Daily Archives: November 18, 2024

The Megachurch of Science

We live in unusual times. Turmoil is palpable on different aspects of our social experience, from ideological trends to popular culture. Standpoints previously held as acceptable and true feel as if they’re undergoing an inversion. The rule of law becomes optional when it is broken for ideologically justified reasons, ancient definitions of sex are now challenged by what is essentially a continuum fallacy, and, of course, the enterprise of scientific discovery—originally a thorough pursuit of truth—is often played as a game of authority and political convenience. There are multiple signs of the seemingly battered state of science in our current age; gone are the days when skepticism was seen as a healthy feature of any scientific thinker and when an excess or lack of skepticism landed you in controversial and conspiratorial thinking at worst. The 2010s were a time when a Flat Earth or the existence of cryptids were the highest forms of mistrust in mainstream science, but in the current cultural climate a vast number of claims labelled as “scientific” are continually challenged and questioned by concerned onlookers. The public intuition for finding foul play in science funding, development, and narrative is at an all-time high.

One of the features of this recent breakdown in the trust for scientific endeavours is the abundance of scandals. Case in point, political commentator and Catholic convert Candace Owens recently described science as a “pagan faith” while boldly professing that she has now “left the megachurch of science.” The sentiment was followed by discussions about the reliability of data, the unchallenged trust in reported scientific findings, and biases in scientific enterprises driven by ideological and financial interests. Similar thoughts have been echoed by popular voices across social media and even among a section of academia. The notion is part of a broader distrust in authority (as is reflected by speakers more critical of the general social climate of our time like Russell Brand), but also includes personalities with notable academic trajectories, including the psychologist and thinker Jordan B. Peterson and evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein. The arguments partially overlap, and while there is no unified set of red flags raised, a major talking point revolves around the impression of a deliberate misuse of scientific research to guide agendas that are incompatible with the ethos of scientific thought. Other scandals at the heart of academic institutions like the 2017 Evergreen College protests, the 2023 U.S. Congressional hearing on antisemitism on Ivy League University campuses and the highly questionable stance of the medical association WPATH on pediatric gender-affirming surgery have only made things worse. As a result, detractors place anything broadly labeled as “science” in a box to be cast aside. Irony strikes once again as technological advances based on scientific research are used to propagate the thought that science is inherently flawed and potentially evil.

Treating the scientific literature as a set of settled facts entirely misses the nature of scientific progress and makes it prone to serious misuse.

I wouldn’t fully disagree with that sentiment: Science is a human enterprise and is therefore expected to be imperfect and flawed. I do, however, believe that there is an important need to recontextualize science as an ancient discipline developed over millennia (and, might I add, an intimate companion to Christian thought) and separate it from The ScienceTM. I won’t dive into the long scientific tradition within the Catholic Church and the contributions of Catholic scientists and philosophers like St. Albert the Great and Gregor Mendel; instead, it’s worth putting science in its proper place by delineating its reach and bounds, its methods and nature. For this purpose, let’s take a page from apophatic theology and examine what science is not. 

Science is not an all-encompassing form of epistemology

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with how we attain knowledge. It has a broad scope and feeds from multiple traditions of thought. Modern scientific empiricism—the notion that we gain knowledge about the physical world from making observations and deriving conclusions from them—is just one of them. In fact, modern science comes from the tradition of natural philosophy, and as such is concerned with a small portion of things that are knowable—namely, the natural world. As moderns, we also refer to this as the material world, which encompasses a set of phenomena which are perfectly suited to be studied through the scientific method. The reason for this adequacy and the remarkable success of science in enhancing our understanding of the material world is simple yet profound: The natural world is governed by laws which make it knowable at least and predictable at best.

A physical world governed by laws which can be inferred through the human intellect, not including miracles, is a clear way of delineating the reach of science. Centuries of successes in describing these laws seem to have bred a false sense of security resulting in the misguided enthroning of science as the preeminent form of knowing: an all-encompassing epistemology. It needs to be reiterated that science is one of many ways of attaining knowledge and is limited to things that can be physically measured. In modern common parlance, it is even normal to see a conflation of rationality with “scientific” thinking; rationality certainly plays a part in scientific empiricism, but it also transcends it.

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Science does not produce statements of absolute certainty

Science, or more specifically scientific empiricism, relies on a classic or extended form of the scientific method: a framework to formulate and test hypotheses to gain knowledge about a phenomenon. By its very conception, the scientific method takes observations from a sample and statistically evaluates the possibility that the insights gained from this relatively small sample can be confidently extrapolated to the whole. While your typical notion of successful scientific discovery brings to mind breakthroughs that produced accurate mathematical descriptions of a phenomenon (like Newton’s laws of mechanics or Mendel’s laws of heredity), most of the driving forces of the material world would require a large number of measurements to be unravelled. Each observation contains an inherent probability for error arising from how observations are made or from biases in how the observations are chosen. Even more, complex phenomena like epidemics need to account for many factors which are technically, practically, or theoretically unmeasurable. Correcting for these factors requires a different type of thinking, where a conclusion like “A produces B” becomes “A is associated with B,” “we are 95% confident that A produces B,” or “A can produce B if C.”

Statistical inference is inseparable from most modern scientific problems, precisely because, in practice, we hit very serious limitations on how we can collect and process data. This sometimes makes it challenging to communicate the uncertainty behind the conclusions of a piece of research. It also explains some of the discrepancies between the conclusions from similar studies performed under different contexts. It’s a warning against taking a single experiment as the basis for a generalizable conclusion, yet many scientists have fallen into the temptation of presenting their insights without fully acknowledging this uncertainty, whether by the flawed application of the scientific method or by the appeal of gaining notoriety or advancing personal convictions and ideologies.

Science is not a collection of agreed-upon facts

Perhaps counterintuitive to the current paradigm, science is not a conglomeration of facts derived from the application of the scientific method. Collectively, the community of people applying the scientific method to tackle different questions can be thought of as “the scientific community,” while the corpus of data, results, and knowledge produced by this enterprise is the visible product of this community. However, the corpus’ nature is dynamic and has in fact changed substantially over time. The number of independent groups doing scientific research and publishing their findings is greater than it has ever been, and with such a breadth of participants the totality of the knowledge produced becomes increasingly blurry. While scientific research is less disruptive now and scientific breakthroughs are rarer due to multiple factors, the bulk of scientific production will inevitably fluctuate between thorough and accurate, incomplete yet insightful, derivative and simply erroneous. Treating the scientific literature as a set of settled facts entirely misses the nature of scientific progress and makes it prone to serious misuse. It ignores the self-correcting nature of science: A currently valid conclusion will be recontextualized and even changed as new high-quality research emerges.

“Follow the science” is more like chasing after a crafty hare, elusive and ever changing its course.

Statements such as “follow the science” are therefore somewhat nonsensical because they refer to an alignment of views to a fixed set of precepts, more often than not framed under a single point of view. Scientific consensus is equally elusive because, while it’s common for ideas to become widely accepted when they are corroborated time and time again through multiple lines of evidence, a large portion of the scientific knowledge remains contested and can even be thwarted by novel, disruptive research. In reality, “follow the science” is more like chasing after a crafty hare, elusive and ever changing its course. This prospect is quite enticing for scientists who inhabit the border of what is known, but it’s a shaky foundation to construct perennial structures. It is also fundamentally different to “following the scientific method”, which addresses the methodological nature of science. Scientific enquiry is defined above all by the process followed, and the process itself is what has truly been cemented over centuries of successful use. Don’t follow the science, just use it. Keep what is good, discard the bad.

Science is not exempt from being wielded nefariously

Ultimately, science is not immune to providing partial and even misdirected answers to empirical questions because, as a tool, it can be directed toward some questions and not others, historically following broader societal interests and concerns. A crucial idea to keep in mind here is that, while there is plenty to learn about the natural world from hypotheses that are formulated and tested (whether they are proven or disproven), there is also plenty to learn from the hypotheses that are ignored entirely. Confident-sounding statements are easy to produce when the bulk of research is aimed at one general way of viewing a problem while entirely dismissing an alternative approach to the same problem—be it due to lack of funding or lack of intellectual support. There is a formula which is accurate in its form but permits the complexity of the bigger picture to be ignored: “There is no evidence to suggest . . .” This phrasing says little about the efforts being made to attain such evidence, or lack thereof.

Along similar lines, the knowledge produced by science can and has tragically been misused for nefarious purposes with clear underlying ideological tints. Pick your stance from across the ideological spectrum, and you’re likely to find examples of research findings being wielded to further an ideology, profit unethically, or impose world views without adequate nuance. This is on top of the plain breaches in research and business ethics which likely drive a lot of the sentiments described at the beginning of this article.

While Candace Owens’ strong proclamation of science being a pagan cult is bombastic, some of the contemporary ways in which science is seen and used can virtually turn it precisely into that. This isn’t new: When Facebook was at its peak among the social media platforms during the early 2010s, a page cheekily called “I F*****ing Love Science” (“IFLS” for short—and to maintain some decency) reigned supreme in my (admittedly nerdy) feed, producing content that praised the contributions and magnificence of science while putting down what at the time was seen as irrational and superstitious. IFLS adopted a form of scientism, the borderline worship of the scientific enterprise and its fruits. As a scientist myself, I can’t fully endorse Owens’ claims of the “megachurch of science,” but I certainly echo her concern about the glorification of a tool and its users which, despite their contributions to human flourishing, deserve no worship whatsoever. We live among egregores that will demand our attention; let us not cast it away from the one true source of it all.

Killer questions at science job interviews and how to ace them

Credit: GettyNature’s 2024 hiring in science surveyThis article is the third in a short series discussing the results of Nature’s 2024 global survey of hiring managers in science. The survey, created in partnership with Thinks Insights & Strategy, a research consultancy in London, launched in June and was advertised on nature.com, in Springer Nature digital products and through e-mail campaigns. It received 1,134 self-selecting respondents from 77 countries, based in academia, industry and other sectors, including industry responses provided in partnership with Walr, a market-research panel. The full survey data sets are available at go.nature.com/3bgpazn.Preparing for a scientific job interview? Knowing in advance the types of questions that recruiters love to ask can give you a considerable edge, and can buy you time to work on your answers. In this article, we’ll look at some of the favourite or most revealing questions that are used by hiring managers. These data were gleaned from Nature’s 2024 global survey of more than 1,100 laboratory heads and research leaders from academia, industry and other sectors.The questions listed below are designed to probe your technical knowledge, interest in a given research field, future ambitions and how you manage conflicts with colleagues or other challenges. By understanding these four question types — and the curveball questions you might also get — you’ll be better equipped to showcase your expertise and passion for science.Technical knowledge or experienceTypical questions• Tell me about one of your recent research projects.• How would you tackle this [specific research question], and how does your background support your approach?Why they are asked. Most applicants will expect to answer interview questions about their research and experience. According to hirers who responded to the survey, these can be great starter questions to allow candidates to settle into the interview before facing something more challenging. Such questions provide insights into the applicant’s problem-solving ability, and they also allow the interviewer to gauge someone’s communication and presentation skills when speaking about something they should know well.Worth remembering. Hirers often spring technical questions on applicants to unmask anyone who might have exaggerated their skills. Tulio de Oliveira, who heads the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, says asking technical questions helps him “separate who will be good at the job” from who is simply “good at doing interviews”. One engineer working in industry in France said that they like to use questions that are premised on ‘false’ or incorrect information. “If the candidate answers it like they know about it, I remove them from the shortlist of potential hires.”Curveball questions• “I ask a basic maths question. You’d be surprised how often people can’t answer them.” — Academic group leader in the biological sciences in the United Kingdom.• “Tell me a story about your best project so far, in five minutes.” — Associate professor in the biological sciences in Sweden.Interest in the team or fieldTypical questions• What aspects of our group’s research do you find especially interesting, and why?• What do you think has been the most important discovery in our field in the past five years?Why they are asked. Hirers like to see evidence that candidates have done their homework before an interview. Questions about the hiring lab are a way to test this, and they also help interviewers to understand applicants’ motivations — whether their chief desire is to find any job, or whether it’s this particular job that interests them.Worth remembering. Be prepared to talk about research that isn’t your own. Which study you choose might not matter as much as having something to say and how you talk about it. Glenn Geher, a psychology researcher at the State University of New York at New Paltz, says that if a candidate hesitates when asked to talk about other people’s work, they might be driven mainly by external rewards, seeing research as ”almost a chore needed to achieve certain outcomes like a degree or tenure”. But if the candidate “excitedly describes an interesting additional line of research”, their motivation is probably more intrinsic, he says.Curveball questions• “Having read our recent paper on [topic], what would you do next?” — Professor of medical science in Ireland.• “Describe the thing that you are best at that you think would be a key contribution to our team.” — Research-group head in the biological sciences at a non-governmental organization in the United States.Tulio de Oliveira (left) asks candidates questions that test their technical knowledge.Credit: Tommy Trenchard/Panos PicturesTackling challenges and conflictsTypical questions• Describe a situation in which you faced a major challenge at work and explain how you solved it.• How would you handle a conflict with a colleague?Why they are asked. Interviewers ask about coping with failure to evaluate candidates’ levels of self-awareness and to gauge their conflict-resolving skills. Questions can be about something that actually happened, or can focus on a hypothetical scenario; it’s worth preparing for both of these possibilities.Worth remembering. Interviewers will be looking for evidence of introspection and learning, so bear that in mind when choosing which experiences to share. “Anyone with experience as an academic should be able to tell you multiple stories about things not going exactly according to plan,” says Geher. Candidates’ answers can reveal whether they are prepared to take responsibility for problems that emerged, or prefer to shift the blame to others, he says. “If they show signs that they genuinely know that they have a lot to learn — and welcome this fact — that is usually a good sign.” One programme manager in medical research reported giving candidates a ‘prioritization’ challenge, where the applicant must list a number of tasks in the order in which they’d choose to tackle them. One task involves a staff member wanting a five-minute private chat about a personal matter. “We prefer candidates that rank this first, as it demonstrates their humanity.”Curveball questions• “Research has its ups and downs; what skills do you have that will enable you to get through the tough days?” — Chemistry professor, country unknown.• “How would you manage work-related burn-out and health?” — Pharmaceutical lab head in Saudi Arabia.Future ambitions and goalsTypical questions• Can you describe your career aspirations for the next five years?• How does this role align with your long-term goals?”Why they are asked. Given that many science jobs are short-term contracts, hirers often want to know what your plans are for when the job ends. For longer-term positions, such as tenure track or equivalent roles, these questions help recruiters to assess what you will bring to a broad department or division. Such questions also test whether candidates understand the demands of a scientific career. One principal investigator who responded to the survey said that the ability to chart a realistic course for career development is one of the skills that candidates nowadays most commonly lack, adding: “Grad school does not teach this.”Worth remembering. For short-term positions, there’s nothing wrong with seeing a job as a stepping stone, but make sure that you still explain how your experience and skills will contribute to the team’s success. Several hirers reported that they prefer candidates who express a long-term interest in their research area. That said, although clear long-term career visions might impress recruiters, it’s usually better to be honest if there are aspects of your future that you are unsure about. “It is easy to identify someone who’s not being honest when answering, and I personally prefer the ones that don’t shy away when saying that they don’t know something,” one astronomer working in academia in Chile said.Curveball questions• “If funding were unlimited, what research problem would you like to tackle?” — Biological sciences lab leader in the United States.• “What is your plan if you are not employed in our organization?” — Academic medical researcher in Iran.