Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science

by Sagan, Dorion

  LIVING IN HISTORY

  The practice of science must be distinguished from thinking for oneself that is the spirit of science. We tend to behave as if we live outside history, but we live in it: many ideas accepted by our culture today will be considered laughably incorrect or even tragically wrong by our descendants. Sometimes ideas that seem ludicrous turn out to be true; sometimes ideas that we have rightly dismissed as being insufficiently critical turn out to be true in another, deeper sense. Consider the disproof of the spontaneous generation of life by Lazzaro Spallanzani and Louis Pasteur, true enough now but not possible if life is believed, as many working scientists speculate, to have originated on Earth. Or again, take heliocentrism: yes, Earth travels around the Sun, but this deep and founding truth (the sense of “revolution” in scientific revolution derives from Copernicus’s realization that Earth revolves) is nonetheless compromised by relativity theory’s assertion that there is no privileged frame of reference. Thus, in a real sense, we can regard the Sun as revolving around Earth after all. Still another example is Empedocles’s notion of evolution by natural selection and symbiosis (albeit of organs) on the ancient Earth: both correct but premature theses were dismissed by Aristotle, who probably thought they smacked of the wild stories of sex beyond species borders familiar from Greek myths. (Aristotle, who had enough to deal with trying to reverse his teacher Plato’s emphasis on an unseen unchanging world, may also not have liked Empedocles’s notions because they flouted Platonic formlike species boundaries.)

  TRUTH IS NOT ABSOLUTE but infiltrated by a changing consensus. This is an idea advanced within social studies of science and is a conclusion of Peircian pragmatism. That agreed-on truths are subject to intellectual fashion is hardly contestable. In an example of epistemological nihilism, the literary agent John Brockman, who today represents the most successful scientist–writers but who once helped organize events with the iconoclastic artist Andy Warhol, once wrote, “Nobody knows and you can’t find out.” Such a sentiment is the antithesis of a naive faith in a scientific truth removed from human mediation, and I think overstates the case. “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away,” wrote the science fiction author Philip K. Dick. The famous economist Joseph Schumpeter said something very similar, that the quality of truth is that it exists whether or not you believe in it. What is science’s ideal? To quote the quantum physicist David Bohm (1917–1992), “Science is the search for truth whether we like it or not.”4

  That wishing won’t make it so is common sense, but common sense, when it challenges widespread beliefs (which, as articles of faith, do not require active thinking), is not so common. And if one engages critical thinking but goes against the multitude, one can be ridiculed, ostracized, or even killed.

  When—to cruise backward in time to briefly show a few salient examples of this phenomenon—James Shapiro wrote a popular article in Huffington Post summarizing his Evolution chronicling the new evidence of transposons (jumping genes), redundant DNA, regulatory RNA, and other discoveries of modern molecular biology that suggest the genome has an ability to rapidly reorganize itself—contradicting the neo-Darwinian tenet of gradual evolution by random mutations—he was lambasted by a University of Chicago colleague on his Why Evolution Is True blog as “completely wrong” and “misguided.”5 And it was suggested, in the largely anonymous comments section, that if he wasn’t a creationist he was playing into creationist hands.6 When I communicated with Shapiro, he assured me that he was not a creationist and that of course there was a role for natural selection, but it should not be used as a “deus ex machina” to explain all complexity—and that empirical investigations showed that evolutionary novelty came from symbiosis, hybridizations, and internal genome restructuring. Neo-Darwinism (whose adherents refer to their beliefs more generally as “modern evolutionary biology”), he characterized, ironically considering its adherents’ quickness to dismiss critics as creationists, as a “religion” for its reticence to honestly consider evidence and alternative views.

  After Case Western Reserve University withdrew its press release that its assistant professor of molecular biology and microbiology, Erik D. Andrulis, had proposed an ambitious new “experimentally and experientially verifiable” theory of life claiming to “unify quantum and celestial mechanics” around a geometric entity he called a “gyromodel,” he was accused of “mental illness” and “Sokalism”—the latter being a reference to a famous practical joke the physicist Alan Sokal played in getting a jargon-infused sham paper accepted by the cultural studies journal Social Text.7

  When Otto Rössler, a German biochemist and author of three hundred papers on chaos theory, warned that CERN has no safety guidelines to protect against a one-in-six chance of particle collisions creating possibly Earth-destroying black holes, his fears (and the lawsuits addressing them) were dismissed.

  Now we live under a sort of temporal distortion that one might call the Logarithmic Illusion of the Now: the past seems settled whereas the present seems relatively magnified, swollen, and urgent. The examples above are relatively unsettled. How do we distinguish between crackpots and curious seekers with good criticisms or alternative theories that need to be investigated in the moment? There is no magic sword, especially not one sharpened with the whetstone of orthodoxy, that will magically separate science from “pseudoscience.” Without assuming that past vindications prove anything about the present, it is obvious that ridicule and claims of madness are not equivalent to valid critique.

  When the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1931) claimed he communicated through the air without wires, some of his acquaintances were convinced enough of his craziness to suggest he be put in a mental institution8—yet just today you may well have checked your e-mail, spoken on a cell phone, or be reading this online.

  THE RISE OF OUR MODERN SCIENCE “thought-style” now threatens Brunian–Galilean young open minds with new repressive social structures.9 Ironically, despite science’s touting of open-minded error correction as the key to “the scientific method”—as if this were only a single procedure—new kinds of repression have been created by science’s institutionalization.

  It is always safer to say what can happen than to say what can’t based on conceptual first principles or theoretical prejudices. After miscalculating the age of the Sun, the physicist William Thomson, or Lord Kelvin (1824–1907), from whose name we get the Kelvin scale in temperature, argued that “heavier than air” flying machines were impossible, that X-rays were a hoax, and that radio was a doomed idea. The first of the three “laws of science” coined by Arthur Clarke (1917–2008), the science fiction writer and proposer of the idea of a telecommunications satellite, is that, “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

  The correct conclusion to be derived from the attempt to have Marconi committed to a mental institution is not that we inhabit the insane universe of Marconi’s demented imagination but that the masses of his contemporaries, including some very smart people, were dead wrong. Although the incessant questioning and critical judgment of organized science led to wholesale revisions of humanity’s views of reality, it arguably did not change human nature—hierarchical, gullible, and authoritarian, with a perhaps evolutionary-based weakness, certainly affecting scientists themselves, for people to attribute correctness to their own beliefs.

  TOO IMPORTANT TO BE LEFT JUST TO SCIENTISTS

  Openness to new ideas threatens to depose the authority of the masters of the old ones, even and perhaps especially, one might argue, the scientists who have staked their methodology on the welcoming of novelty if merited by the evidence; this is because views arrived at after open debate and testing, rather than faith and suppression, enjoy greater legitimacy and efficacy and thus seem, paradoxically, still more impervious to change. Scientists are the priests of the modern age: As sc
ience becomes more institutionalized, more powerful, Butler’s comment becomes more poignant, more profound. To be fair, it seems that scientists personally deserve our vigilance less than the institutional structures that fund science, and of which scientists are a part. For me, Butler’s salient comment has also lately taken on a personal aspect. Like Butler, I am not a scientist, but like him I believe that the scientific attitude comes out of deeper philosophical stance of curiosity and critical thinking, a stance that must face dogma even at the risk of social disapprobation. In a media age, in a public relations state where science can and has been corrupted by corporate bottom lines and government-sponsored agendas, the philosophical heart of science—thinking things through for yourself, and seeking the truth whether we like what we find or not—is increasingly in peril. I was recently exposed to an extreme example of scientific groupthink. The German intellectual Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), who died before his time fleeing the Nazis, wrote that extremes can sometimes be more illustrative of a phenomenon than typical examples. I think this is the case here.

  Let me preface this by saying that non-Darwinians, or better, insufficiently virulent Darwinists, have often been unceremoniously attacked for, for lack of a better term, their lack of faith. Many examples could be adduced, including among Darwinists themselves. Alfred Wallace, whose early understanding of natural selection led Darwin to hurry to publish his similar findings, criticized the notion of sexual selection of bright colors, on the basis that the inside of bodies are brightly colored but not perceived by animals or therefore sexually selected. Gould criticized the tendency to assume all characters have been actively selected for as “panadaptationism.” But this hardly makes him anti-Darwinian. And the neo-Darwinian tendency to overextend the explanatory principle of natural selection is well taken. Male nipples (as Gould pointed out) were not directly selected for but result from the embryological similarity of males and females, which of course as mammals require breasts.

  Clearly part of the vituperation of those insufficiently genuflectory of natural selection is that, in a polarized political climate where Darwinism is closer to experimental science and creationism closer to the tribal atavism of a prescientific superstition, there is no room for nuanced pastels beyond the Zoroastrian palette of black and white. But “Darwin’s dangerous idea” (as Daniel Dennett tagged it—although it was in fact advanced by others, including Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, before him) does not provide a complete explanation for complexity, biological or otherwise. In his memoirs Vladimir Nabokov discusses a butterfly whose wing design seems not only to contain a simulacrum of a water droplet but to accurately display the refraction of the line of a wing marking through it.

  His wording as well as his critique of the twentieth-century canon—Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx and to a lesser extent Charles Darwin—makes the reader wonder whether Nabokov is intimating an otherworldy designer rather than naturally selected camouflage. In fact, he may just be calling attention to the human predilection for finding patterns—a kind of conspiracy theory writ small—whether they be those of grand divine design or of a more measured evolutionary sort. The wing marking may not be naturally selected or indeed anything outside the human beholder. This point was brought home to me when I saw a picture book compiled by someone who had found all twenty-six letters of the alphabet reasonably produced by nature on the wings of butterflies. In what I am about to discuss it absolutely needs to be pointed out that anti-neo-Darwinism is in no way necessarily anti-Darwinian and in fact may be more respectful of the cagey close observer, more fond of observation and qualified prose than rhetoric and polemics, Charles Darwin. It is also worth pointing out that Darwin himself could, if one were so inclined, reasonably be called a Lamarckian because of his adherence to a theory of gemmules, theorized agents of inheritance that could pass on changes accrued within the parent’ own lifetime. The situation is not unlike Oscar Wilde’s barb, “Christ save us from the Christians.” Because the stakes of the science–religion battle were set by the debate between evolution and Christianity, even avowedly secular and demonstrably scientific alternative explanations of complexity have been lambasted if they are perceived to counter the neo-Darwinist creed with its emotional investment and faith in the shaping powers of natural selection. In the “extreme” case I am about to discuss, my mother, Lynn Margulis, argued that natural selection was not a source of variation and innovation but a shaper of it. Symbiogenesis is richly supported with demonstrable examples showing its direct role in speciation,10 whereas speciation by the gradual accumulation of inherited variations, while it claims many more adherents, and is certainly reasonable in principle, has no proven examples. Thus, while the neo-Darwinists doubtless would not want to be added to that Christian proto-existentialist’s company, Søren Kierkegaard’s argument that the less evidence there is for a phenomenon, the more one must put faith (and one might add, intimidating stridency) in it, applies here.

  What happened is that the University of Chicago evolutionary geneticist Jerry Coyne, upset by a recent interview with my mother in Discover magazine, lambasted her for being “extremely dumb,” “diss[ing] evolutionary biology,” “embarrass[ing]” the field and herself, and so on. Coyne said he had been asked by the New York Times to review our Acquiring Genomes: A New Theory of the Origin of Species, but, though he likes reviewing for the Times, he found the book’s ideas “so dreadful” that he refused on the grounds that he didn’t want to give it any attention. Coyne, who’s written the best seller Why Evolution Is True, providing ammunition against shortsighted creationist interpretations of the phylogenetic evidence, was particularly incensed by my mother’s comparison of neo-Darwinists themselves to “a minor twentieth-century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon biology.”

  Many of the people who posted on Coyne’s website, hosted by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason, launched into a litany of ad hominem arguments, calling my mother a “moron”; suggesting that her ex-husband, my scientist father, Carl Sagan, would be outraged or divorce her; describing her brand of evolution as feminist; accusing her of being a careerist, a narcissist coveting attention, a mischaracterizer of her reported conversation with the evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin (in which the Harvard biologist said that many neo-Darwinist models were unsuccessful and used mistaken assumptions but were useful because they received funding from granting agencies); and commenters added on to Coyne’s proposed theory that successful scientists—especially ones who have proposed controversial ideas before and then been proved right—are captivated by fame in later life into believing their own crackpot ideas, seduced by success and forgoing the laboratory work that got them to their positions of authority in the first place. If Coyne had set the tone with his claim that she was “dogmatic, willfully ignorant, and intellectually dishonest,” some readers were quick to join in the largely anonymous bashing.11

  One of the only two or three commenters who dared to dissent from the prevailing mood of derision and name-calling complained that, after visiting the page a week later, he felt physically sick; he compared the dynamic to that of a “feeding frenzy” as shown on a nature documentary. It was at this point that the website’s moderator, Coyne himself, lamented, “Oh, give me a break! The woman made extremely stupid and erroneous comments about evolution and we called her on it.” I was particularly struck by one anonymous (in the sense of having just initials as an Internet handle, rather than an accountable real name) comment that pointed out Margulis not only questioned the connection between HIV and AIDs (such questioning being described by Coyne as “dreadful,” without further comment) but was a “9/11 troofer [sic]” who “pals around with Holocaust deniers, despite being Jewish.” There were also many comments deriding her for her role in contributing to the “Gaia hypothesis” of James E. Lovelock, FRS—inventor of the electron capture device, the microwave oven (although he didn’t patent it), and an early innovator of cryogenic
s technologies, among many other scientific contributions.

  The Gaia hypothesis in its scientific formulation proposes that our biosphere has modulated its atmospheric chemistry, mean temperature, oceanic salinity and pH, and other variables for hundreds of millions of years at a time because of the interaction of gas-exchanging, environment-altering organisms at Earth’s surface. Main tenets of this argument for multiple feedbacks between living and nonliving components in the biosphere have been integrated into geology and Earth system science departments around the world—they do tend to stay away from the word Gaia because it is that of the Greek goddess of the Earth and has been appropriated by new age and feminist environmental groups.

  Agreeing with the man who compared the ill-mannered blog and its posts to a “feeding frenzy” and intellectual “street mugging,” I added and attempted to post my own somewhat acerbic but I think fair comment, which reads as follows: “This blog is an embarrassment. Earth system science is Gaia theory, Margulis in no way denies natural selection, there is a serious question about the relationship of HIV to AIDS in the disease industrial complex, and there is an organization of over 1600 engineers and architects who question the government’s explanation for the three buildings that imploded on 911. LM often overstates her case but I have found that she not only has the courage of her convictions but (as Nietzsche said) the courage to go against them when evidence warrants. (By the way in Oxford Richard Dawkins criticized her for not being symbiotic ‘enough.’) Seriously guys and gals, you can do better—this blog combines the critical acumen of a reality TV show with the emotional tenor of a witch hunt. Why not engage the facts rather than the personalities? Maybe this will help correct the misapprehension about Acquiring Genomes:”—and here I provided a link to my own Amazon review, “coauthorial critique,” addressing what the book did and didn’t say and providing further, postpublication evidence in support of its main thesis.12 Perhaps there was some technological glitch, or perhaps the comment was censored, but as of now my comment has not shown up.