Steve, thank you so much for this very thoughtful and thought-
provoking contribution to the discussion. I look forward to reading
your essay, and anything else on your new Web site, with the care
with which they were written.
And please don't worry about misspelling either my first or last
names. It happens all the time, understandably, and in any case no
trivial error by a courteously-disposed human being could equal
Microsoft Word's suggestion when my first name is entered into its
spell-check device: garrote.
Most gratefully yours,
--Jurretta, on her Mac
On May 8, 2008, at 10:10 AM, S. Corneliussen wrote:
> Concerning this reply message to the Virginia history list, I
> apologize to those who wish the Hemings-TJ tsunami would finally
> recede.
>
> If that apology doesn't work, I invoke the license that was issued
> to me in the message appearing further below, and that was
> reaffirmed later, by Jurretta Heckscher -- to whom I also owe an
> apology for carelessly misspelling her surname the other day.
>
> In 2003, R. B. Bernstein's _Thomas Jefferson_ appeared. Gordon S.
> Wood, who was said at the time to be at work on the 1789-1815
> volume in _The Oxford History of the United States_, called it the
> best short Jefferson biography ever written. Bernstein echoed other
> scholars' belief -- including the belief of Jan Lewis -- that solid
> proof of Hemings-Jefferson parenthood now exists, resting on one
> nonscientific and two scientific evidentiary "pillars": historical,
> DNA, and statistical.
>
> The statistical pillar is a study of the coincidences between Sally
> Hemings's conceptions and Thomas Jefferson's sporadic presences at
> Monticello. My license this morning is to explain my criticism of
> the very structure of that pillar.
>
> The license sensibly stipulates that I be brief and that I use lay
> language. And indeed I believe I've done that in the essay that
> I've just posted at the Web site I've just created, http://
> www.TJscience.org/ . However, although I hope I'm OK on the lay-
> language requirement, I lack the skill to do the explaining in,
> say, three hundred words as opposed to the three thousand that I
> assembled concerning the statistics over the course of several
> years, off and on.
>
> I've been working on the still larger essay itself, in one way or
> another, for nearly a decade. I started not because I'm interested
> in the Ultimate Cosmic Answer to the Paternity Question, though I
> am interested in that, but because I was so offended at _Nature_'s
> irresponsible handling of the 1998 news of Dr. Foster's molecular
> findings. Mind you, the offense had to do with the rules of
> science, not with Hemings-TJ. At the time, I was a tentative
> paternity believer, not the paternity agnostic that I gradually
> became later. When the statistical study appeared in 2000, I became
> an even more serious student of the use and misuse of science in
> the paternity debate.
>
> The title of my newly Web-posted essay is "Sally Hemings, Thomas
> Jefferson, and the Authority of Science." The stand-first summary
> says, "Whether or not Hemings and Jefferson had children together,
> misreported DNA and misused statistics have skewed the paternity
> debate, discrediting science itself." I wrote the piece originally
> for the _The American Scholar_, which turned it down. That was some
> time ago. In 2007, _The New Atlantis_ accepted it, but after they
> strung me along for many months, keeping me in the dark, and after
> they finally rewrote the essay in a way that made it
> unrecognizable, I withdrew it. This week I updated a few things in
> the essay, created the Web site, and posted it.
>
> If you only want to read about the statistical study, please just
> find the paragraph, a little beyond the halfway point, that begins,
> "Neither _Science_ nor _Nature_ appears even to have known about
> the scientific report claiming to erect the statistical pillar, ... ."
>
> What you'll find is that I actually tell a story about the
> evolution of my outlook concerning a scientific paper that appeared
> sequestered from scientific scrutiny in a humanities journal. The
> story comes to involve my friends Bill Blackwelder, a
> biostatistician and a fellow of the American Statistical
> Association, and Dave Douglas, a fellow of the American Physical
> Society and a veteran user of the simulation method that underlies
> the scientific study.
>
> Here I'll report that I'm not a scientist. I have two degrees in
> English. Since 1985 I've worked for and with, and written about,
> scientists and research engineers in national physics laboratories,
> universities, and NASA. I also serve as a media advisor to the CEO
> of a national scientific organization. Today I probably couldn't
> pass the final exams in the basic statistics courses I took in 1968
> and 1983. But Bill and Dave agree with me that the fundamental
> problems in the Hemings-TJ statistical study don't require formal
> statistical training to see.
>
> About a year and a half ago I published a Sunday commentary piece
> in the Richmond Times-Dispatch about what I called Hemings-
> Jefferson science abuse. Annette Gordon-Reed published a letter to
> the editor criticizing it, but in my view, and in the view of Dave
> Douglas as expressed in the rebuttal letter that he published, she
> had missed something crucial concerning the statistical study (and
> she had missed much else, but let that go for now). She had failed
> to see that I'm not discounting the conceptions coincidences as
> important evidence. Of course they're important -- qualitatively.
> What I was, and am, criticizing is something quantitative, not
> qualitative. I'm criticizing the false invocation of the special
> authority of statistical science to claim proof at a level near
> certainty for what is only a historical interpretation.
>
> For all I know, that historical interpretation is right. I'm just a
> referee blowing the whistle on rules infractions.
>
> And again I apologize that I'm so long-winded about it. You've
> heard that saying, if I had had more time, I could have been
> briefer? That surely applies to this e-mail message. But I took ten
> years writing the essay, and it's as short as -- by my lights, such
> as they are -- I can make it.
>
> Thanks very much. I have to go to Washington today, returning late
> Friday night, but I'll be interested to see if anyone comments. And
> although I admit in advance that I'll wince with the petty pride of
> an author, I'll also be grateful for corrections of errors of fact
> and for criticisms about gray areas.
>
> Steve Corneliussen
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jurretta Heckscher"
> <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Sunday, May 04, 2008 3:20 PM
> Subject: [VA-HIST] Statistical Science (was Re: Jefferson's Overseer)
>
>
>> On May 4, 2008, at 12:47 PM, S. Corneliussen wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> True, the misreporting of valid DNA evidence and the outright
>>> misuse of statistical science originated among people
>>> representing science, not the history profession, though
>>> credulous historians unskeptically accepted the statistical stuff.
>>>
>>>
>> Mr. Corneliussen, I assume that your allusion to the use (or
>> misuse) of statistical science refers to the article by Fraser D.
>> Neiman, Director of Archaeology at Monticello, that appeared in
>> the William and Mary Quarterly circa 2000? As I recall, it
>> applied statistical analysis to the probable dates of SH's
>> conceptions and the known dates of TJ's presence at Monticello to
>> demonstrate the extreme improbability that anyone else was the
>> father of her children.
>>
>> This did not, of course, absolutely rule out the paternity of
>> some other man whose presence at Monticello invariably correlated
>> with TJ's. And Dr. Neiman is of course an archaeologist (and a
>> very good one), not a statistician. However, along with the DNA
>> analysis, his statistically-based conclusion is indeed the other
>> piece of scientific--as opposed to traditionally historical--
>> research that many historians, myself included, have found
>> compelling.
>>
>> I am probably not alone among such historians in lacking the
>> statistical training to evaluate Dr. Neiman's study as science.
>> If his study is indeed, in your opinion as a scientist, "outright
>> misuse of statistical science," could you possibly give us a
>> brief explanation in laymen's terms of why you believe this to be
>> so?
>>
>> If you can, thanks very much.
>>
>> --Jurretta Heckscher
>>
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