Carl Sagan is not usually remembered as a political prophet, aside from pioneering recognition of the dangers of nuclear war and remaining an inspiration to opponents of drug criminalization. But his inquiry probed any political order’s taboo “set of forbidden possibilities, which its citizenry and adherents must not at any cost be permitted to think seriously about” (like the USSR’s “capitalism, God, and the surrender of national sovereignty” or the USA’s “socialism, atheism, and the surrender of national sovereignty”). Otherwise, it would wither, as with antiquity’s Alexandrians who never “seriously challenged the political, economic and religious assumptions of their society. The permanence of the stars was questioned; the justice of slavery was not.”

While not a radical leftist like his feminist wife and coauthor Ann Druyan or his New Leftist friend Saul Landau (who, in a sign of the up-in-the-air alliances of the times, contributed to the Cato Institute’s Inquiry Magazine), his liberalism was influenced by the ferment of SDS’s participatory democracy Whole Earth Catalog-style emancipatory technology. It was thus steadfastly in favor of civil liberties, people power, and sexual liberation, and highly wary of moral panics and calls to trade freedoms for security. Despite being vilified by a right dominated by National Review hawkishness, he sought common ground with pro-lifers. As he said of Albert Einstein, he “was always to detest rigid disciplinarians, in education, in science, and in politics,” and his distrust of politics was evident in proposing “[a] series in which we relive the media and the public falling hook, line and sinker for a coordinated government lie.”

He took note that the flowering of inquisitive, tolerant values in ancient Greece and Renaissance Holland grew from their trading economies; as his muse Bertrand Russell put it,

The relation of buyer and seller is one of negotiation between two parties who are both free; it is most profitable when the buyer or seller is able to understand the point of view of the other party. There is, of course, imperialistic commerce, where men are forced to buy at the point of the sword; but this is not the kind that generates Liberal philosophies, which have flourished best in trading cities that have wealth without much military strength.

His antidote for the existential crises of nuclear war and environmental damage was not consensus reasonable-centrism — he was apprehensive of the triumphalist The End of History prediction “that political life on Earth is about to settle into some rock-stable liberal democratic world government” — but the widest possible experimentation. He recommended two of the great science fiction depictions of functional stateless societies: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, with its “useful suggestions… for making a revolution in a computerized technological society,” and Eric Frank Russell’s “conceivable alternative economic systems or the great efficiency of a unified passive resistance to an occupying power.” He hoped the inspiration of such ideas would make a reality “the beginning, much more than the end, of history.”

 -Richard Stallman, Words to Avoid (or Use with Care) Because They Are Loaded or Confusing

Science and innovation are chaotic, stochastic processes that cannot be governed and controlled by desk-bound planners and politicians, whatever their intentions. Good scientists are by definition anarchists.

-Theo Wallimann, biologist at ETH Zurich

The individual is the basic functional unit of innovation. Institutions provide resources — capital, human and fixed. But free people can achieve a lot with very little.

Steve Wozniak built Apple from a garage (with the help of frontman Jobs), and now it reigns among the largest companies in the world (not to glorify the crooks at Apple — they are patent trolls and sweatshop labor exploiters).

Do-It-Yourself scientists working in hackerspaces are positioned to make significant contributions with low overhead and little formal training (becoming necessary and valuable apprenticeship sites as the current higher education system deteriorates). The state has yet to heavily clamp down, but, because such freedom threatens the status quo, we can expect intervention to intensify.

Stigmergic Science

The magnitude of creative productivity is most strongly correlated with the number of researchers, and less with the talent of the individuals involved, and fortunately the positive feedback loop (or virtuous cycle) of technology continues to lower the cost of instrumentation. That is, happy accident probability is proportional to time invested rather than just skill.

Establishment science institutions are somewhat impeded from developing groundbreaking, disruptive or revolutionary technologies, for three reasons:

First, they need to be able to monopolize them. Anything that lends itself to decentralization (solar power, self-replicating 3D printers) threatens the established order and will be resisted to the end. If a modern-day Nikola Tesla were to invent a disruptive energy technology, s/he would likely be suppressed, just as J.P. Morgan and Edison suppressed [1] Tesla.

“Science is but a perversion of itself unless it has, as its ultimate goal, the betterment of humanity.”                            – Nikola Tesla

Second, visible and legally liable institutions must abide the patent monopoly structure. They must pay for the use of ideas. Garage developers fly below the radar. Thus, R&D is cheaper, but patents make marketing a product prohibitively expensive and retard deliverability.

Finally, far-out ideas make established scientists uncomfortable. If your entire career was built around the fax machine, phrenology, the geocentric model or the beeper, you’re not too excited about these crazy kids and their ideas. There is a lot of untapped brainpower out there. The state education mill is a barrier to entry, a great divider — a credential firewall. MOOCs and badges may displace the academic cartel, but not without vested interests fighting to halt creative destruction along the way.

Aided by Randomness

“Academic Libertarian,” statistician and philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb recognizes that “stochastic tinkering” rather than systematic, institutional agendas yield the greatest discoveries. Taleb is best known for coining the term “Black Swan,” to describe hard-to-predict and disproportionately momentous events.

Stochastic tinkering is a process of trial and error, present in all creative endeavors, where randomness plays a great role. Taleb writes, in his essay The Birth of Stochastic Science (PDF):

The world is giving us more “cheap options”, and options benefit principally from uncertainty. So I am particularly optimistic about medical cures. To the dismay of many planners, there is an acceleration of the random element in medicine putting the impact of discoveries in a class of Mandelbrotian power-law style payoffs.

It is compounded by another effect: exposure to serendipity. People are starting to realize that a considerable component of the gravy in medical discoveries is coming from the “fringes”, people finding what they are not exactly looking for. It is not just that hypertension drugs lead to Viagra, angiogenesis drugs lead to the treatment of macular degeneration, tuberculosis drugs treat depression and Parkinson’s disease, etc., but that even discoveries that we claim to come from research are themselves highly accidental, the result of tinkering narrated ex post and dressed up as design. The high rate of failure should be sufficiently convincing of the lack of effectiveness of design. […]

All the while institutional science is largely driven by causal certainties, or the illusion of the ability to grasp these certainties; stochastic tinkering does not have easy acceptance. Yet we are increasingly learning to practice it without knowing — thanks to overconfident entrepreneurs, naive investors, greedy investment bankers, and aggressive venture capitalists brought together by the free-market system [sic].

I am also optimistic that the academy is losing its power and ability to put knowledge in straightjackets and more out-of-the-box knowledge will be generated Wiki-style. But what I am saying is not totally new.

Accepting that technological improvement is an undirected (and unpredictable) stochastic process was the agenda of an almost unknown branch of Hellenic medicine in the second century Mediterranean Near East called the “empirics”. Its best known practitioners were Menodotus of Nicomedia and my hero of heroes Sextus Empiricus. They advocated theory-free opinion-free trial-and-error, literally stochastic medicine. Their voices were drowned by the theoretically driven Galenic, and later Arab-Aristotelian medicine that prevailed until recently.

Radical Biology

As a biologist, I can strongly affirm the accuracy of Taleb’s notion of “accidental” discovery in this field. Biology is extremely complex and experimental outcomes are unpredictable.

Living organisms and cells require time to grow and change. There are too many moving parts and holding them constant is difficult because we don’t even know how many parts there are and how they interact. Metabolic pathways are considered both discrete and continuous, but no one doubts that they are dynamically equilibrating systems that cannot be easily modeled, not as amenable to tinkering like mechanical or chemical engineering — even basic biology is expensive and has historically been the purview of big-budget institutions.

That is changing.

Theory, as usual, has a weak barrier to entry. Projects like TinkerCell allow cellular biologists to design their own metabolic pathways and share them open-source with a community, dramatically boosting stigmergic idea development and cross-pollination. What one wrote on a pad and paper and filed away in a dusty file cabinet for posterity will soon be indexed and searchable.

“Wetlabs,” however, are the big story. These labs are now becoming available to those not associated with universities or corporations. Anyone in the community can pitch in and do biology. Science enthusiasts are organizing IRL to poke and prod at the mystery of life (Making the Modern Do-It-Yourself Biology Laboratory, Singularity Hub).

Molecular biologist Ellen Jorgensen established Genspace, a major DIY lab in Brooklyn. Some highlights from her TED talk:

“You might be asking yourself, ‘What would I do in a biolab?’ Well, it wasn’t that long ago we were asking, ‘What would anyone do with a personal computer?’”

“The press had a tendency to consistently overestimate [biohackers’] capabilities and underestimate our ethics.”

“DIY [biotech] people from all over the world … got together last year, and we hammered out a common code of ethics. That’s a lot more than conventional science has done.”

“[In a DIY bio lab,] you can work on a project and you don’t have to justify to anyone that it’s going to make a lot of money, that it’s going to save mankind, or even that it’s feasible.”

If you want to get involved, check out this listing of DIY wetlabs, or start your own.

If the success of young scientists like Jack Andraka (who surfed the internet and developed a promising and cheap pancreatic cancer screening test — with the help of professionals) are any indication, it’s better to have a lot of moderately-trained people doing science than just a vanguard of highly trained experimenters.

Regarding experiments, something can be said for quantity over quality, perhaps for two reasons: First, experiments take time. The more the merrier. Second, accidental, wild, speculative results are born from intractable randomness — and positive Black Swans may be more likely to come out of science than, say, finance or statecraft.

In this era of big science, the most important lesson to be learned from […] the achievements of countless amateurs is that scientific observations and discoveries don’t necessarily require giant government grants and huge teams of researchers with specialized degrees. Small science still works, and it often works during off hours, weekends, and holidays when professionals are generally at home or on vacation. -Forrest M. Mims III (1999), writing in Science.

Paternalism Comes Knocking

As is evident from several millennia of prudent governance by states, the right balance between free-form innovation and legal restriction will be struck. Statists are already calling for regulation, but restrictions are quite unenforceable (the tools and knowledge of garage science are becoming ever more accessible).

A number of regulatory approaches have been put forward: requiring biosafety training for all practitioners through programs designed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, registering community labs with government agencies, requiring some type of personal liability insurance, excluding felons from DIY activities, and instituting screenings for loyalty and integrity. [2]

The feds have already goofed up an investigation, branding an artist as a bioterrorist.

Casting a long shadow over the DIY bio movement is the case of Steven J. Kurtz, an art professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The case has been held up as a warning about overly aggressive law enforcement in cases involving home laboratories. While not a scientist—professional or amateur—Kurtz uses DNA and other biological materials in his artwork.

In May 2004, Kurtz and his wife, Hope, had been preparing commissioned works when Hope Kurtz died at their home. Her husband called 911. Her death was later determined to be of natural causes. In attending to Hope Kurtz, emergency personnel observed Petri dishes containing bacteria cultures and food–testing equipment that was considered suspicious. They contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Authorities later told Kurtz he was being investigated for bioterrorism, and, eventually, Kurtz and Robert E. Ferrell, former chair of the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Human Genetics, were indicted on mail and wire fraud for their alleged efforts to obtain biological organisms from a lab that was not allowed to sell to individuals.

In April 2008, a federal judge dismissed the mail and wire fraud charges against Kurtz, noting that there was insufficient proof to go forward. Ferrell was fined $500 after pleading guilty to a count of mailing an injurious article, a misdemeanor.

Scientists had feared the case would be precedent–setting, but instead it has turned out to be a cautionary lesson about the dangers of under–educated law enforcement personnel who cannot tell the difference between a bioterrorist lab and an artist’s studio using common bacteria.

The FBI says it has done much to make sure the Kurtz incident stays as the exception rather than the rule. Many safeguards and precautions have been put into place since the announcement, most important, the education of local law enforcement about DIY scientists and labs.

State enforcement will prove incapable of preventing anyone from, say, dumping noxious chemicals or developing the next superbug (indeed, states are already doing that — they just try to keep them in the lab) — but bio-hackerspace communities might. Everyone else’s experiments tend to be known to others, and getting away with anything sinister is much harder.

The greatest risk in state control of scientific inquiry is this: the government is likely to suppress inventions that threaten profit and mass control. Energy and medicine (PDF) are particularly sensitive areas for the corporation-state. Scientists of the future must be skeptical of idea management by means of centralized systematic violence.

“It is the responsibility of scientists never to suppress knowledge, no matter how awkward that knowledge is, no matter how it may bother those in power. We are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible and which are not.”- Carl Sagan, UCLA commencement speech on June 14, 1991

What they call the “social order,” we call predation.

What they call “unregulated” chaos, we recognize as a driver of innovation.

The state cannot be overcome by force, because another state would rise from the ashes of the human mind.

The scarcity and dependence on centralized expertise that appears to justify states can be abolished with the spread of disruptive technology.

$2.00 for the first copy. $1.50 for every additional copy.

The lecture reprinted in this booklet was originally delivered by Dr. Gertrude B. Kelly to the Alumnae Association of the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, on June 1, 1887. It was later reprinted in Bejamin R. Tucker’s radical paper Liberty (Vol. V, No. 3, September 10, 1887, pp. 6-8).

“IT SEEMS TO BE GEN­ER­AL­LY FOR­GOT­TEN by those who fav­or State aid to science that aid so given is not and cannot be aid to science, but to particular doctrines or dogmas, and that, where this aid is given, it requires almost a revolution to introduce a new idea. With the ordinary conservatism of man­kind, every new idea which comes forward meets with sufficient questioning as to its truth, utility, etc.; but, when we have added to this natural conservatism, which is sufficient to protect society against the introduction of new error, the whole force of an army of paid officials whose interest it is to resist any idea which would deprive, or tend to deprive, them of their salaries, you will readily see that, of the two forces which tend to keep society in equilibrium, the conservative and the progressive, the conservative will be very much strengthened at the expense of the progressive, and that the society is doomed to decay. . . .

“WHEN WE CON­SID­ER THAT WE HAVE NOW REACH­ED BUT THE VERY OUT­POSTS OF SCI­ENCE; that all our energies are required for storming its citadel; that human nature, if placed in the same conditions, is apt to be very much the same; that those persons who have the power and the positions will endeavor to maintain them, – do you think it wise to put into the hands of any set of men the power of staying our onward movements? That which we feel pretty sure of being true today may contain, and in all probability does contain, a great deal of error, and it is our duty to truth to cultivate the spirit which questions all things, which spirit would be destroyed by our having high­ priests of science.”

Gertrude B. Kelly (1862-1934) was an Irish-American surgeon, a radical feminist, and an individualist anarchist. She immigrated to the United States in 1873, studied at the Women’s Medical College of New York Infirmary for Women and Children, and established a medical clinic for the poor in New York City. Radicalized by the Irish No-Rent movement and by her experience providing medical care in the tenements, Kelly became one of the most dynamic advocates of individualist anarchism, writing essays on urban poverty, women’s liberation, prostitution, bourgeois charity, natural law, egoism, and the economic and social ideas of Proudhon, Godwin, and Malthus. Her work was published frequently in Anarchist journals including Liberty in Boston and The Alarm in Chicago; from her first article for Liberty in 1885 until her break with the newspaper in 1887, Kelly was Liberty’s most prolific female correspondent; Tucker wrote that “Gertrude B. Kelly . . . by her articles in Liberty has placed herself at a single bound among the finest writers of this or any other country.”

But global warming advocates don’t have a monopoly on the political abuse of science.

It’s funny how the same libertarians who gleefully pounce on “junk science” when it serves an agenda they regard as inimical, are so fond of it themselves when it confirms their own prejudices.

A good example is Rachel Carson’s alleged responsibility for millions of deaths from malaria, as a result of her role in banning DDT. The neocon FrontPage magazine accused her of “ecological genocide,” and a character in a Michael Crichton novel went so far as to say she killed more people than Hitler. The JunkScience.Com (!) website even has a malaria death clock featuring Rachel Carson’s face.

Unfortunately, it’s one of those things everybody knows that just ain’t so. Here are some of the holes in the received version of the story:

1)  The various national bans on DDT all left a loophole for mosquito eradication when other available means were inferior to DDT. Controlled use of DDT for mosquito eradication is entirely legal.

2)  DDT was already losing its effectiveness for mosquito eradication in the 1960s because mosquitoes were becoming resistant to it.

3)  DDT had numerous side-effects that outweighed its limited effectiveness as a pesticide. Most importantly, and like most synthetic pesticides, it also poisoned the rest of the food chain above the mosquitoes. This meant, among other things, that it killed off mosquitoes’ natural enemies, so that it took larger and larger amounts of DDT to achieve the same results as before. In the process, it also caused significant collateral damage. For example, by killing the parasitic wasps that previously kept down the population of thatch-eating caterpillars, DDT indirectly caused an epidemic of collapsing roofs. Another example:  it poisoned geckoes who ate the mosquitoes, and who in turn poisoned the cats who ate the geckoes, thus resulting in an epidemic of rats.

The canard can be traced back at least to a campaign by Roger Bate, a right-wing economist who worked for a variety of industry think tanks. He personally conducted funding pitches around the corporate world, selling his propaganda campaign as a stiletto between the ribs of the environmentalist movement. “The environmental movement, he said, “has been successful in most of its campaigns as it has been ‘politically correct.’” DDT offered the potential of using the environmental movement’s erstwhile advantages against it, he crowed:  “the correct blend of political correctness ( . . . oppressed blacks) and arguments (eco-imperialism [is] undermining their future).”

Reason magazine science reporter Ron Bailey was an early and enthusiastic adopter, regurgitating the urban legend in most of its particulars in 2002 (he linked to an article based almost entirely on Roger Bate’s work).

Picking and choosing evidence to believe based on what its truth would entail, rather than whether it’s valid or not, is a bad thing—regardless of which “side” it comes from.

In the case of anthropogenic global warming, the reflexive opposition of many libertarians is just as cavalier with the truth as the folks crowing over Climategate accuse global warming advocates of being.

That such libertarians feel compelled to take the strategic position they do in regard to global warming speaks volumes about their basic view of the world. It’s a view of the world that shares a lot in common, ironically, with that of the average liberal Democrat.

The reasoning process goes something like this:

If global warming is real, all is lost for libertarians, because the need for statism follows as a direct implication. If global warming is real, it will prove the liberal Democrats are right: the free market has led to disastrous results at least in one particular, and the state is necessary in at least this one case to correct market failure. In other words, given the premise of global warming, libertarians of this stripe see the big government argument as something that follows legitimately from it, as a matter of course. So global warming cannot be happening. QED.

Funny. I’m fairly friendly toward the anthropogenic global warming thesis, and I don’t see global warming as a market failure at all.  I see it as a government failure. If we removed all the government-created externalities that promote consumption of energy and transportation inputs, and protected the fossil fuels industry from full liability for torts committed in the course of its operations, global warming would never have arisen as an issue in the first place. The free market is not the problem, it’s the solution.

But maybe some libertarians see the free market as something that needs protection from the truth.