That day is a long way off. But the self-healing powers of rationality, in which flaws in reasoning are singled out as targets for education and criticism, take time to work. It took centuries for Francis Bacon’s observations on anecdotal reasoning and the confusion of correlation with causation to become second nature to scientifically literate people. It’s taken almost fifty years for Tversky and Kahneman’s demonstrations of Availability and other cognitive biases to make inroads into our conventional wisdom. The discovery that political tribalism is the most insidious form of irrationality today is still fresh and mostly unknown. Indeed, sophisticated thinkers can be as infected by it as anyone else. With the accelerating pace of everything, perhaps the countermeasures will catch on sooner.
However long it takes, we must not let the existence of cognitive and emotional biases or the spasms of irrationality in the political arena discourage us from the Enlightenment ideal of relentlessly pursuing reason and truth. If we can identify ways in which humans are irrational, we must know what rationality is. Since there’s nothing special about us, our fellows must have at least some capacity for rationality as well. And it’s in the very nature of rationality that reasoners can always step back, consider their own shortcomings, and reason out ways to work around them.
CHAPTER 22
SCIENCE
If we were called upon to name the proudest accomplishments of our species, whether in an intergalactic bragging competition or in testimony before the Almighty, what would we say?
We could crow about historic triumphs in human rights, such as the abolition of slavery and the defeat of fascism. But however inspiring these victories are, they consist in the removal of obstacles we set in our own path. It would be like listing in the achievements section of a résumé that you overcame a heroin addiction.1
We would certainly include the masterworks of art, music, and literature. Yet would the works of Aeschylus or El Greco or Billie Holiday be appreciated by sentient agents with brains and experiences unimaginably different from ours? Perhaps there are universals of beauty and meaning that transcend cultures and would resonate with any intelligence—I like to think there are—but it is devilishly difficult to know.
Yet there is one realm of accomplishment of which we can unabashedly boast before any tribunal of minds, and that is science. It’s hard to imagine an intelligent agent that would be incurious about the world in which it exists, and in our species that curiosity has been exhilaratingly satisfied. We can explain much about the history of the universe, the forces that make it tick, the stuff we’re made of, the origin of living things, and the machinery of life, including our mental life.
Though our ignorance is vast (and always will be), our knowledge is astonishing, and growing daily. The physicist Sean Carroll argues in The Big Picture that the laws of physics underlying everyday life (that is, excluding extreme values of energy and gravitation like black holes, dark matter, and the Big Bang) are completely known. It’s hard to disagree that this is “one of the greatest triumphs of human intellectual history.”2 In the living world, more than a million and a half species have been scientifically described, and with a realistic surge of effort the remaining seven million could be named within this century.3 Our understanding of the world, moreover, consists not in mere listings of particles and forces and species but in deep, elegant principles, such as that gravity is the curvature of space-time, and that life depends on a molecule that carries information, directs metabolism, and replicates itself.
Scientific discoveries continue to astound, to delight, to answer the formerly unanswerable. When Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, they could not have dreamed of a day when the genome of a 38,000-year-old Neanderthal fossil would be sequenced and found to contain a gene connected to speech and language, or when an analysis of Oprah Winfrey’s DNA would tell her she was descended from the Kpelle people of the Liberian rain forest.
Science is shedding new light on the human condition. The great thinkers of antiquity, the Age of Reason, and the Enlightenment were born too soon to enjoy ideas with deep implications for morality and meaning, including entropy, evolution, information, game theory, and artificial intelligence (though they often tinkered with precursors and approximations). The problems these thinkers introduced to us are today being enriched with these ideas, and are being probed with methods such as 3-D imaging of brain activity and the mining of big data to trace the propagation of ideas.
Science has also provided the world with images of sublime beauty: stroboscopically frozen motion, flamboyant fauna from tropical rain forests and deep-sea ocean vents, graceful spiral galaxies and diaphanous nebulae, fluorescing neural circuitry, and a luminous Planet Earth rising above the moon’s horizon into the blackness of space. Like great works of art, these are not just pretty pictures but prods to contemplation, which deepen our understanding of what it means to be human and of our place in nature.
And science, of course, has granted us the gifts of life, health, wealth, knowledge, and freedom documented in the chapters on progress. To take just one example from chapter 6, scientific knowledge eradicated smallpox, a painful and disfiguring disease which killed 300 million people in the 20th century alone. In case anyone has skimmed over this feat of moral greatness, let me say it again: scientific knowledge eradicated smallpox, a painful and disfiguring disease which killed 300 million people in the 20th century alone.
These awe-inspiring achievements put the lie to any moaning that we live in an age of decline, disenchantment, meaninglessness, shallowness, or the absurd. Yet today the beauty and power of science are not just unappreciated but bitterly resented. The disdain for science may be found in surprising quarters: not just among religious fundamentalists and know-nothing politicians, but among many of our most adored intellectuals and in our most august institutions of higher learning.
* * *
The disrespect of science among American right-wing politicians has been documented by the journalist Chris Mooney in The Republican War on Science and has led even stalwarts (such as Bobby Jindal, the former governor of Louisiana) to disparage their own organization as “the party of stupid.”4 The reputation grew out of policies set in motion during George W. Bush’s administration, including his encouragement of the teaching of creationism (in the guise of “intelligent design”) and the shift from a longstanding practice of seeking advice from disinterested scientific panels to stacking the panels with congenial ideologues, many of whom promoted flaky ideas (such as that abortion causes breast cancer) while denying well-supported ones (such as that condoms prevent sexually transmitted diseases).5 Republican politicians have engaged in spectacles of inanity, such as when Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, brought a snowball onto the Senate floor in 2015 to dispute the fact of global warming.
The previous chapter warned us that the stupidification of science in political discourse mostly surrounds hot buttons like abortion, evolution, and climate change. But the scorn for scientific consensus has widened into a broadband know-nothingness. Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, has harassed the National Science Foundation not just for its research on climate science (which he thinks is a left-wing conspiracy) but for the research in its peer-reviewed grants, which he pulls out of context to mock (for example, “How does the federal government justify spending over $220,000 to study animal photos in National Geographic?”).6 He has tried to undermine federal support of basic research by proposing legislation that would require the NSF to fund only studies that promote “the national interest” such as defense and the economy.7 Science, of course, transcends national boundaries (as Chekhov noted, “There is no national science just as there is no national multiplication table”), and its ability to promote anyone’s interests comes from its foundational understanding of reality.8 The Global Positioning System, for example, uses
the theory of relativity. Cancer therapies depend on the discovery of the double helix. Artificial intelligence adapts neural and semantic networks from the brain and cognitive sciences.
But chapter 21 prepared us for the fact that politicized repression of science comes from the left as well. It was the left that stoked panics about overpopulation, nuclear power, and genetically modified organisms. Research on intelligence, sexuality, violence, parenting, and prejudice have been distorted by tactics ranging from the choice of items in questionnaires to the intimidation of researchers who fail to ratify the politically correct orthodoxy.
* * *
My focus in the rest of this chapter is on a hostility to science that runs even deeper. Many intellectuals are enraged by the intrusion of science into the traditional territories of the humanities, such as politics, history, and the arts. Just as reviled is the application of scientific reasoning to the terrain formerly ruled by religion: many writers without a trace of a belief in God maintain that it is unseemly for science to weigh in on the biggest questions. In the major journals of opinion, scientific carpetbaggers are regularly accused of determinism, reductionism, essentialism, positivism, and, worst of all, a crime called scientism.
This resentment is bipartisan. The standard case for the prosecution by the left may be found in a 2011 review in The Nation by the historian Jackson Lears:
Positivism depends on the reductionist belief that the entire universe, including all human conduct, can be explained with reference to precisely measurable, deterministic physical processes. . . . Positivist assumptions provided the epistemological foundations for Social Darwinism and pop-evolutionary notions of progress, as well as for scientific racism and imperialism. These tendencies coalesced in eugenics, the doctrine that human well-being could be improved and eventually perfected through the selective breeding of the “fit” and the sterilization or elimination of the “unfit.” Every schoolkid knows about what happened next: the catastrophic twentieth century. Two world wars, the systematic slaughter of innocents on an unprecedented scale, the proliferation of unimaginably destructive weapons, brushfire wars on the periphery of empire—all these events involved, in various degrees, the application of scientific research to advanced technology.9
The case from the right is captured in this 2007 speech from Leon Kass, Bush’s bioethics advisor:
Scientific ideas and discoveries about living nature and man, perfectly welcome and harmless in themselves, are being enlisted to do battle against our traditional religious and moral teachings, and even our self-understanding as creatures with freedom and dignity. A quasi-religious faith has sprung up among us—let me call it “soul-less scientism”—which believes that our new biology, eliminating all mystery, can give a complete account of human life, giving purely scientific explanations of human thought, love, creativity, moral judgment, and even why we believe in God. The threat to our humanity today comes not from the transmigration of souls in the next life, but from the denial of soul in this one. . . .
Make no mistake. The stakes in this contest are high: at issue are the moral and spiritual health of our nation, the continued vitality of science, and our own self-understanding as human beings and as children of the West. . . . All friends of human freedom and dignity—including even the atheists among us—must understand that their own humanity is on the line.10
These are zealous prosecutors indeed. But as we shall see, their case is trumped up. Science cannot be blamed for genocide and war, and does not threaten the moral and spiritual health of our nation. On the contrary, science is indispensable in all areas of human concern, including politics, the arts, and the search for meaning, purpose, and morality.
* * *
The highbrow war on science is a flare-up of the controversy raised by C. P. Snow in 1959 when he deplored the disdain for science among British intellectuals in his lecture and book The Two Cultures. The term “cultures,” in the anthropologists’ sense, explains the puzzle of why science should draw flak not just from fossil-fuel-funded politicians but from some of the most erudite members of the clerisy.
During the 20th century, the landscape of human knowledge was carved into professionalized duchies, and the growth of science (particularly the sciences of human nature) is often seen as an encroachment on territories that had been staked and enclosed by the academic humanities. It’s not that practitioners of the humanities themselves have this zero-sum mindset. Most artists show no signs of it; the novelists, painters, filmmakers, and musicians I know are intensely curious about the light that science might shed on their media, just as they are open to any source of inspiration. Nor is the anxiety expressed by the scholars who delve into historical epochs, genres of art, systems of ideas, and other subject matter in the humanities, since a true scholar is receptive to ideas regardless of their origin. The defensive pugnacity belongs to a culture: Snow’s Second Culture of literary intellectuals, cultural critics, and erudite essayists.11 The writer Damon Linker (citing the sociologist Daniel Bell) characterizes them as “specialists in generalizations, . . . pronouncing on the world from out of their individual experiences, habits of reading and capacity for judgment. Subjectivity in all of its quirks and eccentricities is the coin of the realm in the Republic of Letters.”12 This modus could not be more different from the way of science, and it’s the Second Culture intellectuals who most fear “scientism,” which they understand as the position that “science is all that matters” or that “scientists should be entrusted to solve all problems.”
Snow, of course, never held the lunatic position that power should be transferred to the culture of scientists. On the contrary, he called for a Third Culture, which would combine ideas from science, culture, and history and apply them to enhancing human welfare across the globe.13 The term was revived in 1991 by the author and literary agent John Brockman, and it is related to the biologist E. O. Wilson’s concept of consilience, the unity of knowledge, which Wilson in turn attributed to (who else?) the thinkers of the Enlightenment.14 The first step in understanding the promise of science in human affairs is to escape the bunker mentality of the Second Culture, captured, for example, in the tag line of a 2013 article by the literary lion Leon Wieseltier: “Now science wants to invade the liberal arts. Don’t let it happen.”15
An endorsement of scientific thinking must first of all be distinguished from any belief that members of the occupational guild called “science” are particularly wise or noble. The culture of science is based on the opposite belief. Its signature practices, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, are designed to circumvent the sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable. As Richard Feynman put it, the first principle of science is “that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
For the same reason, a call for everyone to think more scientifically must not be confused with a call to hand decision-making over to scientists. Many scientists are naïfs when it comes to policy and law, and cook up nonstarters like world government, mandatory licensing of parents, and escaping a befouled Earth by colonizing other planets. It doesn’t matter, because we’re not talking about which priesthood should be granted power; we’re talking about how collective decisions can be made more wisely.
A respect for scientific thinking is, adamantly, not the belief that all current scientific hypotheses are true. Most new ones are not. The lifeblood of science is the cycle of conjecture and refutation: proposing a hypothesis and then seeing whether it survives attempts to falsify it. This point escapes many critics of science, who point to some discredited hypothesis as proof that science cannot be trusted, like a rabbi from my childhood who rebutted the theory of evolution as follows: “Scientists think the world is four billion years old. They used to think the world was eight billion years old. If they can be off by four billion years once, they can be off by four billion years again.” The fallacy (putting aside the apocryphal history
) is a failure to recognize that what science allows is an increasing confidence in a hypothesis as the evidence accumulates, not a claim to infallibility on the first try. Indeed, this kind of argument refutes itself, since the arguers must themselves appeal to the truth of current scientific claims to cast doubt on the earlier ones. The same is true of the common argument that the claims of science are untrustworthy because the scientists of some earlier period were motivated by the prejudices and chauvinisms of the day. When they were, they were doing bad science, and it’s only the better science of later periods that allows us, today, to identify their errors.
One attempt to build a wall around science and make science pay for it uses a different argument: that science deals only with facts about physical stuff, so scientists are committing a logical error when they say anything about values or society or culture. As Wieseltier puts it, “It is not for science to say whether science belongs in morality and politics and art. Those are philosophical matters, and science is not philosophy.” But it is this argument that commits a logical error, by confusing propositions with academic disciplines. It’s certainly true that an empirical proposition is not the same as a logical one, and both must be distinguished from normative or moral claims. But that does not mean that scientists are under a gag order forbidding them to discuss conceptual and moral issues, any more than philosophers must keep their mouths shut about the physical world.
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