I had several goals for my time in Vienna:

1. I wanted to make international connections with colleagues around the world;
2. I wished to develop my thinking on the relation of history with evidence–preferably with a bit of legal context;
3. since my philosophical background in regards to science needs work, I wanted to find new ways to approach the philosophy of science that would help me to develop my understanding and appreciation of the field.

How well did this summer’s VISU help me to achieve these goals? Quite well!

First, I met many wonderful people from universities around the world. Most, perhaps unsurprisingly, were from Europe or the United States, and they represented a wide variety of disciplinary approaches to science and evidence. For example, I was able to connect with graduate students working on similar questions as I am from a civil law context, providing a useful comparative potential to add to my own work.

Second, I was thrilled that the focus on the legal context was much deeper than I expected. David Lagnado of UCL provided an especially new and intriguing look at the ways in which juries evaluate evidence in the common-law courtroom, and introduced me to the use of Bayesian analysis in evidentiary analysis.

Third, the 10 or so graduate students coming from the discipline of the philosophy of science helped me to appreciate the philosophical debates more fully. I may still not fully embrace what feels to me like a de-contextualized approach to theory, but I can better appreciate the goal and reasons for trying to describe and explain scientific theories.

Some more highlights of the two weeks:

• Bayesian networks as representations of real-world evidential reasoning. Do people really reason this way? Or is this the ideal way we should do probabilistic reasoning? David Lagnado suggests that people may really use this approach–at least as a qualitative matter–but that we don’t do so well when it comes to quantitative weighing of probabilities.
• The distinctions between a civil law approach to scientific experts (generally appointed by the court) vs. the common law one (represent the parties). The civil law approach appears cleaner, but may well bury the issue a bit further underground–and the need to validate the science still exists, it may just not play out in the courtroom.
• Tal Golan asserts that the statistical expert’s growing role as gatekeeper of “true causes” is co-related with the trial judge’s new role as the gatekeeper of “true science.”

All in all, the two weeks was an excellent experience, and I would recommend it to any other graduate students working in related fields.

Related articles

• Initial reflections on the nature of scientific evidence (inpropriapersona.com)

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For the last week I’ve been a part of the Vienna Institute Summer University (VISU) at the University of Vienna, at a two-week conference on “The Nature of Scientific Evidence.” The program brings together graduate students from a variety of disciplines from around the world to discuss science-related topics. Key lecturers this year include Hasok Chang (Philosophy of Science/Cambridge), David Lagnado (Cognitive Psychology/UCL) and Tal Golan (History of Science/UCSD). Interestingly for my interest in law and science, both Lagnado and Golan have focused on the legal sphere as a powerful “theater” for investigating the (ab)use of scientific evidence.

We can characterize the approaches quickly as follows: Chang discusses the theoretical underpinnings of science, including the logical reasoning process; Golan looks at the historical growth of science in the public imagination and the development of scientific experts; and Lagnado investigates the use of Bayesian networking to understand a cognitive approach to weighing evidence, both normatively and descriptively.

Given that I am an historian of law and technology, and a lawyer, what kinds of takeaways have I gotten so far?

First, that Bayesian networking could be highly beneficial to lawyers, especially in criminal defense. The approach has problems, but is a powerful way to avoid common pitfalls in evidential reasoning.

Second, that scientific evidence is not radically different from other evidence, and that the fallacies that scientists encounter internally are not radically different than when they present externally (this is more controversial, perhaps).

Third, that context is key to evidence, to the acceptance of evidence, and to the use of evidence. One cannot consider all variables, nor all potential outcomes or possibilities, so all decisions made from evidence are bound up in both one’s own context and from the context the evidence came from. (This doesn’t mean that all decisions are necessarily totally subjective and arbitrary, however).

Fourth, that many disciplines can come together and discuss common questions in a useful and powerful way, but that it isn’t always easy to speak a mutually intelligible common language (and I’m not talking about English vs. German).

I will have more to say later.

At least at the University of California, San Diego, the process involves tech transfer officers–6 for the life sciences, 3 for other kinds of technology, and 1 who does both–reviewing the research done at UCSD. They look for innovations that may be potentially turned into marketable intellectual property. According to Dr. Montisano, a life sciences tech transfer officer at UCSD, they do not “police faculty.” As a result, they sometimes do not learn of new technology until after publication, which immediately causes the loss of international patent rights, and puts U.S. patent rights on a 1-year timeline.

If they do manage to intercept the technology in time–either through researchers submitting it to them directly, or by discovering it after publication–they review the innovation, and may file a provisional patent application to preserve their rights (this allows publication). They then have a year to convert that to a full patent.

Once they have provisional protection in place, the office looks for a good licensee for the technology. They first put a description of the innovation on the UCSD web site, making it available to interested parties who may be seeking such technology. They also identify and actively target potential companies for licensing, focusing on those they know do work in the field and who may be interested in the technology.

The point, according to Dr. Montisano, is to get the technology out into the world through commercialization, not to make a fortune, and UCSD looks for licensees on this basis. Such a focus emphasizes the public nature of the university, and emphasizes the role of the tech transfer office as the buffer zone between private and public enterprise–they license innovations for money, but do so with a goal of benefitting the public.

Additionally, the distribution process also protects researchers from undue market influences. The university owns the invention, not the professor, or grad student, or research tech. 50% of the incoming money goes to the university as a whole, while the remaining 50% is split by the department between those who developed the invention and the department. Thus, even the incoming money is diluted and sifted, buffering the researchers themselves from direct contact with the commercial players.

More rules are in place when it comes to researchers profiting or being overly involved in the commercial enterprise while retaining their role at the university. A university researcher cannot be the executive of a licensee company nor a board member, but can sit on a scientific advisory board. Such a researcher can own shares in the company, though, suggesting at least one way for the market to more directly intrude on an individual academic. Nonetheless, to be full involved in directing a licensee, a researcher must leave the university and their post as an academic and fully enter the commercial world.

Finally, the office itself is insulated from the money involved. Although they bring in millions to the University of California, UCSD’s technology transfer office is funded entirely by the state. No funding comes through a percentage of license fees and no officer receives specific bonuses for signing deals. This emphasizes their focus on the public service of commercializing technology, rather than on their use as market-enablers.

Madey v. Duke

Even after Madey, many researchers continue to ignore patent protections, and continue their work as if they didn’t need to license technology. The result has been increasing claims by license-holders, and a growing sense by researchers that this is complicating their scientific pursuits and introducing extra costs and restrictions.

Universities, now large licensors themselves of new technology thanks to Bayh-Dole and technology transfer offices, have turned to, in the language of Professor Robin Feldman, “open transfer” agreements to lossen up these restrictions. Such agreements are added to agreements when universities license their technologies for industry to develop, and permit both the licensing university and any other nonprofit they allow to use the technology for education and research. This approach co-opts the mechanisms of the market, rather like open-source licensing does, to permit the continued free sharing and publishing in the academic community.

What do these clauses look like? In the case of the University of California, San Diego, Article 2.2 of the sample agreement for licensing captures this “open transfer” provision:

2.2 Reservation of Rights. UNIVERSITY reserves the right to:
(a) use the Invention, and Patent Rights for educational and research purposes;
(b) publish or otherwise disseminate any information about the Invention at any time; and
(c) allow other nonprofit institutions to use and publish or otherwise disseminate any information about Invention and Patent Rights for educational and research purposes.

Part (a) and (b) are relatively standard in all licensing agreements, commercial or not. Most industry licenses also permit the licensor to use their own technology. Part (c) is the interesting part, as it permits other nonprofit institutions to also use and even publish on the technology, provided it is for educational and research purposes. In other words, what the Federal Circuit has taken out of common law, university tech transfer offices have recreated through their own market-focused and neoliberal license agreements.

This approach suggests that, despite efforts to commercialize the “ivory tower,” there remain creative resistance that seeks to maintain the traditional values and benefits of an academic research environment.

There are, of course, numerous challenges for tech transfer offices. Within the university, most scientists are “in it for the science” and not for the money, according to Dr. Montisano. University researchers have the tendency to publish first, forcing his office to chase after them to try to prevent the loss of patent rights (publishing first loses most international rights immediately, though U.S. law allows for a year’s grace). Outside the university, industry values focus on profit first–even if many researchers have been taught to value the science by universities first.

Diagram from James A. Severson, Ph.D., of Veratect Corporation, Kirkland, WA

Industry prefers to restrict use of its technologies to those explicitly licensed—and such licensees generally must pay for the privilege of their use. Methods and materials are kept close, as trade secrets, unless licensed out for approved use. Competitors must be kept from access to preserve corporate profits. Universities, on the other hand, have generally taken a much broader approach to technology use and sharing. Researchers in universities must “publish or perish,” and getting describing methods and approaches garners a researcher the most benefit when readership is broad. One-upping academic competitors is still a key goal, but the method is through demonstration and publishing successes, not through profit-making and market dominance.

The Bayh-Dole Act attempted to bridge the divide, and technology transfer offices are the means of its implementation. Prior to Bayh-Dole, “legislators were concerned that for a variety of reasons, the government”–formerly the federal government owned the research it funded–“had proved ineffective as a shepherd of the inventions created with federal research dollars” (see Open Source, Open Access, and Open Transfer: Market Approaches to Research Bottlenecks). By many measures, the results have been phenomenal: at the end of fiscal year 2009, UCSD alone had more than 400 licenses active around the world, with a steady increase since 2000. Also in 2009, UCSD’s technology transfer office distributed more than fifteen million dollars to inventors ($9 million), joint titleholders ($432 thousand) research labs and departments ($2.5 million), and the UC general fund ($2.5 million).

All the money suggests some obvious problems created by the “intrusion” of a neoliberal, market-focused approach into the “ivory tower” university environment (assuming such pure extremes ever existed). For a cash-strapped state government like California’s, why not emphasize this market-connected activity and turn universities into self-supporting institutions? Such an approach risks compromising the university focus of basic research and–perhaps even more importantly–ignores the less commodifiable teaching and research done at such institutions, especially in the humanities. Even within the sciences, forcing research to fit into license agreements and patent arrangements may impede the flow of data, slow down innovation by restricting information sharing, and, ultimately, force university researchers away from basic sciences that form the core of future applications.

Related articles

• Technology Transfer and the Third Way (kfwhite.wordpress.com)
• Columbia University’s Tech Transfer Guru, Orin Herskowitz, on Turning IT, Biotech, and Cleantech Ideas Into Businesses (xconomy.com)

Barrett has written a few times about a medical lab named Doctor’s Data, that he feels is helping certain medical practitioners defraud patients through misleading results. Here’s one example of such a report. You’ll notice that it’s pretty detailed in explaining why Barrett has problems with the use of these reports.
– Quackwatch Sued For Suggesting Medical Lab Quackery

This goal, as you might expect, sometimes gets Quackwatch in trouble. Last summer, Doctor’s Data filed a lawsuit against Quackwatch for “restraint of trade; trademark dilution; business libel; tortious interference with existing and potential business relationships; fraud or intentional misrepresentation; and violating federal and state laws against deceptive trade practices.” (Doctor’s Data, Inc. v. Barrett et al.)

From my reading, the main complaint seems to be that Barrett has gone through the test report produced by Doctor’s Data, along with the context in which medical practitioner’s request testing, and found it wanting in medical utility. Even more defaming, according to the suit, is that he wrote that primarily “nonstandard practitioners” make use of Doctor’s Data.

His description of the testing process suggests that practitioners first give patients heavy metals (“provocation”), then order a test for heavy metals, then tell them they need chelation therapy when the test results come back saying patients have elevated levels of heavy metals in their systems. His conclusion? “Provoked testing is a scam.” He goes on to review the advice endorsed by Doctor’s Data’s vice president–recommending chelation therapy–as “very, very, very, very wrong.”

Doctor’s Data took umbrage with Dr. Barrett’s criticisms, and sued. First, though, they sent a cease and desist letter, demanding a retraction, but failing to identify the specific statements at issue. After a further letter that also neglected to name specifics, Doctor’s Data filed suit in federal court in Illinois.

Without paying PACER to access the various filings, I can’t glean much more about the details and progress of the case. At first glance, it seems like a classic example of a potential SLAPP lawsuit–that is, a suit designed specifically to silence critics, whatever the merits of the criticism. Illinois does have anti-SLAPP legislation, known as the Citizen Participation Act (CPA) and, apparently, Barrett’s attorneys have indeed filed an anti-SLAPP motion.

It’s unclear to me whether such an action will be successful under the Illinois statute, since the CPA is focused primarily on protecting speech concerning government or public concern. That said, it seems to me, calling out possibly fraudulent medical activity falls on the side of discussing an issue of public concern.

Of course, defamation is an actionable offense, provided the defamatory statements are not true (truth is an absolute defense) nor mere opinion. First Amendment protections, of course, are considerations, which is likely why Doctor’s Data focused on the business aspects of the case (benefits to Quackwatch as a business–although it appears to be a nonprofit–and harm to Doctor’s Data’s business). Barrett, then, would likely emphasize that he is acting in the public interest, as journalists do, and is not, for example, trying merely to damage Doctor’s Data’s business or to act as a competitor.

I’ll be curious to see where this goes next. My prediction on the outcome? Likely favorable to the defendant–but that’s just my opinion.

Related articles

• The Quackwatch Lawsuit Attacks Free Speech And Science (blogs.forbes.com)
• Doctor’s Data Sues Quackwatch (sciencebasedmedicine.org)

For the enlightened of the mid-eighteenth century, the most fundamental aspect of their enlightenment was “sociability,” according to Mary Terrall in The Man Who Flattened the Earth (3). Sociability of the time consisted of public lectures, cafe discussions, salons, and scientific academies; the successful man of science had to link sociability with “private reading and writing” (4). Maupertuis, by Terrall’s account a master manipulator of his own image, utilized these “interlocking practices” of public and private sociability to build his persona and his reputation (4). Today, such self-conscious image building is often disparaged by “real scientists,” who consider such activities to be reserved for writers of so-called “popular science,” but at the time the connections between men of science and men of letters was less disputed and arguably more normal.

Maupertuis positioned himself as both a “man of science” and a “man of letters.” During the Enlightenment, men of science began to serve practical (that is, state) ends, and not just philosophical ones. But what did it mean to be a man of science in the time of Maupertuis? While such a man did seek practical ends with their work, he “was not yet a bureaucrat, nor a professional, as his nineteenth-century descendants would be, nor even an expert in the modern sense of the word” (166). Still, the state—through instututions like the Académie, had increasingly found utility in such men. Still, although men like Maupertuis “made their work useful to the state, and to absolutist rulers, … they also pursued knowledge in the service of the more idealized goals of human progress, rationality, and critical engagement.” (165). These idealized goals connected the men of science to the world of letters or philosophy, as Maupertuis most effectively demonstrates.

Maupertuis was, in Terrall’s account, the quintessential man of science of his period, and his geodetic expedition to Lapland became the mechanism by which he combined his social connections and publications to create and enhance this image. He thus portrayed himself as not just a man of science, but also as a man of letters: “Maupertuis himself was one of a small number of members of the science academy who was also elected to the elite literary academy, the Académie française, which in turn was closely linked to the salons of powerful aristocratic hostesses.”

Maupertuis was not the only man of science of the time to also venture into the realm of letters, and Terrall points out that the “successful man of science … was also a man of letters (369). It seems that the institutionalized world of the Académie was not so very separate from the social world of talk and discussions. Dialog and other social interactions found their way into the more private world of print, while letters and published books were read and discussed in social situations. Terrall writes:

Traces of dialogue and exchange abound in printed works, in footnotes, prefaces, dialogues, and critical reviews; this literary angle was essential to the connection between science and sociability. Reading might seem a solitary and unsociable activity, but discussion and debate about books dominated many social gatherings and epistolary exchanges. To be sociable meant, among other things, to converse and correspond about books, their authors, their attackers, their supporters, and any attendant scandal. (7)

Maupertuis marshaled this connection between the printed word and the social world, making his way through the salons and cafés while writing numerous works that “range across an encyclopedic variety of topics, belying anachronistic notions of specialization or expertise” (6). “Reputation,” writes Terrall, “was crucially important in this world of gossip, performance, and reading” (7). Maupertuis masterfully developed his reputation as he “systematically crafted his public identify by building relations with a variety of constituencies and patrons, and by writing for several overlapping audiences” (8). According to Anne Vila, Maupertuis wrote frequently, and did so in a manner designed to keep himself in the public eye (118). He sought to balance his appearance in print before the reading public of the time with higher-level connections “with top mathematicians like Johann Bernouilli, powerful French ministers such as Cardinal Fleury, leading intellectuals like Voltaire, Emilie du Châtelet, and Denis Diderot, and eventually, Frederick the Great of Prussia, who invited Maupertuis to head the Berlin Academy of Sciences and Belles-Lettres in 1746″ (Vila 118). It was through his writings, especially his various accounts of the Lapland expedition, to portray himself as “adventurer, wit, and philosopher, equally comfortable in salon and academy”(Terrall 8–9).

Maupertuis’ personality appeared well-fitted for taking advantage of his voyage to Lapland. He appealed effectively to the reading public with his persona as an “eccentric yet important savant,” according to Andrew Simoson. As Terrall points out, Maupertuis “had a reputation as a libertine man-about-town, equally happy to consort with duchesses and their maids,” and he built on this image for his literary persona. The scientific data brought back from Lapland was important, and the trip helped Maupertuis within the Académie, but his publications for the literary world at large helped to establish him as more than an academic or servant of the crown (367–69).

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In fact, it was his literary productions that helped gain Maupertuis the fame he sought, more even perhaps than that available through the state (367). According to Terrall, this is in many ways unsurprising, as the “boundaries separating the official institutions from the less differentiated public were never impermeable; indeed, the learned pursuits of savants gained a measure of legitimacy by appealing to this readership” (368). This ties in nicely with Dorinda Outram’s discussion of the marked increase in literacy rates during the Enlightenment, with a concurrent increase in social integration. Maupertuis took advantage of these dramatic shifts in the production and accessibility of ideas, especially via the new world of printed literature. He tied this into the new social institutions based on the exchange of ideas (the salon and the coffee houses), but did so without ignoring existing institutions that did mark and display social and political rank (like the Académie). The public sphere–to tie into Habermas’s discussions–developed and expanded in Maupertuis lifetime, and he effectively took advantage of this expanding social sphere, including new readers of his literary science.

But who was this new readership? Outside of state and official institutions, who granted Maupertuis his fame and reputation? Who was the reading public he so carefully developed and targeted?

The relation between writer and public developed in the interstices of the many overlapping hierarchies of the old regime; hence, the fluidity of reputation derived from published works, and the many kinds of strategies that might lead to visibility and fame. All sorts of writers—journalists, novelists, playwrights, philosophers, chemists, mathematicians, travelers–referred to “the public” as the consumer and beneficiary of their works.” (367)

Maupertuis was hardly alone in seeking public fame. He joined others–novelists, playwrights, and other scientists–in this effort to appeal to the growing power of a public audience, an effort only made possible by the spread of literacy and the growth of printing technologies.

But if Maupertuis was targeting the public as part of his literary efforts to establish himself, what kind of science was he presenting? According to Terrall, “[i]t was not the entrepreneurial science of the instrument makers and public lecturers, flourishing in the shops and cafés of London and Paris in the same period.” Instead, it seems, Maupertuis avoided a kind of “vulgarizing” his science, instead “retail[ing] an elite science and philosophy to a literary public” (369).

Presented with a scientist today in the model of Maupertuis, we would, I think, be likely to dismiss him as a “mere popularizer“of science, and see his literary and pubic ambitions as tainting his scientific achievements. But if Terrall is right, and Maupertuis sold “elite science” to the public, then it is, I think, unfair to denigrate in any sense the “scientificness” of his achievements on the basis of his literary persona. In fact, perhaps Maupertuis unification of the world of science and of letters is one that modern-day scientists could learn from. Perhaps by sharing and explaining “elite science to a literary public,” we can move beyond the paralysis of doubt that many feel when faced by scientific experts today. If Maupertuis were explaining global climate change, would we skeptics still hold such a sway on the public? Perhaps a bit more of Maupertuis’ sociability would be of benefit to today’s scientists.

Related articles

• Dorinda Outram on the Enlightenment (inpropriapersona.com)
• The “Lost Women”: science popularizers and communicators of the 19th century [bioephemera] (scienceblogs.com)

Certainly textual and citation analysis approaches are not new. The scientific community has been analyzing citation patterns to determine influence since the 1960s and the development of the Science Citation Index. In the law, Shepherd’s and KeyCite are two competing methods to help determine the influence of legal cases through citation analysis.

My idea, though, is to use similar techniques to try to measure the impact of new technologies on both courtroom decisions, both substantively and–for lack of a better term–stylistically.

As an example of the first concept, X-rays were developed around 1895 by Wilhelm Röntgen. How soon after their development did courts begin to refer to them? CCTV (surveillance cameras) were first used in the U.S. around 1968–how long was it before courts began to grapple with the issues? Did it take more or less time than with X-rays? (Obviously I would need a number of other examples.)

My second concept is to see if, for example, the number of citations in opinions–or the length of opinions, for that matter–increased or decreased as technology changed. Did the introduction of typewriters correlate to increases in opinion length or number of opinions per year per judge? Did the development of citation indexing systems like KeyCite increase the number of citations? Have online and electronic systems increased the number of citations? Similarly, have the types of citations changed? (One way to grossly measure this would be to look at how old the cases cited are when viewed from the perspective of the new decision.)

Here’s a few examples of related ideas:

• Network Analysis and the Law: Measuring the Legal Importance of Precedents at the U.S. Supreme Court
• The Hazards of Precedent: A Parameterization of Legal Change
• History of Citation Indexing (from Thomson Reuters)

Thoughts? Opinions? Anyone done similar work to this, perhaps in another field? What tools might work best?

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• Harvard reference or citation generator (dairyscience.info)
• Papers with more references are cited more often (ebiquity.umbc.edu)
• Social citations: using Mendeley API to measure citation readership (iphylo.blogspot.com)
• Impact Factors (healthlinks.washington.edu)

The main idea is that each side should take charge of their own fate, in a kind of courtroom analog to capitalism and free-market individualism, and that this self-determination is the best way to produce fairness and truth. The judge serves merely as the umpire ensuring each side follows the rules, which themselves are designed to create a level playing field between the parties. The jury must decide whose facts to believe.

This presents problems when the facts at issue are steeped in scientific dispute. In the American system (and, perhaps to a lesser extent, in all countries following the Anglo-American legal approach), science and scientific evidence emerges and is interpreted through the actions of the parties involved. Expert witnesses testify for a particular side, and are employed by a particular side.

This also presents some problems for scientific experts, who have historically grounded themselves in disinterestedness and objectivity. How does one keep out the influence of one’s employer, either out of self-interestedness or just a lack of access to anything but what one’s own side provides?

While the U.S. judicial system has developed a number of methods to deal with these problems–from various rules of evidence, to standards for judging scientific evidence from Frye to Daubert–there are still problems for scientific expertise in the courtroom. As just one example, how do you enforce rules against perjury if an expert is testifying to a theory? How are lay juries–consisting of specifically of people unfamiliar with the evidence, the case, and the facts–supposed to evaluate and decide between competing scientific claims?

Scientists and others have come up with a number of suggestions, but all of them have involved too many changes to the process for lawyers and judges to agree on implementing them. Appointing experts as direct advisors to the court, for example, interferes with traditional ideas of the judge as a neutral umpire, merely refereeing each side’s zealous advocacy. (Contrast this with European methods, which place approved experts in direct service to the judge, who, incidentally, often gathers evidence as well as overseeing the trial.) Putting scientists into the jury isn’t too popular with lawyers either–typically, special knowledge disqualifies you instead, because lawyers don’t want jurors with preconceived knowledge or ideas.

But at the very least, why not allow experts–jurors who are “people having ordinary skill in the art”–in the jury on patent trials? Or how about eliminating juries for patent trials entirely? (England, our common-law mother, did this already.) But the Constitution can make such distinctions between types of cases problematic, and in any case, lawyers and judges are invested in the current system. Questioning its fairness in one kind of case might lead to questioning it in other situations.

So what to do? How can juries possibly decide between equally compelling and apparently valid scientific theories? Do we need to change the system? Or can lay juries do just fine, despite the scientific complexities of many cases?

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Daubert Standard (socyberty.com)
• SFgate.com Chevron: Outtakes prove collusion with expert (sfgate.com)

The main point of his article is to combat the denigrating myth that credits the Greeks for “all that was noteworthy in Arabic science” (note that the term “science” itself is potentially controversial, but I will keep it for the sake of its utility). In contrast, Haq argues that the Arabic translations of Greek texts, begun in earnest in the ninth century and heavily relied upon by European scholars beginning in the twelfth, were far more than simple restatements of Greek texts in the Arabic language. Haq says, instead, that the process was a creative act, and that is should be no surprise as such that Christian European scholars preferred the Arabic texts, even when the original Greek ones were available, because of the Arabic clarifications, improvements, and recasting.

Haq also takes issue with the claim that Islam’s scientific scholars were marginalized by mainstream Muslim society, and that opposition by “orthodox” religious leaders like Abu Hamid al-Ghazali in the 12th century effectively ended scientific pursuits in the Islamic world. Instead, says Haq, Islamic science continued to flourish in an “open marketplace” of ideas until fading by the time of “the so-called scientific revolution in western Europe.”

Absent from Haq’s article is much of an explanation of why Islamic translators sought to recast ancient Greek texts into Arabic, or why this pursuit was supported by the Abbasid elites.

Similarly, although Haq rejects the idea that Islamic theological and philosophical orthodoxy eventually led to the setting of Islam’s “scientific star,” he does not provide a robust alternative explanation, other than to point to “several severe reversals” experienced by political Islam, including the Christian reconquista in Spain and Hulagu Khan’s sacking of Baghdad and capture of Damascus in the thirteenth century.

So if medieval Islamic culture was so conducive to scientific pursuits, why didn’t it last? And why shouldn’t contemporary Islamic society be equally supportive of science?

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• Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi: “1001 Inventions”: How Islamic Scientific History Can Combat Today’s Extremists (huffingtonpost.com)
• Modern Islam and science: an article by Seyyed Hossein Nasr (inpropriapersona.com)