Laughing at our ancestors. When is it legitimate?

We've recently posted on the subject of laughing at the arrogance or self-assurance, and sometimes societally hurtful but false reasoning that can pass as scientific truth when said from the pulpit, and presumed imprimatur of major universities.  We picked on WH Sheldon in one post, pointing out the problems with his photos of naked Ivy League university students with the aim of showing that humans came in discrete body types which were windows into individual personality--that is, into an individual's inbred, causally deterministic characteristics.

Sheldon did his work in the days when mainly white people attended major colleges, and women were widely treated as modified (or, perhaps, degenerate) men (after all, their designation is (wo)men).  'Political correctness' had not yet entered the vocabulary of our culture.  So one did not have to excuse his statements about how things were.  However, cultural context and biases influence even scientific statements, which many recognize (if you're a strict genetic determinist, it's highly likely that you're a right-winger; similarly, those who believe that environment is an important determinant of most traits are more likely to be lefties).  Scientists are not as objective as we might fancy.

But can we ridicule our historical predecessors in science, or is that unfair or cruel beyond reason? They did, after all, reflect their times and were as sincere about what they said (and as convinced of their correctness and even rectitude) as we are today, even if that had a subjective aspect.  As we noted in our earlier post, the beliefs of every age will seem risible to others at some future time.  So perhaps we should just say, in a flat voice, that they were wrong but only because they hadn't the data, technology, or experience that we have--and the same will be true of us in the future.  That fits history, but seems risky to anyone who rails against cultural relativism because it seems to say that neither we, nor anybody, knows the truth.  A debatable point, to say the least.

But is past science, though pronounced from on high (that is, the Ivy League, Michigan, Wisconsin, or Berkeley--or Oxbridge), ever more culpable than that?  Should it be subject to ridicule?  How about this example, from a contemporary of Sheldon, Carleton Coon?  He was at Penn and Harvard-trained, and thus considered a world expert on human evolution and human races.  Though his books were generally written as if they were sober, unemotional, objective science, he was a white supremacist in at least two senses.  It was found after the fact that behind the scenes Coon had lobbied against school integration, on the grounds that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites and, well, you can guess the rest.

Secondly, he was known for looking at human prehistory, fossils, and current racial variation and arguing that whites crossed the 'human' threshold before those of other geographic areas (Asia and, naturally last, Africa).  This differed from, for example, today's out-of-Africa hypothesis by which modern humans evolved first in Africa and then expanded both in Africa and out into Eurasia.

Now, in Coon's book The Living Races of Man (Knopf, 1965) which we all had as anthropology students and was widely consulted and used as a text, he makes several statements about personality. Among them are that

No one can express anguish more convincingly by his facial expression than an Italian.  A Negro's facial expression, on the other hand, consists largely of exposing his eyeballs and his teeth.  There is a good reason for this difference: the Italian's mobile and moving communication would be lost, under most lighting conditions, on a black face. . . .In sum, light-skinned Caucasoids and Mongoloids independently developed the same capacity for nonverbal communication through a change in the expression of their faces.

Need we restrain our smiles?  Well, here is Coon's illustration of the superior version of the facial muscles, offered as supporting evidence, which I remember very well because I saw it as a graduate student and remarked about it even then:

Coon's version of the 'sophisticated' facial muscles (European left, Asian right)

Note those finely crafted muscles!  Even as students--at the time--we found this worthy of derision. Yes, the eugenics era would be proud of such categorical statements, and we see an emergence of the same kind of stuff, now couched in (this time definitive, trust us) genomic causal terms, today.

Now it so happened that I had got my PhD at the University of Michigan, and was there as a post-doc in the Human Genetics department at their Medical School, where I was and taking gross anatomy. We used one of the leading texts of the time, written by a distinguished anatomist and the course's instructor, Russell Woodburne (Essentials of Human Anatomy, 1970, Oxford).  When we got to human facial musculature, here is the book's illustration (page 199; I added the coloration to help study for the exam):

Woodburne's choice of cadaver to illustrate the human facial muscles

The irony in this illustration should be obvious!

Now there are times when we have every right to ridicule what was said by past scientists, even if they were working within the cultural landscape at the time, but which reveals how clearly one's biases can cloud even what is purported to be objective scientific judgment. This is but one example. Stepin Fetchit may have been acceptable for the movies at that time (to the (white) people who could afford to go), but not for text-books, not then, not ever.  Coon must have seen all those old movies, but not realized the characters in movies are acting.

Let's make the point in another way.  In Coon's time, the typical white's stereotype of blacks was that they were naturally, that is inherently, subservient.  One reason given was that they evolved in steamy tropical Africa where being intellectually energetic would have been selected against.  Now, within one adult lifetime, the white's stereotype of African Americans would not be of subservience, but, if anything, it would be one of inherent violent or criminal tendencies.  Or, as many would have us believe, of inherent low intelligence. Why?  Because they evolved in steamy tropical Africa where being intellectually energetic would have been selected against.

And remember when the eugenicists were convinced of the inferiority of Jews or--what was it in the US?--that they were innate champion boxers?  These changeable 'essences' reflect the mistake of comfortably equating what a whole group seem to be, today, with what they must have been selected for.  In the tempting search for inherency, that mode of thinking is still widespread.

Anyone still clinging to the idea that scientists are really objective needs to read some history
No matter how sincerely most of us do, truly, try to be detached and objective, and open about our assumptions and biases, and no matter how some aspects of our methods and technology can be seen as objective, and disregarding politically motivated criticism of science by those who just don't like what scientists say (e.g., 'postModern' critiques), we are human and our work, including even the questions we choose to ask, has subjective elements.  When those elements color what is said in material ways, especially ways that can not only mislead science but also society (as, for example, undermining integration because of the purported primitiveness of some racial groups treated as discrete categories), in our opinion it deserves all the scorn and ridicule it can get.

Who speaks for the facts?

Everyone else is speculating on what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, so we don't have to. The one thing that most people agree on is that the plane met a tragic end, and we pause for a moment to recognize the pain and sorrow this has caused so many people. But, the wide range of hypotheses is fascinating, and we wanted to briefly consider why there are so many and what this might say about science.

We don't need to rehash the possibilities, which range from simple accident to malicious intent on the part of one or more passengers, or even the pilots.  Indeed, you can generate your own conspiracy theory right here.  E.g.:

But a new hypothesis is intriguing and puts the rest in stark relief -- a piece over at Wired, "A Startlingly Simple Theory About the Missing Malaysia Airlines Jet", written by a pilot named Chris Goodfellow, is a reminder that perspective is everything. Well, informed perspective.

Goodfellow says:

There has been a lot of speculation about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Terrorism, hijacking, meteors. I cannot believe the analysis on CNN; it’s almost disturbing. I tend to look for a simpler explanation, and I find it with the 13,000-foot runway at Pulau Langkawi.

He goes on to say that pilots are trained to always know where the closest, safest airport is if something were to happen to the airplane they are flying.  He says the pilot of Flight 370 must have landed at Pulau Langkawi many times, and that he must have realized that there was an emergency on board, and turned toward that airport, knowing it was the closest place he would be able to land.

What I think happened is the flight crew was overcome by smoke and the plane continued on the heading, probably on George (autopilot), until it ran out of fuel or the fire destroyed the control surfaces and it crashed. You will find it along that route–looking elsewhere is pointless.

Goodfellow says this fits all the data, from the loss of transponders to the turning of the aircraft.  He is appalled that people are considering the pilot to have had malicious intent, when in all likelihood -- in fact Goodfellow is certain -- instead he acted heroically.  See his post for the detailed explanation.

Our point here is not to explain what happened, because we have no idea, but to take a look at how hypotheses are made, and how they are evaluated.  Goodfellow is an old and experienced pilot.  He is evaluating the data from inside the pilot's head, and it turns out that his is probably the most parsimonious explanation.  And, as everyone knows, a parsimonious explanation is always the best explanation.  Occam's razor.  And add to that that 'experts' are assumed to have judgment as to what explanation is most parsimonious.

Fossils from the Cretaceous, found in Lebanon; Wikimedia

Except that parsimony is an arbitrary measure of the quality of data assessment.  The basic idea, and it certainly has much merit, is that when a simple explanation will do, adding other variables and explanations is not called for by the data and as a general principle we avoid making explanations more complex than they need to be to account for our data.  Which is not to say that parsimonious explanations can't be the best, just that parsimony itself isn't why they are the best.

Everyone is working with the same data on this airplane mystery.  But terrorism experts see evidence of terrorism, mechanics see sure signs of engine trouble, and so forth.  It's the pilot who can imagine himself in the pilot's seat who, at least to us, makes the most sense.  Not because of parsimony -- do we have good reason to think that the flight tragedy was due to one thing only?  An electrical failure or fire, or a hijacking, or sudden gain in altitude that knocked everyone, pilot and passenger, out cold?  Normally, in this case, we would not think that there was, say, a hijacking and then an on-board fire.  That would be complex compared to just one of those--but how would we know that more than one event didn't account for things?  The hijackers could have jerked on the controls and sent the plane too high, which knocked everyone out, etc.

Also, of the separate hypotheses, is there really at this stage a good reason based on parsimony to choose one over the other?  Each author has his own idea, or advocacy.  The pilot's explanation seems to make the most sense because he's a pilot, and can evaluate the evidence as if he'd been flying a troubled plane.

And in science
Everyone saw the same world Charles Darwin saw in the early to mid 1800's, too, and only he and Alfred Wallace made lasting order from the data, suggesting that the diversity of life is the result of descent with modification from a common ancestor via natural selection, and the fact of evolution is confirmed every day in biology labs around the world.  Alternative explanations for the origins of the diversity that everyone saw around them were many; then as now fundamentalists saw the hand of God and, fossils were thought to be 'sports of nature', not evidence of extinct species, because God wouldn't have made species that went extinct.  A case can be made that Darwin lost his faith after the death of his daughter, Annie, and a theory that didn't require a divine being was one he could readily accept.

One argument against the God argument is that God would have had to have a separate reason for making insects have 6 legs, but not spiders or lobsters, and vertebrates four, but not fish or birds, who have fins and wings.  That is, God made a separate, unique decision about each creature.  That is more complex than saying evolution and common ancestry generically account for what we see. 

Now evolution is different for every creature, just as God's choices would have been, and 'God's choice' is as parsimonious as 'evolution', so the criteria for what is the empirically simplest explanation does involve some subjective judgment.  If evolution is a true generic explanation for life and its diversity, and all the evidence suggests that it is, we tend to seek the simplest evolutionary explanation.  Still, nothing guarantees that an ad hoc phenomenon like evolution has to go from A to Z by the shortest path!

Indeed, there are even those who question the 'obvious' physics principle that radiation like light travels in 'straight' lines (here, modern physics might say 'geodesic' lines in spacetime).  However, some physicists say that energy takes infinite histories all at once, and that the straight-line path is not 'the' path but the average path taken by the radiation.  That puts a twist, so to speak, on parsimony ideas.

And in genetics, everyone has access to the same data, when GWAS results are reported, or genome sequences uploaded to GenBank, yet some geneticists see simple answers and some see complexity. And evolutionary psychologists see adaptive explanations where others might see genetic drift. And many look for one explanation -- this gene, or that bad lifestyle -- even when it is blatantly obvious that genes and lifestyles have effects only in their overall context.  So what is the most 'parsimonious' explanation is debatable and we have no real rigorous way to adjudicate in many instances -- even if we would all agree that we don't invoke a gene plus the tooth fairy plus raging storms on Jupiter to account for a case of cystic fibrosis.

Observations don't speak for themselves, in science or forensics.  It is through the mouths of subjective observers that they speak, observers with more and less credibility.  Who we choose to believe is in turn affected by our own subjective decisions, not usually an evaluation of which argument is more parsimonious.  Parsimony can be one criterion, but it may not be 'the' true explanation, or even the best one.  Life, due to its meandering and highly probabilistic pathways, may be one of the least parsimonious phenomena that science tries to understand.