A Letter to PZ Myers About When to Trust Authority

Dr. Myers,

I would first like to say that I love your blog. I attend what is probably the most pious public university in America, and your blog is a daily source of sanity in the land of the insane.

That said, I have a question that I was hoping you could answer.

I am an undergraduate mathematics student, heavily loading myself up on biology courses for my electives. I feel in my two years at college I have learned a lot. I work in a biology lab on campus -- I have learned a lot about how science works from working there.

One thing I have come to realize is that no matter how much you personally go out and examine the evidence, you can not possibly do this for everything. There are some things which are easier than others to understand and examine for yourself, such as evolution. I see that the evidence and explanation for evolution is pervasive and accessible. It is easy to come to your own conclusion about this topic with a little help and guidance. I can not see how anyone can come to any other conclusion. Furthermore, the biology authorities are unanimous and unequivocal in their advocacy of the theory.

This is not always the case, however. For instance, with the autism/vaccine controversy you have seemingly credible sources spouting that vaccines are in fact a cause of autism. Browsing the literature I have found no correlation between vaccinations and autism, however I have certainly found articles that describe at a molecular level beyond my current comprehension how mercury is harmful to the body. I know that the amount of mercury in vaccines is in the micrograms, but I do not know what dosage will be harmful to the body. All of this makes the vaccination theory at least seem plausible. I don't agree with the vaccination theory because in studies that I have read, they found no correlation between vaccination and autism. I also don't agree with the vaccination theory because I tend to be fairly trusting of the scienceblogs community. However, the main reason that I disagree with the vaccination hypothesis is the latter -- I trust authority.

As a couple of more examples, homeopathy is all but dead in America, however in India it is far more prevalent. You have many medical authorities granting at least some degree of credibility to homeopathic medicine. I have almost no understanding of medicine -- I only don't believe in homeopathy because of what I have learned watching popular science documentaries and what I have read at scienceblogs. Again, this is simply the fact that I trust a certain authority -- not because I understand something the rest of the crowd doesn't. But the mechanism of homeopathy seems rather implausible anyway. Perhaps an example from physics will better illustrate my point.

If someone were to tell me about special relativity, general relativity, or quantum mechanics and I did not know that these theories were accepted by the scientific community, I would look at them as though they were insane. Inconstancy of time? Curving of space? An entity known as space-time? Quantum strangeness? You must be crazy. I would demand evidence before I were to give them a shred of credibility. I would want to see their experiments, and even after that I would be incredulous. I would try and poke holes in their experiments as best as I could. However, since these are accepted theories by the scientific community I do not demand the same rigor of evidence -- I accept them on the authority of science.

My question to you is, how do you know which authorities to trust? What is an acceptable level of skepticism, and what is taking it too far? As the religious right have demonstrated, parents are obviously inadequate authorities for scientific information. How do you get children to skeptically challenge what their parents say, and not raise chaos in the household?