Are strings finally unraveling?

For decades, string theory has been the leading candidate for a unified theory of physics, which wraps quantum mechanics and relativity and all nature’s forces into one tidy mathematical package. Depending on which variant you prefer, string theory holds that reality is woven out of infinitessimal strings, or loops, or membranes thrumming in a hyperspace of ten, or eleven, or [fill-in-the-blank] dimensions. Advocates–let’s called them “yarn-heads,” or “braniacs” (because “membrane” is often shortened to “brane”) or better yet “pluckers”–claim strings represents a “theory of everything” that will answer the most profound of all questions: How did the universe come to be? And why did it take this particular form rather than some other form that would not have permitted our existence?

The trouble is, pluckers have not produced an iota of empirical evidence for their theory. In fact, according to the theory’s fine print, strings’ existence cannot be proven even in principle! I’ve been harping on these embarrassing facts for more than a decade, and especially in The End of Science, where I called strings the epitome of unconfirmable “ironic” science.

In 2002 I put my money where my mouth is, betting the braniac Michio Kaku (whom I’ll debate at Stevens on October 18) $1,000 that no physicist will win a Nobel Prize for string theory or indeed any other so-called quantum gravity theory by the year 2020. I’d make the bet even if the Nobel deadline were 2120. (Of course, biologists would have to solve the problem of mortality for me to collect, but that’s a topic for another post.)

Meanwhile pluckers have continued to strum odes to strings in popular books such as The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, The Cosmic Landscape by Leonard Susskind, Parallel Worlds by Kaku and Warped Passages by Lisa Randall. The physicist Lawrence Krauss of Case Western University offers only a tepid critique of strings in his recent book Hiding in the Mirror, perhaps because—as he keeps reminding us–some of his best friends are yarn-heads.

I am thus delighted by the publication of a new book by Peter Woit–a mathematical physicist at Columbia, not a mere English major and journalist like me–that slices strings into snippets (sorry, it’s compulsive). Recycling a legendary put-down by Wolfgang Pauli, Woit likes to say that string theory is so speculative–so utterly disconnected from the physical reality that physicists can actually probe with accelerators and other instruments–that it is “not even wrong.”

That is the title both of his new book and of a blog where Woit gripes about strings. Woit’s book was released in England last month and is scheduled for U.S. publication.in September. Perhaps unwisely, Woit favorably mentions my anti-string rants in The End of Science and elsewhere. On his blog, Woit has also given a pat to “The Scientific Curmudgeon.” I hope his association with me does not harm his credibility. So far, so good: Woit has gotten positive coverage from John Cornwell in the Sunday (London) Times and from Sharon Begley in the Wall Street Journal. Woit also came off well in a Q&A in Discover last February with Susan Kruglinski, who dubbed him the “Dean of Debunkers.”

Woit and I disagree on one significant point: he believes that even if string theory represents a dead end, theoretical physics still has a future, because mathematical advances will trigger revolutions as profound as those that took place a century ago in physics. I have my doubts, which I’ll spell out in a future post.

Woit’s book will be joined in September by another anti-string screed, The Trouble With Physics by the gadfly physicist Lee Smolin. Will this mounting criticism persuade all the pluckers that strings are hopelessly out of tune and should be abandoned? Never entirely, I suspect. If academic scholars can keep writing papers on political allusions in Beowulf or the aesthetics of Grecian chamberpots, surely a few obsessives at marginal institutions will always fiddle with strings.

Moreover, even if most physicists no longer take the theory seriously, stringy memes will continue to infect the culture at large. New Age authors in particular have embraced string theory. The appeal is obvious. Along with such quasi-scientific notions as Gaia, complexity theory, psychoanalysis and the anthropic principle, strings entwine the public’s imagination not because they explain the world but because they mystify it.

A major new biography of Timothy Leary by Robert Greenfield has given critics at the New York Times, New Yorker, and Washington Post the opportunity to revisit the psychedelic 1960s (which of course extended into the 1970s), when Leary touted psychedelics as a route to personal and political liberation. Both Greenfield and the reviewers of his book focus on Leary’s legendary flaws. Like many gurus, he preached transcendence of the ego and yet was himself an egomaniac, who wreaked havoc on those around him, including a wife and son who committed suicide.

None of the reviews mention what makes this biography so timely: psychedelics are quietly making a comeback, not as illicit street drugs but as legal adjuncts of psychotherapy and religious worship. In fact, one of the leaders of this renaissance—a young psychiatrist named John Halpern, who has carried out federally sanctioned studies of peyote and MDMA, better known as “Ecstasy”–is at Harvard, where psychedelic research rocked off the rails in the early 1960s in large part because of Leary’s shenanigans. Halpern and other researchers take pains to distance themselves from Leary, whose irresponsible evangelizing destroyed the fledgling field of psychedelics research. “I’m leery of Leary,” John Halpern once told me.

Last February, moreover, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled—unanimously! incredibly!–that a religious sect based in New Mexico can consume a hallucinogenic tea called ayahuasca. Brewed from two plants found in the Amazon, ayahuasca has been ingested by Indians in South America for centuries, and it now serves as a legal sacrament for several churches in Brazil. Ayahuasca contains dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, which induces effects similar to LSD and mescaline and like them is a Schedule 1 drug, banned for all purposes. Halpern and other researchers—notably Charles Grob, a psychiatrist at UCLA who has studied ayahuasca and other drugs—testified on behalf of the New Mexico sect as the case wound its way through the courts.

Most journalists wisely shun the resurgence of research on psychedelics, but I find it too fascinating to resist. I’ve covered the topic in Rational Mysticism and in articles in New Scientist and Discover. The latter, titled “Peyote on the Brain,” describes John Halpern’s study of peyote consumption by members of the Native American Church (he found no ill effects and possible benefits, such as lower rates of alcoholism, as he reported in a peer-reviewed paper). As part of my research for the article, I joined Halpern in a peyote ceremony on a Navajo reservation in Arizona, an experience that challenged—to put it mildly—my journalistic objectivity. For these Navajo, the ceremony seemed to provide a cathartic, spiritually profound experience.

Make no mistake: psychedelics can be dangerous, particularly when consumed in excess by those who are psychologically unstable. Another new book—2012: The Return of Quetzacoatl, by the journalist Daniel Pinchbeck–unwittingly exposes psychedelics’ downside. Pinchbeck, a Leary wannabe who has the grandiosity without the charm, has taken lots of LSD, ayahuasca and other psychedelics. His trips have persuaded him that in 2012 we will plunge into a global apocalypse that was foreseen by Mayans and involves aliens and crop circles and quantum ruptures in the spacetime continuum. As one Amazon reviewer notes, “What a load of New Age rubbish.”

Of course, mystical experiences in general–not just those that are drug-induced–often leave you convinced that Yaweh or Allah or Ectoplasmic Aliens in an Extragalactic Hyperspace have singled you out for a mission upon which the destiny of humankind depends. If you can somehow persuade others to share your delusions of grandeur, you may become the founder of a new religion, worshipped by millions. Otherwise, you’re just another nut.

Scientists, and science writers, can be divided into explainers, who try to reduce everything to simple, clear scientific accounts, and mystifiers, who show how hopelessly inadequate our theories are. In the realm of biology, Richard Dawkins is the supreme explainer, arguing that natural selection has basically solved the riddle of life. Stephen Jay Gould is, or was, a mystifier, who preferred to dwell on all that Darwinism leaves unanswered.

In the realm of brain science, the late Francis Crick, author of the Greatest Book The Astonishing Hypothesis, is, was, a hard-core explainer. Oliver Sacks, author of the Greatest Book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, is a brain mystifier, and one of my favorite writers, period. In his writings, Sacks provides extraordinarily vivid profiles of people afflicted by autism, strokes, tumors, Tourette’s syndrome and other brain disorders.

Sacks resembles a Victorian scientist astonished, entranced, by the endless curiosities that life presents him. What saves Sacks from being a mere voyeur, ogling others’ pathologies, is his compassion and empathy. While most neuroscientists try to work around the irreducibility of individual humans, Sacks has made it the centerpiece of his work. He once told me that he tried to follow Wittgenstein’s precept that a book should consist of “examples” rather than generalizations. “People keep saying, ‘Sacks, where’s your general theory?’ But I’m rather content to multiply case histories and leave the theorizing to others.”

“Stereo Sue: Why two eyes are better than one,” in the June 19 New Yorker, has all the hallmarks of Sacks’s best work: a case study of a compelling character (Sue, a herself a neurobiologist) and disorder (strabismus, which interferes with stereo vision and hence perceptions of depth); autobiographical material (Sacks has been fascinated by stereo vision since childhood, when he made his own stereophotographs); historical arcana (3-D pornography was introduced in the mid-1850s, just after 3-D photography); significant scientific implications (the article raises questions about the dogma that some perceptual capacities cannot be acquired after childhood).

Sacks’s great gift is to help you see the world from his patient’s perpective, in such a way that you see your own mental faculties afresh, in all their glorious, irreducible mystery. Thus Sue, after eye surgery in adulthood, gradually acquires stereo vision and enters a strange and wonderful three-dimensional world. Sacks gives Sue the last word, as she recalls seeing a snowfall with her new eyes

“In the past, the snow would have appeared to fall in a flat sheet in one plane slightly in front of me. I would have felt like I was looking in on the snowfall. But now, I felt myself within the snowfall, among the snowflakes. Lunch forgotten, I watched the snow fall for several minutes, and as I watched, I was overcome with a deep sense of joy. A snowfall can be quite beautiful, especially when you see it for the first time.”

We, too, reading Sacks, see the world anew. Although he would probably cringe at this description, he is a poet and mystic as well as a mystifier. Years hence, will Sacks be seen as primarily a literary figure, like Freud, or as a scientist?

Nature is my favorite journal. I find something pat-worthy in it almost every week. The June 8 issue, for example, has an incisive report on “econophysics,” the latest attempt to render economics as precise and predictive as nuclear physics.

Pieces about some grand new interdisciplinary venture, with its own shiny new coinage (neuroeconomics, neurotheology, evolutionary psychology), are almost always hypey, breathless, awful. But in “Culture Crash,” Philip Ball (one of my co-authors in the picture book Within the Stone) takes a tough, skeptical stance toward econophysics, remarking that many economists “wonder whether it is ever going to deliver on its early promise.” Note the word “ever.”

Physicists and economists apparently disagree on such basic issues as whether economies tend toward equilibrium and whether money is conserved. Ball also places econophysics in historical perspective, pointing out that efforts to discover mathematical laws of economics and other social phenomena date back at least to Pierre-Simon Laplace; over the past few decades, scientists in the faddish fields of chaos and complexity–armed with ever-more-powerful computers–have pursued this same vision of making social “science” a true science rather than a mishmash of half-baked opinions with math thrown in.

I mocked this vision—particularly as set forth at a trendy thinktank called the Santa Fe Institute (also mentioned by Ball)–in The End of Science in a chapter titled “The End of Chaoplexity.” (I coined the term “chaoplexity” to reflect the fact that chaos and complexity theory are really the same fields wrapped in different glossy packages.)

Let me offer just one simple reason why I still think econophysics and similar efforts are doomed to fail:

Plasmas and solar systems and weather systems and other strictly physical systems don’t care what scientists think about them. Social systems, on the other hand, consist of objects that read newspapers and journals and books and blogs and change their behavior as a result. Newton’s model of planetary motion did not affect Jupiter’s course, but an initially persuasive model of dollar-yen exchange rates may affect those rates in a way that renders the model totally obsolete.

In other words, the effort to understand economies—or indeed almost any human system—changes the system! I’m not talking about some subtle quantum-observer effect but something much more dramatic. Marx creates Marxists, Keynes Keynsians, Freud Freudians, leading to wars and depressions and lots of bad psychotherapy.

Economics and physics are qualitatively different enterprises, and always will be. The latter is child’s play compared to the former. A remark of Paul Feyerabend, my favorite philosopher, comes to mind: “Prayer may not be very efficient when compared to celestial mechanics, but it surely holds its own vis-a-vis some parts of economics.”

Social science is chasing a moving target, and it will never, ever, catch up.

Should Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa be on the Greatest Science Books list? One reader of this blog thinks not; he accuses Mead of “lying and distorting the facts” about Samoa. As I now acknowledge in my annotation, Mead has been criticized as a naïve or dishonest (can’t be both, right?) ethnographer who imposed her romantic, leftist, feminist ideology on this alien society. One list even ranks Coming of Age as the worst book of the century!

But Mead stays. First of all, if I rejected her on grounds of veracity, I’d have to throw out Freud, whose story-telling is at least as suspect. Also, as the even-handed comments on Wikipedia point out, Mead’s critics are driven by ideology too, and she still has many defenders. And veracity aside, her book also inspired many young people—more specifically, many young women–to become social scientists. She made social science glamorous, intellectually thrilling, politically relevant.

To be candid, I was also determined to have at least one female author among the first 30 Greatest Science Books. I’m sensitive to the issue of women in science. Various critics, notably Natalie Angier of the New York Times, thumped me for profiling only one female scientist–the biologist Lynn Margulis–in my first book, The End of Science.

I wanted to include more female scientists in End of Science; I just had difficulty finding any who were at the top of their fields and had also written popular books about the meaning of life and the limits of knowledge and all the other grandiose topics I was addressing. My suspicion is that female scientists—unlike their more egotistical male counterparts–work so hard to get respect that they are loath to jeopardize it by pontificating about matters beyond their expertise.

Interestingly, talented, tough female science journalists abound. Natalie Angier and Gina Kolata of the New York Times, Sharon Begley of the Wall Street Journal, Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker all come to mind. The last two editors of the all-powerful Science Times have both been female.

But women are obviously still under-represented in science and engineering. Stevens, my employer, only started admitting women 25 years ago. Just 25 percent of its undergraduate population is female and 17 percent of its full-time faculty.

My next version of the Greatest Science Books will recognize more books by women. Like Mead’s Samoa, these will not be tokens; they will deserve inclusion. My two top candidates: A Natural History of the Senses by the poet and essayist Diane Ackerman; and A Feeling for the Organism, a biography of the geneticist and Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock by the philosopher Evelyn Fox Keller. Other nominations—and comments on these comments–welcome.

The New York Times deserves a whack for “That Wild Streak? Maybe It Runs in the Family,” published on page one yesterday, June 15. Amy Harmon reports that studies linking genes to traits such as addiction, sexual orientation, risk-taking, obesity, dancing ability (!) “are changing the way Americans feel about themselves, their flaws and their talents, as well as the decisions they make.”

Harmon’s article is well-written and lively, full of amusing quotes, anecdotes and factoids, but it’s a classic example of what I called gene-whiz journalism, which treats claims about the genetic basis of human behavior far too credulously. Articles like this are self-fulfilling, driving the cultural trend they purport to report on.

Harmon treats as news our growing tendency to favor nature over nurture as an explanation for what we do. But virtually identical articles could have been written–and were–at any time since the late 1980’s, when new technologies emboldened scientists to begin searching for genes underlying specific traits and diseases.

Over the past 15 or 20 years, researchers have announced the discovery of “genes for” attention-deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, manic depression, schizophrenia, autism, dyslexia, alcoholism, heroin addiction, high IQ, male homosexuality, sadness, extroversion, introversion, novelty-seeking, impulsivity, violent aggression, anxiety, anorexia nervosa, seasonal affective disorder, pathological gambling and religious belief.

Not a single one of these claims has been confirmed by followup investigations. Not one! Zero! Zilch! The “discovery” is often front-page news but never the study that contradicted it a year or two later, resulting in an illusory impression of progress.

Harmon does not mention the horrendous track record of behavioral genetics. If challenged, she might say she wasn’t really focusing on the genetic research per se but only on how it makes people feel. But this isn’t astronomy or string theory or some other field that has no serious consequences and can be treated lightly. Science is a deadly serious endeavor whenever it purports to tell us what we are, what we can be, what we should be.

Geneticists hate it when I say this, but we should never forget that research on human genetics inspired eugenics, the pseudo-science upon which Nazism was based. Given this history, reporters must treat modern genetic pronouncements skeptically, and cautiously.

Just to clarify my position: Genes obviously shape our personalities and behavior in important ways; no sensible person doubts that. My point here is that the science linking specific traits to specific genes is flimsy, to put it mildly. The research should not inspire the sort of genetic fatalism that Harmon describes—let alone prophecies (found in many gene-whiz stories, though not Harmon’s) about designer babies with 200 IQs and Olympian athleticism and sunny dispositions.

I’ve whacked behavioral genetics several times over the years: in “Eugenics Revisited,” a June 1993 article for Scientific American; in “Gene-Whiz Science,” chapter 5 of my 1999 book Undiscovered Mind; and in 2004 in an article for the Chronicle, “Do Our Genes Influence Behavior?”
Why does gene-whiz journalism get me so riled? Must be a genetic thing.

I have to brag.

Tonight, over dinner, just a half hour ago, my 11-year-old daughter Skye solved one of the most baffling mysteries I have ever encountered, a conundrum that has stumped the world’s most brilliant scientists. Let me explain.

In 1990, I traveled to a remote resort in the mountains of northern Sweden to attend a symposium, sponsored by the Nobel Foundation, on “The Birth and Early Evolution of Our Universe.” I was the only journalist there, along with 30 of the world’s leading imaginers of how the cosmos came to be. They included “The Simpsons” guest star Stephen Hawking; Jim Peebles, one of cosmology’s wisest wise men; Sidney Coleman, once described as a cross between Einstein and Woody Allen; Michael Turner, without doubt the leading cartoonist in astrophysics; John Ellis, hairy coiner of the term “theory of everything”; Alan Guth, mop-topped inventor of the inflation theory of creation; Martin Rees, the Royal Astronomer—you get the picture.

Also there was Andrei Linde, a flamboyantly creative Russian physicist, now at Stanford, and author of the chaotic, fractal, eternally self-reproducing, inflationary, multiverse theory of reality. He liked to explain all sorts of mysteries as products of what he called “kvantum fluctuation.”

One evening, the symposium organizers flew us by helicopter to a remote mountain lake, where everyone began imbibing a potent local brew called Wolf’s Blood. The following scene ensued, which I describe in The End of Science, page 98.

“After imbibing a drink or two…Linde snapped a rock in half with a karate chop. He stood on his hands and then flipped himself backwards and landed on his feet. He pulled a box of wooden matches out of his pocket and placed two of them, forming a cross, on his hand. While Linde kept his hand–at least seemingly–perfectly still, the top match trembled and hopped as if jerked by an invisible string. The trick maddened his colleagues. Before long, matches and curses were flying every which way as a dozen or so of the world’s most prominent cosmologists sought in vain to duplicate Linde’s feat. When they demanded to know how Linde did it, he smiled and growled, ‘Ees kvantum fluctuation.’”

As far as I know, none of the scientists at the meeting ever figured out how Linde did it. I’ve described the trick to many people since then, and no one else has figured it out either. I certainly haven’t.

Tonight, over dinner with my wife and kids, my 12-year-old son Mac mentioned a kid at school who can do backflips and other tricks, and I recalled Linde’s backflips and match trick. I even got a couple of matches to demonstrate the latter.

Skye took a match, put it in her palm, and said, “Maybe he did it this way.” She blew on the match—just a little puff—and it twitched, exactly as I remember the matches twitching in Linde’s palm.

“That’s it!” I yelled. I remembered Linde leaning his face toward the matches, staring at them intently, pretending that he was focusing his brain waves. Obviously he had learned how to blow on the matches without any detectable sound or movement of his mouth.

I’m so proud.

Maybe science has a future after all.

Right now, a dozen journalists—representing such influential media as The Washington Post, Reuters, Slate, The Guardian, BBC, NPR—are meeting in Cambridge, England, to ponder what is arguably the most consequential issue of our age, the relationship between science and religion. These opinion-makers are recipients of the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship, which is funded by the Templeton Foundation. I participated in the first fellowship, in the summer of 2005, and I wrote an essay about the experience for the April 7 Chronicle of Higher Education, “The Templeton Foundation: A Skeptic’s Take.”

I hope that the 2006 fellows will consider what I believe to be an important part of the science-religion story, which I call the Templeton effect. Through cash and other more subtle incentives, the Templeton Foundation amplifies the science-religion dialogue and nudges it in a particular direction, which favors religion in general and Christianity in particular. This is the Templeton effect. If people are more aware of the Templeton effect, it will diminish, and the dialogue fostered by Templeton funds will become more intellectually honest. That was why I described my first-hand observations of the Templeton effect (although I coined the phrase later) in my Chronicle essay.

“Skeptic’s Take” can be found on edge.org, along with mostly favorable responses from infidels like Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett and a piece in the London Times by the science writer Anjana Ahuja. The essay also provoked negative responses, notaby from Julia Vitullo-Martin, co-director of the fellowship and a journalist herself, and from several 2005 Templeton fellows. Vitullo-Martin’s letter was just published in the May 19 Chronicle; except for George Johnson, who spoke out on edge.org, the 2005 fellows have chosen not to publish their remarks.

A few of the 2005 fellows privately suggested if you take the foundation’s money, it is rude and unethical to criticize it afterwards. Obviously, and, yes, self-servingly, I disagree. I think accepting the foundation’s money gives journalists an even greater responsibility to examine its role in the current debate about science and religion.

The larger question is this: Should journalists, scientists and other scholars ever accept money from organizations whose goals they don’t share? If they do take the money, what are their ethical responsibilities thereafter? I raised these questions in an April 21 forum of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (the AAAS is, by the way, another ambivalent recipient of Templeton funds). I’ve decided to take the money, then bite the hand that feeds me. I realize this may not be the ideal route to moral purity or financial security.

Anyway, below are the letters published in the May 19 Chronicle, which are difficult to access online. Comments, as always, welcome.

To the Editor:

I’m a Christian doctoral student in Latin American history at a large state university in Florida. One of my hobbies is pop theology, especially the interstices of faith and science. I therefore very much enjoyed John Horgan’s mea culpa for accepting (as an agnostic) a fellowship from the John Templeton Foundation (“The Templeton Foundation: a Skeptic’s Take,” The Chronicle Review, April 7).

I found Mr. Horgan’s piece refreshingly honest. I concur wholeheartedly with him that the Templeton Foundation should not impose a Christian (or religious) worldview on applicants for grants or fellowships, or in any way engage in censorship of ideas.

However, I’m left with the impression that Mr. Horgan, despite his generally positive experiences and exchanges with “educated” Christians while at Cambridge, remains smugly cocksure of the unsullied virtues of secular humanism vis-à-vis religion. I find his openly stated desire to see faith and religion eradicated every bit as close-minded, self-righteous, and offensive as the theocratic desires of fundamentalists of all religions.

Certainly religion in general and Christianity in particular have a checkered past (and present), replete with crusades, jihads, inquisitions, and witch hunts. I wonder, however, how many more people have been victimized by the secular isms of the modern age. How many lives have been lost in wars fought for patriotism or nationalism? How many have been sacrificed in the name of imperialism, fascism, communism, and, yes, even capitalism?

Secularists, materialists, agnostics, and atheists, it seems, can be as fundamentalist as any born-again Christian. They just appeal to different gods (reason, objectivity, science, economics, etc.) than we monotheists do.

Roberto Pacheco, Ph.D. Candidate in Latin American History, Florida International University, Miami

To the Editor:

John Horgan expressed his “misgivings about the foundation’s agenda of reconciling religion and science” lest it interfere with his preferred cultural trajectory–namely, that religion would simply disappear. Horgan also expressed concern about Jack Templeton’s evangelical faith and the agenda he brings to the foundation, now that he has taken over the reins from his more theologically liberal father.

I have been involved in many Templeton projects over the past decade,and for the past several years I have headed up two publications funded by the foundation: Science & Theology News and Science & Spirit. Horgan has contributed excellent pieces to the latter, as have other top thinkers and writers.

I take issue with Horgan’s concerns about Jack Templeton and his assessment of the relations between science and religion. Horgan and many of his fellow journalists have a knee-jerk reaction to conservatives, as if they are all closet fascists who should be marginalized. Jack Templeton, with whom I have had many professional and personal interactions, is an informed and tolerant conservativemore conservative than Iwith articulate viewpoints that serve America’s pluralistic democracy well.

I have published many articles discussing and even promoting liberal viewpoints on hot-button topics that get many conservatives up in arms–homosexuality, stem cells, global warming, abortion, and so on. Not once has Jack Templeton used his considerable influence to redirect my editorial focus, or to promote a conservative agenda at either of the publications I head. Like his father before him, he welcomes a diversity of viewpoints, believing that the best ideas are those forged in the furnace of open discussion.

I also take issue with Horgan’s concern that a constructive engagement of science with religion should be opposed because it might derail secularization and give religion more staying power. Does he really think that America is better off with millions of evangelicals opposed to science as the enemy of their religion, rather than engaged with science as an important source of truth that might be incorporated into their faith? Religion in America is not going away, and everyoneincluding Horganwill be better off if that religion is scientifically informed.

Religions that have engaged with science find common ground and sensible ways to deal with controversies like those surrounding evolution, stem cells, and global warming. And secular ideologies like Nazism and Marxism have opened frightening windows through which we can view versions of worlds without religion. A world without religion might be brave and new, but there is no guarantee that it would be better.

Karl Giberson, Professor of Physics, Eastern Nazarene College

Editor in Chief, Science & Spirit, Science & Theology News

To the Editor:

The essay written by John Horgan about the Templeton Foundation was so full of misrepresentations and untruths that it’s difficult to know where to start….The aim of the Templeton-Cambridge fellowship is, and has from its origins been, to promote the public discussion of science and religion. We have no investment in the outcome of that discussion. It has not been the fellowship’s aim for one moment (or the John Templeton Foundation’s aim either) to reconcile science and religion….

We offered fellowships to journalists with the views that he seems to think are so controversial—as well as the contrary views—both last year and this. We know this not because we inquired, but because journalists tend to be articulate and happy to discuss their opinions. What those opinions happen to be are irrelevant to the fellowship’s directors.

The field of science and religion is vast, with a growing body of scholarly research and opinion. A critical function of the fellowship is to provide journalists with an island of time for study, discussion, and contemplation in a sea of pressing deadlines. The idea is to create a safe place in which journalists can deepen and broaden their knowledge of this growing field.

Mr. Horgan claims to have entered the fellowship determined not to expand his knowledge but to remain “true to his views.” If so, his determination faltered. For he had taken great pains during the extensive and rigorous fellowship application process to put forth a view quite the opposite of the one he now espouses. “My overarching concern,” he volunteered, “is whether science can be reconciled with mysticism and, more generally, with spirituality and religion. This, I believe, is one of the great questions for our age.”…

The premise of the Templeton-Cambridge Fellowship is that the marketplace of ideas works. We believe that the best ideas, whatever their source or their current popularity, will triumph in the end, even if they are occasionally waylaid by undisciplined thinking, gross distortions, and sloppy writing.

Julia Vitullo-Martin, Co-Director, Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

John Horgan responds:

Let me assure Karl Giberson and Roberto Pacheco that I am concerned about excessive belief in science as well as in religion. Moreover, I think science can be compatible with spirituality, particularly if it is shorn of supernatural trappings. These are major themes in my writings, including those I submitted in my application to the Templeton fellowship. But recent events, including some that took place during the fellowship, have deepened my anxiety about religion’s harmful effects, and hence about the Templeton Foundation’s goal of a “collaboration of science and religion.”

Incredibly, Julia Vitullo-Martin denies that the foundation or its journalism fellowship seeks “common ground” (Giberson’s phrase), reconciliation (my word), collaboration (from the foundation’s website) or any other outcome of the “dialogue” between science and religion. The fellowship she organized belies her assertion. The very first speaker, the Christian biologist Denis Alexander, argued that the conflict between science and religion has been exaggerated, and fourteen of the next 17 speakers said that they had reconciled their religious and scientific views. Only one speaker, Richard Dawkins, explicitly repudiated such a reconciliation.

Vitullo-Martin says I never suggested during the fellowship that humanity might be better off without religion. Actually, I proposed this notion ad nauseam during the second half of the fellowship, after Muslim fundamentalists bombed London, an event that profoundly affected all of us; I was also increasingly disturbed at how certain speakers, especially world-class scientists such as Simon Conway Morris, defended their supernatural religious beliefs.

Finally, Vitullo-Martin herself—contrary to her letter–told me that someone who wished that religion would fade away should not have accepted the fellowship.

“Wander down the halls of some neurobiology departments these days and you may catch a few decidedly nonscientific terms floating by in conversations there. Researchers reared in the hard materialism of Western science may well be chatting about Franciscan nuns, the Dalai Lama, the soul, or enduring happiness…. [Some researchers are] raising taboo topics such as whether the mind exists beyond the body or whether basic scientific knowledge must be linked to human values.”

Thus begins “Religion on the Brain,” an article in the May 26 Chronicle of Higher Education on “the connections between the brain and spirituality,” a topic I’ve been interested in—okay, obsessed with—for many years now. Rich Monastersky is an excellent, tough-minded reporter with whom I traveled to the South Pole in 1992 on an NSF junket for journalists (he was with Science News then). But I’ve got to give him a whack for this piece, which is far too credulous.

Monastersky does a good job highlighting major players involved in “exploring the connections between the brain and spirituality.” He mentions that this trend is being fueled by two pro-religion non-profits: the Templeton Foundation, which has a Christian slant, and the Mind and Life Institute, which favors Buddhism. He quotes a few skeptics, such as Christof Koch of Caltech, one of my favorite neuroscientists. But overall Monastersky is too sympathetic toward the growing “open-mindedness”—I’d call it flakiness–on the part of neuroscientists.

Of course no one has a clue how brains make minds; that is a major theme of all my books. But some neuroscientists interviewed by Monastersky, such as Donald Price of the University of Florida, suggest that we may need to jettison the notion that “consciousness exists only inside a body.” Huh? Monastersky should have asked what exactly that means. Are we talking ghosts? Angels? Astral projection? Heaven? Bodies without minds are all too common—I’m thinking of corpses, not George Bush–but no one has ever produced the tiniest shred of proof that minds can exist without bodies.

For example: The parapsychology-believer-turned-debunker Susan Blackmore has asked astral projectors to visit her home, read notes she has placed in various spots and tell her what they say after they return to their bodies. None have succeeded—because out-of-body experiences are delusions! As Christof Koch tells Monastersky: “No matter, never mind.”

Many of the scientists interviewed by Monastersky are Buddhists or quasi-Buddhists. In large part because of the immense personal charm of the Dalai Lama, Buddhism has become increasingly fashionable among scientists and other intellectuals lately. For more skeptical takes on Buddhism, see “Why I Can’t Embrace Buddhism” and “Why I Gave up on Zen.”

I’ll discuss the Templeton Foundation–whose cash infusions represent the the single largest cause of all the recent “convergence” between science and spirituality–soon.

It is a “tsunami,” a “revolution,” which “will make the computer revolution look like small change” and “will affect everything from the batteries we use to the pants we wear to the way we treat cancer.” This is how Jennifer Kahn describes nanotechnology in “Nano’s Big Future,” a classic example of gee-whiz science journalism in the June issue of National Geographic, which deserves a hearty whack. In the title and throughout the narrative, Kahn highlights the contrast between the scale of nanotechnology–really, really teeny–and its potential–really, really big. The U.S. government spent $1 billion in nanoresearch last year! Corporations will invest $4 billion this year! The National Science Foundation says nanotech will be a trillion-dollar industry by 2015! The Gap is already selling stain-resistant nanopants! Shaquille O’Neal is 2,160,000,000 nanometers tall!

The big payoff? Treatments for cancer. Kahn’s story begins and ends with Richard Smalley, a chemist and Nobel laureate who before he died of cancer last fall predicted that within 20 years “nanoscale missiles” will defeat the disease that defeated him. As evidence that Smalley’s prophecy is already coming to pass, Kahn cites research at Rice University, in which a treatment involving gold-plated silica nanospheres eliminated tumors—in mice. This “evidence” reminded me of a story I wrote in journalism school back in 1983 about that era’s cancer cure, monoclonal antibodies, which would soon cure cancer in humans because they were already curing it in mice. I remember my professor warning me that, unfortunately, what works in mice often doesn’t work in humans.

For a clearer-eyed account of nanotech, see “Tiny Toxins” by Phil Ross in the May/June issue of Technology Review. The potential health risks of nanoparticles, Ross notes, “could throw a shadow over the nanotech revolution.” Just this March, Ross notes, “six people went to the hospital after using a German household cleaning product called Magic Nano.” Ross adds that federal regulatory agencies are ill-equipped to assess the safety of nanoproducts. Sound familiar?