The scientific method. It’s simple. It’s robust. But it’s not magic. Got bias? It’ll spin like Rafael Nadal’s forehand. Got unconscious or subconscious bias? It’ll spin, but you won’t know it. You’ll lie to yourself, like the memory-ravaged protagonist in a Philip K. Dick nightmare.
The elaborate and intricate protocols needed to eliminate bias make science look complicated. Random sampling, blind and double blind study designs, placebos, and control treatments are all accouterments of bias reduction. The scientific method works because the answers to the greatest questions that can be asked come from the nuts-and-bolts, glue-it-together-and-let-it-fly, tee-it-up-and-give-it-a-whack process of experimentation. Science can only answer questions amenable to this kind of manipulative testing. Unamenable (is that a word? The MS Word writing police certainly don’t like it…I kind of do, though) questions are simply, by definition, beyond the realm of science (because science, by definition, is the nuts-and bolts, glue-it etc. method of inquiry). This is why, despite entertaining clashes along the scrum lines of evolution and intelligent design, science and religion are non-overlapping ways of knowing. The scientific answer to the ultimate question of “why are there things in the universe instead of no things, nothing, emptiness?” is going to be something like “because there is an asymmetry in the ninth decimal place between the quantities of matter and antimatter formed in first moments of the Big Bang”. The religious answer is something like “because there is/are a god, God, or gods”. Far from being mutually exclusive, in this case science and religion are simply complementary. If you want to see your god, God or gods, just look over in the ninth decimal place.
The real beauty of the scientific method is in collective enterprise. In the realm it rules—the elucidation of facts of nature—the scientific method is self-correcting and self-adapting. Even if you set it up so your experimental system lets you lie to yourself, the next three people who test your conclusions will root out your bias.
The controversies that spin up in the wake of the ship of science arise because people bring their bias to the broader meaning of the facts. It is a fact that ingesting too much fresh, potable water in a short period of time causes a lethal syndrome of electrolyte imbalance and neural swelling. Whether this makes fresh, potable water a toxicological hazard depends on your perspective. The scientific method makes the facts themselves robust and mostly idiot-proof. It doesn’t protect us from idiotic application and interpretation of said facts.
When I was in school contemplating a major in (among a depressingly long list of other subjects) anthropology, there was a deep systemic bias afflicting the field. It had become fashionable to dismiss reports of aboriginal peoples headhunting, cannibalizing, and ethnic cleansing as western bigotry. In my sophomore cultural anthro class we read pretty much everything published on the Dani people of highland Papua New Guinea. The Dani population was distributed over the landscape in family-linked groups of a few 100s of people per, each group living in a single large longhouse or village of a few longhouses. The borders of the lands associated with each group were sorted out by ritualized spear-shaking dances nominally replacing actual physical combat at the contact points. Unfortunately for the western investigators anticipating gentle, benign behavior from low-tech peoples, it devolved rather frequently that the ritualized dancing degraded into spear-throwing with the inconvenient outcome of the occasional fatality. Once there was a fatality, the balance-of-power between the groups at issue was inflamed until vengeance in the form of a complementary fatality was administered. Sometimes propagating a chain of reprisal killings worthy of highland clan peoples from Scotland to Appalachia.
To us chuckleheaded undergrads the Dani culture was largely defined by a lengthy legacy of murder and counter-murder. To the academics attempting to shoehorn the culture into a model of benign serenity each death was an aberration requiring convoluted explanation usually invoking forecasts of future Dani culture as benign and serene if not quite there by just a smidgen at the present time.
This “friendly natives” dream continues to plague anthropology. A segment of the community has wandered down a dead-end path of political correctness that refuses to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence for massive environmental impacts of Pleistocene peoples. In particular, about the time meaningful numbers of humans hotfooted it…actually, I’m guessing “coldfooted” was more like it…across the Bering Sea, the entire mammalian megafauna of the Americas (except for a couple of cats, the bison and Andean camelids—guanaco, vicuna, llama) went extinct. Coincidence? I’m guessing not. Similarly, as the Caribbean islands were peopled, the weird insular endemic rodents called hutia were eliminated from most places, and the residue were mopped up when Europeans arrived with rats, cats, pigs and dogs in tow. Same fate befell the giant flightless moa birds of New Zealand.
The book “The Airmen and the Headhunters: A True Story of Lost Soldiers, Heroic Tribesmen and the Unlikeliest Rescue of World War II” (2009 by Judith M. Heimann, Mariner Books) is worth a read regarding the sociology of warfare.
The author pieced together a wonderful account of the surviving crew of a B-24 bomber shot down over Borneo. The locals had mostly been Christianized in the preceding decades, and it had been a good ten years or more since the last formal human head taking in the Borneo highlands. But with Yankee airmen in their midst and the prospect of imperial Japanese death and destruction being unleashed in retaliation, the local folks did what local folks do. That is, they killed a dog in ritual fashion, tasted its blood in a ceremonial cup-passing, and pledged to work together to take the heads of as many Japanese military men as necessary. Mind you, the Japanese soldiers, a long way from home and itchy and uncomfortable in the steamy tropical forests, weren’t making it much of a chore for the locals to revive their decapitative trophy collections. Heimann’s research reveals the almost comical tactical tendency of small units of the Japanese army to “split up and meet later”. You know, like the point in the movie where you’re yelling “don’t you guys go to the movies?!?!?” right before the protagonists separate and subsequently buy the farm? 3 or 4 times, the Japanese command sent squads into the Borneo hinterland where they promptly split up and hired local guides who promptly led them right into the almost-but-not-quite-forgot-how-to-use-‘em head collection stations in the jungle. In fact, the transition from headhunting to Sunday-go-to-meetin’ culture had been smoothed by the formal requirements of the headhunting game. The locals were forbidden to take the heads of humans, they could only take the heads of demons who had possessed human bodies. The Japanese rather short-sightedly pre-adapted themselves for head loss by routinely raping, murdering, and otherwise mistreating the locals, who not irrationally started to view the Japanese occupation as inhuman.
Happy endings all around, then, for everyone except the Japanese. Heimann provides a follow-up “what are they doing now” coda on the protagonists of her story (think last scene in Animal House). She didn’t report as to whether or not the Borneo highland people continued headhunting after the war. But it’s possible. I’m guessing that as long as human beings are human beings, grievances will be settled by violence and Long Pig will be at least an occasional menu item. Despite the best efforts of academic sociologists to make like it never happened.
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