But at a closer look this view turns out to be historically untenable. For one thing, there are periods in which a given art-form shows a definite, cumulative evolution, comparable to scientific progress. To quote our leading art historian, Sir Ernst Gombrich:
In antiquity the discussion of painting and sculpture inevitably
centred on [the] imitation [of nature] -- mimesis. Indeed it
may be said that the progress of art towards that goal was to
the ancient what the progress of technology is to the modern:
the model of progress as such. Thus Pliny told the history of
sculpture and painting as the history of inventions, assigning
definite achievements in the rendering of nature to individual
artists: the painter Polygnotus was the first to represent people
with open mouth and with teeth, the sculptor Pythagoras was the
first to render nerves and veins, the painter Nikias was concerned
with light and shade. The history of these years [ca. 550 to 350
B.C.] as it is reflected in Pliny or Quintilian was handed down like
an epic of conquest, a story of inventions . . . In the Renaissance
it was Vasari who applied this technique to the history of the arts
of Italy from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. Vasari never
fails to pay tribute to those artists of the past who made a distinct
contribution, as he saw it, to the mastery of representation. 'Art
rose from humble beginnings to the summit of perfection' [Vasari says]
because such natural geniuses as Giotto blazed the trail and others
were thus enabled to build on their achievements. [10]
'If I could see further than others,' said Newton, 'it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants.' Leonardo said much the same. 'It is a wretched pupil', he wrote, 'who does not surpass his master.' Dürer and others expressed similar opinions. What they evidently meant was that during the period of explosive development which started with Giotto around the year 1300, each successive generation of painters had discovered new tricks and techniques -- foreshortening, perspective, the treatment of light, colour and texture, the capture of movement and facial expression -- inventions which the pupil could take over from the master and use as his baseline for new departures.
As for literature, it need hardly be emphasized that the various schools and fashions of the past were not static, but evolved during their limited life-span toward greater refinement and technical perfection -- or decadence. We take it for granted that today's physicists know more about the atom than Democritus; but then Joyce's Ulysses also knows more about human nature than Homer's Odysseus. On a shorter time-scale, even films no more than twenty years old appear now -- exceptions always granted -- surprisingly dated: obvious, over-acted, over-explicit. There is hardly a writer, past or present, who did not or does not sincerely believe his style and technique of writing to be closer to reality, intellectually and emotionally, than those of the past. Let us face it: our reverence for Homer or Goethe is sweetened by a dash of condescension not unlike our attitude to infant prodigies: how clever they were for their age!
Thus we can safely reject as a gross over-simplification Gleb Nerzhin's view that science is cumulative like a brick-layer's work, while art is timeless, a dance of coloured balls on the jets of a fountain. The history of art, too, shows cumulative progress -- in certain periods, though not in others. In the history of European painting, for instance, there are two outstanding periods in which we find rapid, sustained, cumulative progress in representing Nature, almost as tangible as the progress in engineering. The first stretches roughly from the middle of the sixth to the middle of the fourth century B.C., the second from the beginning of the fourteenth to the middle of the sixteenth century. Each lasted for about six to eight generations, in the course of which each giant did indeed stand on the shoulders of his predecessors, and could take in a wider view. It would of course be silly to say that these were the only periods of cumulative progress. But it is nevertheless true that in between these periods of rapid evolution there are much longer stretches of stagnation or decline. Besides, there are the lone giants, who seem to appear from nowhere and cannot be fitted into any neat pyramid of acrobats balancing on each other's shoulders.
The conclusion seems to be obvious. Our museums and libraries demonstrate that there is a cumulative progression in every art-form -- in a limited sense, in a limited direction, during limited periods. But these short, luminous trails sooner or later peter out in twilight and confusion, and the search for a new departure in a new direction is on.
However, contrary to popular belief, the evolution of science does not show a more coherent picture. Only during the last three hundred years has its advance been continuous and cumulative; but those unfamiliar with the history of science -- and they include the majority of scientists -- tend to fall into the mistaken belief that the acquisition of knowledge has always been a neat and tidy ascent on a straight path towards the ultimate peak.
In fact, neither science nor art has evolved in a continuous way. Whitehead once remarked that Europe in the year 1500 knew less than Archimedes who died in 212 B.C. In retrospect there was only one step separating Archimedes from Galileo, Aristarchus of Samos (who fathered the heliocentric system) from Copernicus. But that step took nearly two thousand years to be made. During that long period, science was hibernating. After the three short glorious centuries of Greek science, roughly coinciding with the cumulative period of Greek art, comes a period of suspended animation about six times as long; then a new furious awakening, so far only about ten generations old.
Progress, then, in science as in art, is neither steady nor absolute, but -- to say it again -- a progression in a limited sense during limited periods in limited directions; not along a steady curve, but in a jagged, jerky, zigzag line.
A Chinese proverb says that there is a time for fishing and a time for drying the nets. If you take a kind of bird's-eye view of the history of any branch of science, you will find a rhythmic alternation between long periods of relatively peaceful evolution and shorter bursts of revolutionary change. Only in the peaceful periods which follow after a major breakthrough is the progress of science continuous and cumulative in the strict sense. It is a period of consolidating the newly conquered frontiers, of verifying, assimilating, elaborating and extending the new synthesis: a time for drying the nets. It may last a few years or several generations; but sooner or later the emergence of new empirical data, or a change in the philosophical climate, leads to stagnation, a hardening of the matrix into a closed system, the rise of a new orthodoxy. This produces a crisis, a period of fertile anarchy in which rival theories proliferate -- until the new synthesis is achieved and the cycle starts again; but this time aiming in a different direction, along different parameters, asking a different kind of question.
It is thus possible to detect a recurrent pattern in the evolution of both science and art. As a rule the cycle starts with a passionate rebellion against and rejection of the previously dominant school or style with a subsequent breakthrough towards new frontiers: call this phase one. The second phase in the cycle has a climate of optimism and euphoria; on the footsteps of the giants who spearheaded the advance, their more pedestrian followers and imitators move into the newly opened territories to explore and exploit its rich potentials. This, as said before, is the phase par excellence of cumulative progress in elaborating and perfecting new insights and techniques in research, and new styles in art. The third phase brings saturation, followed by frustration and deadlock. The fourth and last phase is a time of crisis and doubt -- epitomized in John Donne's complaint on the fall of Aristotelian cosmology: 'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.' But it is also a time of wild experimentation (Fauvism and Dada and its equivalents in science) and of creative anarchy -- reculer pour mieux sauter -- which prepares and incubates the next revo
lution, initiating a new departure -- and so the cycle starts again.
This recurrent pattern is in some respects analogous to the successive stages in the process of individual discovery, according to the schema proposed by Helmholtz and Graham Wallas: conscious preparation -- unconscious incubation -- illumination -- verification and consolidation. But while the individual's process of discovery is concluded at the last of these stages, on the historical scale the last stage of one cycle shades into the first stage of the next.
A more recent theory which has strong affinities with the conception of historic cycles first developed in The Act of Creation and summarized above is Thomas Kuhn's much-quoted essay The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn calls the cumulative phases of the cycle 'normal science' and refers to the revolutionary breakthroughs as 'paradigm changes'. In spite of the different terminology, there are some striking similarities between Kuhn's schema and the one proposed in The Act of Creation, though they were developed independently from each other. Both represent radical departures from George Sarton's venerable theory which asserts that the history of science is the only history which displays cumulative progress, and that, accordingly, the progress of science is the only yardstick by which we can measure the progress of mankind.
In fact, however, as we have seen, the progress of science on the charts of history does not appear as a continuously ascending curve, but as a zigzag line, not unlike the history of art. This does not mean, of course, that there is no advance; only that both are advancing on an unpredictable, often erratic course.
In the course of the last hundred years, history has accelerated like a rocket taking off, and has produced new discoveries at a breath-taking rate -- but also more crises, about-turns and undoing-redoings than ever before. This is in evidence in all branches of science and art -- in painting and literature, physics and brain-research, genetics and cosmology. In every field the demolition squads were as feverishly active as the construction workers, but we see only what the latter built and tend to forget the once proud citadels of orthodoxy that were destroyed. No doubt in the next few decades we shall witness even more spectacular feats of undoing-redoing. Some speculative hunches on this subject will be found in later chapters.
PART THREE
Creative Evolution
IX
CRUMBLING CITADELS
1
One of the crumbling citadels of orthodoxy mentioned at the end of the previous chapter is the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution (which also goes by the name of 'synthetic theory'). The situation was summed up by Professor W. H. Thorpe when he wrote of 'an undercurrent of thought in the minds of perhaps hundreds of biologists over the last twenty-five years' who reject the neo-Darwinian dogma.* The contradictions and tautologies of the synthetic theory have actually been known even longer, as a kind of open secret, and yet the dogma has been and still is strenuously defended by the academic community, with the penalty of discreet but effective ostracism for heretics. The reason for this paradox seems to be twofold: firstly, commitment to a scientific theory can be as charged with emotion as a religious credo -- a subject much in evidence throughout the history of science; secondly, the absence of a coherent alternative to neo-Darwinism makes many biologists feel that a bad theory is better than no theory at all. Whether this is to be regarded as good scientific strategy is a matter of opinion.
* It was this remark of Thorpe's which sparked off the
'Beyond Reductionism' symposium (cf. Ch. I).
The essence of the theory is perhaps easiest to convey by drawing a parallel between neo-Darwinism in biology and behaviourism in psychology. Both derived their inspiration from the same Zeitgeist of reductionist philosophy which prevailed during the first half of our century. Behaviourism was founded by John Broadus Watson just before the First World War, and made its sensational impact mainly by proclaiming that 'consciousness' and 'mind' are empty words with no basis in reality. Half a century later, Professor Skinner of Harvard University -- probably the most influential academic psychologist of our time -- continued to proclaim the same views in even more extreme form. In Skinner's standard textbook Science and Human Behaviour, the hopeful student of psychology is told from the very outset that 'mind', 'ideas', etc., are non-existent entities, 'invented to provide spurious explanations. . . . Since mental or psychic events are asserted to lack the dimensions of physical science, we have an additional reason for rejecting them." (By the same logic, we may reject the reality of radio waves, because they consist of vibrations in a vacuum devoid of any physical properties.)
I have often found it difficult to convince non-academic friends that this patently absurd doctrine still dominates academic psychology. As a recent critic wrote:
It is an interesting exercise to sit down and try to be conscious
of what it means to say that consciousness does not exist. History
has not recorded whether or not this feat was attempted by the
early behaviourists. But it has recorded elsewhere and in large
the enormous influence which the doctrine that consciousness does
not exist has had on psychology in this century. [2]
We are now approaching a vital issue towards which behaviourism and neo-Darwinism show strikingly similar attitudes. It concerns their views of the driving forces behind biological evolution on the one hand, and cultural evolution on the other. Take cultural evolution first. How can scientific discovery and artistic originality be explained in the mindless universe of the behaviourist? Here is Watson's answer -- and let me point out that the quote which follows is the only passage in his book in which creativity is mentioned (Watson's italics):
One natural question often raised is, how do we ever get new verbal
creations such as a poem or a brilliant essay? The answer is
that we get them by manipulating words, shuffling them about until
a new pattern is hit upon . . . How do you suppose Patou builds
a new gown? Has he any 'picture in his mind' of what the gown
is to look like when it is finished? He has not . . . He calls
his model in, picks up a new piece of silk, throws it around her,
he pulls it in here, he pulls it out there . . . He manipulates the
material until it takes on the semblance of a dress . . . Not until
the new creation aroused admiration and commendation, both his own
and others, would manipulation be complete -- the equivalent of the
rat's finding food . . . The painter plies his trade in the same way,
nor can the poet boast of any other method. [3]
The two points to retain here are (a) that the solution is 'hit upon' by chance after many random attempts, and (b) that it is retained because it has been rewarded by approval.
Thirty years after Watson's book was published, Skinner drew the same conclusions about the way scientific discoveries are made -- though by that time behaviourism had developed its own esoteric jargon:
The result of solving a problem is the appearance of a solution in
the form of a response . . . The appearance of the response in his
[the human individual's] behaviour is no more surprising than the
appearance of any response in the behaviour of any organism. [4]
The 'organisms' to which he refers here are the experimental rats in the so-called Skinner box which behaviourists regard as the most effective means for the study of psychology.* The box is equipped with a food tray and a bar which can be pushed down like the lever of a slot machine, whereupon a food pellet drops into a tray. When a rat is placed into the box it will sooner or later 'hit upon' the lever with its paw by pure chance, and be automatically rewarded by a pellet; and it will sooner or later learn that to obtain a pellet it must press the bar. This experimental procedure is called 'operant conditioning'; pressing the bar is called 'emitting an operant response'; the food pellet is called a 'reinforcer'; withholding the pellet
is a 'negative reinforcer'; the number of times the rat presses the bar in a given period of time is the 'rate of response', which is automatically recorded and plotted on charts. The purpose of these experiments is to enable the behaviourist to realize his stated purpose: 'to measure, predict and control behaviour' -- including human behaviour.
* Nothing in the ambitious titles of Skinner's The Behaviour of
Organisms and Science and Human Behaviour indicates that
the data in them are almost exclusively derived from conditioning
experiments on rats and pigeons.
The details of behaviourist rat-lore do not concern us here*; the relevant point is again that the animal's discovery of the secret of the lever was due to pure chance, and that lever-pressing was added to its repertory of skills because it was 'reinforced' by rewards.
* See The Ghost in the Machine, Ch. I-III and Appendix II.
If we now turn to the Darwinian's answer to the question how man evolved out of a primordial blob of slime, we find that it is much the same as Watson's answer to the question how Patou transforms a piece of material into an elegant dress: 'He pulls it in here, he pulls it out there . . . he manipulates the material until it takes on the semblance of a dress.' Darwinian evolution is supposed to operate on the same principle, that is, by manipulating at random the organic raw material -- putting a tail here, putting a pair of wings there -- until a suitable pattern is hit upon, and retained owing to its fitness to survive.
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