The arrogance of science.

We have not read Sam Harris's new book, the soon-to-be bestseller, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, but we have watched his TED lecture on the subject, and read Appiah's review in the Sunday NYT and we're pretty sure we're not likely to read the book.  But of course that isn't stopping us from having something to say about it.

Two things disturb us about Harris' argument.  (If you've read the book and can tell us that reading it would change our minds, please let us know -- we'd love to be wrong on this.)  But as we understand it, Harris's argument is both arrogantly imperialistic -- or worse -- and non-Darwinian, which is rather ironic from someone arguing that science will out the Truth. The 'logic' of the argument is to put together intelligent-sounding phrases that have little actual content....especially little scientific content.

Best known as one of the New Atheists, Harris has written previously on how he knows there is no God.  He argues in his new book, and in the lecture, that only science can answer the questions of life's "meaning, morality and life's larger purpose" (as quoted in the review).


Which prompts us to ask, Where is existentialism when we need it?  Better yet, let's call it Darwinian existentialism.  If we are truly to take the lessons of Darwinian evolution to heart, we must accept that there is no "larger purpose" to life.  The only purpose to life, which we don't ourselves construct, is to survive and reproduce.  And even that is not a purpose to life itself, which to an arch Darwinian might be not to survive, so something better can do it instead.  Or to expend solar energy in some particular way.  To argue otherwise is to position humans above Nature, which is precisely what Darwin and his contemporary supporters argued was biologically not so (though even Darwin fell into that ethnocentric trap in Descent of  Man).

Further, if we accept Darwinism in the raw, there is no meaning or morality for science to find. Meaning, morality and purpose are constructed by us once we've got food and a mate. As animals with history and culture and awareness of both, we imbue our lives with values and morals and meaning, but they are products of the human mind.  This doesn't mean that they aren't important, or compelling, or even things to live or die for, but those judgments are our own.  But people with the same genome can adopt very different sense of meaning -- which is equally important and compelling.

According to Harris, science can uncover not only facts, but values, and even the 'right values'.  Just as science can tell us how to have healthy babies, science can tell us how to promote human 'well-being'.  And "[j]ust as it is possible for individuals and groups to be wrong about how best to maintain their physical health," he writes, as quoted in the review, "it is possible for them to be wrong about how best to maximize their personal and social well-being."

What is this well-being of which he speaks?  Who says we or anyone should 'maximize' it, and who are 'we' in this context?  Well-paid professors?  If he meant Darwinian fitness we might pay attention because that's the only objective measure of success that counts in a Darwinian world (unless it's ecosystem expansion, even if at the expense of particular species).  But what he means is something much less empirically tangible -- ironically for someone arguing that science will find it.  He means happiness.  This would be perfectly fine in the realm of psychology or Buddhism or philosophy, but, to our minds, this argument of his is on the same playing field with religious arguments about morality and purpose -- which of course he would not accept -- and even pre-Darwinian.

And, it wasn't that long ago that Science decided that homosexuality wasn't an illness to be cured, or that phrenology wasn't in fact enlightening, or that bleeding patients wasn't a cure -- and of course there are many other such examples.  When what was once True becomes False, what does this say about Science and its ability to find the ultimate Truth? Why would anybody think we're right today....unless it's from ethnocentric arrogance?


The Enlightenment period was the age in which the belief grew that modern science could be used to create a better world, without the suffering and strife of the world as it had been.  It was a world of the Utopians.  Their egalitarian views were opposed vigorously by the elitist right ('we're just scientists telling it like it is')  in the form of Thomas Malthus, Herbert Spencer, strong Darwinians, who opposed the more idealistic thinking.  The Science Can Find the Moral Truth view grew through much of the 19th century, but its consequence, 'modernism', was rejected after science gave us machine guns, carpet bombing, eugenics, the Great Depression, dishonorably wealthy industrial barons, and other delights of the 20th century.  The reaction to that went under various names, but included things like cultural relativism and anti-scientific post-modern subjectivism.  Unfortunately, like any Newtonian reaction, the reaction was equally culpable, if less bloody, in the opposite direction, by minimizing any reality of the world.

Cultural relativism, against which Harris rails, is the view that each culture is a thing of its own, and we can't pass judgment about the value of one culture over another, except as through our own culture-burdened egotistical eyes.  That is not the same as saying that we have to like someone else's culture, nor adopt it, nor need it be a goody-goody view that we have to put up with dangers from such culture (like, for example, the Taliban).  But there is no external criterion that provides objective or absolute value.   Racism and marauding are a way of life in many successful cultures; maybe by some energy consumption or other objective measure it's best for their circumstances.  Science might suggest (as it did to the Nazis and Romans and some groups today) that their way is the only way, the best way, Nature's chosen way.


Science may be a path to some sorts of very valuable Truth, and better lives, such as how to build a safe bridge or have painless dentistry (the greatest miracle of the 20th century!).  Regarding many aspects of our culture, we would not trade.  We ourselves would love to attain the maximum happiness that Harris describes.  But it is an arrogance to assume that in some objective sense that is 'the' truth. 

And what if the 'facts' said that to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number (not exactly an original platitude, by the way) meant that people like us (and Harris) had to cut our incomes by a factor of 100, or 1000, for resources to be equitably distributed?  After all, the USSR implemented 'scientific' ideas of maximal good for the masses (communism, Lysenkoism, to the tune of tens of millions purged, frozen to death in Siberia, or starved because of failed harvests, and more).  The Nazi policies were explicitly based on the belief that Aryans were simpler better than others, based on warped Darwinian truths, and we know what happened.

So, anyone who would still not realize that the smug self-confidence that one can find the ultimate truth through science either is another tyrant potentially in the making, or hasn't read his history.

Whether or if there can be some ultimate source of morality is a serious question and if it has an answer nobody's found it yet.  Religion has no better record than materialistic science, nor secular philosophy.  Nor does Darwin provide that kind of objective value system, especially in humans where very opposed cultural values can be held by people toting around the same gene pool.

The Darlings of the Smug rise, like mushrooms, in every society.  They are glib, but so are demagogues of other sorts.  They're all potentially dangerous -- or are those for whom they serve as the intellectual justification.  Again, that is not to say we should adopt someone else's values, nor that we should hold back from defending ourselves against those who threaten us.

Still, oblivious to these points, Harris argues, as does the far right in the US, that cultural relativism is wrong and should be completely and utterly discounted.  Here are some quotes from his TED talk:

How have we convinced ourselves that every opinion has to count?  Does the Taliban have a point of view on physics that is worth considering?  No. How is their ignorance any less obvious on the subject of human well-being?  The world needs people like ourselves to admit that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human flourishing, and morality relates to that domain of facts.  It is possible for individuals and even for whole cultures to care about the wrong things.  Just admitting this will transform our discourse about morality.

Again, how is this different from, say, the Aryan line which would say we have a right to decide and purge, all in the name of science (and, by the way, it was medical science as well as Darwinism)?  Why is this not the arrogance of imperialism all over again?

When the Taliban, the religious right and the likes of Harris and the New Atheists all believe that only they are the keepers of the Truth, dominion can be attained not by science but by wielding of power alone.

Playing dice

Einstein wrote with respect to the randomness of quantum physics, which troubled him greatly, "I, at any rate, am convinced that He [God] does not throw dice [with the universe]."  Well, the 2010 Ig Nobel prizes were announced on Thursday (they say they'll post a webcast of the event soon).  We blogged about the Biology prize winning paper demonstrating fellatio in bats when it came out, so we'll take this opportunity to point out with pride that it's not just disappointing papers that catch our attention, we do also recognize prize-winning research when we see it.  

But the Management prize caught our attention as well.

MANAGEMENT PRIZE: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random. 

REFERENCE: “The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study,” Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo, Physica A, vol. 389, no. 3, February 2010, pp. 467-72. 

Those of us over a certain age remember the splash that The Peter Principle made when it first came out in 1969.  Author Peter Lawrence explained in a way that made complete sense why we were destined to be forever surrounded by maddening incompetence: as the prize-winning paper puts it, ’Every new member in a hierarchical organization climbs the hierarchy until he/she reaches his/her level of maximum incompetence’ -- after which, of course they are promoted no further.  This is perplexing.
 
As Pluchino et al explain,

Despite its apparent unreasonableness, such a principle would realistically act in any organization where the mechanism of promotion rewards the best members and where the mechanism at their new level in the hierarchical structure does not depend on the competence they had at the previous level, usually because the tasks of the levels are very different to each other. [In the paper] we show, by means of agent based simulations, that if the latter two features actually hold in a given model of an organization with a hierarchical structure, then not only is the Peter principle unavoidable, but also it yields in turn a significant reduction of the global efficiency of the organization. 

So, in the worst of all possible worlds (which sounded eerily familiar to many in 1969), most positions in most organizations are filled with the person least able to carry out the required responsibilities.  


Did this Ah-ha! realization change the world?  Of course not -- we need not point out that the economic fiascos of the past two years are perfect evidence of this.  No doubt Pluchino et al. had this in mind as they explored this issue further:

Within a game theory-like approach, we explore different promotion strategies and we find, counterintuitively, that in order to avoid such an effect the best ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are either to promote each time an agent at random or to promote randomly the best and the worst members in terms of competence.

So, the Peter Principle happens because of the widespread, perhaps even universal assumption that if an employee excels at a job at one level, s/he will excel at the job on the next rung of the organizational hierarchy, even if it actually requires very different skills.  This is just common sense, right?  

But the problem is, as Pluchino et al. point out, that "common sense in many areas of our everyday life, often deceives us."  To demonstrate just this, they did mathematical simulations of what would happen to organizational efficiency if the most competent, the least competent, and then a random selection of employees were promoted.  They found that the random selection -- or equivalently, promotion of some of the most and some of the least competent -- was preferred.

Fine, so they've solved the global efficiency problem, and the world will surely take notice.  But let's take this back around to science -- sidestepping any possible effects of The Peter Principle in academia, which isn't the reason we're interested in this paper.  Instead, to us this paper relates to the general problem of determining cause and effect, something we write about here a lot.

Science, another human endeavor, is just as loaded with incorrect assumptions about cause and effect as business, of course.   It isn't just that science's knowledge is always limited, but that we cling to things we have reason to believe are not correct but that it would be inexpedient of us to acknowledge.  This has to do with vested interests, career momentum, and so on.

We also cling to deeper beliefs: for example, that things simply must have a cause, and that if that's so, then it's only technology and the like that keeps us from identifying it.  We just do not like to accept randomness any more than we absolutely have to.  Mendelian transmission is an example where, with some exceptions, we do accept limited predictability.  But we fight it:  many if not most evolutionary biologists, and hanger-on people of all sorts who invoke 'evolution' or Darwin's name to advance some favorite point of view, simply do not want biological traits to be affected by chance. They want them to be predictable from genes.  But we know this is true only to a limited extent.

Grant reviews and funding decisions, exam paper scores and grades, promotion and tenure reviews, and many other aspects of academic and scientific life are clearly largely random.  Yet we toil away to a great extent to make them seem critically well-evaluated.

Another thing all of this shares is reliance on 'experts'.  Even when we know that experts are often as wrong as right when it comes to many of the most key decisions -- be they whether to go to war, how to regulate economies, or science funding policies.

Perhaps it's part of the human condition to rely on denial of things we know are true, assume the world is more causally knowable than we know it is, and hope the bombs we release in the process don't fall on us.

In a serious sense, while we know this is a problem, it is not at all clear what to do about it.  Society, science, universities, companies, and so on have to act and take decisions.  How should it be done better than we do it now?   It sounds funny to suggest it could be done at random -- funny enough to be worthy of an Ig Nobel prize -- but what serious, applicable lessons can be gleaned from that?

Do science lovers know the most about science?

All right everybody. Here's an unsatisfying attempt (read: failure) to brilliantly cap off this week's buzz....

All the rage this week has been about how people without religion know the most about religion and about how religious folks know relatively little about religion.

Since this has quickly become part of the greater Religion and Science discourse, the natural next question that follows, at least to me, is this:

Do the people who trust science the most (some called this "faith" in science), actually know the most about it?

Or, as we saw in the religion poll this week, do people who have the least "faith" in science know the most about it?

I think we'd all be very surprised if the answer to the second question is yes, but the first question is not as simple because there are certainly people who fully support science without looking into any of it for themselves. Everyone knows someone like this. Sometimes they're completely reasonable. Other times their embrace of science is so enthusiastically wide and undiscerning, that they support pseudoscience as well. My friend who thinks aliens built the pyramids. Yours who buys the vibration-laden sugar pills at Whole Foods to treat headaches.

To my chagrin, this poll and its results published in Scientific American this week have absolutely no bearing on our questions. Out of all the topics they listed, people trust scientists about evolution above anything else. It's interesting, but be forewarned... they polled readers of Scientific American and Nature. Guess how many scientists and science-minded people are in their sample population?

Hmmm. Wonder how much a randomly sampled population of Americans actually trusts science and scientists? I'm guessing it's a little less than these results.

There is nothing in this report about whether or not the science trusters are informed or knowledgeable compared to those who don't trust science.

Anyway, I hope that if you know of any links that have answers to our question (the question in the title), you'll post them in the comments.

Or, instead, you may choose to rant about how supporting science is not a proper analogy to being religious. (My personal view.)

Genetics the right way....er, at least part-way!

A story about a gene for migraine headaches is making the rounds of health-related websites.  A paper published in Nature Medicine on Sept 26 reports that mutations in a gene that encodes the potassium ion channel TRESK K2P are responsible for common migraine with aura (one such aura is depicted in the picture to the left, though the artist says it doesn't do the temporal/spatial experience justice at all).  This ion channel was already known to have a role in pain pathways and as such has been a target for anesthesia, and other ion channel genes have been found to be associated with rare forms of migraine, which is why the authors decided to investigate KCNK18, the gene that codes for this particular ion channel.  So far so good.

The authors found that a mutation in this gene 'segregates perfectly' in a large family -- that is, everyone with migraine in that family had the mutation (which causes a frame-shift that results in a truncated channel), and no one without migraine had it. They then looked for expression of this gene in 'migraine-salient areas', and found it where it was expected. So, this was a good use of a priori knowledge about the biology of a trait to zero in on a gene that may cause migraines, and of course the possible sequel to the story is that it may thus be a therapeutic target.

'Segregates perfectly', however, raises the question about whether all those who did not have migraine in the family did not carry the mutant allele.  As it turned out, no one without migraine in the family had the mutation, so it did segregate perfectly (we have to assume that no unaffecteds in the family later became affected, which may not be a trivial point)  But then the researchers went on to sequence this gene in unrelated people with and without migraine0--a case-control comparison. This, it turns out, was problematic.

Unfortunately you have to go to the Supplementary information to find this out -- and we have to say that burying important data in the supplementary tables, without clearly spelling out its implications in the regular text that everybody (including reporters) reads, can be a cynical way to take the focus off serious issues.  We hope that we haven't somehow misunderstood the supplementary data, but of the hundreds of KCNK18 genes these authors sequenced, they found 14 different mutations in the gene, most of them very rare but more importantly, none of them statistically more common in those with migraine than in those without.  The frame-shift mutation that may be responsible for migraine in the one family is very rare as well, and certainly comes no where close to being 'the' gene, or even a primary gene, for migraine, even if it does explain it in this one pedigree.

Now, the fact that migraine generally takes a trigger -- or people with genetic susceptibility would have excruciating headaches all the time -- means that people with a genetic predisposition but who have never met their trigger may still be susceptible.  But it also means that this is one of those disorders that's 100% environmental, and 100% genetic.  And it makes the choice of controls difficult or even uninformative, when anyone with a truly causative mutation might be unaffected because they haven't been exposed to the provocative environment.

But this is a trivial problem with respect to this study, since so few cases or controls have a mutation in this gene. In this family, too, it could be that the effect is manifest only in some genetic background that was not varying in the family which would generate a 100% concordance pattern but would implicate the particular gene only in that background.  In other words, suppose a variant at some other gene, X, was shared by all members of this family, and the detected effect at KCNK18 only occurs in people also carrying the gene-X variant. That is by no means implausible.

We don't want to complain all the time, although resistance to poor practices, vested interests and the like is important, in at least a small way, to help keep science on as close to an optimal track as can be done in the realities of human society.  We don't think people, especially scientists, should wander in dreamland, intentionally or avoidably oblivious to known truths.  There are enough unknown truths to deal with!

But you don't get published in Nature Medicine by being too forthright with caveats.  The current reward system encourages burying caveats in Supplemental material, or minimizing them.

We still say that, in this case, the discovery process seems to have been done the right way -- by putting biology first.  The investigators used the kinds of understanding of basic biology, as being about signaling interactions among cells, that we try to describe in our Mermaid's Tale book.  Neurological traits are about interactions among neurons, and they signal to each other by a limited variety of means, ion channels being a major component of that.  But it would still be wrong to yield to temptation and call this 'the' migraine gene, since it explains so few cases in the population, and is found in controls as well.  Neither can it be called a 'migraine gene', since one would assume that its function and evolution were not to cause migraines.

Searching candidate genes, in this case known ion channel genes for mutations, rather than blind genomewide association studies (GWAS), is a sensible way to find genetic factors.  Indeed, GWAS for common migraine with aura had not worked -- and that's no surprise.  In a family with clearly inherited migraine problems, to search the limited genome space occupied by ion channel genes makes biological sense, and that's what seems to have worked in this one family.  But if there are many causes of this trait, this one might not have been frequent enough in cases vs controls sampled from the general population, to be statistically detectable.  Or, if the variant is rare, to even have been included in the set of cases that were analyzed in the GWAS.

While we don't believe these authors have done much for migraine sufferers in general, in spite of the widespread attention this paper got (and this column in The Guardian explains why the attention was so sloppy), at least the approach was a right one.

Taking it on faith?

Well, here's a surprise....or is it?  The NYTimes reports results from a survey that tests peoples' knowledge about religion.  And guess who know their faith the best?  Atheists, agnostics, Jews, and Mormons.  Other 'Christians' fared worse, often not knowing even basic things about the tenets of their faith.  (Here are the results of that survey.)

Well, ignorant and proud of it might be one response: the whole idea of religion to many is that it must be taken on faith. Let the pastor or priest tell you what's what.  Don't ask questions.

This might be OK in the sense that if religion can't be proven by scientific means, one must get it from the experts in costume who must somehow get it more directly and authoritatively.  Details don't matter. 

But this is a difficult position to square with the widespread aggressive assertions of religion against what we actually know about the world, the real one, the one we live in.  These assertions purport to give real-world reasons for the Faith and against the marauding of science.  If science is actually so evil (especially, those nasty evolutionists!), then what are the counter truths on which its opponents' knives are whetted?

We won't say more about this than that many of our strident Christians seem not to have read the fundamentals, like the Sermon on the Mount.   At least, the 'religious' engage in enough greed, hate, and inequality to suggest that, as we're seeing in the US these days.  (And Christians are not alone: plenty of Muslims cite what is convenient from the Prophet, assuming those strapping bombs on their chests have actually read any of it.)

More relevant  is that this shows the symbolic, cultural, nature of the science-religion divisions in our society.  This is about cultural power and influence, partly perhaps in terms of access to wealth but probably mainly access to psychological and symbolic 'wealth'.  Don't bother me with the facts!  It's highly tribalistic in that sense, about membership, waving the right banner, and that sort of thing, more than it is about the facts of the world.

The story has some symmetries.  Many in evolutionary biology and genetics do not have a very sophisticated or complete knowledge of what is actually known, and cling to various beliefs of their own--beliefs that life is simpler or more deterministic than we actually know is the truth.  The belief in Darwinian essentialism--you are what your genes are--is as deeply invoked, regardless of the evidence, as theological beliefs.  Or, scientists proclaim as if science somehow could prove the falseness of religion (i.e., that there's no God), showing that they, too, haven't understood the limits of their own field.

So, when we're in a cultural conflict, what role do the facts actually play, and does knowledge of the essentials that are purportedly behind one's expressed point of view matter?  Of course, in a democracy it is perfectly legitimate to vote  however you want without having to give a reason--or even without having to have a reason.  So does a democracy decide relevant questions, such as the legality of stem cell research, based on facts of some sort (religious or scientific), or is this mainly about planting one's flag in the enemy's territory?

More on the potential of crowdsourcing

Maybe the Office of Rare Diseases at the NIH could do with some crowdsourcing.  A place for patients to go when all else has failed, this office is a repository for unsolved medical mysteries.  Even with a record of more unsolved than solved cases, this clinic is a source of hope for many, because they're in the business of mining all the information they can on rare conditions.

The patients who go there are desperately hoping for answers, but the clinicians who try desperately to find them are facing a major limitation of science.  Science is about causal regularity in Nature, and does rather poorly with unique observations.  Repetition and prediction are gold-standard criteria for understanding.  Yet these cases are essentially unique!

A story on the CNN website tells of two patients with undiagnosed diseases who spent five days at the NIH, the recipients of exhaustive testing for every possible thing that could be wrong.  The problem with rare diseases, of course, is that they can be so rare that only one case has ever been seen.  Or, at least rare enough that there just isn't enough data in the medical literature, or collective experience with the disease, to facilitate a diagnosis.  

Here's where crowdsourcing could be -- and often is -- useful, as we suggested about last week.  The huge numbers of people who populate the web, and perhaps intensely when they have a medical dilemma that concerns them, provides a potentially unique way in which repetition can be ascertained.  People seem to find each other, and relate their stories.   Of course, these are informal and not rigorous by normal clinical standards, but experience shows that sense can be made of the data, at least to some useful extent.

Doctors try as best they can to pigeon-hole their patients into categories for which there are treatments.  Most doctors work with small sets of patients, or in small communities, where they simply can't be expected to see very rare traits more than once or twice, if at all, and then not at the same time.

Taking advantage of huge population samples, assembling rare information to reveal patterns.  Crowdsourcing.

Is science killing God?

So, Stephen Hawking declares it was physics, not God, that set the universe in motion, and now scientists declare it was natural processes that parted the Red Sea (in a paper published in PLoS One).

Click to play

Click to playComputer simulations show how the movement of wind could have parted the waters of the Red Sea

New computer simulations have shown how the parting of the Red Sea, as described in the Bible, could have been a phenomenon caused by strong winds.

The account in the Book of Exodus describes how the waters of the sea parted, allowing the Israelites to flee their Egyptian pursuers.

Simulations by US scientists show how the movement of wind could have opened up a land bridge at one location.

Sustained winds of 63 mph, it turns out, could have maintained an open land bridge for 4 hours, long enough for the Israelites to cross.  

Is this proof that the parting of the Red Sea wasn't a miracle?  Moses (and therefore God) wasn't needed after all?  

Is science killing God?

We did assume that was the intent of this paper, at first glance.  If what has previously been deemed a miracle can be found to have 'natural causes', then no deity need be invoked, hands wiped, science wins again.   

But apparently we were wrong.  The 'competing interests' section of the PLoS paper says this:

Competing interests: The lead author has a web site, theistic-evolution.com, that addresses Christian faith and biological evolution. The Red Sea crossing is mentioned there briefly. The present study treats the Exodus 14 narrative as an interesting and ancient story of uncertain origin.

The lead author is, it seems, a computer scientist in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado.  If you go to his theistic evolution website, you see that he's a Christian who believes in evolution and, he says, in questioning everything.  We can only guess that, as a scientist, he wanted to convince himself that the parting of the Red Sea was scientifically explicable -- and that if he could convince himself of this, this would confirm his belief in the Biblical story.  Indeed, we don't know but we're guessing that, as a scientist, he doesn't want to believe in miracles, but if he can turn them into natural events, he's sold.  


What interests us is that we're surprised that this is the point of this paper since the motivation and interpretation of this simulation could just as easily have gone the other way, evidence that no God was needed, the Israelites escaped on their own, with the aid of sustained high winds.  Of course, we would have then pointed out that this wasn't going to be good enough, and that no amount of evidence will change minds on either side.


Let's assume for the moment that a Big Wind  could, in fact, part the waters and make a walkway to Promised Land.  Why would this mean that God wasn't needed?  No, it could have been God who made the Red Sea partable.  In fact, if we accept the plausibility of the biblical story, this natural occurrence happened just at the time the fleeing Israelites needed it.  How plausible is that?  Its probability is about the same as the probability that God made it happen.

There is simply no 'scientific' way out.  If you're a believer in the Biblical story, you can find a way to explain it, be that natural or supernatural. If you're a skeptic, the partability of the Red Sea has nothing to do with whether it parted at exactly the right time, or whether the Biblical story is historically true. 

Let's have a bit of fun with this.  The old saw "How odd that God should choose the Jews" would now make sense.  So one should comb for other similarly revealing stories.  God seemed to choose the Muslims, when the Patna, abandoned by Lord Jim, did not sink as the abandoning crew thought it would.  

Of course these are fictional examples.  But Saladin really did capture Jerusalem for the Muslims!  And what about the motive for God's anger when a party of Christians, the Donner party, was fatally snowed in as they tried to cross the Sierras for their promised land?  Or the salting of the water and plagues of locusts that beset the early Mormon settlers in theirs? (they survived, showing God's favoritism yet again--but to a different group).  And why did God arrange for the massacre of Jews--his alleged favorites--by Christian crusaders, not to mention the Nazis?


Even science cannot account for God's fickleness.