Occam's Broom

6. OCCAM’S BROOM

The molecular biologist Sidney Brenner recently invented a delicious play on Occam’s Razor, introducing the new term Occam’s Broom, to describe the process in which inconvenient facts are whisked under the rug by intellectually dishonest champions of one theory or another. This is our first boom crutch, an anti-thinking tool, and you should keep your eyes peeled for it. The practice is particularly insidious when used by propagandists who direct their efforts at the lay public, because like Sherlock Holmes’s famous clue about the dog that didn’t bark in the night, the absence of a fact that has been swept off the scene by Occam’s Broom is unnoticeable except by experts. For instance, creationists invariably leave out the wealth of embarrassing evidence that their “theories” can’t handle, and to a nonbiologist their carefully crafted accounts can be quite convincing simply because the lay reader can’t see what isn’t there.

How on earth can you keep on the lookout for something invisible? Get some help from the experts. Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell (2009) purports to expose the systematic impossibility of life having a natural (nonsupernatural) origin, and gives what seems—even to a relatively well-informed reader—to be a fair and exhaustive survey of the theories and models being worked on around the world, showing how irredeemably hopeless they all are. So persuasive is Meyer’s case that in November 2009 the eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel declared it his Best Book of the Year in London’s Times Literary Supplement, one of the world’s most influential publications of book reviews! In a spirited correspondence I had with him after his rave appeared, he demonstrated that he knew quite a lot about the history of work on the origin of life, enough to think he could trust his own judgment. And as he noted in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement (January 1, 2010), “Meyer’s book seems to me to be written in good faith.” Had Nagel consulted with scientists working in the field, he would have been able to see Meyer’s exploitation of Occam’s Broom, whisking inconvenient facts out of view, and he might also have been dismayed to learn that the experts hadn’t been sent an early copy of Meyer’s book, as he had, or been asked to referee it before publication. Learning that the book he admired was a stealth operation might have shaken his confidence in his judgment, or it might not have. The scientific establishment has been known to squelch renegade critics unjustly on occasion, and perhaps—perhaps—Meyer had no choice but to launch a sneak attack. But Nagel would have been wise to explore this prospect warily before committing himself. It is fair to say that the scientists working on the origin of life do not yet have a secure and agreed-upon theory, but there is no dearth of candidates, an embarrassment of riches rather than an almost empty arena.

Conspiracy theorists are masters of Occam’s Broom, and an instructive exercise on the Internet is to look up a new conspiracy theory, to see if you (a nonexpert on the topic) can find the flaws, before looking elsewhere on the web for the expert rebuttals. When Brenner coined the term, he wasn’t talking about creationism and conspiracy theories; he was pointing out that in the heat of battle, even serious scientists sometimes cannot resist “overlooking” some data that seriously undermine their pet theory. It’s a temptation to be resisted, no matter what.