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[29]Essay

[30]Fall 2021

Manufacturing Consensus

Science needs conformity — but not the kind it has right now.

[31]M. Anthony Mills

Subscriber Only
[32]Sign in or [33]Subscribe Now for audio version

After having been told for over a year that there was a scientific
consensus that Covid had a natural origin — and that any suggestion of
a possible lab leak in Wuhan was tantamount to a xenophobic conspiracy
theory — it now appears that there is not, and never was, such a
consensus. And the lab-leak hypothesis, which once marked any
publication discussing it as fringe, has become the subject of an
official presidential investigation.

To be sure, the science on this matter is no more settled now than it
was before. A report commissioned by President Biden, and released in
August, found conflicting assessments from U.S. intelligence agencies
about the pandemic’s origin. Many scientists [34]still believe that the
virus most likely emerged from human contact with some kind of animal
host, and the past few months have not revealed any definitive new
evidence to the contrary. What they have revealed is that scientific,
political, and media elites have not been entirely forthcoming about
the true state of the experts’ knowledge of — and the uncertainty
surrounding — the origin of the virus. Some appear to have actively
suppressed public scrutiny of the question. At this point, we may never
be able to arrive at an answer. But if the lab-leak hypothesis does
turn out to be true, this episode will have done more to damage the
credibility of scientific experts than any other in recent memory.

Whatever the outcome — whether we learn that the virus jumped to humans
from an animal, or that it accidentally escaped from a laboratory, or
we remain in a state of ignorance — the lab-leak debacle may become a
potent symbol of science’s [35]crisis of legitimacy. The list of
boondoggles that much of the public, rightly or wrongly, blames on “the
experts” in general — from Vietnam to Iraq to 2008 — is long and
growing. But the current crisis comes amid a global emergency in which
medical and other scientific experts have played a role whose
prominence in public life and intimacy in private life is unlike any we
have seen.

What is worrisome about the lab-leak controversy therefore is not only
that our public discussions and political decisions about Covid-19 may
have been hampered by the experts’ mischaracterization of scientific
knowledge. The long-term danger is that the experts themselves have
helped to undermine public trust in scientific expertise and the
institutions that depend on it, at a moment when such knowledge is more
deeply intertwined with our social and political life than ever before.

To help us understand what went wrong, we need to ask again what
“scientific consensus” really means, and how the experts got it so
wrong in discussing Covid’s origins. One tempting response,
particularly to those already primed to distrust elites, is to conclude
that scientific consensus is inherently dangerous — little more than
self-deluded group think, or a tool for manipulating the public. But
that is the wrong conclusion to draw. Consensus, rightly understood, is
a distinguishing feature of modern science, indispensable to its
progress, and part of its well-earned authority in understanding the
natural world — it deserves a defense.

What the lab-leak controversy shows is not the danger of scientific
consensus per se so much as the danger — both to democratic discourse
and to science itself — when the concept of consensus gets weaponized
by those seeking to exploit the authority of science to stifle public
debate.

The Galilean Myth

According to one influential view, consensus should play no role in
science. This is because, so the argument goes, science is
fundamentally about questioning orthodoxy and elite beliefs, basing
knowledge instead on evidence that is equally available to all. At the
moment when science becomes consensus, it ceases to be science.

This view can be traced to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth
century, with precursors among some of modern science’s founders,
notably René Descartes. In the eighteenth century, it was extended and
embellished by Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and Paul-Henri
Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, who sought to use science to overthrow what
they saw as the superstitious dogmas of the past. This view of science
has since been kept alive by influential philosophical accounts no less
than popular portrayals of renegade scientists speaking truth to power.
We see its passionate democratic ideal in Mark Twain, who [36]heaped
scorn on the “breeds of Experts that sit around and get up the
Consensuses and squelch the new things as fast as they come from the
hands of the plodders, the searchers, the inspired dreamers, the
Pasteurs that come bearing pearls to scatter in the Consensus sty.”

In our own time, the “anti-consensus” view of science gets deployed
alternately by progressives and conservatives when marshalling science
to attack the views of their opponents. It has acquired a particular
allure during the coronavirus crisis — especially for critics of the
scientific establishment. To Covid skeptics, scientists brave enough to
question mainstream views on masks, lockdowns, and vaccines are
modern-day Galileos, [37]counter-experts who claim the mantle of
science by rejecting the consensus. [38]At the same time, defenders of
our government’s pandemic policies claim that Anthony Fauci is the real
Galileo, boldly facing the onslaught of Republican politicians and an
ignorant public.

But however influential, the characterization of science as
fundamentally anti-consensus is largely a myth. Like all myths, it has
its heroes, especially Galileo — who, having been forced by the
Catholic Church to recant the Copernican theory that the Earth revolves
around the Sun, is alleged to have muttered Eppur si muove! (“And yet
it moves!”). And also like all myths, this one contains [39]elements of
truth.

Early modern science did break with tradition in many respects. It did
so by rejecting particular scientific claims associated with medieval
religion, such as the ancient geocentric model of the cosmos. Modern
science also claimed autonomy from medieval religious and philosophical
traditions broadly, developing into its own distinctive intellectual
tradition. And, of course, scientists sometimes are and must be
skeptical of received wisdom and question entrenched beliefs.

These are the aspects of modern science that get reflected — and
exaggerated to the point of distortion — in popular portrayals of the
lone scientific genius resisting the tyranny of consensus. The truth,
however, is that while scientists may sometimes speak like Galileos,
especially when they find themselves on the margins of scientific or
political respectability, they rarely, if ever, act like the Galileo of
myth, even when they are challenging prevailing scientific views.

Science as a Tradition

A look at how Galileo and other founders of modern science actually
went about breaking with the past reveals the Galilean myth to be just
that. First, these thinkers hardly rejected all authority; most of
them, including Copernicus, Descartes, and Galileo, were religious
believers. Even Newton, who did indeed break with Christian orthodoxy,
for instance by denying the doctrine of the Trinity, based his faith on
what he took to be an older, more authoritative religious tradition.
Second, most of them relied on past philosophical and scientific
traditions far more than the Galilean myth would have us believe.

Descartes, for instance, deployed the technical vocabulary and
conceptual distinctions of medieval scholasticism when penning his
revolutionary works. Galileo was influenced by the Parisian nominalist
school of the fourteenth century, a group of medieval scientists who
criticized and reformulated key aspects of Aristotle’s physics, and who
laid the groundwork for the modern concept of inertia. Copernicus was
of course responsible for one of the greatest scientific revolutions in
history. The modern sense of “revolution” — meaning a transformative
change, not a circular motion — is said to originate from the title of
his work On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, which outlined the
heliocentric model of the solar system. Yet some scholars believe he
was influenced by ancient and medieval traditions of thought, from
Neo-Platonism to the Parisian nominalists to the fourteenth-century
Arab astronomer Ibn al-Shatir.

Or take Einstein, whom popular lore often portrays as the lone genius
overthrowing Newtonian physics. He was indeed one of the most creative
thinkers in the history of science, and a key figure in the second
scientific revolution that began in the nineteenth century. But he saw
his own path-breaking work as advancing, rather than overthrowing,
classical physics. His special theory of relativity, for instance,
unified the most prominent fields of physics at the time —
electromagnetism and mechanics — by drawing out the implications of two
accepted postulates (Galileo’s principle of the relativity of motion
and the invariance of the speed of light).

The greatest scientific innovators throughout history were not lone
geniuses, radically questioning everything that came before them and
building up science anew. The ideas of scientists such as Copernicus,
Galileo, Descartes, and Einstein were revolutionary, and faced
resistance from defenders of the scientific status quo. But these
revolutionaries were themselves masters of past traditions, including
those they helped to overturn. And many of them understood themselves
as building on, rather than rejecting, what came before.

None of this should be surprising. In order to participate in or
contribute to established science — much less to criticize or overthrow
it — one has to have been trained in the relevant scientific fields.
That is to say, one has to have been brought up in a particular
scientific tradition, whether geocentric or heliocentric astronomy, or
classical or relativistic physics.

Science as a Collective Practice

To be initiated into a tradition, one has to first submit to the
authority of its bearers — as an apprentice does to the master
craftsman — and to the institutions that sustain the tradition. In the
natural sciences, the bearers of tradition are usually exemplary
figures from the past, such as Newton, Einstein, Darwin, or Lavoisier,
whose stories are passed down by teachers and textbooks. For example,
first-year students of physics may be taught paradigmatic instances of
scientific discovery from the history of physics and astronomy, and
asked to imitate them — discoveries such as Galileo’s experiments with
falling objects, or Kepler’s derivation of the laws of planetary
motion, or Newton’s formulation of the universal law of gravity.

In doing so, students are not formulating hypotheses on the basis of
observations and then conducting experiments to test them, as the
“scientific method” requires. Nor are they independently confirming
scientific results by means of new experiments, as practicing
scientists might do. Instead, they are being told by their teachers and
textbooks that certain hypotheses are true — for instance, that an
object’s rate of fall is independent of its mass. And then they are
instructed to reproduce experiments, such as Galileo’s [40]inclined
plane experiment, knowing in advance that they will confirm them. Any
deviations from the expected experimental outcome are attributed to
error or inexperience — not to the students’ having made revolutionary
new discoveries.

The purpose of such exercises is not to transmit bits of information —
reading a book could accomplish that. Rather, it is to impart the
skills needed to practice science, including how to run an experiment,
calibrate a measuring device, interpret its results, and use these data
to test a hypothesis. While such skills involve theoretical knowledge,
they also depend on what scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi
referred to as “tacit knowledge” — the kind of knowledge that is
implicit rather than explicit, and can only be learned by doing.

To be sure, as students grow in experience, they learn to formulate
their own hypotheses and design new experiments. Along the way, they
may wind up questioning or even rejecting some of what they learned in
school. Eventually, they may pass from apprentices to masters — often
after having spent years working in the laboratory of an already
established researcher. If a student is unusually talented or lucky (or
both), he or she may not only corroborate or build on past discoveries
but also make new ones, transforming or even overturning existing
theories in the process.

In advancing the state of the field, however, a scientist remains
dependent on scientific authority in important respects. For instance,
he or she will take for granted those parts of established science that
go unchallenged by — or are required for — his or her research. This is
what Einstein did when he accepted parts of classical physics, such as
the relativity of motion, in order to draw conclusions that transformed
other parts, such as Newtonian conceptions of time and space. It would
be impossible for a single researcher to put to the test every single
theory or hypothesis needed to conduct scientific research. It would
require too much time, money, and mastery of too many kinds of
expertise. Nor would it be desirable.

If every scientist had acted as Descartes advised — radically doubting
everything except what can be deduced from indubitable first principles
— science would never have advanced beyond “I think, therefore I am.”
Even when making revolutionary advances, scientists do not generally
operate like skeptics, questioning all past assumptions or hypotheses
and beginning their work afresh on independently established
foundations. Rather, they accept the reliability of most established
scientific theories, methods, and techniques, along with the
trustworthiness of their fellow scientists.

The scientific enterprise, then, is not composed of an aggregate of
individual researchers locked in skeptical conflict with the prevailing
consensus, as the Galilean myth has it. It is a collective practice,
rooted in shared — albeit sometimes divergent or conflicting —
traditions of knowledge and habits of thought, requiring a high degree
of mutual cooperation and trust, even when revolutionary changes are
underway. This is why consensus is so vital to science — and why the
institutions of science not only can and do but should use their
authority to enforce it.

The Authority of Scientific Institutions

Scientific expertise is elitist, in the sense that the vast majority of
us are not qualified to practice science any more than the vast
majority of us are qualified to practice law or medicine or commercial
aviation. As a result, most people are barred from active participation
in scientific institutions —publishing in scientific journals,
presenting at scientific conferences, and teaching university-level
science courses. The barriers to entry into science are, and ought to
be, high. This is not what makes science unique; it’s what makes it a
form of expertise like any other.

One of the things that does make science unique, however, is the role
that consensus plays in establishing these barriers. A scientific
consensus helps to define a given field or subfield. It determines what
kinds of questions are genuine scientific questions and which are not;
which topics are in bounds and which are out; which methods are
appropriate and when; what kinds of empirical data are
counter-instances to established theory or anomalies yet to be
explained. This brings out what is one of the most important, if
overlooked, functions of scientific institutions: gatekeeping.

The great majority of opinions and conjectures, including even
scientific ones made by trained scientists, have no place in a mature
field, at least once a consensus has been well-established. In this
sense, a scientific consensus rules out as much — perhaps much more —
than it rules in. Reputable physics journals do not publish geocentric
theories of the solar system, for instance, no matter how sophisticated
the arguments, how well-credentialed the authors, and how reliable
their data. Nor do they publish refutations of such theories — this
would already be giving them too much credence.

Heliocentrism has been the consensus view for centuries (although
geocentric models are still useful in many practical contexts, such as
navigation). At a certain point in the sixteenth century, there were
various alternatives on the table — the mainstream geocentric view, its
heliocentric rival, and others, such as the view promoted by Tycho
Brahe that combined elements of both. But the heliocentric model has
long since been well-established — and refined and improved — and is
now deeply integrated into other well-established theories and, indeed,
our worldview. It would — and should — take a whole lot more than a
recalcitrant observation or sophisticated theoretical argument to get
scientists to abandon it, or even to consider alternatives.

Heterodox views, whether [41]geocentrism or [42]cold fusion or
[43]parapsychology, do of course get published in fringe journals. Some
of their contributors may be well-credentialed, and their arguments may
appear scientific, especially to the non-expert — with mathematical
equations and appeals to empirical evidence. Such scientists usually
have their own professional institutions — societies, conferences, and
publications — that often resemble mainstream ones, at least to
untrained eyes. (This makes bright-line demarcations between science
and “pseudoscience” harder to draw than we might like to believe.)

What is striking, however, is that the arguments presented in these
venues are almost never refuted by mainstream scientists. They may be
[44]publicly denounced, but without elaborate argumentation in
professional journals. Most of the time, they are simply ignored. This,
of course, only reinforces the perception of the fringe scientists that
their views are unfairly maligned by the majority — that they are the
true Galileos challenging the consensus. But when it comes to
well-established scientific theories, mainstream scientific
institutions have little choice but to ignore the vast majority of
fringe ideas. Science could never advance if it had to re-establish
every past theory, counter every objection, or refute every crank. This
is true in spite of the fact that a consensus may well turn out to be
wrong, incomplete, or in need of revision.

This grates against our democratic ears — we instinctively side with
Twain’s “inspired dreamers.” Yet most of us accept it as a matter of
course. Whenever we say that we believe, or dismiss those who doubt,
that the Earth revolves around the Sun, or that the universe is not
thousands but billions of years old, or that water is composed of one
oxygen and two hydrogen atoms, or that evolution takes place through
natural selection, we are implicitly accepting the authority of
scientific consensus and the scientific institutions that enforce it —
that is, unless we can carry out the relevant demonstrations,
experiments, or empirical observations ourselves.

Our situation, in other words, is one of [45]dependence — on the
testimony and thus the authority of others. This is true for many of
our beliefs, not just scientific ones. How do you really know, for
example, what city you were born in? What is unique about our
dependence on scientific experts is that much of the time, we are not
and could not be in a position to confirm whether their testimony is
reliable. We are not utterly or helplessly dependent. We can, for
instance, critically assess whether scientific experts seem credible or
trustworthy, as we do with anybody else on whose testimony we rely in
our ordinary lives. But to really know whether a scientific claim is
true we would have to become experts in, or at least intimately
familiar with, the relevant fields ourselves.

Yet acquiring such expertise is almost impossible for most of us, who
lack the ability or time or resources to do it. And no one — including
scientists themselves — has the ability or time or resources to acquire
expertise in every scientific field. As a result, all of us —
scientific experts and non-experts alike — are unavoidably dependent,
at least to some degree or another, on the authority of scientific
experts and the institutions, such as universities, journals, and
professional societies, that express the scientific consensus in a
given field.

An ‘Essential Tension’

What a scientific consensus provides — with the aid of authoritative
scientific institutions — is a relatively stable framework, held
together by mutual trust, within which scientists can advance
knowledge. This is what historians and philosophers of science call a
“research program” or “paradigm.”

A scientific paradigm is a set of beliefs and background assumptions,
not only about particular theories (like special relativity) and
hypotheses (like the invariance of the speed of light), but also about
methodologies and skills (such as experimental or mathematical
techniques), and even about philosophical postulates (such as the idea
that every event is determined by prior causes). All this gets
transmitted to the next generation of researchers by enculturation into
a scientific tradition. Thus understood, a scientific consensus cannot
be achieved, maintained, and transmitted without the authority of
scientific institutions.

But that does not mean that scientific authorities are infallible, as
we well know from history. A scientific consensus may need to be
revised, or even rejected. This is what happened to the geocentric
model of the cosmos, which was replaced by the heliocentric one, and to
classical physics, which was challenged and then reinterpreted by
relativistic and quantum physics.

To be sure, such reforms and revolutions can only happen if some
minority of scientists breaks with prevailing views and poses new
problems, or new methods for solving old ones, or if they make bold new
conjectures, or combine old theories in creative new ways. Yet such
ruptures are, well, disruptive, even painful, potentially requiring
wholesale rejection or revision of past theory and practice. It is no
surprise that scientific institutions tend to resist them. The bar for
throwing out battle-tested theories is high, and ought to be.

The possibility of revolutions in science means that some of today’s
scientific consensuses may someday be rejected. It may even turn out
that some of today’s fringe scientists really are tomorrow’s Galileos.
Historically, scientists who have successfully challenged scientific
orthodoxy were often treated as cranks, at least initially. But,
however important for the advancement of science, such revolutionaries
are exceedingly rare. And much scientific progress happens during
periods of relative calm — what historian of science Thomas Kuhn
referred to as “normal science.” Science would break down if its
institutions opened the door to every would-be Galileo.

This delicate balance between tradition and revolution, stability and
instability, stasis and change, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, is what
Polanyi called “[46]purposive tension” and Kuhn called the
“[47]essential tension” in science. It is what gives modern science its
characteristic dynamism. And it is the job of scientific institutions
to ensure that the tension remains productive. They must be at once
flexible enough to accommodate both piecemeal and large-scale change,
and strong enough to resist corrosive forces that would undermine
scientific progress.

To strike this balance, scientific institutions must maintain and
enforce standards and ensure that scientists are held accountable to
them — which requires that the institutions retain sufficient
authority, that they are recognized as legitimate by scientists and
non-scientists alike.

Why Consensus Is Rare

Viewed in this light, consensus is not what stifles science but part of
what makes it progress — and lends it its unique epistemic authority.
Long before it had demonstrated its technological power — before
electrification and radio and atomic weapons and computing — modern
science, especially classical physics, stood as an exemplar of the kind
of knowledge that could command common assent. This was a striking
contrast to traditional philosophy and theology, which was and remains
riven by disagreement and competing schools of thought. But while the
achievement of consensus is characteristic of modern science, it does
not characterize all of science — or even most of it.

There is typically no consensus in an immature field or subfield, for
example when empirical data are sparse, or the boundaries of the field
are still fuzzy, or methods and standards of evidence remain in
dispute. Consensus is also frequently lacking in the social sciences,
such as economics, psychology, and sociology, and in well-established
interdisciplinary fields, such as environmental science and public
health. This is not to say there is never consensus within these
fields. But there are often deep, even irreconcilable disagreements
within them, and rival schools of thought — about what kinds of methods
are appropriate, say, or which theories are supported by the evidence,
or what standards of evidence to use, or even whether the field in
question should be understood as a science at all. For example,
sociologists disagree about whether their discipline is a science,
public health experts clash over what kind of evidence should be used
to assess medical interventions, and psychologists argue over the
merits of various statistical techniques.

Such disputes and divisions are less common in the natural sciences.
You will not hear chemists debating whether chemistry is a science, or
physicists arguing about whether calculus is an appropriate
mathematical tool. Notably, this was not always so: The scientific
status of what came to be called chemistry was in dispute prior to
Lavoisier, and calculus was controversial when it was first introduced
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These consensuses had to
be won, as all do.

Even within our most well-established branches of natural science,
consensus is not guaranteed. There is no consensus today in theoretical
physics about whether string theory is a satisfactory unification of
quantum and relativistic physics. Nor is there a consensus in
evolutionary biology about the extent to which random genetic drift can
account for evolutionary changes. From this perspective, a scientific
consensus looks like a rare and precious thing. It is perhaps the
exception rather than the rule in science — especially if by “science”
we mean to include not only the natural but also the various human,
social, and medical sciences.

‘Consensus’ without Consensus

Yet, the achievement of consensus within science, however rare and
special, rarely translates into consensus in social and political
contexts. Take nuclear physics, a well-established field of natural
science if ever there were one, in which there is a high degree of
consensus. But agreement on the physics of nuclear fission is not
sufficient for answering such complex social, political, and economic
questions as whether nuclear energy is a safe and viable alternative
energy source, whether and where to build nuclear power plants, or how
to dispose of nuclear waste. Expertise in nuclear physics and literacy
in its consensus views is obviously important for answering such
questions, but inadequate. That’s because answering them also requires
drawing on various other kinds of technical expertise — from statistics
to risk assessment to engineering to environmental science — within
which there may or may not be disciplinary consensus, not to mention
grappling with practical challenges and deep value disagreements and
conflicting interests.

It is in these contexts — where multiple kinds of scientific expertise
are necessary but not sufficient for solving controversial political
problems — that the dependence of non-experts on scientific expertise
becomes fraught, as our debates over pandemic policies amply
demonstrate. Here scientific experts may disagree about the meaning,
implications, or limits of what they know. As a result, their authority
to say what they know becomes precarious, and the public may challenge
or even reject it. To make matters worse, we usually do not have the
luxury of a scientific consensus in such controversial contexts anyway,
because political decisions often have to be made long before a
scientific consensus can be reached — or because the sciences involved
are those in which a consensus is simply not available, and may never
be.

To be sure, scientific experts can and do weigh in on controversial
political decisions. For instance, scientific institutions, such as the
National Academies of Sciences, will sometimes issue “consensus
reports” or similar documents on topics of social and political
significance, such as [48]risk assessment, climate change, and
[49]pandemic policies. These usually draw on existing bodies of
knowledge from widely varied disciplines and take considerable time and
effort to produce. Such documents can be quite helpful and are
frequently used to aid policy and regulatory decision-making, although
they are not always available when needed for making a decision.

Yet the kind of consensus expressed in these documents is importantly
distinct from the kind we have been discussing so far, even though they
are both often labeled as such. The difference is between what
philosopher of science Stephen P. Turner [50]calls a “scientific
consensus” and a “consensus of scientists.” A scientific consensus, as
described earlier, is a relatively stable paradigm that structures and
organizes scientific research. By contrast, a consensus of scientists
is an organized, professional opinion, created in response to an
explicit political or social need, often an official government
request.

This second type of consensus is more like a decision by committee. It
is second-order, so to speak: It represents a deliberate expression of
collective judgment on the part of a scientific institution about how
the available scientific research or evidence, often from many
different fields, pertains to a given question or policy.

Whatever the value of such expert opinions, they are not the same as a
scientific consensus of the kind that characterizes fields such as
particle physics or molecular biology — the kind that is the
well-earned source of modern science’s epistemic authority. A consensus
of scientists can and often will draw on fields in which there are
scientific consensuses. But an expert opinion expressing a second-order
judgment about whether and how such knowledge bears on a particular
policy matter is not the same thing as a scientific consensus.
Moreover, the existence of such a second-order consensus does not
necessarily settle disagreements in the contentious realm of politics,
when much more than scientific evidence is at stake, when facts may be
in dispute and values in open conflict. As we saw above, even a
scientific consensus rarely does that.

And this, at last, brings us back to the lab-leak controversy.

The ‘Natural Origin’ Consensus that Wasn’t

From the early days of the pandemic, we were told that there was a
scientific consensus that Covid had a natural origin. Scientific
institutions and [51]popular media [52]promoted the claim, while social
media platforms [53]banned dissenting views as “misinformation.” Most
prominently, a February 2020 [54]letter in the prestigious scientific
journal The Lancet, by a group of twenty-seven well-credentialed
scientists, claimed that the experts who analyzed the virus
“overwhelmingly conclude” that Covid-19 had a natural origin. The
authors went further, condemning any suggestions that the virus might
not have a natural origin as “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories”
that encourage “prejudice.”

It [55]was later revealed that the scientist who organized this letter,
British zoologist Peter Daszak, failed to disclose a rather significant
competing interest: He is the CEO of EcoHealth Alliance, the non-profit
funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health that has supported
[56]controversial research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the
Chinese lab that is the prime suspect for a possible leak. According to
a June [57]investigative piece in Vanity Fair, Daszak not only failed
to disclose this connection, but did so “with the intention of
concealing his role and creating the impression of scientific
unanimity.” And we now know, based on a series of in-depth journalistic
reports and publicized emails between Anthony Fauci and other experts,
there was — and still is — far more uncertainty about the virus’s
origin than that Lancet letter led us to believe.

As NBC News has reported, on [58]January 31, 2020, Kristian Andersen,
an infectious disease expert at Scripps Research in California, wrote
an email to Fauci raising the possibility that the virus had been
“engineered.” Just four days later, in an email offering feedback to a
National Academies of Sciences letter, Andersen called such ideas
“crackpot theories.” The “data,” he now said, “conclusively show” that
the virus was not engineered, neither for research nor for “nefarious
reasons.” Commenting on his own rapid about-face, Andersen later wrote:
“We seriously considered a lab leak a possibility,” but “significant
new data, extensive analyses, and many discussions” led him and his
colleagues to reach a different conclusion. “What the email shows, is a
clear example of the scientific process.”

This line continues to be parroted in the [59]mainstream media. But one
does not need to be a scientific expert to recognize that this is not
the scientific process at work. At least, it is not the same scientific
process that produced the scientific consensus surrounding
heliocentrism or relativistic physics or the modern evolutionary
synthesis. These are the kinds of consensus that scientific
institutions can and should enforce, ones which, once established — and
it usually takes a little longer than four days — are difficult to
overturn. What we had in February 2020 appears, instead, to have been a
forced consensus — a contestable characterization of scientific
knowledge foisted prematurely onto the public by a small number of
scientific experts and policed by the media.

In retrospect, the claim that there was a scientific consensus about
the origins of the virus should have been surprising on its face. As we
have seen, a consensus is a rare achievement in science, and hard-won
at that. It can take years or even decades to form. So how could there
have been a scientific consensus about the origins of a virus whose
existence was unknown less than two months prior? Certainly, this was
no scientific consensus, if by that we mean the kind that is
characteristic of modern science and the source of its unique
authority.

Perhaps this is unfair. Perhaps the relevant notion of “consensus” is
not that of a scientific paradigm but rather the kind of “consensus of
scientists” described earlier — a collective expert judgment about
available scientific evidence. Indeed, there was scientific research,
especially genomic analyses, that suggested a natural origin as early
as February 2020. And many scientists agreed with this assessment then,
and [60]still do now.

But if that is what the experts meant by “consensus,” then it’s a lot
harder to see why dissenting views should have been treated not merely
as minority opinions but utterly beyond the pale. What’s more, even if
scientific opinion had been unanimous about the evidence that was then
available, this would hardly have amounted to a consensus of any
meaningful sort, given how very little evidence there was. Consider
just a few of the reasons why not.

First, the experts began making pronouncements about a scientific
consensus before there was any official investigation into the origins
of the pandemic — roughly a year before the World Health Organization
even started its official inquiry. (The WHO’s director-general later
[61]said he believed there had been a “premature push” to rule out the
lab-leak hypothesis, and [62]described the official investigation as
not “extensive enough.”) It’s hard to imagine an ordinary research
scientist trumpeting a scientific consensus about a hypothesis that had
yet to be systematically investigated — and castigating anyone who
doubted it as a xenophobic conspiracy monger — even if he could point
to some suggestive analyses. Second, key pieces of empirical evidence
were lacking in early 2020. For instance, epidemiological data on early
cases in Wuhan were not then available — nor indeed are they now, since
the Chinese government has [63]refused to share them with the WHO.
Third, scientists who posit a natural origin of the virus have
theorized that it likely arose in a bat, but also that the first human
likely did not get directly infected from a bat — meaning there should
be an intermediary host animal. But no such animal had been identified
then — nor has it since.

Given the evidence available in February 2020, it would have been
perfectly reasonable for scientific experts to formulate conjectures or
make predictions or to express informed opinions about the origins of
the virus. And it would have been (and remains) perfectly reasonable
for experts to articulate why certain opinions or conjectures appear
less probable than others, and to inform the public and to advise
lawmakers accordingly.

This is much closer to the spirit of the short [64]letter that the
National Academies of Sciences sent to the U.S. Office of Science and
Technology Policy on February 6, 2020. While stating that “the closest
known relative” of the virus “appears to be a coronavirus identified
from bat-derived samples collected in China,” it also explained that
“additional genomic sequence data … are needed to determine the origin
and evolution of the virus.” (Oddly enough, this letter was prominently
cited in the Lancet letter as providing further support for the
“overwhelming” conclusion that the virus had a natural origin.)

But a collective expert opinion of this sort, especially early on and
on the basis of the scanty evidence then available, cannot carry the
same weight — or the social and political authority — as a scientific
consensus. Really, it did not even amount to a “consensus of
scientists,” just an invitation to further study. And even a true
consensus of scientists at that stage could not have justified
banishing alternative viewpoints as conspiratorial or xenophobic
lunacy.

So why did “consensus” talk get so misused?

Grasping for Authority

Consensus formation is messy, but scientific history is written by the
victors. The consensus is the finished product, which gets printed in
textbooks, taught in schools, cited in scientific reports, and
popularized in the media. The messy history that gave rise to it gets
papered over. Rather than rival scientific theories and clashing
standards of evidence, we get a triumphalist narrative in which the
consensus appears as the inevitable outcome of linear scientific
progress. From a distance, the process appears neat and tidy.
“[65]Distance lends enchantment,” as the sociologist of science Harry
Collins puts it.

Most of the time, this distance between the messy reality of scientific
practice and its polished public image is no cause for concern.
Scientists and scientific institutions — particularly in such fields as
physics, astronomy, chemistry, and biology, in which there is often a
high degree of consensus — have accrued considerable authority and thus
credibility over the course of centuries. In those fields, we don’t
necessarily need or even care to know all that goes into the research
that leads scientists to reach a consensus. One reason for this is that
the consequences of such research rarely affect ordinary citizens
directly. The chemical composition of distant stars, the breeding
patterns of whales, the age of the universe — such bits of knowledge
tell us much about the natural world we inhabit, but they don’t impact
our daily lives, at least in any immediate way.

With the pandemic, this distance collapsed. Not only did decisions have
to be made quickly, without awaiting a scientific consensus, but
countless scientific fields and subfields had to be called upon [66]at
once, making expert disagreement almost unavoidable. Moreover, unlike
in theoretical physics or astronomy, getting the science right during a
pandemic does matter for our everyday lives — indeed for our very lives
— making public scrutiny both necessary and unavoidable. At the same
time, the authority of traditional scientific institutions such as
journals has weakened, as they have sought to adapt to the pace of
shifting circumstances by encouraging faster publication. “[67]Fast
[68]science” has resulted in the wide availability of research that has
not been vetted by the standard processes of scientific evaluation,
accelerating the proliferation of scientific information, both genuine
and counterfeit, and narratives contrary to mainstream scientific and
political views. If distance lends enchantment, proximity lends
disenchantment, even resentment.

What we have seen with the lab-leak controversy is experts responding
to this state of affairs not with the kind of humility the situation
calls for, but by forcing consensus to create the appearance of
certitude in order to preserve their social and political authority.
The misrepresentation of the state of our knowledge regarding Covid’s
origins was therefore not simply a misstep or institutional failure. It
was a perversion of the norms that scientific institutions and experts
are supposed to uphold.

In our frustration at the scientific establishment, we must remember
that skepticism in science has its limits, and that there are moments
where science’s integrity must be protected by enforcing consensus. But
this was not one of them. Ironically, the experts who trumpeted a
natural-origin “consensus” to bolster their credibility instead lost
it. We hear constantly today, and rightly enough, that trust in
scientific expertise is under assault. Too often during Covid, the
assailants have been the experts themselves.

Topics

* [69]Scientific Integrity
* [70]History of Science
* [71]Technocracy and Expertise
* [72]Public Health

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[75]M. Anthony Mills is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute and a senior fellow at the Pepperdine School of Public
Policy.
M. Anthony Mills, “Manufacturing Consensus,” The New Atlantis, Number
66, Fall 2021, pp. 30–46.
Header image: [76]DariuszPa / iStockPhoto

Essay

[77]Fall 2021

Topics

* [78]Scientific Integrity
* [79]History of Science
* [80]Technocracy and Expertise
* [81]Public Health

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