Book Review - Not Even Trying: The Corruption of Real Science by Bruce Charlton

A scathing indictment of the modern research establishment.

Charlton begins the book with the definition of 'Real Science': science that operates on the basis of a belief in the reality of truth: that truth is real. He then claims scientists no longer believe in the truth, and hence cannot be doing real science. While some scientists may have been so seduced by postmodernism that they no longer believe in truth, I think this is going one step too far. Rather, scientists (whether or not they believe in truth) no longer care about truth; it is no longer the central motivating force behind their research. In a similar vein, scientists have also given up on realism in science. Quantum physics was the first field to accept non-realism, and the failure has cascaded through different fields. It even infects modern philosophy of science, which largely accepts the propaganda that quantum physics is the most precise theory ever devised, and hence usually argues in favour of some brand of non-realism.

Charlton's other main point is that creative genius (based on earnest truthseeking) is a requirement for scientific advancement. The expansion of science starting in the 19th century resulted in first the recruitment of smart but uncreative people, and then merely hardworking people, "until untalented, unmotivated and dishonest career-orientated professional scientists became a large majority within science and included most of the most successful researchers; thus careerists took-over the peer review evaluation procedures such as to impose their values; and ‘science’ became nothing but a ‘professional research bureaucracy’."

The careerist takeover of science has turned it into a fundamentally dishonest enterprise, though this is obscured by the narrowly-focused factual accuracy of most research. Technical rigour is often substituted for actual truthseeking, and when truthseeking occurs it is often lacking in the aforementioned technical rigour, leading it to be dismissed. Thus "[t]he primary and fundamental act of scientific dishonesty is: denial of the pervasive reality of scientific dishonesty."

He ties the decline in truthseeking to the collapse of religion. Religions inculcate transcendent values that are absent in atheistic, nihilistic materalism. Thus, to him, truthseeking can persist for only one transitional generation after the collapse of religion, in the individuals who were shaped by religion growing up but abandoned it as adults. Science may have been running on fumes until the final decades of the 20th century, but has now all but collapsed. Traditional society was built on the intellectual foundation of the Classics, just as science forms the intellectual foundation of Modern society. As science collapses, we may see a corresponding collapse in Modernity as well.

Indeed the sciences are in such bad shape that in some fields a large number of papers could be simply deleted and it would not affect the overall state of the literature. Other fields are based on a foundational fraud, and continue apace even when the fraud is found out. Alzheimer's research is an example. Ultimately any field that secures sufficient funding will continue to exist, no matter how intellectually bankrupt. This creates zombie sciences that exist only to serve non-scientific interests (often economic or political). An increasing number of scientific publications, conferences, labs, etc. does not necessarily indicate that knowledge is advancing.

Of course scarcely anyone working in science would tell you this¹, since dishonest hyping is baked into the modern research process, from grant applications, to research articles to press statements. "[H]ype (i.e. propaganda) [has expanded] from being merely a superficial sheen added to real science in order to make it more interesting to the general public, to the present situation where hype defines reality for scientists (as well as everyone else) – where propaganda is so pervasive that nobody can know what – maybe nothing at all, or the opposite to the propaganda – lies beneath it. There is, indeed, no ‘beneath’ since by now hype goes all the way through science: from top to bottom, inside and out."

This organizational structure is built on the conceit that science is a truth-machine where funnelling enough resources will produce truth, and as such science is managed bureaucratically. The role of the scientist is then to obey their managers, and apply for grants to work on the projects that the managers have decided they want completed. A real genius would never stand for this, hence their almost complete extirpation from mainstream science. It is doubly counterproductive since real science is so difficult that it will not succeed without spontaneous internal motivation and interest. As Francis Crick put it in What Mad Pursuit, you should only research something that you could gossip about.

Unfortunately the fields that most students of science are most interested in nowadays are precisely those fields that have been the most hyped in popular culture. Worse still when students study these topics in university they are rarely practicing anything that resembles how research is actually performed. Scientists used to be trained through apprenticeship, which has the benefit of passing down tacit knowledge. As the number of scientists increased dramatically in the 20th century, the apprenticeship model was not maintainable and was replaced by explicit instruction. Such a system is much inferior, due to "the gulf between on the one hand being able to do something, and on the other hand knowing how you have done it; and the further gap between knowing how you have done something, and being able to teach it by explicit and free-standing instructions. Such systems as apprenticeship recognize that the most important aspects of knowledge may be those which are not known or understood to be the most important, or may even be in opposition to that which is believed or supposed to be important."

Apprenticeship now mostly occurs at the PhD level, although in a meagre form compared to the tutelage a Liebniz would have received from a Huygens in past centuries. The kind of work PhD students do is also strongly influenced by their supervising professor, and many students are simply set a project within the scope of their supervisor's research program. The research they do at the PhD level often sets the trajectory of their entire career if they choose to remain in academia, with increasing specialization in that subfield. This kind of specialization, though productive in past eras, has become pathological. Microspecialization may create islands of logical consistency within subfields, but there is no effort to check or impose logical consistency between the microspecializations. The lack of coherence checking between specialties means that there is no overarching Science and individual specialties are the largest units of coherence.

"Thus, micro-specialists are ultimately technicians and/or bureaucrats; thus they cannot even understand fatal objections and comprehensive refutations of their standard paradigms when these originate from adjacent areas of science. So long as their own specific technique has been conducted according to prevailing micro-specialist professional practice, they equate the outcome with ‘truth’ and assume its validity and intrinsic value. In a nutshell, micro-specialization allows a situation to develop where the whole of a vast area of science is bogus knowledge; and for this reality of total bogosity to be intrinsically and permanently invisible and incomprehensible to the participants in that science. If we then combine this situation with the prevalent professional research notion that only micro-specialists are competent to evaluate the domain of their micro-speciality – and add-in the continual fragmentation of research into ever-smaller micro-specialties - then we have a recipe for permanent and intractable error."

My personal experience corroborates this analysis. I once had a conversation with a researcher in environmental microbiology. I brought up Gilbert Ling's work in cell physiology, suggesting that our understanding of how cells regulate ion concentrations was incorrect. To my surprise he disinterestedly stated that he was not competent to evaluate the claims. He said he had met and spoken with Gerald Pollack at a conference once (Pollack's work was inspired in part by Ling's) but never bothered to look into it afterwards. This anecdote is, I think, emblematic of the problems in modern science discussed by Charlton. I, despite not being a practicing biologist, have made some effort to understand Ling and Pollack's work and how it fits into the larger structure of science. Meanwhile a professor of biology working in an adjacent field is neither interested in nor competent to evaluate the research being done.

Overall the book is a satisfying, if relatively short, invective against the state of modern science. It dovetails nicely with Charlton's other book, The Genius Famine, since the solution he proposes is to recognize and restore the role of genius in science, even if that means the collapse of the present academic system. Any such development would of course be staunchly resisted by the technocrats currently running the show, since they are, as Charlton points out, largely administrators and technicians rather than geniuses.

1. The absolute number of people speaking out has increased in recent years, but as a percentage of working scientists it’s still quite low.