Richard Dawkins and Gregory House

I generally enjoy reading Richard Dawkins’s books. I find the man himself to be more or less reasonable in interviews (or, at least, as reasonable as everyone else I’ve seen). I share his skepticism of religious and supernatural phenomena; I share his belief that science really does bring us closer to the truth.

Likewise, by all rights, I should really enjoy House M. D. I like characters who are embody contradictory or problematic traits: unpleasant but good, nice but ineffective, flawed but useful. I like ethical dilemmas where neither choice is right. I enjoy snappy dialogue.

This said, often watching shows with the fictional Dr. House or the real Dr. Dawkins frustrates me.

I don’t mean that Dr. Dawkins is in any way like Dr. House; on the contrary, the impression I get of Dr. Dawkins from his books and interviews is that he’s almost the complete opposite. He seems pleasant to talk to: openly friendly, happy, and kind. Instead, what I mean is that the elements that frustrate me about Dr. Dawkins’s arguments are also present thematically in the episodes of House M. D. I’ve seen.

This, no doubt, is because Dr. Dawkins is often arguing about Science and Reason, and, in some ways, the character Gregory House embodies these concepts.

The Right kind of medicine (as the characters on House M.D. seem to believe, or at least, as they’re always forced to believe once House turns out to be right yet again), is Science. We observe the evidence and use our previous knowledge to draw logical hypotheses. We use those hypotheses to make predictions, and then we treat those predictions as though they were true. If the predictions fall through, then we go back to making observations and forming new hypotheses.

When something goes wrong – when it’s difficult or confusing to figure out, it’s never the fault of the Science. Science is always right. Or, at least, it would be, if not for the stupid People that keep getting in the Scientists’ way and messing up their studies by doing awful things like lying to them, or having emotional investment in the results, or, worse, by just plain (gasp!) Not Believing in the miracle of Science.

Via House’s constant snark and his tirades at the other characters and, most important of all, via the fact that he turns out to be right ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time, House M.D. hints that, not only is this view of Science correct, but that House is the one character on the show who “gets” it. The doctors surrounding him sometimes let their emotions get in the way – you know, by caring whether the baby dies or protesting the immoral invasion of the patient’s privacy or hesitating to commit an act that might kill someone. But the only emotion (if you can call it that) House allows himself to show* is the right kind – a passionate scientific curiosity!

What bugs me about this isn’t that I believe a scientific approach is wrong or inappropriate. What bugs me is that the show implies over and over again that doing science while possessing emotions (as exemplified by the other doctors House works with) gets you the “wrong” answer. You need to rid yourself of bias before you can do a proper scientific inquiry.

But that’s fine, right? I mean, isn’t the whole idea of science to avoid bias in your results? Isn’t that a good moral?

The thing about science is that it’s a two-edged sword. On one hand, yes, the ideal is for a scientific investigator to be unbiased, omniscient, standing somewhere outside the world looking in. And that’s a great ideal to have. But the other half of the bargain is this: no one is unbiased. No one. Not me. Not you. Not House, not Wilson, Cuddy, or any of the other recurring characters, and definitely not a single actual scientist in real life.

This is another one of those things that’s a lot easier to see in science of the past than in present-day work, especially in medicine. Sure, you could argue that things like frontal lobe lobotomies and institutionalizing women for “hysteria” and deciding African adults had the same intellectual capacity as English children were the products of bias on the part of scientists. The point is, the scientists who obtained those conclusions did not regard themselves as biased. And neither did the society in which they operated. They were “normal”: white, well-to-do males! The people who did (correctly, according to us) regard them as biased were labeled as overly sentimental and seen to be interfering with the “correct” and “objective” methods of Science, just like Cuddy, Wilson, and House’s team of doctors on the show.

In one of the essays in his book The Devil’s Chaplain, Dr. Dawkins protests against making arguments against science based on mistakes from the past, like I’ve just done. Indeed, there are a couple of general objections we might have: yes, scientists have been wrong in the past BUT a) correct scientific theories haven’t changed in ways that affect their application (Dawkins mentions this, and the example he argues against is Newtonian physics vs. Einsteinian physics – both “work”, although Newtonian physics is technically incorrect), and b) it doesn’t matter if scientists have sometimes been incorrect in the past as long as we can still say that science naturally finds and corrects the mistakes it does make – which seems fair, considering that to make an argument from the past, we have to be able to look back and identify those mistakes as mistakes in the first place.

I don’t find either of these points very convincing: the first because, even from my limited knowledge base, I can think of several examples of very, very wrong scientific theories that were applied differently than their “correct” successors. Maybe if you were very determined, you could persuade me that it makes sense to look at the natural sciences this way, but I can’t think how you’d make the social sciences fit this model.

Regarding the second: first, I’m not sure being able to point to past mistakes necessarily indicates progress toward the “Truth” – in the humanities, every new generation points out the flaws of previous thinkers, but it would be hard to argue e. e. cummings is objectively better than Percy Shelley or that Bertrand Russell and his peers were “more right” than Socrates and his. Second, to make this point, you still need to show that it’s some property of science that revealed these errors, not anything sociopolitical or ethical like, say, people of African descent fighting to be treated as equals or the feminist movement.

Finally, even if this point is 100% correct, it doesn’t address the problem at hand: given that scientists are sometimes significantly mistaken, what should I do now when I encounter a theory that seems to me to be wrong? If I’m being pressured into allowing a controversial medical procedure to be performed on my mom or on my child or on me, it does me no good to know that, if the results recommending it are actually the result of bias on the part of the researchers, science will eventually find out. I need to be able to evaluate that procedure this instant, with the limited resources I have.

So… if no one can be unbiased and science is often wrong, does that mean no one should ever do science or believe its results? Of course not! What it does mean is that no one should ever do science or believe scientific results without remembering that no one is objective. Because of this, science (and pretty much every human activity) will always have a political aspect: who’s doing this research? What assumptions went into it? Who agrees or disagrees and why? And it means that any sophisticated and realistic understanding of science must take that fact into account.

In an entertaining clip filmed for his new documentary (you can find the uncut version on richarddawkins.net), Dr. Dawkins interviews the illusionist Derren Brown on the subject of mediums. They both believe these people are fakes, as do I. But the crazy thing, they point out, is that people can witness the complete unmasking of an alleged psychic – in the case they mention, someone actually broadcast the concurrent radio feed the performer was getting from his informant on live television – and yet still believe in his or her powers. So far, so good.

But then Dr. Dawkins and Mr. Brown go on to marvel at the general irrationality of people who won’t accept evidence. Dr. Dawkins implies that this is one of the reasons why some hold-outs refuse to believe in the truths of science, like evolution – they’re just too darn stubborn to accept the evidence. He and Mr. Brown go on to talk about how this is likely a result of “relativism” trickling down from academia, etc., etc.

What I think Dr. Dawkins is missing here – and what I think House M. D. is also missing from its thematic vocabulary – is an understanding of what “evidence” actually is.

Let me give you an example. I believe in atoms. If you asked me to give you evidence that atoms exist, I could talk about past studies like Rutherford’s classic experiment with gold foil and alpha particles, or I could point out all the technologies we have that we explain via atomic theory, like carbon-dating, chemotherapy, and nuclear power. But in actual reality, the evidence on which I base my belief in atoms is none of those things.

I’ve never carbon-dated a fossil or operated a Geiger counter. I wasn’t there when Rutherford recorded his results, and I didn’t witness any of the work done on the Manhattan Project. I’ve never even been inside a physics lab. My so-called “evidence” is just things people have told me that I believe are true. For all I know from my own experience, nuclear power plants could be run by magic angels who spirit the power into being. Or atoms could be something like the ether or phlogiston – imaginary entities that figured in explanations during their own time that were ultimately found not to exist.

The point is, you can’t separate the issue of “accepting evidence” from that of “trusting people”. Who wrote my textbook? Who’s giving me this lecture? Who says that experiment happened this way? If I trust the textbook writer or the professor or the historian, then I’ll take what they say as evidence. If not, then I will doubt their conclusions.

The same goes for experiments. What are you actually seeing when you witness a scientific demonstration? When I pour baking soda into vinegar, I see a bunch of foamy stuff appear. I do not see the reaction of an acid and a base; that’s something I’ve been told is happening by someone I trust. Likewise, in the lab or the emergency room, I’m not seeing a elevated radiation levels or a picture of my broken bone – I’m seeing numbers on a computer screen and fuzzy white blobs on a piece of black shiny paper. Someone else has told me what they mean, and whether I accept them as evidence depends on whether I believe that person.

Dr. Dawkins (and the writers for Dr. House) don’t seem to realize that the fact that scientists are personally biased rightly affects their audience’s willingness to accept their evidence as valid. Most people don’t know enough to judge whether it’s true that they have lupus or that fossils date back millions of years. Instead, we have to judge whether we trust the doctor who says there’s evidence for that diagnosis or the biologist who talks about carbon-dating. And if you’ve had bad experiences with the medical or scientific establishment – if you are in a position to see their bias, whether it’s as whites, or people of colour, or males, or transgendered persons, or atheists, or Christians, or upper middle-class citizens, or Westerners, or “healthy” people, or lovers of circus clowns – it’s going to be reasonable – not stubborn, emotional, or irrational – for you to doubt their word.

* Unless it’s February sweeps or a season finale…