Who Has the Right to Challenge “Scientific Experts”?

Years ago I was blathering to a science-writing class at Columbia Journalism School about the complexities of covering psychiatric drugs when a student raised his hand. He said he didn’t understand what the big deal was; I should just report “the facts” that drug researchers reported in peer-reviewed journals.

I was so flabbergasted by his naivete that I just stared at him, trying to figure out how to respond politely. I had a similar reaction when I spotted the headline of a recent essay by journalist Chris Mooney: “This Is Why You Have No Business Challenging Scientific Experts.”

Mooney is distressed, and rightly so, that many people reject the scientific consensus on human-induced global-warming, the safety of vaccines, the viral cause of AIDS and the evolution of species. But Mooney’s proposed solution – which involves non-scientists yielding to the opinion of “experts” – is far too drastic. In support of his position, Mooney cites Are We All Scientific Experts Now?, a book by sociologist of science Harry Collins, who argues that scientific expertise is uniquely authoritative. Here’s how Mooney puts it:

Collins argues that “there’s something very special about being a member of an expert, scientific community, which cannot be duplicated by people like vaccine critic [and actress] Jenny McCarthy… Read all the online stuff you want, Collins argues—or even read the professional scientific literature from the perspective of an outsider or amateur. You’ll absorb a lot of information, but you’ll still never have what he terms ‘interactional expertise,’ which is the sort of expertise developed by getting to know a community of scientists intimately… That’s why we can’t listen to climate change skeptics or creationists. It’s why vaccine deniers don’t have a leg to stand on.”

The irony is that the “No Business Challenging Scientific Experts” argument applies not only to activists like Jenny McCarthy but also to journalists like Mooney and me. After all, we journalists are “outsiders” and “amateurs” compared to the scientists whose work we cover, so how dare we second-guess them?

I agree with Mooney and Collins that science is a uniquely potent method for discovering how nature works, and it gets some things right, once and for all: the atomic theory of matter, the (basic) big bang theory, evolution by natural selection, DNA-based genetics. But the history of science suggests — and my own 32 years of experience reporting confirms — that even the most accomplished scientists at the most prestigious institutions often make claims that turn out to be erroneous or exaggerated.

Scientists succumb to groupthink, political pressures and other pitfalls. More than a half century ago, the scientific consensus was that Freudian psychoanalysis was an effective theory of and therapy for mental disorders. The new consensus is that mental illnesses are chemical disorders that need to be chemically treated.

This shift says more about the emerging financial clout of the pharmaceutical industry–and its control over the conduct and publishing of clinical trials–than it does about the actual merits of antidepressants and other drugs. That’s why I was so stunned when that Columbia student said peer-reviewed “facts” could speak for themselves.

Journalists must question scientific claims even if – especially if — they come from authoritative sources. And it’s precisely because we journalists are “outsiders” that we can sometimes judge a field more objectively than insiders. Mooney surely agrees with me on this. There is an enormous contradiction buried within his “you-have-no-business” argument. He obviously doesn’t want us to yield to every scientific consensus, only to those that he, Mooney, deems credible.

Google is reportedly working on algorithms for evaluating the credibility of websites based on their factual content. But there will never be a foolproof way to determine a priori whether a given scientific consensus is correct or not. You have to do the hard work of investigating it and weighing its pros and cons. And anybody can do that, including me, Mooney and even Jenny McCarthy.

John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which is part of the Stevens College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from one originally published on his ScientificAmerican.com blog, “Cross-check.”