Science in the Soul Read online

  G.S.

  The values of science and the science of values*1

  THE VALUES OF SCIENCE; what does this mean? In a weak sense I shall mean – and shall take a sympathetic view of – the values that scientists might be expected to hold, insofar as these are influenced by their profession. There is also a strong meaning, in which scientific knowledge is used directly to derive values as if from a holy book. Values in this sense I shall strongly*2 repudiate. The book of nature may be no worse than a traditional holy book as a source of values to live by, but that isn’t saying much.

  The science of values – the other half of my title – means the scientific study of where our values come from. This in itself should be value-free, an academic question, not obviously more contentious than the question of where our bones come from. The conclusion might be that our values owe nothing to our evolutionary history, but that is not the conclusion I shall reach.

  The values of science in the weak sense

  I doubt that scientists in private are less (or more) likely to cheat their spouses or their tax inspectors than anybody else. But in their professional life scientists do have special reasons for valuing simple truth. The profession is founded on a belief that there is such a thing as objective truth which transcends cultural variety, and that if two scientists ask the same question they should converge upon the same truth regardless of their prior beliefs or cultural background or even, within limits, ability. This is not contradicted by the widely rehearsed philosophical belief that scientists don’t prove truths but advance hypotheses which they fail to disprove. The philosopher may persuade us that our facts are only undisproved theories, but there are some theories we shall bet our shirt on never being disproved, and these are what we ordinarily call true.*3 Different scientists, widely separated geographically and culturally, will tend to converge upon the same undisproved theories.

  This view of the world is poles away from fashionable prattlings like the following:

  There’s no such thing as objective truth. We make our own truth. There’s no such thing as objective reality. We make our own reality. There are spiritual, mystical, or inner ways of knowing that are superior to our ordinary ways of knowing.*4 If an experience seems real, it is real. If an idea feels right to you, it is right. We are incapable of acquiring knowledge of the true nature of reality. Science itself is irrational or mystical. It’s just another faith or belief system or myth, with no more justification than any other. It doesn’t matter whether beliefs are true or not, as long as they’re meaningful to you.*5

  That way madness lies. I can best exemplify the values of one scientist by saying that, if there comes a time when everybody thinks like that, I shall not wish to go on living. We shall have entered a new Dark Age, albeit not one ‘made more sinister and more protracted by the lights of perverted science’*6 – because there won’t be any science to pervert.

  Yes, Newton’s Law of Gravitation is only an approximation, and maybe Einstein’s General Theory will in due season be superseded. But this does not lower them into the same league as medieval witchcraft or tribal superstition. Newton’s laws are approximations that you can stake your life on, and we regularly do. When it comes to flying, does your cultural relativist bet his life on levitation or physics, Magic Carpet or McDonnell Douglas? It doesn’t matter which culture you were brought up in, Bernoulli’s Principle doesn’t suddenly cease to operate as soon as you enter non-‘Western’ airspace. Or where do you put your money when it comes to predicting an observation? Like a modern Rider Haggard hero you can, as Carl Sagan pointed out, confound the savages of relativism and the New Age by predicting, to the second, a total eclipse of the sun a thousand years ahead.

  Carl Sagan died a month ago. I met him once only but I have loved his books and I shall miss him as a ‘candle in the dark’.*7 I dedicate this lecture to his memory, and shall use quotations from his writings. The remark about predicting eclipses is from the last book he published before he died, The Demon-Haunted World, and he goes on:

  You can go to the witch doctor to lift the spell that causes your pernicious anaemia, or you can take vitamin B12. If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate. If you’re interested in the sex of your unborn child, you can consult plumb-bob danglers all you want…but they’ll be right, on average, only one time in two. If you want real accuracy…try amniocentesis and sonograms. Try science.

  Of course, scientists often disagree with each other. But they are proud to agree on what new evidence it would take to change their minds. The route to any discovery will be published and whoever follows the same route should arrive at the same conclusion. If you lie – fiddle your figures, publish only that part of the evidence that supports your preferred conclusion – you will probably be found out. In any case, you won’t get rich doing science, so why do it at all if you undermine the only point of the enterprise by lying? A scientist is much more likely to lie to a spouse or a tax inspector than to a scientific journal.

  Admittedly, there are cases of fraud in science, and probably more than come to light. My claim is only that in the scientific community fiddling data is the cardinal sin, unforgivable in a way that is hard to translate into the terms of another profession. An unfortunate consequence of this extreme value judgement is that scientists are exceptionally reluctant to blow the whistle on colleagues whom they may have reason to suspect of fiddling figures. It’s rather like accusing somebody of cannibalism or paedophilia. Suspicions so dark may be suppressed until the evidence becomes too overwhelming to ignore, and by then much damage may have been done. If you fiddle your expense account, your peers will probably indulge you. If you pay a gardener in cash, thereby abetting a tax-dodging black market, you won’t be a social pariah. But a scientist who is caught fiddling research data would. He would be shunned by his colleagues, and without mercy drummed out of the profession for ever.

  A barrister who uses eloquence to make the best case he can, even if he doesn’t believe it, even if he selects favourable facts and slants the evidence, would be admired and rewarded for his success.*8 A scientist who does the same thing, pulling out all the rhetorical stops, twisting and turning every way to win support for a favourite theory, is regarded with at least mild suspicion.

  Typically, the values of scientists are such that the charge of advocacy – or, worse, of being a skilled advocate – is a charge that needs to be answered.*9 But there is an important difference between using rhetoric to bring out what you believe is really there, and using rhetoric knowingly to cover up what is really there. I once spoke in a university debate on evolution. The most effective creationist speech was made by a young woman who happened to be placed next to me at dinner afterwards. When I complimented her on her speech, she immediately told me she hadn’t believed a word of it. She was simply exercising her debating skills by arguing passionately for the exact opposite of what she considered to be true. No doubt she will make a good lawyer. The fact that now it was all I could do to stay polite to my dinner companion may say something about the values that I have acquired as a scientist.

  I suppose I am saying that scientists have a scale of values according to which there is something almost sacred about nature’s truth. This may be why some of us get so heated about astrologers, spoonbenders and similar charlatans, whom others indulgently tolerate as harmless entertainers. The law of libel penalizes those who knowingly tell lies about individuals. But you get off scot-free if you make money lying about nature – who can’t sue. My values may be warped, but I’d like nature to be represented in court like an abused child.*10

  The downside to the love of truth is that it may lead scientists to pursue it regardless of unfortunate consequences.*11 Scientists do bear a heavy responsibility to warn society of those consequences. Einstein acknowledged the danger when he said: ‘If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith.’ But of course he wouldn’t really. And when the opportunity came, he signed the famous letter al
erting Roosevelt to the possibilities and dangers of the atomic bomb. Some of the hostility meted out to scientists is equivalent to shooting the messenger. If astronomers called our attention to a large asteroid on a collision course for Earth, the final thought of many people before impact would be to blame ‘the scientists’. There is an element of shooting the messenger about our reaction to BSE.*12 Unlike the asteroid case, here the true blame does belong with humanity. Scientists must bear some of it, along with the economic greed of the agricultural foodstuffs industry.

  Carl Sagan remarks that he is often asked whether he believes there is intelligent life out there. He leans towards a cautious yes, but says it with humility and uncertainty.

  Often, I’m asked next, ‘What do you really think?’

  I say, ‘I just told you what I really think.’

  ‘Yes, but what’s your gut feeling?’

  But I try not to think with my gut. If I’m serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it’s okay to reserve judgement until the evidence is in.

  Mistrust of inner, private revelation is, it seems to me, another of the values fostered by the experience of doing science. Private revelation doesn’t sit well with the textbook ideals of scientific method: testability, evidential support, precision, quantifiability, consistency, intersubjectivity, repeatability, universality, and independence of cultural milieu.

  There are also values of science which are probably best treated as akin to aesthetic values. Einstein on the subject is sufficiently often quoted so here, instead, is the great Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, in a lecture in 1975, when he was sixty-five:

  In my entire scientific life…the most shattering experience has been the realisation that an exact solution of Einstein’s equations of general relativity, discovered by the New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr, provides the absolutely exact representation of untold numbers of massive black holes that populate the Universe. This ‘shuddering before the beautiful’, this incredible fact that a discovery motivated by a search after the beautiful in mathematics should find its exact replica in Nature, persuades me to say that beauty is that to which the human mind responds at its deepest and most profound.

  I find this moving in a way that is missing from the skittish dilettantism of Keats’ famous lines:

  ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ – that is all

  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

  Going only a little beyond aesthetics, scientists tend to value the long term at the expense of the short; they draw inspiration from the wide open spaces of the cosmos and the grinding slowness of geological time rather than the parochial concerns of humanity. They are especially prone to see things sub specie aeternitatis, even if this puts them at risk of being accused of a bleak, cold, unsympathetic view of humanity.

  Carl Sagan’s penultimate book, Pale Blue Dot, is built around the poetic image of our world seen from distant space.

  Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home…The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

  Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in a great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

  For me the only bleak aspect of the passage I have just read is the human realization that its author is now silenced. Whether the scientific cutting down to size of humanity seems bleak is a matter of attitude. It may be an aspect of scientific values that many of us find such large visions uplifting and exhilarating rather than cold and empty. We also warm to nature as lawful and uncapricious. There is mystery but never magic, and mysteries are all the more beautiful for being eventually explained. Things are explicable and it is our privilege to explain them. The principles that operate here prevail there – and ‘there’ means out to distant galaxies. Charles Darwin, in the famous ‘entangled bank’ passage which ends The Origin of Species, notes that all the complexity of life has ‘been produced by laws acting around us…’ and he goes on:

  Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

  The sheer time it has taken species to evolve constitutes a favoured argument for their conservation. This in itself involves a value judgement, presumably one congenial to those steeped in the depths of geological time. In a previous work I have quoted Oria Douglas-Hamilton’s harrowing account of an elephant cull in Zimbabwe:

  I looked at one of the discarded trunks and wondered how many millions of years it must have taken to create such a miracle of evolution. Equipped with fifty thousand muscles and controlled by a brain to match such complexity, it can wrench and push with tonnes of force…at the same time, it is capable of performing the most delicate operations…And yet there it lay, amputated like so many elephant trunks I had seen all over Africa.

  Moving as this is, I quote it to illustrate the scientific values that led Mrs Douglas-Hamilton to stress the millions of years it has taken to evolve the complexity of an elephant’s trunk rather than, say, the rights of elephants or their capacity to suffer, or the value of wildlife in enriching our human experience or a country’s tourist revenues.

  Not that evolutionary understanding is irrelevant to questions of rights and suffering. I am shortly going to support the view that you cannot derive fundamental moral values from scientific knowledge. But utilitarian moral philosophers who do not believe there are any absolute moral values nevertheless justly claim a role in unmasking contradictions and inconsistencies within particular value systems.*13 Evolutionary scientists are well placed to observe inconsistencies in the absolutist elevation of human rights over those of all other species.

  ‘Pro-lifers’ assert, without question, that life is infinitely precious, while cheerfully tucking into a large steak. The sort of ‘life’ that such people are ‘pro’ is all too clearly human life. Now, this is not necessarily wrong, but the evolutionary scientist will, at very least, warn us of inconsistency. It is not self-evident that abortion of a one-month human foetus is murder, while shooting a fully sentient adult elephant or mountain gorilla is not.

  Some six or seven million years ago there lived an African ape which was the common ancestor of all modern humans and all modern gorillas. By chance, the intermediate forms that link us to this ancestor – Homo erectus, Homo habilis, various members of the genus Australopithecus and others – are extinct. Also extinct are the intermediates that link the same common ancestor to modern gorillas. If the intermediates were not extinct; if relict populations turned up in the jungles and savannahs of Africa; the consequences would be poignant. You’d be able to mate and have a child with someone who’d be able to mate and have a child with someone else who…after a handful of further links in the chain, would be able to mate and have a child with a gorilla. It is sheer bad luck that some key intermediates in this chain of interfertility happen to be dead.

  This is not a frivolous thought experiment. The only room for argument is over how many intermediate stages we need to
postulate in the chain. And it doesn’t matter how many intermediate stages there are in order to justify the following conclusion. Your absolutist elevation of Homo sapiens above all other species, your unargued preference for a human foetus or a brain-dead human vegetable over an adult chimpanzee at the height of its powers, your species-level apartheid, would collapse like a house of cards. Or if it did not, the comparison with apartheid would turn out to be no idle one. For if, in the face of a surviving continuum of intermediates, you insisted upon separating humans from non-humans, you could maintain the separation only by appealing to apartheid-like courts to decide whether particular intermediate individuals could ‘pass for human’.

  Such evolutionary logic does not destroy all doctrines of specifically human rights. But it certainly destroys absolutist versions, for it shows that the separation of our species depends upon accidents of extinction. If morals and rights were absolute in principle, they could not be jeopardized by new zoological discoveries in the Budongo Forest.

  Values of science in the strong sense

  I want to turn now from the weak to the strong sense of the values of science, to scientific findings as the direct source of a system of values. The versatile English biologist Sir Julian Huxley – incidentally a predecessor of mine as Tutor in Zoology at New College – tried to make evolution the basis for an ethics, almost for a religion. For him, The Good is that which furthers the evolutionary process. His more distinguished but unknighted grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley took an almost opposite view. I am more in sympathy with Huxley senior.*14

  Part of Julian Huxley’s ideological infatuation with evolution stemmed from his optimistic vision of its progress.*15 Nowadays it is fashionable to doubt that evolution really is progressive at all. This is an interesting argument and I have a view on it,*16 but it is superseded by the prior question of whether we should anyway base our values upon this or any other conclusion about nature.