonah ! Lehrer TNY 12/13/10

An open letter to The New Yorker

12-17-10

As a practicing scientist/physician, the new and humiliating paradigm shift for science comes as no surprise to me; although I have to congratulate the New Yorker editorial board for their bravery in presenting this data to a world blissfully and willingly unaware of such bleeding-out of our scientific integrity.

The first and most immediate question is the most apparently practical one: who is going to pay for all this? I cannot but think of the horse Boxer in "Animal Farm" who in the face of an obviously failed pig's paradigm simply declared that he must work harder. My guess is that if our studies cannot be few but many to achieve the funnel effect, and must have larger and larger numbers of subjects--then science in which we can have confidence will become rather like much of our medical and consumer technology, i.e. a luxury that increasingly few can afford.

I have seen this effect time and time again in medical practice, not only the effect of entropy on hype, but also a therapeutic law of diminishing returns. The broader question now is, can science be actually and reliably done by mankind? Is, as you rightfully ask, the scientific method flawed to the core? Do we have enough resources to actually do trustworthy science any more? Or are we lacking something else we cannot see or imagine?

At the very least it demonstrates that the source and sustenance of science is culture, not the other way around. The scientific community is the tail, not the dog, in spite of its vaulting ambitions to dominate every field from politics to poetry to philosophy.

It also suggests what many have long suspected, that it isn't just a paradigm shift that defines and redefines the role and methods of science; there is an unsubsumable (to use Walker Percy's phrase) ethic required to do science that is not only transcultural but supracultural. If science as we currently know it is in thrall to the la belle dame sans merci of cultural norms, then the very definition of science becomes a de facto moot point, and we are back to the purely arbitrary. Which is where your excellent article left it, more or less. Good meat for postmodernists and political junkies!

This has implications for TNY itself. In retrospect, TNY has only been around since 1925, and its founder based its unique contribution on the phrase, "I believe in malice." as per your previous article on this subject.

That may be the critic's go-ahead signal, but it is far more than that. TNY would not even be possible without the advent and assumption of scientific materialism. And like Boxer, the horse that knows not what he does, TNY has participated unknowingly in the demise of its own basic paradigm, which is the same essence as Loren Eisley's famous statement, that one must be sure that no mysterious supranatural foot gets in the door. The TNY has been fastidious to a fault in this regard.

The scientific commmunity at large however is far less united on the principle of "materialism-only, forever and ever amen", than are the editorialists of the magazines we generally read--these family feuds in science are something we rarely hear about because we get much of our information from said magazines.

Spiritual beliefs were supposed to die out after Darwin--but studies done at the dawn of the 20th century and repeated recently showed that a steady 40% of scientists in general would not assume that there is no divine principle at work in the world. Under the surface of well- publicized unity of scientism there are enough personal doubts to put the whole scientific enterprise into a larger perspective which sees the scientific method as an occasionally useful tool, in the nature of a hammer or a saw; not as a life-coach or a master over philosophy etc. There are, obviously, many ways of knowing--but virtually always "in part, through a glass dimly"

Is this then,at last, a "Boxer Rebellion"?

Sincerely,

William Schuler M.D. Mendota IL