New Scientist magazine, 22 April 2000
Bryan Appleyard
Some scientists are as dogmatic as the fundamentalists they attack.
I AM, ACCORDING TO CERTAIN scientists, a charlatan.
Whether you believe this or not, it is true that over the past
few years I have become very sceptical of the claims of
scientists. I'm not alone. The success of creationism is simply
the most systematic and extreme expression of this
scepticism. But, more importantly, its rigid fundamentalism is a
mirror image of a similarly inflexible fundamentalism--combined
with an amazing cultural arrogance--among scientists.
Now since I have had this argument a thousand times, I know
that I need to make two things clear at this point. First, I am
not speaking about all scientists, simply those who have
adopted the highest profile in this debate. If hard, uncritical
attitudes to science are not shared by you and your
colleagues, fine. But I am afraid they are the attitudes of
many who speak for your calling.
Secondly, I am not disputing science's claim to be an
extraordinarily effective tool for unlocking the secrets of the
material world. What I am saying is that its very effectiveness
makes it dangerous in the wrong hands. This is partly because
the provisional and often limited nature of the secrets it does
uncover is often forgotten, and partly because it can persuade
people that a causal explanation of the material realm can be
a complete account of the human realm. The idea that science
can provide such an account is, in the words of Isaiah Berlin,
"one of the most grotesque claims ever made".
Broken truce
Until I met Stephen Hawking, just before the publication of A
Brief History of Time, I cosily assumed that the treaty
between science and other forms of wisdom, as contained in
religion, the humanities, art and so on, still held. This treaty
said that science attempted to explain one kind of
thing--nature--while the rest attempted to explain another
kind of thing: broadly speaking, the human experience.
Hawking shocked me out of my dogmatic slumber, not simply
because of his famous "know the mind of God" line at the end
of his book but because, when I pointed out to him that he
had misunderstood the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, he
said he had not and would not discuss the matter further.
Since then, the belief that science can improve upon--indeed,
dispense with--philosophy and the other humanities has been
widely evangelised. I could quote a hundred cases from the
writings and conversations of Lewis Wolpert alone. Or what
about this from Gerald Edelman's highly praised book Bright Air,
Brilliant Fire: "Plato is not even wrong; he is simply out of the
question." Really? Out of which question?
This is not mere rhetoric. In biology especially, it is routine to
hear the claim that science has entered a new phase in which
it can explain away or perhaps provide a new scientific basis
for the humanities. This claim takes a number of forms. E. O.
Wilson says that natural selection can provide a new unifying
myth for humanity that has the advantage over previous
myths in that it happens to be true. Richard Dawkins uses his
public role, in part at least, to attack religion. Matt Ridley
argues that evolutionary psychology justifies the free market.
And so on and so on.
The problem is clearly that neo-Darwinism, especially in the
form of evolutionary psychology, feels to these scientists like
a liberation from the prison of their speciality. Darwinian
evolution is, after all, the one ordering principle in nature
whose origin and mechanism we seem close to understanding
fully. It must, they feel, explain everything. And so we get
absurdly circular Just So stories. Women don't kill their babies,
because of evolution; but, on the other hand, if they do kill
their babies, that must also be because of evolution. A theory
that explains everything might just as well be discarded since
it plainly has no real explanatory value.
Of course, the other thing about evolution is that anything
can be said because very little can be disproved. Experimental
evidence is minimal. The same might be said of genetics,
though here, I acknowledge, there is a more solid experimental
foundation. But in both cases the open-endedness of what
can be said has led many biologists into the realm of pop
Darwinism and pop genetics. We saw headlines about the gene
for homosexuality, only to discover later that it wasn't a gene
and, in any case, the correlation was very weak.
True science
We see further headlines about the Darwinian basis of the sex
roles or almost any other set of human behaviours you care to
name, only to discover that the arguments are based on very
long and patently unsustainable chains of historic causality.
And, anyway, they cannot prove that culture and environment
did not play an equal or more important part. These claims
adopt the authority of hard science without accepting the
humility and uncertainty of true science. Blame the journalists
if you must, but, speaking from within that profession, I can
tell you that it is invariably the scientists who set the ball
rolling.
The impression spreads that hard science has successfully
invaded the human realm and that all other forms of wisdom
will soon be redundant. This can be silly--the physicist Steven
Weinberg once wrote, laughably, that the Final Theory would
persuade people not to read their horoscopes--or it can be
threatening. Many scientists, encouraged by publishers who
watched with envy the success of Hawking's book, are now
writing as social, political, philosophical and even
quasi-religious visionaries. In the face of such writings, the
religious might well turn to creationism and those, like myself,
who consider Plato and Wittgenstein as among the most
profound thinkers the world has yet produced might well turn
to science-bashing.
We are only ten years into this particular phase of scientific
triumphalism--there have been others, notably in the
thirties--but it is showing few signs of weakening.
Neo-Darwinism, in particular, is being successfully popularised
as a potent new orthodoxy. If this continues, you can reliably
predict more creationism and more science bashing. You simply
cannot make such large claims in the public realm without
attracting a backlash. Attacks on religion or crude, improperly
substantiated claims about the nature of human life will
diminish, not increase, the public understanding and
acceptance of science.
If, in your eyes, I am indeed a charlatan, then so be it. But
don't come crying to me when the publishing advances dry up
and vital research is subject to threats and demonstrations
and, ultimately, the loss of funding from governments more
interested in opinion polls than science. You started it.
Bryan Appleyard is the author of Understanding the Present:
Science and the Soul of Modern Man (Picador, £5.99) and
Brave New World: Genetics and the Human Experience
(HarperCollins, £16.99). He writes for The Sunday Times
From New Scientist magazine, 22 April 2000.
Copyright New Scientist, RBI Limited 2000
Oryginal: http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinion_223523.html