Deconstructing the "Science Wars" by Reconstructing an Old Mold
by Stephen Jay Gould
I. What If They Gave a War and Nobody Came?
or
reasons that seem to transcend cultural peculiarities, and may lie deep within the
architecture of the human mind, we construct our descriptive taxonomies and tell our
explanatory stories as dichotomies, or contrasts between inherently distinct and
logically opposite alternatives. Standard epitomes for the history and social impact
of science have consistently followed this preferred scheme, although the chosen
names and stated aims of the battling armies have changed with the capricious winds
of fashion and the evolving norms of scholarship—as in scientific novelty
versus permanent wisdom in the founding 17th-century debate of "moderns" (the
empirical method for gaining new knowledge) versus "ancients" (Greek and Roman
perfection)[1]; science versus religion in a favorite trope of
late 19th-century secularism[2]; and the sciences versus the
humanities in the icon for the second half of the 20th century, C. P. Snow's "two
cultures"[3].
At the close of this millennium, the favored dichotomy features
a supposed battle called "the science wars." The two sides in this hypothetical
struggle have been dubbed "realists" (including nearly all working scientists),
who uphold the objectivity and progressive nature of scientific knowledge, and
"relativists" (nearly all housed in faculties of the humanities and social
sciences within our universities), who recognize the culturally embedded status
of all claims for universal factuality and who regard science as just one system
of belief among many alternatives, all worthy of equal weight because the very
concept of "scientific truth" can only represent a social construction invented by
scientists (whether consciously or not) as a device to justify their hegemony over
the study of nature.
But all these dichotomies must be exposed as deeply and doubly
fallacious—wrong as an interpretation of the nature and history of science,
and wrong as a primary example of our deeper error in parsing the complexities of
human conflicts and natural continua into stark contrasts formulated as struggles
between opposing sides. When we reject this constraining mental model, we will
immediately understand why a science war can only exist in the minds of critics
not engaged in the actual enterprise supposedly under analysis. The exposure of
this particular naked emperor can only recall the wisdom embedded in a familiar
motto of recent social activism: "What if they gave a war and nobody came?" a
statement that may seem a bit limp in its irenic humor at first, but that
actually embodies a deep insight about the nature of categories falsely judged as
natural and permanent, while truly originating as contingent and socially
engendered. (The defining model of dichotomous pairing also lies within the set
of mental categories falsely imputed to nature's intrinsic order.)
The best scholars have always been able to scrutinize their
own foibles, and an antidote to dichotomous pairing has also existed since
antiquity as the aurea mediocritas, or "golden mean," of Horace and Aristotle.
The Oxford English Dictionary traces a first English use to Spenser's
The Faerie Queene (1590), with an explicit contrast to dichotomous
pairing:
...the face of golden Meane.
Her sisters, two Extremities:
strive her to banish cleane.
Most falsely dichotomized battles include important aspects
of virtue at each pole, if only we can break through the emotion of mutual
anathema and move toward literal mediation. The golden mean of the science wars
could not be more commonsensical, or more enlightening, in upholding, at the
same time and without contradiction, both the continuous social construction
and the growing empirical adequacy of scientific knowledge. Why did we
ever construe such consonant notions as antithetical? Science, as done by human
beings, could only be envisaged and practiced within a constraining and
potentiating set of social, cultural, and historical circumstances—a
variegated and changing context that, by the way, makes the history of science
so much more interesting, and so much more passionate, than the cardboard
Whiggery of conventional marches to truth over social impediments (the model
that scientists devised for self-serving motives and that still permeates the
obligatory historical paragraphs of most scientific textbooks). On the other
side, who would wish to deny the probable truth value of science, if only as
roughly indicated by increasing technical efficacy through time—not a silly
argument of naïve realism, by the way, but a profound comment, however obvious
and conventional, about the only workable concept of factual reality.
II. Francis Bacon and the Instrument of Instauration.
The objectivist myth of science as a fully general method,
rooted in observation by minds consciously free of constraining social bias and
using universal tools of reason to accumulate reliable knowledge leading toward
an increasingly synthesized theoretical understanding of causes, affixes a
definitive label upon our profession, as represented by the false dichotomy of
the science wars. The conventional hero in English versions of this myth
Francis Bacon (1561-1626), upheld the new birthright of the scientific
revolution by asserting a central paradox in his generation's "battle of the
books" between classical and modern knowledge: Antiquitas saeculi, juventus
mundi, or "the good old days were the world's youth." We should not, as the
resolution of this paradox proclaims, regard ourselves as callow, and the
ancient Greeks as hoary with wisdom that we might learn to emulate but could
never surpass—the standard argument that motivated the Renaissance
(literally, the rebirth), a movement that did not strive for novelty on a modern
scientific model but sought to rediscover the supposedly eclipsed perfection of
ancient knowledge. In contrast, the Greeks and Romans lived during the world's
youth, whereas we represent the graybeards, enjoying time's benefit and seeing
farther by standing on the shoulders of earlier giants (to cite Newton's famous
phrase, borrowed from a common aphorism in his day)[4].
Knowledge accumulates through time; we now know more than ever before and will
continue to advance through the empirical methods of a new and developing
discipline called science.
Bacon's name therefore became an adjective in the objectivist
myth, a symbol for accurate observation, uncluttered and unbiased by theoretical
preferences rooted in social constraints. In a famous passage of his
autobiography, for example, Darwin described his procedure in devising the
theory of natural selection[5]:
"My first note-book was opened in July 1837. I
worked on true Baconian principles and without any theory collected facts on a
wholesale scale."
As many historians have noted, Darwin did not (and could not,
for no one can) proceed in such an empty-headed manner, and his later
recollection that he did so in his youth can only represent an imposition of
unachievable professional ideals upon a forgotten reality. Darwin may have had
no inkling of natural selection when he began, but his notebooks represent an
extended mental adventure in the constant test and rejection of sequential
hypotheses[6]. In private letters, Darwin often expressed
his keen intuition that facts must be ordered and selected as tests of ideas,
and that objectivity can only be meaningfully defined by fair recording and by
a willingness (even an eagerness) to alter and reject favored hypotheses in the
light of such records. In an equally famous letter of 1863, Darwin wrote[7]: "How odd it is that anyone should not see that all
observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!"
Bacon's dubious, and wholly undeserved, reputation as the
apostle of a purely enumerative and accumulative view of factuality for the
source of theoretical understanding in science rests upon the tables for
inductive inference that he included in the Novum Organum, the first
substantive section following the introduction to his projected Great
Instauration. Bacon, who has never been accused of modesty, had vowed as a
young man "to take all knowledge for my province." To break the primary
impediment of unquestioned obeisance to ancient authority (the permanence and
optimality of classical texts), Bacon vowed to write a Great Instauration (or
New Beginning), based on principles of reasoning that could increase human
knowledge by using the empirical procedures then under development and now
called "science."
Aristotle's treatises on reasoning had been gathered
together by his followers and named the Organon (tool or instrument). Bacon
therefore named his treatise on methods of empirical reasoning the Novum
Organum, or "new instrument" for the scientific revolution. The "Baconian
method," as Darwin used and understood the term, followed the tabular
procedures of the Novum Organum for stating and classifying observations, and
for drawing inductive inferences therefrom, based on common properties of the
tabulations.
Perhaps Bacon's tables do rely too much on listing and
classifying by common properties, and too little on the explicit testing of
hypotheses. Perhaps, therefore, this feature of his methodology does buttress
the objectivist myth that has so falsely separated science from other forms
of human creativity. But when we consider the context of Bacon's own time,
particularly his need to emphasize the power of factual novelty in refuting
a widespread belief in textual authority as the only path to genuine knowledge,
we may understand an emphasis that we would now label as exaggerated or undue
(largely as a consequence of science's preeminent success).
Nonetheless, a grand irony haunts the Novum Organum, for
this work, through its tabular devices, established Bacon's reputation as
godfather to the primary myth of science as an "automatic" method of pure
observation and reason, divorced from all gutsy and sloppy forms of human
mentality, and therefore prey to the dichotomous separations advocated in our
modern science wars. In fact, the most brilliant sections of the Novum
Organum—scarcely hidden under a bushel by Bacon, and well known to
subsequent historians, philosophers, and sociologists—refute the Baconian
myth by defining and analyzing the mental and social impediments that lie too
deeply and ineradicably within us to warrant any ideal of pure objectivism in
human psychology or scholarship. Bacon referred to these impediments as
"idols," and I would argue that their intrusive inevitability fractures all
dichotomous models invoked to separate science from other creative human
activities. Bacon should therefore become the primary spokesperson for a
nondichotomized concept of science as a quintessential human activity,
inevitably emerging from the guts of our mental habits and social practices,
and inexorably intertwined with foibles of human nature and contingencies of
human history, not apart, but embedded—yet still operating to advance our
genuine understanding of an external world and therefore to foster our access
to "natural truth" under any meaningful definition of such a concept.
The old methods of syllogistic logic, Bacon argues, can
only manipulate words and cannot access "things" (that is, objects of the
external world) directly[8]: "Syllogism consists of
propositions, propositions of words, and words are the tokens and marks of
things." Such indirect access to things might suffice if the mind (and its
verbal tools) could express external nature without bias; but we cannot
operate with such mechanistic objectivity: "If these same notions of the mind
(which are, as it were, the soul of words) be rudely and rashly divorced from
things, and roving; not perfectly defined and limited, and also many other
ways vicious; all falls to ruin." Thus, Bacon concludes, "we reject
demonstration or syllogism, for that it proceeds confusedly; and lets Nature
escape our hands."
Rather, Bacon continues, we must find a path to natural
knowledge—as we develop the procedure now known as modern science—by
joining observation of externalities with scrutiny of internal biases, both
mental and social. For this new form of understanding "is extracted not only
out of the secret closets of the mind, but out of the very entrails of Nature."
As for the penchants and limitations of mind, two major deficiencies of sensory
experience impede our understanding of nature: "The guilt of Senses is of two
sorts, either it destitutes us, or else deceives us."
The first guilt of destitution identifies objective limits
upon physical ranges of human perception. Many natural objects cannot be
observed "either by reason of the subtility of the entire body, or the
minuteness of the parts thereof, or the distance of place, or the slowness,
and likewise swiftness of motion."
But the second guilt of deception designates a more active
genre of mental limitation defined by internal biases that we impose upon
external nature. "The testimony and information of sense," Bacon states, "is
ever from the Analogy of Man, and not from the Analogy of the World; and it
is in error of dangerous consequence to assert that sense is the measure of
things." Bacon, in a striking metaphor once learned by all English
schoolchildren but now largely forgotten, called these active biases
"idols"—or, "the Idolae, wherewith the mind is preoccupate."
Bacon identified four idols and divided them into two major
categories, "attracted" and "innate." The attracted idols denote social and
ideological biases imposed from without, for they "have slid into men's minds
either by the placits and sects of philosophers, or by depraved laws of
demonstrations." Bacon designated these two attracted biases as "idols of the
theater," for limitations imposed by old and unfruitful theories that persist
as constraining myths ("placits of philosophers"); and, in his most strikingly
original conception, "idols of the marketplace," for limitations arising from
false modes of reasoning ("depraved laws of demonstrations"), and especially
from failures of language to provide words for important ideas and phenomena,
for we cannot properly conceptualize what we cannot express. (In a brilliant
story entitled "Averroes's Search," the celebrated Argentinian writer Jorge
Luis Borges, who strongly admired Bacon, described the frustration of this
greatest medieval Islamic commentator on Aristotle, as he struggled without
success to understand two words, central to Aristotle's Poetics, but having
no conceivable expression in Averroes's own language and culture: comedy and
tragedy.)
But if these attracted idols enter our minds from without,
the innate idols "inhere in the nature of the intellect." Bacon identified two
innate idols at opposite scales of human society—"idols of the cave,"
representing the peculiarities of each individual's temperament and
limitations; and "idols of the tribe," denoting foibles inherent in the very
(we would now say "evolved") structure of the human mind. Among these tribal
idols of human nature itself, we must prominently include both our legendary
difficulty in acknowledging, or even conceiving, the concept of probability,
and also the motivating theme of this article: our lamentable tendency to
taxonomize complex situations as dichotomies of conflicting opposites.
In a key insight, and explicitly invoking his idols to
dismember the myth of objectivity, Bacon holds that science must inevitably
work within our mental foibles and social constraints by marshaling our
self-reflective abilities to understand—because we cannot dispel—the
idols that always interact with external reality as we try to grasp the nature
of things. We might identify, and largely obviate, the theatrical and
marketplace idols imposed from without, but we cannot fully dispel the cave
and tribal idols emerging from within. The influence of these innate idols can
only be reduced by scrutiny and vigilance: "These two first kinds of Idolaes
(attracted idols of the theater and marketplace) can very hardly; but those
latter (innate idols of the cave and tribe), by no means be extirpate. It
remains only that they be disclosed; and that same treacherous faculty of the
mind be noted and convinced."
In a striking metaphor, Bacon closes his discussion of
idols by describing our scientific quest as an interplay of mental foibles and
outside facts, not an objective march to truth—a marriage of our mental
propensities with nature's realities, a union to be consummated for human
betterment: "We presume that we have prepared and adorned the bridechamber of
the Mind and of the Universe. Now may the vote of the marriage-song be, that
from this conjunction, human aids, and a race of inventions may be procreated,
as may in some part vanquish and subdue man's miseries and necessities."
III. Olaus Worm and the Archiater of Darmstadt
We need to invoke Bacon's general model of advancing
science, inextricably intertwined with and potentiated by our mental foibles
and social constraints, if we wish to fracture the false dichotomy of
objective realism versus social constructionism that defines and fuels the
illusory science wars. But small and concrete cases debunk this spurious
conflict even more effectively by proving that both supposedly opposite poles
invariably work together, as science builds genuine items of natural knowledge
from constantly changing and persistently indivisible mixtures of observation
and socially embedded interpretation. I therefore apply this truly Baconian
model of advancing science within socially constructed explanatory matrices
to a particular, well-bounded case—an exemplification of the most
important voyage of discovery ever completed within my profession of
paleontology: the 16th- to 18th-century debate on the nature of fossils
(spanning the 17th-century "invention" of modern science from the early years
of Bacon and Descartes to the consummation wrought by Newton's cohort).
I shall describe a complex transition that occurred over two
centuries, from Agricola's first geological treatise of 1546 to Linnaeus's
taxonomic compendium of 1753, and that indubitably features the genuine
discovery and construction of an objective factual truth about the nature of a
puzzling natural object. In a cryptic one-liner in his Historia naturalis,
Pliny had spoken of stones that resembled female genitalia on one side and the
corresponding male parts on the other. Georgius Agricola and Konrad Gesner,
the mid-16th-century polymaths and founders of modern paleontology, described
stones that corresponded to Pliny's words, and these specimens then assumed
the standardized name of hysteroliths (womb stones, or vulva stones), because
the female likenesses on one side seemed so much more impressive than the
vague male analogies only sometimes found on the opposite side.
The nature of hysteroliths posed a major puzzle throughout
the 16th and 17th centuries. No one regarded them as actual petrified parts of
human females, so why did they resemble the human vulva so closely in form?
Did the similarity merely represent an accidental lusus naturae (sport or joke
of nature), or did this morphological correspondence between mineral and animal
kingdoms express some causal property that might be utilized for human benefit?
By the mid-18th century, all scientists had accepted the discovery that
hysteroliths form as internal molds of fossil brachiopod shells, with the
slitlike "vulva" corresponding to a ridge on the shell's interior, expressed on
the mold as an incision. The resemblance that had inspired the original name
must therefore be meaningless and accidental—and the old designation
disappeared.
The first published illustration of a hysterolith adorns
the famous 1655 museum catalog of the Danish naturalist Olaus Worm[9]. He recognized the specimens as molds of some object but
chose not to speculate about the organic versus inorganic status of the
original model. He also felt comfortable with a claim for human utility, based
on the formal resemblance and suggested by an eminent local physician who had
discovered the specimens. Worm wrote (my translation from his Latin
original):
"These specimens were sent to me by the most
learned Dr. J. D. Horst, the archiater (chief physician) to the most
illustrious Landgraf of Darmstadt.…Dr. Horst states the following about
the strength of these objects; these stones are, without doubt, useful in
treating any loosening or constriction of the womb in females. And I think it
not silly to believe, especially given the form of these objects that, if worn
suspended around the neck, they will give strength to people experiencing
problems with virility, either through fear or weakness, thus promoting the
interests of Venus in both sexes (Venerem in utroque sexu
promovere)."
At first glance, and as nearly always interpreted, this
story of scientific progress seems to fit the old model of empirical
objectivity gradually dispelling the prejudicial darkness of antiquated social
belief—the realist side of the science wars. How can we view Dr. Horst's
opinion that an inert rock might cure human illness by virtue of an accidental
resemblance to the afflicted human parts as anything but the silly
superstition of a "prescientific" age?
The conventional and hagiographical history of paleontology
affirms this view by presenting a heroic tale of scientific light dispelling
ideological darkness in three sequential stages. Consider, as a standard
source, the early 20th-century Transformations of the Animal World by
the leading French paleontologist Charles Depéret[10].
In the first stage, Depéret writes, nearly everyone viewed fossils as inorganic
products of the mineral kingdom, formed by fatuous means that could not be
regarded as scientific:
"The Middle Ages retained the ideas of
Aristotle, and almost unanimously adopted the theories of the spontaneous
generation of fossils or petrifactions under varying formulas, such as
plastic force, petrifying force, action of the stars, freaks of nature,
mineral concretions, carved stones, seminal vapours, and many other analogous
theories. These ideas continued to reign almost without opposition till the
end of the sixteenth century."
In stage two, advancing science fractured these myths and
established the organic nature of fossils. But progress remained stymied by
religious dogmas that designated all fossils as relics of Noah's flood:
"The seventeenth century saw little by little
the antiquated theories of plastic force and of carved stones disappear, and
the animal or vegetable origin of fossil remains was definitely established.
Unfortunately the progress of palaeontology was to be retarded for a long space
of time by the rise and the success of the diluvian theories, which attributed
the dispersion of fossils to the universal deluge, and endeavoured to adapt
all these facts to the Mosaic records."
Finally, in stage three, the advancing force of exact
description dispels this final impediment and establishes the fossil record as
a chronology for an immensely long history of life. The gradual and progressive
triumph of objective observation over social and ideological constraint has
now been completed.
"Yet there were, among these partisans of the
Flood, a few men of worth, whose principal merit, outside their too frequent
extra-scientific speculations, was that they deeply studied fossils and spread
the better knowledge of them by exact representations. This task of the
description and illustration of fossil animals was especially the work of the
scholars of the eighteenth century which was the age of systematic zoology.
From all quarters they set themselves to gather and collect fossils, to study
and describe them by the aid of plates often of great beauty of execution, to
which modern palaeontologists are still compelled to have
recourse."
This simplistic tale may match some cardboard heroic
fantasies about the invincibility of scientific reasoning and the inevitability
of human progress. But Depéret's tripartite story fails miserably as an
accurate history of a genuine scientific advance for at least three reasons:
l. The three putative stages (fossils as inorganic, fossils
as relics of Noah's flood, and fossils as products of a long history of life)
cannot represent a progressive chronology, because all three opinions vied as
alternatives from the very beginning of recorded paleontology. In the first
decade of the 16th century, well before the initiating publications of Gesner
and Agricola, both Leonardo da Vinci and Girolamo Fracastoro explicitly
discussed these three interpretations as the full set of conceivable
explanations for the greatest particular problem posed by fossils: How can
objects looking so much like modern marine shells get into rocks on the tops
of high Italian mountains? Moreover, both Leonardo and Fracastoro personally
favored the third alternative, universally accepted today, and initially
developed by nearly all classical Greek authors who wrote about fossils (and
who generally accepted Aristotle's view of Earth's potential eternity, leading
to a cyclical notion of changing positions for land and sea, with modern
mountaintops representing ancient sea floors). Leonardo penned his ideas into
private notebooks that had no influence upon the later history of science,
but Fracastoro's opinions received prominent attention in several standard
17th-century sources[11].
2. The inorganic theory, supposedly first in time and most
foolish in content, did not represent the emptiness of pure ignorance based
on a failure to observe actual fossils carefully, but rather made eminently
good sense in light of a different theory about the nature of reality—a
defendable notion (even in the peculiar version of Darmstadt's archiater)
under a disparate concept of causality that only became obsolete after the
rise of modern science in the 17th century. Under the Neoplatonic doctrine of
"signatures," all basic forms achieved explicit representation (through
different means) in each of nature's three realms: animal, vegetable, and
mineral. These correspondences not only recorded nature's inherent harmony
and order but also embodied meaningful sympathies with potential curative
power. Thus, the vulva form of the mineral kingdom might help to restore its
diseased or depleted analog in the animal kingdom. Such "signatures" and
sympathies make no sense, and seem risible, under a different (and clearly
more adequate) concept of mechanistic causality that triumphed in the
scientific revolution of the 17th century. But the anachronism of later
dismissal cannot brand superseded ideas as foolish in their own time. Many
of our most cherished beliefs, including concepts that we regard as
factually established and free of social bias, will no doubt seem just as
bizarre to our successors as the inorganic theory of hysteroliths strikes
us today.
3. The reinterpretation of hysteroliths from inorganic
replicas of human genitalia to internal molds of fossil brachiopods did not
occur primarily by the weight of accumulating observation. Rather, this
radical revision arose as a logically implied consequence of major changes
in underlying world views—a crucial transition in human intellectual
history provoked by complex factors rooted as deeply in altered social
contexts as in improving empirical knowledge. First of all, the key factor
that secured the organic nature of hysteroliths—the downfall of the
Neoplatonic theory of signatures—owed little or nothing to advancing
observation of fossils, but rather marked the imposition upon paleontology
of a novel and revolutionary approach to understanding nature (called
modern science) that specified an organic interpretation of fossils as
the unavoidable consequence of a new view of causality.
Secondly, the "right answer" of brachiopod molds demanded
far more than a simple accumulation of accurate observations, for this
factual resolution presupposed a complex ideological shift in the basic
taxonomy of "organized things in rocks," an achievement that required the
dismemberment of several theatrical and marketplace idols. No distinct word
for organic remains even existed (a classic Baconian idol of the marketplace)
before the early 19th century, for "fossil," from the past participle of the
Latin fodere (to dig up), initially referred to any organized object
extracted from the ground, including crystals, concretions, geodes,
stalactites, and other inorganic items of definite and "interesting" form.
As their distinctive status became clear, organic objects first achieved
separate recognition as "extraneous fossils" (that is, as objects introduced
into rocks from the animal or vegetable kingdom), as opposed to "intrinsic
fossils," or mineralogical phenomena. Finally, as both the coherence and the
importance of organic objects rose to prominence, the general term "fossil"
gradually shifted and contracted to designate organic remains alone.
Until scientists drew an unambiguous taxonomic distinction
between organic objects on one side and all complex, regular, and intriguing
inorganic phenomena on the other, the status of fossils (in the modern
meaning of organic remains) could not be resolved, and hysteroliths would
remain in cognitive limbo. As a striking example, consider two illustrations
from the mid-l8th century[12]: first, from a French
publication of 1755, the last gasp of a promiscuous taxonomy that included
organic remains with inorganic objects of similar or analogous form. As long
as scientists classified brachiopod molds that looked like female genitalia
with stalactites that accidentally mimicked male genitalia, the proper causal
distinctions would remain elusive, and hysteroliths could not be resolved as
brachiopod molds. By contrast, Linnaeus's figure, printed at virtually the
same time in 1753, forges the requisite taxonomic division and resolves two
centuries of debate by placing hysteroliths into an exclusive category with
other brachiopods that, as remains of external shells or as internal molds
of species without interior ridges to impose vulvalike slits, show no
accidental resemblance to female genitalia. Common causal genesis had
finally replaced common overt appearance as the basic criterion for
taxonomic union.
Once the necessary theoretical shifts had occurred, and
hysteroliths became undoubted organic remains, the few persisting questions
could be resolved by procedures close to the stereotype of canonically
objective observation: Are hysteroliths the internal molds of vegetable
nuts or animal shells? As molds of animal shells, do they represent
impressions of clams or of brachiopods? As molds of brachiopods, what
species within the phylum grow interior ridges that engrave vulvalike slits
on their internal molds? But these observational resolutions only cleaned
up a few remaining details. The major advances that converted hysteroliths
from ambiguous objects of potentially mineral origin to the internal molds
of brachiopods arose as consequences of deep theoretical and ideological
transitions rooted as much in social, political, and philosophical changes
in European life and values as in simple accumulation of accurate factual
information about the natural world.
In short, and however modestly this small incident of
two centuries may rank in the general scheme of things, the resolution of
hysteroliths as brachiopod molds marks a genuine and indubitable gain in
accurate factual knowledge about a fascinating item of external
reality—and no genre of victory in all the annals of human achievement
could possibly be deemed more noble or more sweet (although other
achievements in the arts and humanities may surely claim equal merit!).
Nonetheless, paleontology resolved this small problem as all increments in
the genuine "progress of science" must be won—by a complex and socially
embedded construction of new modes for asking questions and attaining
explanations. Science advances within a changing and contingent nexus of
human relations, not outside the social order and despite its impediments.
IV. Parsing Science Within All Human Creativity
If, to state four propositions arising from this paper and
expressing its central argument:
l. Science truly does "progress" in the sense of gaining,
albeit in a fitful and meandering way through time, more useful knowledge
that, without mincing words, must record an improving understanding of an
objective external world: and if science must also be the work of eminently
fallible human beings, freighted with predispositions based on complex
factors of social context, psychological hope, mental and temperamental
construction, and historical circumstance—and if:
2. Francis Bacon, despite his stereotypical status as an
apostle of objectivism based on the automaticity of observations and their
mental manipulation to reach inductive conclusions, recognized and
emphasized (in perhaps his most famous image) the "idols" of mind and social
organization that inevitably make science a social enterprise constructed
within changing ideological contexts—and if:
3. Close analysis of any apparently simple and linear
sequence in factual gain, leading to the solution of a definite empirical
problem—as in the transition from interpreting a prominent group of
fossils as "vulva stones" that meaningfully mimic female genitalia to
interpreting them as internal molds of certain brachiopods—invariably
and ineluctably reveals the central role of social and ideological factors
in crucial theoretical shifts that make key observations possible by
setting contexts for asking requisite questions—and, finally, if:
4. Dichotomous models of us against them represent
Baconian idols of the tribe, or foibles of human mentality imposed upon more
complex situations from within—
Then, we must reject the widespread belief that a science
war now defines the public and scholarly analysis of this institution, with
this supposed struggle depicted as a harsh conflict pitting realists engaged
in the practice of science (and seeking an absolute external truth
progressively reachable by universal and unbiased methods of observation and
reason) against relativists pursuing the social analysis of science (and
believing that all claims about external truth can only represent social
constructions subject to constant change and unrelated to any movement
toward genuine factual knowledge). The very concept of a science war only
expresses a basically silly myth, rooted in our propensity for devising
dichotomous schemes and supported by the invention of nonexistent,
caricatured end-members to serve as straw men in a self-serving rhetorical
ploy that can only generate heat without light. (And I do pronounce a plague
on this tendency within both houses. Social commentators may be more guilty
in their frequent mischaracterization of working scientists; but some
scientists have constructed equally misleading, and basically philistine,
images of social critics out to trash any statement about an ascertainable
fact in an objective external world.)
Most working scientists may be naïve about the history of
their discipline and therefore overly susceptible to the lure of objectivist
mythology. But I have never met a pure scientific realist who views social
context as entirely irrelevant, or only as an enemy to be expunged by the twin
lights of universal reason and incontrovertible observation. And surely, no
working scientist can espouse pure relativism at the other pole of the
dichotomy. (The public, I suspect, misunderstands the basic reason for such
exceptionless denial. In numerous letters and queries, sympathetic and
interested nonprofessionals have told me that scientists cannot be relativists
because their commitment to such a grand and glorious goal as the explanation
of our vast and mysterious universe must presuppose a genuine reality "out
there" to discover. In fact, as all working scientists know in their bones,
the incoherence of relativism arises from virtually opposite and much more
quotidian motives. Most daily activity in science can only be described as
tedious and boring, not to mention expensive and frustrating. Thomas Edison
was just about right in his famous formula for invention as 1% inspiration
mixed with 99% perspiration. How could scientists ever muster the energy and
stamina to clean cages, run gels, calibrate instruments, and replicate
experiments, if they did not believe that such exacting, mindless, and
repetitious activities can reveal truthful information about a real world? If
all science arises as pure social construction, one might as well reside in
an armchair and think great thoughts.)
Similarly, and ignoring some self-promoting and cynical
rhetoricians, I have never met a serious social critic or historian of science
who espoused anything close to a doctrine of pure relativism. The true,
insightful, and fundamental statement that science, as a quintessentially human
activity, must reflect a surrounding social context does not imply either that
no accessible external reality exists, or that science, as a socially embedded
and constructed institution, cannot achieve progressively more adequate
understanding of nature's facts and mechanisms.
The social and historical analysis of science poses no threat
to the institution's core assumption about the existence of an accessible "real
world" that we have actually managed to understand with increasing efficacy,
thus validating the claim that science, in some meaningful sense, "progresses."
Rather, scientists should cherish good historical analysis for two primary
reasons: (1) Real, gutsy, flawed, socially embedded history of science is so
immeasurably more interesting and accurate than the usual cardboard pap about
marches to truth fueled by universal and disembodied weapons of reason and
observation ("the scientific method") against antiquated dogmas and social
constraints. (2) This more sophisticated social and historical analysis can aid
both the institution of science and the work of scientists—the institution,
by revealing science as an accessible form of human creativity, not as an arcane
enterprise hostile to ordinary thought and feeling, and open only to a trained
priesthood; the individual, by fracturing the objectivist myth that can only
generate indifference to self-examination, and by encouraging study and scrutiny
of the social contexts that channel our thinking and the attracted and innate
biases (Bacon's idols) that frustrate our potential creativity.
Finally, how shall we respond to a harried and narrowly
focused scientist who might exclaim: "Fine, I agree; the history of science may
be interesting, relevant, and socially constructed. But I have no time to study
such ancillary matters, and the results make no practical difference to my life
because an objective reality exists 'out there,' and science would eventually
arise to access this factuality in the same basic way, even if our actual
history must follow contingent and meandering pathways of social
construction."
I would respond that no inevitability attends our eventual
understanding of a real world outside our social construction. All basically
scientific roads through any conceivable human culture may lead toward an
exterior "Rome." But the same Rome shines with different lights tuned to the
form and direction of the particular path that people actually construct for
their excursion to the eternal city of natural knowledge. We would still know
a great deal (perhaps more than now) about the surrounding universe if Zheng
He's 15th-century ships (five times the length of Columbus's biggest caravel)
had continued their explorations beyond Africa, and imperial China had
conquered the world. Or if Tamerlane, or Genghis Khan, or Suleiman the
Magnificent had vanquished Europe (as each could probably have done, if such
issues depended only upon pure technological prowess, and not upon the
vicissitudes and contingencies of social practice and personal decision as
well). We would still gaze upon Rome, but at what distance, and with what
different eyes and concepts?
Not to mention the ultimately sobering thought that, just
because Rome exists in a position accessible to roads of many forms and styles,
no guarantees for human visitation can be located anywhere in the structure of
mind or the nature of the universe. We might never have gazed upon this wondrous
light in any hue or texture. The dispersal of such false dichotomies as the
science wars, and the promotion of science from the heart of its social
construction, build a maximally reliable vehicle for this most adventurous of
all improbable journeys toward the grandest goal of human striving and natural
order.
References and Notes
- This favored late 19th-century dichotomy (still
persisting today) viewed social and technological progress as the outcome of a
"warfare" between science and theology, and received a "semiofficial" status in
two contrasting and phenomenally successful volumes: J. W. Draper's History of
the Conflict Between Science and Religion (1874) and A. D. White's
A History of the Warfare of
Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Draper, a vehement
anti-Catholic who hoped that liberal Protestant theology might live in peace with
science, had presented the speech (on "the intellectual development of Europe
considered with reference to the view of Mr. Darwin") that unleashed the famous
"debate" between T. H. Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in 1860. White, as
the first president of Cornell University and a dedicated and ecumenical theist,
hoped to persuade his fellow believers that the beneficial and unstoppable
advances of science posed no threat to genuine religion but only to outmoded
dogmas and superstitions.
- C. P. Snow, a scientist by training and a novelist
and university administrator by later practice, delivered his famous talk on
"The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution" as the Rede Lecture at
Cambridge University in May 1959. He spoke of the growing gap between literary
intellectuals and professional scientists, noting for example how "one found
Greenwich Village talking precisely the same language as Chelsea, and both
having about as much communication with M.I.T. as though the scientists spoke
nothing but Tibetan."
- The great American sociologist of science Robert K.
Merton wrote an entire book on pre-Newtonian uses of this image to make the
serious point, with a wonderfully light touch, that supposed personal
inventions (not claimed by Newton in this case but attributed to him by later
commentators) often reflect long and complicated social settings and previous
uses. See R. K. Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants—A Shandean
Postscript (The Free Press, New York, 1965). See also my appreciation of
Merton's book: S. J. Gould, "Polished pebbles, pretty shells: An Appreciation
of OTSOG," in Robert K. Merton: Consensus and Controversy, J. Clark, C.
Modgil, S. Modgil, Eds. (Falmer Press, New York, 1990), pp. 35-47.
- F. Darwin, Ed., The Life and Letters of Charles
Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter (John Murray, London, 1888),
vol. 1, p. 83.
- Darwin's intellectual journey toward the theory of
natural selection is brilliantly described, along with a transcription of two
key notebooks, in H. E. Gruber and P. H. Barrett, Darwin on Man (Dutton, New
York, 1974).
- F. Darwin, Ed., More Letters of Charles Darwin
(D. Appleton, New York, 1903), vol. 1, p. 195.
- All the following quotations from Bacon come from
his preface to the Great Instauration, translated (from the original
Latin) by Gilbert Wats: Francis Bacon, On the Advancement and Proficiencie of
Learning: or the Partitions of Science (Thomas Williams, London, 1674), pp.
17-21.
- O. Worm, Museum Wormianum seu Historia rerum
rariorum Elsevier (already selling books at high prices!), Leiden, 1655,
p. 84.
- C. Depéret, The Transformations of the
Animal World (Kegan Paul, London, 1909), pp. 4-5.
- At least three 17th- and early 18th-century museum
catalogs describe Fracastoro's views. The earliest reference I can find comes
from Andrea Chiocco, Musaeum Francisci Calceolari Veronensis (Angelo
Tamo, Verona, 1622), p. 407.
- The 1755 figure of hysteroliths shown with a
stalactite resembling male genitalia appears on plate 7 of Dezallier
D'Argenville, L'histoire naturelle #233;claircie dans une de ses parties
principales, l'Oryctologie (De Bure, Paris). Linnaeus's accurate picture of
1753 comes from his famous catalog of the collection of Count Tessin: Museum
Tessinianum (Laurentius Salvius, Stockholm), plate 5.
[ Stephen Jay Gould, "Deconstructing the 'Science Wars' by Reconstructing
an Old Mold," Science magazine, 287 (January 14, 2000): 253-261. ]
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