I Explain Academia to Thomas Cudworth

Over at Uncommon Descent, Thomas Cudworth asks why prominent evolutionary scientists did not attend the Evolution 2011 conference in Norman, Oklahoma this summer.

Actually, to say "asks" is far too generous. He's doesn't seem at all interested in the answer; he's clearly intent on denigrating evolution's defenders by implying their absence indicates something is rotten with their scientific credentials.

This is just a Swift Boat-style attack: if the record of your own side is completely deficient, attack the other side's. Sadly for Mr. Cudworth, it is the scientific credentials of prominent ID proponents that are not exactly stellar. For example, in this post I examined the citation record of William Dembski, and in this one, I examined the scientific output of David Berlinski. Mr. Cudworth might equally want to ask, why has William Dembski not presented his work at an AMS meeting? Why does his work receive so few citations?

Nevertheless, since he seems so completely unfamiliar with how academia works, I will try to answer Mr. Cudworth's question as if it were genuine.

First, scientists are typically funded by a variety of funding agencies, which help to pay the cost of you and your students to attend a conference. Once you add up airfare, conference registration fees (often $300-$600 or more), transportation to and from the airport and to and from the conference site, and hotel, attending a conference can easily cost $2000 -- more if the conference is on another continent. Eventually, it becomes more important for your students to go to conferences than for you to go - you don't really need to advance your career very much, and it's better that your students get some visibility. So, given limited financial resources, you might choose to send them instead.

Second, conferences take up time, and many of us teach 9 months of the year or more, meaning that it is not so easy to simply pick up and shuffle off to a conference while teaching. Scientists who engage in field work (like some paleontologists) might spend most of their free time in the field collecting, or in the lab, preparing and analyzing specimens.

The bottom line is that, for reasons of time and funding, the typical academic scientist might attend only one or two conferences a year. Of course, there are jet-setters that attend 5 or 10 or 20 conferences a year, and some people (for example, those at small teaching colleges who get little funding) might attend no conferences at all.

Now, given that many of us have to choose the one or two conferences in a year we want to go to, we have to choose carefully. Do we really want to attend a huge conference like Evolution 2011, with a thousand or more attendees, covering a wide area that might have only a small intersection with our competence? Or should we attend a small workshop with 30 or 40 participants that is tightly focussed on our current interests? In my field, I might want to attend (just to name a few) STOC, FOCS, STACS, ICALP, DLT, DCFS, MFCS, LATA, SIAMDM, SODA, CIAA, WORDS, and CanaDAM. Clearly this is impractical. I have to choose.

So why would someone like Kevin Padian choose to go to Evolution 2011 instead of another conference in his area, vertebrate paleontology? Answer: there's no obvious reason he would. I have no idea what meetings Padian goes to, but I'm sure he has the same kinds of constraints I do.

And, as you get older, you slow down. When I was younger, attending a conference was more fun. Now that jet lag impacts my sleeping, and my health isn't always perfect, attending a conference can sometimes be a chore. I don't know for sure how old Paul R. Gross is, but I think he was born in 1928, which would make him about 82. Heck, at age 82, I sure hope I'll still be alive and attending conferences, but I don't know for sure. In any event, I'm happy to put Prof. Gross's scientific record up against Behe, Jonathan Wells, and other ID advocates. Richard Dawkins, at age 70, is no spring chicken either.

My thesis adviser once told me that he only attends conferences where he is presenting a paper. That might be yet another reason why someone might not attend a conference: he or she has submitted his papers to conferences more tightly focussed on his area of interest. Robert Pennock seems to be more of a philosopher and cognitive scientist; he might choose to attend conferences like the "Midwest Cognitive Science Meeting" instead.

The bottom line is that it is extraordinarily foolish to attempt to infer something about someone's scientific competence by their non-attendance at a single professional conference; only someone unfamiliar with academic science would attempt to do so.

But let's not fool ourselves. Cudworth is not interested in the answer. He just wants to score rhetorical points. When he says, "In most scientific areas, non-experts don’t pretend to stand in for experts" and asks, "how many of the self-appointed defenders of Darwinian evolution have demonstrated competence, proved by research and publication, in the field of evolutionary biology?", he might just want consider the competence of his own side. Why are lawyers Phillip Johnson and Casey Luskin, and philosophers Stephen Meyer and David Berlinski, and journalists David Warren, Tom Bethell, and David Klinghoffer, and mathematician William Dembski, such loud and ignorant voices against evolution, when they are not biologists? Indeed, my impression is that the vast majority of creationists and ID supporters are not biologists. Certainly this is true for people like Denyse O'Leary, Angus Menuge, Robert Coons, Henry Morris, Walter Bradley, Richard Milton, just to name a few.

Mr. Cudworth, there's a giant mote in your own eye.

Addendum: Cudworth responds by digging himself into an even deeper hole.

Amazing: it's not just that these guys are ignorant and arrogant - they're proudly so.