What Science Knows
And How It Knows It by James Franklin
Encounter, 230 pp., $23.95
Between 1817 and 1825 the Department of the Seine reported an average of 356 suicides per year for the greater Paris area. The number stayed between 300 and 400. Fourteen percent of the suicides were by firearm, 10 percent by hanging. These numbers were also surprisingly constant, as though the French were trying to be Swiss.
What do such regularities tell us about ourselves, or at least about the French? Are there macabre fixed patterns of human (mis)behavior, to be teased out by the social sciences? Are we like coins that, while individually unpredictable, are quite routine in the aggregate? Toss a thousand coins and you will get around 500 heads; watch 19th-century Paris for a year and 356 Frenchmen will terminate themselves, apparently of their own free will. The suicide rate is easier to predict than the weather.
Such provocations comprise the flora and fauna of Australian philosopher James Franklin’s engaging, and distinctly Down Under, romp. Franklin is an everyman philosopher, comfortable with the idea that science must know something, especially if you think about it during a “visit to the dentist.” The unlicensed critics of science and its methods—part of the plague of postmodernity—have simply got it wrong, even when they get David Hume right: Hume did, indeed, say that we can’t generalize without knowledge of “cause and effect,” but he was, alas, wrong. Ten percent of the Seine suicides reliably hanged themselves, year after year, and nobody had any idea why they preferred that to the more popular drowning.
Hume was a brilliant philosopher, as we know. But he was a modernist, which means we can dismiss—or “deconstruct,” as we now say—all his insights as the product of white male power games. Franklin ups the ante, though, with Hume’s 20th-century counterparts, philosophers of science like Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. These irrationalists, as Franklin calls them, borrowing a term from David Stove, had limited influence on scientists but thoroughly confused everyone else. They failed to understand the simple reality that science advances, although, as citizens of the 20th century, they surely must have noticed it. Popper’s infamous (and not entirely useless) criterion of “falsifiability” to distinguish science from nonscience provides no mechanism by which one unfalsified theory might be preferred over another, or how successive passes of this test might endow an insight with certainty.
At what point can we say with certainty that the earth does go around the sun, blood does circulate in the body, and viruses do cause disease? The probability that these scientific discoveries are not true is, in the words of Martin Gardner, who wrote a cover blurb for this book, “indistinguishable from zero.” This, of course, is also why we know going to the dentist for a root canal is a good idea, rather than casting about for some other explanation for that pain in our jaw. Thomas Kuhn, apparently, also went to the dentist, despite his confidence that the denticular paradigm of his dentist was merely different and not superior to the one it replaced.
Franklin unleashes his heaviest critical artillery on contemporary postmodern critics of science—the “social constructivists”—whose lyrical nonsense was immortalized by Alan Sokal. The “Sokal Hoax,” as it has come to be known, skewered an entire field by getting a rhetorically resonant but entirely vacuous “paper” published in Social Text, a leading journal. The “social deconstruction of science” is now widely regarded as academia’s most profound encounter with the platonic form of utter stupidity. Its guiding intuition is that “since science is done by people, its explanation should be in the realm of causes acting on people, not the realm of abstract reasons.” By these rapidly dimming lights, we should suppose that gravity caught on because of Isaac Newton’s charming personality rather than its ability to explain impersonal orbits.
The “enemies of mathematics” get the greatest barrage of derision, especially poor Paul Ernest who, in Social Construction as a Philosophy of Mathematics, labored mightily until he had convinced himself that he couldn’t be sure that “2 x 3 = 3 x 2.” This towering achievement, says Franklin, is a “truly heroic level of refusing to know.” Luckily, the feeble gauntlets flung by the social constructivists at science and mathematics have, for the most part, floated off into space. In the final analysis they are as ineffectual as the buttocks that the Siberian Chukchees expose to the wind to make it stop blowing.
After laying waste to the disgruntled critics, Franklin takes the reader on an engaging tour through the culture of science, pausing to talk about grants and patronage, peer review, and the “Psychology of Science.” (Physicists and mathematicians, he notes, benefit from having a “touch of autism and introversion.”) He laments that the scientific community rarely receives the benefit of its own discoveries. The Internet, for example, was developed at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to share physicists’ papers but was then given away to the business world where it enabled many people and companies to amass great fortunes using the technology to share pictures of Paris Hilton. If CERN had retained even a small financial interest in this project, their funding would be unlimited and they would probably have found the God Particle by now. “Scientists,” says Franklin, need to be “better at sociology, politics, and marketing.”
Franklin occasionally seems like a wide-eyed science groupie, mesmerized by his subject. And, perhaps, this is an appropriate stance for all of us: We can—and should—wring our hands about nuclear bombs and global warming, but let’s not forget that science has tripled our life expectancy and cured so many diseases that many of us have 75 good years, enriched by email, digitized music, and no worries about the bubonic plague. Our hapless ancestors were grateful for 40 bad years. “On balance,” says Franklin, the effects of science have been “overwhelmingly for good.”
But science—or at least the scientist—has limitations of various sorts. Franklin castigates the ethical lapses in a research study where women were denied beneficial therapies because they were in the “control” group. And he pulls no punches with the Nazi and Japanese experiments on people, accusing those scientists of being mad or suffering from a “touch of autism.” Such lapses he calls “gross deformations of the scientific will to knowledge,” and not part of science qua science.
What Science Knows really comes to life when it explores what science doesn’t know, both in terms of its own uncertainty and its intrinsic limitations. Take evolution, for example. (His other case study is global warming.) Franklin asks, “Could something as complex as humans have evolved by chance and natural selection in four billion years?” This is an entirely reasonable question, and one that can certainly be posed by people who actually want to know—as opposed to the brave soldiers fighting evolution in Ken Ham’s creation museum. It is also a question that has no good answer right now.
Sir John Polkinghorne once noted that physicists like himself “would like to see an estimate, however rough, of how many steps would take us from a slightly light-sensitive cell to a fully formed insect eye.” Richard Dawkins greeted this simple question with derision in River Out of Eden, and dismissed it as “a doddle to answer.” Dawkins pejoratively labeled Polkinghorne’s query an “Argument from Personal Incredulity,” and suggested that if people understood big numbers better they wouldn’t ask such questions. But these are reasonable questions and, while evolution provides by far the best answers that we have at present, the answers are still not great and fall short of the explanations that, say, physics can provide for the phenomena it studies. (Ask a physicist how you can get all the diverse material in the world from protons, electrons, and neutrons, and you will be amazed at how good the answer is.) Chastising polemicists like Dawkins, who once famously described anti-evolutionists as “ignorant, stupid, or insane,” Franklin writes that “the complexities of the evidence are such that a higher standard of politeness to skeptics who raise serious problems would be well-advised.” Good advice.
Franklin’s diplomatic concerns about rudeness go into overdrive in the final chapter and turn into prophetic condemnations of scientists’ increasing tendency to wander off the ranch into ethics. Reprising Hume’s prohibition against drawing moral conclusions from simple facts, Franklin—now in league with Hume—castigates evolutionary psychology.
To be sure, our evolutionary history has endowed us with habits, like our unbridled enthusiasm for both sex and sugar. Some of those habits, however, motivate noble actions, like caring for children or telling the truth. But this insight into our history offers “no reason at all why we should approve those habits or follow them.” Take, for example, E. O. Wilson’s insistence that the omnicompetent powers of natural selection in creating our brains “must be pursued to explain ethics.” Franklin provocatively compares this to “irrationalist” arguments that the “truths” of mathematics are somehow just hiccups in our frontal cortex. Both exemplify postmodern oversimplifications of the sort immortalized in David Stove’s 1985 project titled “Competition to Find the Worst Argument in the World.” It doesn’t pay to get on the wrong side of James Franklin.
What Science Knows ends paradoxically: “What must the universe contain, at a minimum, if its contents include not only stones, galaxies, atoms, and brains but also beings of moral worth?” The answer is something that Science Doesn’t Know.
Karl W. Giberson is the author, most recently, of Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution.