Carelessness and dishonesty in academia: What does it signal and what do we do about it?

Richard Dawkins has taken issue with John Cornwell’s book Darwin’s Angel, where he alleges that Cornwell has made some gross misrepresentations of the content of The God Delusion, and questions if they were deliberate. Dawkin’s lists the evidence and to put it mildly, some of Churchill’s quoting of Dawkins is extremely dubious (not just flat out wrong).

Take for example from The God Delusion, Dawkins’ skeptical position towards the moral nihilism attributed to Dostoevsky because of the beliefs of his character Ivan Karamazov.

“It is widely believed that Dostoevsky was of that opinion, presumably because of some remarks he put into the mouth of Ivan Karamazov.”

(The God Delusion quoted at Richarddawkins.net, 2007)

Dawkins isn’t attributing the views of Ivan Karamazov to Dostoevsky. Heck, there is no really good reason to attribute Ivan’s views exclusively to Dostoevsky over any of the views of the other Brothers Karamazov. Indeed, Ivan seems damned by Dostoevsky in a way that seems like dog-whistling to theologians (at least that’s the impression I got – probably an artifact of reader response and my exposure to anti-atheist straw man arguments seemingly modeled on Ivan Karamazov).

But I’m getting beside the point. Dawkins went on to say;

“Perhaps naively, I have inclined towards a less cynical view of human nature than Ivan Karamazov.”

(The God Delusion quoted at Richarddawkins.net, 2007)

That is to say that unlike Ivan, Dawkins doesn’t believe that no God = no morality.

“You are happy to inform your readers, with the neat disclaimer — “Perhaps naively’ — that you have inclined towards a less cynical view of human nature than Dostoevsky.”

(Darwin’s Angel quoted at Richarddawkins.net, 2007)

This misquote of Dawkins (substitution of Dostoevsky for Ivan Karamazov) was used to claim that Dawkins himself misunderstood Dostoevsky by attributing the views of Karamazov to Dostoevsky. It gets worse.

“But if that is irritating, the following is gratuitously offensive. Cornwell is talking about Dostoevsky’s reading of nineteenth century thinkers. He mentions Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Utopian Marxism, and “a set of ideas that you would have applauded – Social Darwinism.” Does Cornwell seriously imagine that I would applaud Social Darwinism? Nobody nowadays applauds Social Darwinism, and I have been especially outspoken in my condemnation of it (see, for example, the title essay that begins A Devil’s Chaplain).”

(Richard Dawkins, 2007)

There is something that I find really odd about this scenario though. Cornwell isn’t simply a pundicrat who uses straw man arguments about atheists to arouse the sympathies of bigoted Christians with persecution complexes (although he seems to be trying pretty hard). Cornwell isn’t some hegemaniac Young Earth Creationist looking to trigger a Kuhnian scientific revolution through the contrived accumulation of faux-anomalies.

Cornwell is the director of the “Science and Human Dimension Project” at the Jesus College of Cambridge University.

Sadly, I’ve seen this kind of crap going on at Uni as well. Being straddled across the humanities and the natural sciences as I am, I’ve had the opportunity to either see hints of mild philistinism towards the humanities bubbling through the surface of older scientists, but to be honest I’ve seen far far worse in the humanities.

I’ve witnessed a vegetarian academic, when talking to a class about Darwinian evolution and ecology claiming that “maybe vegetarians are the next step of human evolution” and that the “top of the food chain” argument was about the hubris of the top species.

Wrong. Crap. Bogus.

For a start, speciation doesn’t involve one species disappearing, that happens further down the track (if at all). If evolution worked like that, there would be only one species on the planet. Speciation causes diversification. There are no “next steps”, just side steps that some populations take.

As for “top of the food chain” as justification for carnivory, in cases where this is relevant there are a number of things that can go wrong when you stop carnivory in an ecosystem. Here’s one: the heterotrophs that eat the autotrophs can experience a population boom that causes over-grazing which in turn can result in the collapse of the ecosystem.

While a lot of the meat eaten by humans isn’t justified by ecology (e.g. inhumane pig farms), some of it is; Kangaroos for example. Predation of Kangaroos by non-human species simply isn’t sufficient to prevent over-population.

Put simply, we had an academic totally mislead a class about evolution and food-chains.

Fortunately the mistakes (and I use this word cautiously) that I have witnessed have been more or less honest.  But am I being too fair? Should the standard for “honest mistake” be less tolerant of academics?

“I honestly thought… I didn’t know that… I never checked…” is good enough for non-academics, but academics who frankly are supposed to know (and study) what they are talking about? An honest mistake for an academic is perhaps one where they have genuinely tried to understand.

When an academic quotes from a text, it is inferred by way of their role that they have read it. If they have read it in good faith and then made a mistake, fine. But if they haven’t read relevant material in good faith, or at all, then they probably can’t be seen as honest unless giving a qualifier along the lines of “but don’t take me seriously, I haven’t bothered to look”.

The tragic thing is, these fallacies about evolution and ecology are oft repeated and well documented. As are those made about Richard Dawkins and atheism.

Which brings us back to Cornwell as possibly a harbinger for how all of this is going to pan out. There is no doubt that Cornwell is misrepresenting Dawkins and at best you can say that he hasn’t read The God Delusion in good faith. That is of course assuming that he is competent, which given his title I’m assuming he is.

But what if Dawkins’ suspicion is right? What if the distortion is deliberate? Will it just be an Oxford versus Cambridge spat? Will Cornwell be forced by the evidence to recant? Will Cornwell hold out and maintain he is right? If he does, it will strengthen the view that he is being misleading as he has to deal with more and more examples of his distortion coming to light.

Where is the breaking point? When do people (Cornwell himself included) move beyond the debate asking what distortions are being made and on to doing something about the distortions? If the Cornwells of the academic world persist in making distortions, will someone else have to do something and if so, what?

~ Bruce