Yesterday the work of David Murray, though not his name, was cited in this
thread. Dr. Murray's name and work have come up before in this forum. I
can't imagine that the article cited yesterday could be any other than the
Washington Post commentary piece "Paternity Hype Visits Monticello," which
appeared on page C1 (the front of the Sunday Outlook section) on Nov. 15,
1998 -- very soon, as was noted, after the famous DNA report appeared in
Nature.
Murray is a paternity skeptic who was then directing research at a
rightward-leaning Washington media-monitoring organization called the
Statistical Assessment Service. His article can be found in the Washington
Post online archive, where access requires payment. But a
copyright-permitted copy appears for free at this URL:
http://www.tjheritage.org/documents/WP--NatureRush.pdf
Despite what was said yesterday, the article is not a quantitative
statistical analysis of the conceptions coincidences -- the intriguing data
showing that TJ was present at Monticello on many but not all of the days
when Sally Hemings's kids could have been conceived. The article doesn't
even address those apparent coincidences. Instead, it's a lucid criticism of
the misreporting that flooded across the media worldwide following
publication of the Nature DNA report.
"Much of the coverage demonstrated a remarkable flight from careful and
skeptical reporting," Murray wrote. "All too often, the news stories,
commentary and analysis transformed an intriguing but inconclusive
scientific finding into a dead certainty." As far as I know, Murray in this
article was the first high-visibility whistle blower concerning abuse of the
special authority of science in the Hemings-TJ controversy.
Murray's article appeared over a year before the William and Mary Quarterly
published what purported to be a quantitative statistical analysis of the
conceptions coincidences. That WMQ report confidently claimed the full
authority of science in declaring that TJ had fathered six Hemings children.
I started this thread the other day because I'm trying to find out if the
Thomas Jefferson Foundation is still standing by and citing that report, and
also because it's possible that others, about whom I don't yet know, have
attempted similar statistical studies. (And Jurretta Heckscher, maybe you're
right that I should simply inquire at the Jefferson Library. Thanks for
suggesting that.)
But Murray's 1998 Washington Post commentary piece deserves to be
remembered -- even by paternity agnostics and paternity believers if they
care about the principle of fact-based debate. He understood that many might
couple the limited DNA molecular findings with other evidence to arrive at
paternity belief. He respected that, though he didn't buy it. What he
disrespected, and protested, was the proclaiming of paternity certainty
based only on limited molecular findings.
When his article appeared, I had penciled myself in as a paternity
suspecter, if not a paternity believer. Only later -- in part because of
skepticism-inducing dismay at many journalists' and some historians'
irresponsibility with scientific evidence -- did I move toward paternity
agnosticism. But I knew horrendous misreporting when I saw it. Yet during
the two weeks before Murray's article appeared, I had begun to wonder if I
was the only person on the planet who actually understood what the Nature
DNA report did prove and what it didn't prove.
Later Murray was to publish a highly skeptical but mainly nontechnical
critique of the WMQ statistical report. It was a chapter in an ardently
paternity-disbelieving anthology with a confrontational subtitle -- The
Jefferson-Hemings Myth: An American Travesty. There Murray was the first, as
far as I know, to observe that the WMQ statistical report argues
circularly -- that it begs the question (in the original but disappearing
sense of that phrase) with a Bayesian procedure that somehow uses, or claims
to use, the pro-paternity argument's nonstatistical, qualitative threads to
validate quantitative statistical simulation results.
But even in that chapter, Murray didn't offer a comprehensive technical
analysis of the WMQ study. By then I had come to know Murray by e-mail. My
surmise is that he was daunted not so much by the technical content of the
WMQ study as by its failure to do what any scientific report is supposed to
do: provide information about methods so that another scientist can
replicate the work to check its validity. One of the failings of the WMQ
study is that it doesn't follow that standard scientific practice. I think
Murray felt constrained from making certain arguments because he couldn't
even tell completely what he was supposed to be arguing against. (My friend
and Jefferson Lab colleague Dave Douglas, a distinguished
particle-accelerator physicist who makes his living in part by doing
statistical simulations, has also emphasized this failing in the WMQ study.)
It's worth noting also that Murray did a fine job in a brief debate in the
Times Literary Supplement with Gore Vidal in late 2000. Vidal had blurred
the distinction between DNA findings and historical interpretation of DNA
findings -- a common offense, in Hemings-TJ matters, against the principle
of fact-based debate. Vidal was haughty and dismissive to Murray, but he
seems nevertheless to have learned something in the exchange. In 2003 Vidal
wrote -- with a simple accuracy that, thankfully, has become more common in
public discussion of Hemings-TJ -- that DNA testing "establish[ed]
consanguinity" between the Hemingses and Jefferson.
I was disappointed when David Murray left the Statistical Assessment Service
and ceased participating in the Hemings-TJ discussion. But I'm glad his name
and work have come up in this thread. I've lost track of him and don't even
know if he knows about TJscience.org, which he helped inspire. If anybody
knows him, please forward this message to him.
Thanks very much.
Steven T. (Steve) Corneliussen
Poquoson, Virginia
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