Along with many economists, I suffered for years from physics envy. I wished that economists could bring to their subject the rigour and the focus on falsifiable experiment which is characteristic of the natural sciences. But I've been cured. The Bj?rn Lomborg affair has played a large role in the cure.
Lomborg is a Danish statistician, the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, a polemical attack on what he calls "the litany"-a collection of widely disseminated claims about environmental deterioration. Lomborg's book was published in Britain at about the same time as EO Wilson's The Future of Life. The two books, pitched at a similar popular level, lie at opposite ends of the spectrum of environmentalist views. Wilson's style is moving, almost lyrical, while Lomborg's prose is plodding. Lomborg's book is, however, more tightly argued and widely referenced.
The reactions to Lomborg were, from the beginning, odd. Criticism was aimed not at his work, but at Lomborg himself. Wilson and other American scientists attacked Cambridge University Press for publishing it. Scientific American published a symposium which contained much sound and fury but signified very little. In Oxford, someone threw a custard pie in Lomborg's face.
But the most peculiar response came from the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty. I have to admit that my first reaction was to assume that this organisation was a spoof. But it really exists, and I suppose such organisations are necessary in the light of scandals such as Cyril Burt's falsification of intelligence research data and the supposed invention of cold fusion.
The Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty did not undertake any investigation of Lomborg's primary research-reasonably enough, since he did not claim to have undertaken any. Less reasonably, it did not undertake any investigation at all, simply reproducing verbatim assertions made in Scientific American. The style of its approach can be illustrated with one example from the committee's report.
Lomborg claims that a widely cited estimate by Norman Myers-that species are becoming extinct at the rate of 40,000 a year-has no scientific basis, and was simply a number made up in order to attract attention. This is a serious accusation, but it appears to be in all essentials true. In the current state of knowledge, there is no means of estimating how many species exist in the world or the numbers of them which disappear. More recent estimates have tended to focus not on the absolute number of extinctions, but on the ratio of that number to some base level-although the evidentiary basis of these figures also seems to be extremely weak.
Myers is close to the line in terms of scientific dishonesty, but since he does not claim that his number is based on substantive research, he probably falls on the right side of it. Incredibly, however, the committee levelled its charge not at Myers for making up the number of 40,000, but at Lomborg for pointing out that he had done so.
It is kinder at this point to leave the Danish committee alone. One might have expected that serious scientists would have denounced its absurd proceedings but, in fact, the only public comments from the scientific community seem to have been supportive. The principal criticism of the committee's report has come from economic journalists-The Economist magazine and Martin Wolf in the Financial Times. And for a well-argued criticism of Lomborg's conclusions on climate change, you should look not to Scientific American, but to the critique in Prospect (May 2002) by Adair Turner, economist and banker.
What is going on? The proceedings of the committee, and the rants in Scientific American, have nothing to do with the evaluation of scientific evidence: they are affirmations of tribal loyalty. For the Danish committee, as for George W Bush, the world divides into good guys and bad guys and all that matters is which side you are on. If you are on the wrong one, off to Guant?namo Bay: evidence and due process are for wimps.
The lesson I have learned is that the skills needed to handle questions of moral or political controversy are much rarer, and more difficult to acquire, than I had imagined. All of us come to these issues contaminated by background and prejudice. Sound training in economics, in history, in philosophy or in law helps us to handle that contamination. There are still too many partisan historians and economists, biased lawyers and bad philosophers: the results of that training are by no means always effective. It is much easier to ask "is he one of us?" Still, the best social scientists bring rigour and logic to issues that others find difficult to argue dispassionately.
Most natural scientists have no training in handling practical controversy, and many of them do not have the ability to do so. Perhaps that is how it should be: without his passion for the natural environment, Wilson might not have completed either his meticulous work on insect behaviour or his imaginative efforts to unify the sciences. But the corollary is that scientists have a smaller contribution to make to issues of science policy than they think-and that economists have distinctive capabilities to be proud of, after all.
