Did it? Sure, it’s clear cut now. But what I’ve read about the subject says that back in the days when it was a matter of mainstream intellectual debate, it was long and very messy, and included things like scientists on the ‘right’ side accepting extremely dodgy evidence for spontaneous generation of life in the test tube because they felt that to reject it would weaken the case for being able to do without divine intervention.
I don’t think this is a good example. My post is intended to apply to the contemporary academia, whereas the basics of evolutionary theory were proposed way back in the 19th century, and the decisive controversies over them played out back then, when the situation was very different from nowadays in many relevant ways. (Of course, creationism is still alive and well among the masses, but for generations already it has been a very low-status belief with virtually zero support among the intellectual elites.)
On the other hand, when it comes to questions in evolutionary theory that still have strong implications about issues that are ideologically charged even among the intellectual elites, there is indeed awful confusion and one can find plenty of examples where prestigious academics are clearly throwing their weight behind their favored ideological causes. The controversies over sociobiology are the most obvious example.
In contrast, when it comes to modern applications of evolutionary theory to non-ideologically-sensitive problems, the situation is generally OK—except in those cases where the authors don’t have a clear and sound approach to the problem, so they end up producing just-so stories masquerading as scientific theories. This however is pretty much the situation that should trigger my first heuristic.
Evolutionary biology benefited from two things: the correct side (vis-a-vis Creationism) was absolutely correct—could not possibly have been more correct—and the incorrect side was culturally identified, both by themselves and academia, as outsiders to the mainstream intellectual tradition.
As it happens, all the evidence points to life on earth arising by completely natural processes. The amount of supernatural involvement that apears to be there is: 0% (and negative rates aren’t possible.) Compare with a question like “what is the marginal effect of tax rates on labor supply?” Whatever the correct answer to that question is in that time and place, there are different social groups that benefit from governments acting on relatively higher and relatively lower estimates, and there’s no logical bound on where it could lie, independent of empirics. (Most people’s intuitive guess is that it moderately reduces labor supply in some sense, but perhaps that’s just because that’s where the political balance of power lies right now. Rand wrote novels where modest taxes lead the captains of industry to actively destroy output; a clever grad student could show microeconomic pathways leading from higher taxes to higher labor supply.)
And: pretty much everyone in the left-right economics debate, from Austrians to neoclassicals to Keynesians to Marxists, thinks of themselves as operating within the mainstream Western intellectual tradition, even if they don’t have the dominant position in economics at the moment. Bias affects all humans, but they all at least like to self-conceptualize as principled followers of evidence. Creationists tried to put on that garb late in the game and no one bought it anyway; since for cultural reasons they would never become dominant in the academy, few presumably felt the need to twist academic interpretations around to prevent Creationists from gaining ground.
On occasion, there have been ideologically-charged debates within mainstream materialist biology. I’m no expert on the technical issues involved, but it doesn’t seem that those who can credibly claim to be arrived at a clear consensus either (as they did on “is the diversity of life on Earth the result of natural processes?”)
And: pretty much everyone in the left-right economics debate, from Austrians to neoclassicals to Keynesians to Marxists, thinks of themselves as operating within the mainstream Western intellectual tradition, even if they don’t have the dominant position in economics at the moment. Bias affects all humans, but they all at least like to self-conceptualize as principled followers of evidence.
While they are within the Western philosophical tradition, it’s my impression that neither Austrians nor Marxists can be described as strictly “followers of evidence”, leading me to wonder whether the others can really, either.
The Austrian notion of praxeology, and the Marxist notion of dialectical materialism, are non-empirical. Von Mises insisted on praxeology being an “a-priori science”, like mathematics, rather than an empirical science. Marxist dialectics similarly attempts to begin from axiomatic principles (“laws of dialectics”) rather than measurement.
It’s true that the claims of various schools of thought to be principled followers of the evidence is exceedingly likely to be an exaggeration, if it holds any connection to reality at all. But that doesn’t impugn the claims’ sincerity - or their function as cultural ingroup markers, which is what matters here. (Of course, there are other cultural barriers between them, but none as extreme as that between Creationists ans mainstream biologists, I think.)
“Evidence” can be rationalist as well as empiricist; if the Austrians are right that the laws of economics are discoverable by deduction, then everyone else is wrong to look to the physical world. (Recall the mathemetician’s joke about the physicist who proved all odd numbers are prime: “3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 - measurement error, 11 is prime, 13 is prime, viola!”) I think it’s pretty silly for them to think this, of course, but.. For their part I’ve never really seen a western Marxist invoke dialectics except in some very trivial way. What Marxists, Keynesians, and neoclassicals do do (and Austrians also do, although they’d deny they’re doing it) is adopt simplifying assumptions to construct models around. Plausibility limits what one can assume, of course, but choosing the right assumptions is a sufficiently subtle task that each can just as plausibly accuse the others (and, probably more often, their intra-school rivals) of adopting whatever assumptions lead to their preferred conclusions. (My ex ante guess is that the highest proportion of good research takes place within neoclassical and to a lesser extent Keynesian, but only because its status gives it better access to talent and funding, and scrubs away any ideology-signaling effects of working within the discipline.)
On “ideologically charged” science producing good results:
Evolutionary biology, in general. Creationism went down really hard and really quickly.
Did it? Sure, it’s clear cut now. But what I’ve read about the subject says that back in the days when it was a matter of mainstream intellectual debate, it was long and very messy, and included things like scientists on the ‘right’ side accepting extremely dodgy evidence for spontaneous generation of life in the test tube because they felt that to reject it would weaken the case for being able to do without divine intervention.
I don’t think this is a good example. My post is intended to apply to the contemporary academia, whereas the basics of evolutionary theory were proposed way back in the 19th century, and the decisive controversies over them played out back then, when the situation was very different from nowadays in many relevant ways. (Of course, creationism is still alive and well among the masses, but for generations already it has been a very low-status belief with virtually zero support among the intellectual elites.)
On the other hand, when it comes to questions in evolutionary theory that still have strong implications about issues that are ideologically charged even among the intellectual elites, there is indeed awful confusion and one can find plenty of examples where prestigious academics are clearly throwing their weight behind their favored ideological causes. The controversies over sociobiology are the most obvious example.
In contrast, when it comes to modern applications of evolutionary theory to non-ideologically-sensitive problems, the situation is generally OK—except in those cases where the authors don’t have a clear and sound approach to the problem, so they end up producing just-so stories masquerading as scientific theories. This however is pretty much the situation that should trigger my first heuristic.
Evolutionary biology benefited from two things: the correct side (vis-a-vis Creationism) was absolutely correct—could not possibly have been more correct—and the incorrect side was culturally identified, both by themselves and academia, as outsiders to the mainstream intellectual tradition.
As it happens, all the evidence points to life on earth arising by completely natural processes. The amount of supernatural involvement that apears to be there is: 0% (and negative rates aren’t possible.) Compare with a question like “what is the marginal effect of tax rates on labor supply?” Whatever the correct answer to that question is in that time and place, there are different social groups that benefit from governments acting on relatively higher and relatively lower estimates, and there’s no logical bound on where it could lie, independent of empirics. (Most people’s intuitive guess is that it moderately reduces labor supply in some sense, but perhaps that’s just because that’s where the political balance of power lies right now. Rand wrote novels where modest taxes lead the captains of industry to actively destroy output; a clever grad student could show microeconomic pathways leading from higher taxes to higher labor supply.)
And: pretty much everyone in the left-right economics debate, from Austrians to neoclassicals to Keynesians to Marxists, thinks of themselves as operating within the mainstream Western intellectual tradition, even if they don’t have the dominant position in economics at the moment. Bias affects all humans, but they all at least like to self-conceptualize as principled followers of evidence. Creationists tried to put on that garb late in the game and no one bought it anyway; since for cultural reasons they would never become dominant in the academy, few presumably felt the need to twist academic interpretations around to prevent Creationists from gaining ground.
On occasion, there have been ideologically-charged debates within mainstream materialist biology. I’m no expert on the technical issues involved, but it doesn’t seem that those who can credibly claim to be arrived at a clear consensus either (as they did on “is the diversity of life on Earth the result of natural processes?”)
While they are within the Western philosophical tradition, it’s my impression that neither Austrians nor Marxists can be described as strictly “followers of evidence”, leading me to wonder whether the others can really, either.
The Austrian notion of praxeology, and the Marxist notion of dialectical materialism, are non-empirical. Von Mises insisted on praxeology being an “a-priori science”, like mathematics, rather than an empirical science. Marxist dialectics similarly attempts to begin from axiomatic principles (“laws of dialectics”) rather than measurement.
It’s true that the claims of various schools of thought to be principled followers of the evidence is exceedingly likely to be an exaggeration, if it holds any connection to reality at all. But that doesn’t impugn the claims’ sincerity - or their function as cultural ingroup markers, which is what matters here. (Of course, there are other cultural barriers between them, but none as extreme as that between Creationists ans mainstream biologists, I think.)
“Evidence” can be rationalist as well as empiricist; if the Austrians are right that the laws of economics are discoverable by deduction, then everyone else is wrong to look to the physical world. (Recall the mathemetician’s joke about the physicist who proved all odd numbers are prime: “3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 - measurement error, 11 is prime, 13 is prime, viola!”) I think it’s pretty silly for them to think this, of course, but.. For their part I’ve never really seen a western Marxist invoke dialectics except in some very trivial way. What Marxists, Keynesians, and neoclassicals do do (and Austrians also do, although they’d deny they’re doing it) is adopt simplifying assumptions to construct models around. Plausibility limits what one can assume, of course, but choosing the right assumptions is a sufficiently subtle task that each can just as plausibly accuse the others (and, probably more often, their intra-school rivals) of adopting whatever assumptions lead to their preferred conclusions. (My ex ante guess is that the highest proportion of good research takes place within neoclassical and to a lesser extent Keynesian, but only because its status gives it better access to talent and funding, and scrubs away any ideology-signaling effects of working within the discipline.)
Just beat me to it.
I thought evo biology pretty obvious, actually. Maybe OP has some reason for disqualifying it?