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”.
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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.
