Science & Religion in America

Last weekend, I co-organized Princeton's American Studies Graduate Conference. Our topic was "Science and Religion in America," and we had twelve papers, four panels, two keynote addresses, and one great Cheselden print:

Our chronology ranged over three centuries, and participants' disciplinary identities spanned history, religion, anthropology, political science, and integrated science studies programs at a variety of American institutions.

As you might be able to guess, given this range of interests and the broad nature of the theme itself, there was lots in the air over our day and half together – too much for one blog post (even if that blog post's written by me).

Rather than try to tie everything together, what I'll do here is just point out two of the major themes that emerged over the course of the conversation, and highlight a thematic arc connecting the two keynote addresses.

Authority – in many ways the ur-theme of the study of the relationship between science and religion – kept coming up throughout the conference, from historical appeals to authority to the use of authoritative rhetoric.

It was especially prominent in the second panel. There, the relative authority of science and religion was reframed as performance: from Scopes to spaceflight, it was less what was appealed to than how the appeal was made.

This leads me to the second theme I'll highlight: Narrative. From Anne Harrington's notion of "scripts" to the power of storytelling to change the world, narrative proved a central, though often subtle, analytical category.

Two papers on Puritans really brought this home. By fleshing out the Empiricist roots of the justification of confessional narratives as evidence in witch trials, both papers helped recast Perry Miller's take on the Puritan mind.

Finally, a word on a connection between our first keynote (by David Hollinger, on William James and twentieth-century Protestant thought) and our second (by Priscilla Wald, on normative narratives in a genomic age).

Hollinger tracked James' legacy amongst ecumenical Protestants who at first rejected, yet ultimately returned to, Jamesian abstraction, while Wald connected myths and anxieties about biotechnology and selfhood.

What helped bridge – or perhaps differentiate – the two was their orientation. While Hollinger only hinted at liberal Protestantism's future, Wald insisted on the need to change our narratives – and thereby, the world.

It was an interesting, and idealistic, end to an excellent conference. When pressed on just how much control anyone has over the myths that undergird our age, Wald simply expressed a faith that writers must have it.

For my part, I doubt there's much we can do to balance the news media's power over public opinion. If not science or religion, then we need a way to find the grounds for narrative authority today. Philosophy, anyone?

Cinematic Cultural Cartography: Scientists in Hollywood

Kubrick and Clarke working on 2001

This weekend, I had the pleasure of watching Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey in the company of a bevy of historians of Cold War science. One of them, a specialist, as he puts it, in "the human experience in the milieu of space," pointed out the way in which Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke – the author of the book that formed the basis for the movie – worked closely with engineers at NASA to shape such visions. It seems fair to say that 2001 played an important role in stoking support for the Apollo Program that led astronaut Neil Armstrong to take his momentous “small step” on July 20, 1969.

Why I am telling you this? There could be a thousand reasons. But the one I want to highlight in this short post is about scientists as technical advisers to filmmakers. I’m particularly interested in the role that claims to technical accuracy (not to be confused with T/truth) play in mediating science and fiction.

In my research on the history of cryobiology I have been startled at how often scientists, as early as the 1930s (if not before), were asked to go on set to ensure the ‘accuracy’ of scenes involving attempts at human preservation. For example, in the late 1930s scientist Ralph Willard was credited as a consultant to the film “The Man With Nine Lives,” a medical thriller starring Boris Karloff as a mad-scientist who attempts to freeze humans alive. Willard, who is now viewed as a purveyor of pseudo-science, conducted early experiments with cold-induced hibernation. In the late 1950s, James Lovelock (yes, that James Lovelock) earned a day’s pay by serving as an on-set consultant for the play The Critical Point, which “revived” the effort to depict humans in a state of cryopreservation. Before he came up with his cybernetic Gaia hypothesis, Lovelock made important breakthroughs in the ability to keep blood and sperm functional after exposure to low temperatures. The ability to defrost and revive whole bodies remains controversial and elusive, but is an example that makes it worth asking: What’s at stake for scientists when they participate in the production of fiction? The boundary work of scientists behind the scenes of pop culture is still largely uncharted territory for students of the cultural cartography of science.

I’ll conclude with an example from the present. In the weeks following the release of Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, a number of the scientists and public health officials who served as technical advisers for the film have used their involvement as a platform for raising awareness about biosecurity and epidemic preparedness. Assuring accuracy in the film both legitimates them as experts and legitimates the film as an extension of that expertise. Time will tell if anyone is taking them seriously and how.

There are many, many more examples. What scientists/films come to mind? What sort of scholarship -- work on nature films, scientists as consultants in other fields, etc -- could one draw on to go deeper into these questions?

Cases: History, Philosophy, Science

I've touched on the relationship between history, philosophy, and science too many times to hyperlink (key posts: here, here, and (hesitatingly) here). It's both an important topic for the discipline and the subject of my own research, and today I'll try to bring those two things together.

My dissertation is about the scientific method. Specifically, it's about meta-scientific arguments between psychologists, philosophers, and scientists in the United States around 1900. I show why these folks felt so much was at stake in debates about methods in the sciences—and why they were right.

Part of what's interesting is that the vocational categories I just listed–psychologists, philosophers, and scientists–were only then coming into their modern forms. The result is a boon and a bother: contexts and terms blinked in and out of existence as these debates about science unfolded.

It turns out that changes in the cultural authority of science a century ago link up with the way we write and teach the history and philosophy of science today. In particular, that period's wide range of views on how science worked reveals a more capacious sense of what science is and what it's for.

This came to mind as I looked over a new textbook in the philosophy of science: Steven Gimbel's Exploring the Scientific Method. The book adopts a case-based approach in which students test philosophical views against episodes in a given "track" of the history of science (e.g. "Astronomy").

For Gimbel, as for many, philosophical ideas transcend their contexts and become part of the arsenal with which we address questions like the one central to his textbook: "What actually is the scientific method?" Answers are philosophical; history provides data against which to try them out.

This is one way to approach the issue–and, I want to emphasize, it's not a wrong one. Still, it's not the only way to use cases to tackle the question of what science is and how it works. Indeed, history reveals an alternative that stitches the history and philosophy of science together far more firmly.

That alternative first emerged in the work of Lawrence Henderson almost a century ago, and its story comprises the second chapter of an excellent book by Joel Isaac on the history of the human sciences at Harvard in the twentieth century, forthcoming next year from Harvard University Press.

Henderson adapted the case method pioneered by C.C. Langdell at Harvard Law School to instruction in the social sciences. Specifically, Henderson hoped to use cases to turn sociologists into scientists. Just as legal cases helped to make lawyers, scientific cases might help to make scientists.

Cases were part and parcel of the hybrid sort of "scientific philosophy" Henderson practiced. They were not only records of science's practices and advances, but also spurs to further practices and further advances. History, philosophy, science–all were knitted together in this approach to cases.

Though true of Henderson's cases, this was less true of a subsequent (and more famous) use of the case method at micentury Harvard: University President James Bryan Conant's Case Histories in Experimental Sciences, for which a young Thomas Kuhn famously served as an instructor.

As Isaac shows, this latter use of the case–now enshrined in the disciplinary history (and hagiography) of integrated history and philosophy of science–was more about explaining scientific progress than about inviting contributions thereto. Conant's cases were, after all, for non-scientists.

So, where does Gimbel fall? Somewhere between the two. Though history is not bound up with philosophy (and science) as it was for Henderson, Gimbel is in the business of making scholars and advancing knowledge–he just happens to be making philosophers of science, not scientific philosophers.

This distinction is important, for both my dissertation and my sense of the discipline. In an academic context still dominated by analytic philosophy, the meaning of "scientific philosophy" is puzzling in ways that it wasn't a hundred years ago. Henderson's hybridity doesn't make as much sense.

Back then, appeals made to "science" were appeals to something more diffuse–and more enlivening–than the "science" which is the object of both supplication and denigration today. In short: before Big Science, "science" was somehow bigger–and studies of it were richer as a result.

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Economic vs. Scientific Value: The Case of National Parks

Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona.

There is an interesting piece in today's New York Times about the expansion of Petrified Forest National Park in north-eastern Arizona.  The park, which began its life as a National Monument under Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, has now been enriched with over 25,000 acres of land formerly belonging to a private ranch.

Negotiations between the Dpt. of the Interior and the owner of this land had been stalled for over a decade.  The reason is that the two parties could not agree to a price.  The ranch's owner, Marvin Hatch, demanded $500 per acre, which would have amounted to over $13 million in total.  When the government refused, Hatch turned the land -- which is especially prized for the abundant dinosaur fossil it contains -- into a private theme park.  Calling it International Petrified Forest, Hatch built a giant concrete dinosaur along I-40 to attract visitors and charge them an entrance fee.  

International Petrified Forest, photo by Dean Jeffrey

Hatch has since passed away, and his sons agreed to sell the ranch-land at the reduced price of $300 per acre. In part, they appear to have been motivated by the fact that International Petrified Forest never really took off as a tourist destination.  The Times goes on to describe the immense scientific value of the new acquisition, citing, among other things, the discovery of Gertie, a diminutive ancestor of the Cretaceous monster Tyrannosaurus rex.

The Times also quotes unnamed scientists as stating that the "value of the land in terms of research ... is impossible to measure."  This is an interesting thing to say in an article that is primarily about how the United States Government did exactly that: negotiate a fair price for the land.

Historians of American conservation policy will recognize a further, deep irony in this story.  The legislation that first made it possible for the US Executive to set certain areas aside for conservation as a National Monument was explicitly enacted to remove these sites from the free market.  Originally passed in 1906, the Antiquities Act was drafted by scientists in an effort to ban commercial collectors (or "pot hunters" as they tended to be called) from the Mesa Verde Cliff Dwellings in Colorado.

The Antiquities Act was designed only to protect sites of archeological and historical interest from capitalism.  But it's language was extremely vague, stating the President could declare any "historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest that are situated upon the lands owned or controlled by the Government of the United States to be national monuments."  Moreover, the act made it illegal for anyone to "appropriate, excavate, injure, or destroy any historic or prehistoric ruin or monument, or any object of antiquity, situated on lands owned or controlled by the Government of the United States."

A few years later, in 1909, vagueness of the Act's language -- which could be construed to include natural historical treasures in addition to archeological ones -- prompted a land agent in Utah to deny a mineral claim by Earl Douglass on behalf of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.  Douglass filed the claim in an attempt to secure ownership of a particularly rich dinosaur quarry, hoping to keep it from falling into the hands of private collectors or rival museums.

Earl Douglass at Dinosaur National Monument

When the Carnegie Museum's director, William J. Holland, learned that Douglass' mineral claim had been denied, he was furious.  Holland had a personal hand in drafting the law, and never dreamed that it could be invoked to do anything but protect the interests of museums such as his own.  He immediately got in touch with the Secretary of the Interior, and an awkward compromise was worked out in which Woodrow Wilson declared Douglass' dinosaur quarry to be a National Monument.  This was not entirely satisfactory, because it meant the Carnegie Museum might have to allow rival museums like the Smithsonian to dig for dinosaurs there.  But at least it would keep commercial fossil dealers off of the site.

What is the upshot of all this?

I think the history of the Antiquities Act points to the fact that sites of historic and scientific interest cannot really be removed from the market.  Scientists and governments are economic players too! Legislation such as the Antiquities Act has often been used as a mechanism by which certain players assert their dominance over others in the course of an economic negotiation.  William J. Holland was not offended by the notion that a monetary value might be placed on Douglass' dinosaur quarry.  What bothered him was the thought that his museum might not be able to maintain control over the site.

So what do we mean when we declare a site to be immeasurable scientific or historical value?  The usual way to interpret such language is that we think there is something profane about putting a cash value on historic landmarks or scientific discoveries.  The point that I want to make is that this idea -- the idea that objects of scientific significance cannot be assigned a cash value -- has a particular history. Moreover, we should recognize that it serves the interests of scientists who understandably want to exercise control over those objects.

To forestall any misunderstandings, let me clarify one thing: I am not in favor of having National Parks or Monuments given over to private ownership.  Far from it!  I do think they represent a common heritage, and thus ought to be treated as a public good to be kept in the public domain.  So I am the first to support the creation of public parks, national monuments, and so on.  But just because they ought to belong to everyone does not mean they are not worth something.  I think they are worth a great deal, and ought to belong to us all!

Statistical Infrastructure

It has little to do with America directly, but I am fascinated by the New York Times' coverage of India's new nation-wise statistical and biometric registry: "Aadhaar"---which translates, in an Asimovian twist, to "foundation."

The project aims to assign a 12-digit ID to every Indian---that's 1.2 billion IDs---and link those IDs to names, fingerprints, and iris-scans. As Lydia Polgreen, the Times reporter, notes: "It is a project of epic proportions." It also promises to make the Indian government into the world's most important aggregator of biometric data, surpassing the US-Visit program by an order of magnitude.

Nandan M. Nilekani, the former chairman of Infosys and Aadhaar's head, explained the necessity of the system in terms that made it sound like a natural governmental activity: "What we are creating is as important as a road." It is, in other words, a kind of infrastructure: statistical infrastructure. That's a phrase I use quite a bit in my own work as I trace the ways that different systems for gathering data about individuals developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries around the life insurance industry. In that story, private and public actors worked in parallel and sometimes together to improve the nation's system of vital statistical registration, to discipline doctors and nurses, and to build special biometric (of sorts) databases that could help assess each individual's risk. Yet the United States' own giant leap in gathering data (Social Security) created a national identity database only as an after-thought and had no thought of including biometric data.

That's the most intriguing thing about Aadhaar, as viewed through Polgreen's reporting. Identity sits at the center of the project. Polgreen begins with Ankaji Bhai Gangar volunteering to be IDed with hopes of getting "the first official proof that he exists." She ends with Mohammed Jalil pointing to the biometric station and saying "This will give me an identity....It will show that I am a human being, that I am alive, that I live on this planet. It will prove I am an Indian."

I'm wary of Polgreen's enthusiasm. She brushes aside concerns of "privacy watchdogs" effortlessly. She thrills at the possibililies of overcoming corruption on the local level and getting around the "crippling bureaucracy that is a legacy of [India's] socialist past." Aadhaar, we learn, will increase worker mobility and allow for greater agricultural modernization---these are both, we are made to understand, necessarily good things.

I'm all in favor of reducing corruption, improving the distribution of poor relief and welfare benefits. I think the poor ought to have access to savings, credit, cell phones, and teachers who show up to work. Who doesn't? But will a centralized, national system of identification really do that? Does bypassing local government---rather than, say, fixing it---solve that problem? I can't pretend to know, but I think there's reason to be skeptical with any theory of improving governance that tries to bypass local institutions. I do hope my fears prove entirely unfounded.