Issue Ratatouille

There being too much happening, I offer this issue ratatouille rather than trying to focus on a single matter.

On my pet theme of our information era's deficiencies of communication, several items:

"[I]f a vote were held, it appears that the majority of [Harvard University] professors would vote 'no confidence' in [university president Lawrence] Summers," according to an unnamed senior professor quoted in the Harvard Crimson.

This because of the "intellectual tsunami" Summers triggered last month by suggesting, in what were supposed to be off-the-record remarks, that intellectual differences between the sexes might be one reason for the low numbers of women in science and engineering faculties at research universities. (Transcript here.)

My take, briefly: It's perfectly plausible that there are mental differences between the sexes or between the races. But if there are, they should not be discussed aloud. Our world is too stupid. (And differences in statistical means or variations would be irrelevant in assessing individuals.)

A more sunny view is expressed in what is perhaps the most beautiful and clever comment on the Summers tsunami -- Different but (Probably) Equal, by Olivia Judson. Excerpt:

London -- HYPOTHESIS: males and females are typically indistinguishable on the basis of their behaviors and intellectual abilities.

This is not true for elephants. Females have big vocabularies and hang out in herds; males tend to live in solitary splendor.

The hypothesis is not true for zebra finches. Males sing elaborate songs. Females can't sing at all.

And it's not true for green spoon worms. This animal, which lives on the sea floor, has one of the largest known size differences between male and female: the male is 200,000 times smaller. He spends his whole life in her reproductive tract, fertilizing eggs by regurgitating sperm through his mouth. He's so different from his mate that when he was first discovered by science, he was not recognized as being a green spoon worm; instead, he was thought to be a parasite.

Is it ridiculous to suppose that the hypothesis might not be true for humans either?

No. But it is not fashionable - as Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University, discovered when he suggested this month that greater intrinsic ability might be one reason that men are overrepresented at the top levels of fields involving math, science and engineering.

There are - as the maladroit Mr. Summers should have known - good reasons it's not fashionable. Beliefs that men are intrinsically better at this or that have repeatedly led to discrimination and prejudice, and then they've been proved to be nonsense. Women were thought not to be world-class musicians. But when American symphony orchestras introduced blind auditions in the 1970's - the musician plays behind a screen so that his or her gender is invisible to those listening - the number of women offered jobs in professional orchestras increased.

Similarly, in science, studies of the ways that grant applications are evaluated have shown that women are more likely to get financing when those reading the applications do not know the sex of the applicant.

All the same, it seems a shame if we can't even voice the question. Sex differences are fascinating - and entirely unlike the other biological differences that distinguish other groups of living things (like populations and species). Sex differences never arise in isolation, with females evolving on a mountaintop, say, and males evolving in a cave.

The science of sex differences is a ferociously complex subject. It's also famously fraught, given its malignant history. In fact, there was a time not so long ago when I would have balked at the whole enterprise: the idea there might be intrinsic cognitive differences between men and women was one I found insulting. But science is a great persuader. The jackdaws and spoon worms have forced me to change my mind. Now I'm keen to know what sets men and women apart - and no longer afraid of what we may find.

Another academic controversy involves a scientific argument for a Creator. Not God necessarily ... but some intelligent being that designed us and other life forms. The argument cannot be assessed without more scientific knowledge than I possess, but it seems highly reasonable from a layman's perspective:

The theory of intelligent design is not a religiously based idea, even though devout people opposed to the teaching of evolution cite it in their arguments. Rather, the contemporary argument for intelligent design is based on physical evidence and a straightforward application of logic. The argument for it consists of four linked claims.

The first claim is uncontroversial: we can often recognize the effects of design in nature. For example, unintelligent physical forces like plate tectonics and erosion seem quite sufficient to account for the origin of the Rocky Mountains. Yet they are not enough to explain Mount Rushmore.

The second claim [is]: the physical marks of design are visible in aspects of biology. This is uncontroversial, too. The 18th-century clergyman William Paley likened living things to a watch, arguing that the workings of both point to intelligent design. Modern Darwinists disagree with Paley that the perceived design is real, but they do agree that life overwhelms us with the appearance of design.

The resemblance of parts of life to engineered mechanisms like a watch is enormously stronger than what Reverend Paley imagined. In the past 50 years modern science has shown that the cell, the very foundation of life, is run by machines made of molecules. There are little molecular trucks in the cell to ferry supplies, little outboard motors to push a cell through liquid.

The next claim in the argument for design is that we have no good explanation for the foundation of life that doesn't involve intelligence. Here is where thoughtful people part company. Darwinists assert that their theory can explain the appearance of design in life as the result of random mutation and natural selection acting over immense stretches of time. Some scientists, however, think the Darwinists' confidence is unjustified. They note that although natural selection can explain some aspects of biology, there are no research studies indicating that Darwinian processes can make molecular machines of the complexity we find in the cell.

The fourth claim in the design argument is also controversial: in the absence of any convincing non-design explanation, we are justified in thinking that real intelligent design was involved in life. To evaluate this claim, it's important to keep in mind that it is the profound appearance of design in life that everyone is laboring to explain, not the appearance of natural selection or the appearance of self-organization.

The strong appearance of design allows a disarmingly simple argument: if it looks, walks and quacks like a duck, then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to conclude it's a duck. Design should not be overlooked simply because it's so obvious.

Still, some critics claim that science by definition can't accept design, while others argue that science should keep looking for another explanation in case one is out there. But we can't settle questions about reality with definitions, nor does it seem useful to search relentlessly for a non-design explanation of Mount Rushmore. Besides, whatever special restrictions scientists adopt for themselves don't bind the public, which polls show, overwhelmingly, and sensibly, thinks that life was designed. And so do many scientists who see roles for both the messiness of evolution and the elegance of design.

[Edited excerpt from Design for Living, by Michael J. Behe, New York Times, February 7, 2005.]

I looked forward to responses from the scientific community when I first read this in the Times. But those that appeared (they are presented together with the original article at the link above) mirror -- with comical irony -- the dogmatism of religious believers. National Academy of Sciences President Bruce Alberts, for example, writes:

Because "intelligent design" theories are based on supernatural explanations, they can have nothing to do with science.

This is precisely the objection that Prof. Behe's piece anticipated:

Some critics claim that science by definition can't accept design.... But we can't settle questions about reality with definitions.

The irrationality of Alberts's position would be self-evident if some unmistakable example of intelligent design were to present itself. Suppose the stars aligned themselves tomorrow to spell out the message, "Believe it!" -- in English letters that everyone could see? If "science" rejected such irrefutable evidence of an intelligent designer's handiwork, it would no longer have anything to do with the plain evidence of our senses.

The first imperative of science is to be consistent with observed reality. "Intelligent Design" is certainly unappealing from a scientific perspective. (Prof. Behe's "elegance of design" is nonsense.) But if the evidence supports it, then science must adapt.

More on the world's sad failures of communication:

As many realize, the mainstream news media (MSM) possesses excessive and undeserved power to shape the news and our perceptions of the world. Somebody very witty once ensured he'd be quoted forever (especially by MSM victims) by observing that one should never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. It's long been true that that's a losing fight.

But now, suddenly, we have the blogosphere. Bloggers brought down Dan Rather. And now they've toppled Eason Jordan, the chief news executive at CNN. According to the Times:

Mr. Jordan, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in late January, apparently said, according to various witnesses, that he believed the United States military had aimed at journalists and killed 12 of them. There is some uncertainty over his precise language and the forum, which videotaped the conference, has not released the tape.

Some of those most familiar with Mr. Jordan's situation emphasized, in interviews over the weekend, that his resignation should not be read solely as a function of the heat that CNN had been receiving on the Internet, where thousands of messages, many of them from conservatives, had been posted.

Nonetheless, within days of his purported statement, many blog sites were swamped with outraged assertions that he was slandering American troops.

[Excerpted from Bloggers as News Media Trophy Hunters, New York Times, February 14, 2005.]

Is this good or bad? One would want to know, wouldn't one?

If the MSM is now being punished for its distortions, inadvertent and otherwise, then wonderful! It's a victory for truth, justice, progress.

But is that what has happened here?

The same article suggests Jordan was not wrong, and that his termination was an injustice:

Steve Lovelady, a former editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Wall Street Journal and now managing editor of CJR Daily, the Web site of The Columbia Journalism Review, [lamented online]: "The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail."

[Some bloggers] are openly questioning where they are headed. One was Jeff Jarvis, the head of the Internet arm of Advance Publications, who publishes a blog at buzzmachine.com. Mr. Jarvis said bloggers should keep their real target in mind. "I wish our goal were not taking off heads but digging up truth," he cautioned.

At the same time, some in the traditional media are growing alarmed as they watch careers being destroyed by what they see as the growing power of rampant, unedited dialogue.

"Have we entered an era where our lives can be destroyed by a pack of wolves hacking at their keyboards with no oversight, no editors, and no accountability?" asked a blogger named Mark Coffey, 36, who says he works as an analyst in Austin, Tex.

"I think he was attacked because of what he represented as much as what he said," said David Gergen, who moderated the panel at Davos and who has served in the White House for administrations of both parties. He said he was troubled by the attacks on Mr. Jordan and said that his resignation was a mark of the increasing degree to which the news media were being drawn into the nation's culture wars.

It was a businessman attending the forum in Davos who put Mr. Jordan's comments on the map with a Jan. 28 posting. Rony Abovitz, 34, of Hollywood, Fla., the co-founder of a medical technology company, was invited to Davos and was asked to write for the forum's first-ever blog, his first blogging effort. In an interview, he said that he had challenged Mr. Jordan's assertion that the United States was taking aim at journalists and asked for evidence.

Mr. Abovitz said the remarks bothered him, and at 2:21 a.m. local time, he posted his write-up on the forum's official blog (www.forumblog.org) under the headline "Do U.S. Troops Target Journalists in Iraq?"

He did not think it would get much attention. But Mr. Jordan's comments zipped around the Web and fired up the conservative bloggers, who saw the remarks attributed to Mr. Jordan as evidence of a liberal bias of the big American news media.

[In the aftermath of Jordan's resignation,] Mr. Abovitz said he hoped bloggers could develop loftier goals than destroying people's careers. "If you're going to do this open-source journalism, it should have a higher purpose," he said. "At times it did seem like an angry mob, and an angry mob using high technology, that's not good."

The article also suggests Jordan's comments may actually have been well founded:

Ann Cooper, executive director for the Committee to Protect Journalists, said that 36 journalists, plus 18 translators who worked for journalists, had been killed in Iraq since 2003. Of those 54, she said, at least nine died as a result of American fire.

"From our standpoint, journalists are not being targeted by the U.S. military in Iraq," Ms. Cooper said. "But there certainly are cases where an atmosphere of what, at best, you can call indifference has led to deaths and other problems for journalists."

As an example, Ms. Cooper cited the shelling by American troops of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, well known as the residence of journalists, in April 2003, killing two journalists.

The article quotes the Captain's Quarters blog: "The moral of the story: the media can't just cover up the truth and expect to get away with it -- and journalists can't just toss around allegations without substantiation and expect people to believe them anymore."

Great. Delightful. Unless what we now have is hordes of salivating morons and vigilantes exploding and ruining legitimate careers whenever the MSM publishes something that can offend anyone. That's what this Times article suggests about the effects of the blogging phenomenon.

But .... Have we forgotten? The Times is MSM. They are hardly disinterested observers. And as we've seen, the Times gets kind of unbalanced, not to say unhinged, when reporting on opponents. (See First Amendment Desecrated by New York Times.) So this article's failure to resolve central ambiguities (did CNN cave in to a lynch mob?) may well reflect a wish to implant false prejudices about the MSM's new adversaries.

The lynch mob thesis certainly does not hold up very well under scrutiny. (How much power could a pack of red-faced blowhards exert over CNN?) What seems likelier is that it's a cover being used to conceal a reality that both CNN and the Times want kept quiet: the power of MSM owners to suppress journalists' lapses from orthodoxy -- especially those that offend their friends in the Bush White House.

The partnership between the Bush administration and the MSM is the threat to truth and openness. (See Journalistic violations contribute to national disaster.) Not the blogosphere. Let's not be silly.

Speaking of the Times, its ombudsman Daniel Okrent, whom I've had occasion to discuss (Exchange with New York Times Ombudsman), has been writing some uncharacteristically unimbecilic things recently. His Feb. 20 column, noting various examples of letters to the editor that were only published after the writers agreed to expunge criticisms of the Times ("Patricia Grossman of Brooklyn had a letter published last August, but only after she agreed to delete her accusation that a Times headline had maligned protesters at the Republican convention.... Gary Sheffer of General Electric's public relations staff was told his letter would be published only if specific references to what he considered inadequate reporting were deleted.... Scott Segal, representing an electric power industry trade group..., was asked to delete from his letter the suggestion that I had endorsed one of his points (which I had)") makes a radical, and superb, proposal:

Allowing the subjects of [Times] stories and other readers to criticize The Times as an institution for its reporting or its headlines, its news judgment or its preconceptions, its prose style or its public editor is something the paper is strong enough to withstand. What's difficult is figuring out how to do it given the limitations of space and staff, and the risk of degeneration into charge, countercharge, imprecation, untruth, calumny and libel.

Two answers: the Web, and editing.

Here's what you can do on the Web. You are not limited to three slender columns of the right side of the editorial page; nytimes.com stretches from here to the horizon. In the electronically archived version of articles -- the ones that exist for the ages -- you could move letters from their own ghetto and append them to the articles they address; that's the way that corrections are handled.

The better use of the Web site could also give readers the chance to see letters from The Times. One of the great frustrations of my job is seeing the thoughtful letters that go out from Times reporters to readers who have taken issue with something they've written. Why frustration? Because one reader gets the benefit of the thoughtfulness (and, sometimes, the writer's candid acknowledgment that he or she might have done something better), and a couple of million others who might appreciate it do not.

There are many at The Times who really dislike some of these ideas. Al Siegal understandably worries that the paper's authority, the staff's morale and the honest pursuit of truth could be severely undermined by deceitful or disingenuous attacks on specific articles by interested parties. And some reporters are very wary of posting for the millions their own letters to individual readers, fearing they would soon be forced (by editors, by competitive reporters, by me) into an endless public confessional.

The argument that all this would be too hard to monitor, that expanded Web forums would require too much staff attention to keep from degenerating into a free-fire zone of mud-slinging, rumor-spreading or character-bashing, is a strong one. Even now it's a problem, as some of the current forums at nytimes.com can be so unruly and digressive that they've lost their intended value. It will take some very serious editing resources to make certain that every Web-posted letter passes reasonable standards to prevent those excesses, not to mention transgressions against the libel laws.

But that's true of anything important in a newspaper. Is the airing of criticism and challenge important, and therefore worth finding the resources for it? To me, The Times's Op-Ed page is at its best when it publishes pieces at odds with the paper's own editorial positions -- when it shows it's strong enough to take the blows of differing views and thereby deepen the public debate. Likewise with informed, civilized criticism of journalistic practices: the strong can withstand it, and show their strength by absorbing it.

(Continued at More Ratatouille)

Re the Intelligent Design theory:

• See also my Dogmatic Scientists Fight Rational Christians;

• My hypothetical scenario above -- "Suppose the stars aligned themselves tomorrow to spell out the message, 'Believe it!' -- in English letters that everyone could see?" -- produced a notable response from "ClubhouseCancer" at blogcritics.org (comment #7):

  What if the stars all aligned into a perfect animated portrait of former Full House star Dave Coulier, dressed up like Fidel Castro, dancing about merrily? That would be great!

  But what if they all lined up in the shape of a huge arrow and came hurtling toward earth really fast! Ahhhhhh!

  That would be really scary.

  What if they all went dark at the same time, and then just suddenly turned back on, except in wild colors?

  Man, I freakin' love science.