“My uncle was a scientist, but he believed that love is real. A kind of natural phenomenon.”
– Cloud Atlas, Megan Sixsmith (Zhu Zhu)
I’ve
recently been reading a book – Consilience: The unity of knowledge – by the
biologist E.O. Wilson, which I’d
like to tell you about. The book is an analysis and re-statement of the enlightenment
ideal of the unity, convergence or – in Wilson’s terms – consilience of scientific understanding. The dream was that we
might trace the threads of causality across every possible level – from
biology, through chemistry to physics. Wilson’s addendum is that we might also
extend the methods and insights of the of the ‘hard’ sciences – particularly
evolutionary psychology and populations genetics – to inform a
cross-pollination between ‘the two cultures’, the natural sciences and the
humanities. I don’t agree in all particulars, but contrary to some reviews I’ve
read, this isn’t just materialistic
triumphalism. I promise this is less a manifesto on how economics,
anthropology, political science and philosophy have got it all wrong, and more
a extended plea that the entrenched positions of the culture wars and their
false dichotomies be put aside, so that a new and unfamiliar intellectual
territory might be fruitfully explored by both traditions. I’m a neuroscientist
by vocation, and only a philosopher by avocation, but I’ve noticed that people
from the other culture tend to view
such promises with suspicion. So, just go read the book – if nothing else the
prose ain’t half bad.
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| Purity, by xkcd (http://xkcd.com/435/) |
A good book is a good book, sure – but why blog about it
here? Firstly, there’s Wilsons southern american christian background and the
revelatory impact of being exposed at college to the neo-darwinian synthesis,
as well as his frustration with the inability of people he’d known from
childhood to see the merit of such a heathen perspective. Secondly, there’s the
familiar way he appears to view the similarities between religion and science –
both are seen as arising out of the wellspring of the human need for meaning –
as well as their differences. While I can see religion as a valid approach to
how people might choose to relate to the world and their place in it, for me
science trumps religion for certain kinds of questions when you are interested
in the world in and of itself – and for very specific reasons. Forgive the long
extract, but I couldn’t put it better myself:
“There is nothing in science more provocative than a cleanly defined and surprising prediction, and nothing held in higher regard than such a prediction confirmed in detail. To this end, scientists look for four qualities in theory generally and mathematical models in particular.The first is parsimony: the fewer the units and processes used to account for the phenomenon, the better. Because of the success of parsimony in the physical sciences, we do not today need an imaginary substance called phlogiston to explain the combustion of firewood, or nonexistent ether to fill the void of space.The second quality is generality: the greater the range of phenomena covered by the model, the more likely it is to be true. In reagent chemistry the periodic table precludes a separate theory for each element and compound. One theory works exactly for all.Next is consilience. Units and processes of a discipline that conform with solidly verified knowledge in other disciplines have proven consistently superior in theory and practice to units and processes that do not conform. That is why, in every scrap of data from every level of biology, from the chemistry of DNA to the dating of fossils, it has been the case that organic evolution by natural selection beats Creationism. God may exist, He may be delighted with what we are up to on this minor planet, but His fine hand is not needed to explain the biosphere.And finally, drawing from all of the above virtues, the definitive quality of good theory is predictiveness. Those theories endure that are precise in the predictions they make across many phenomena and whose predictions are easiest to test by observation and experiment.”- EO Wilson – Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Page 222
Another
reason is Wilson’s consilience program – if materialistic science might inform
and be informed by contact with the social sciences, might religion as a
natural phenomenon then be within the rubric of science? Quite aside from any theoretical or
empirical critiques of such a program, I’ve noticed when talking with
religiously inclined people from the other
other culture, that there’s a general view that some things are precious and
better left unexplained or unexamined too closely. Oddly enough, I don’t think any scientist sees
themselves as in the job of removing wonder and magic from the world – or
engaged in a war against irreducible complexity. Rather - for me and at least the scientists
I’ve had the opportunity to discuss this with - if anything, they feel like
they are in the job of increasing it exponentially. I spoke before about how I
like the image of all the things that are, have been, will be or might be in
the world as facets of a great, gorgeous four-dimensional crystal. The beauty of a worldview informed
by the scientific method lies in how an increase in quantitative knowledge of
the many, many facets of my world-crystal provides new levels and unexpected
vistas of beauty, elegance, magic and complexity. They are all the more
brilliant precisely because they do not necessarily conform to what the human
mind might invent for itself. Indeed, if
the perspectives generated by human beings or gods, or both, are so special,
why do their own adherents consider them so fragile that a closer look might
irrevocably undermine them?
“The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.”- EO Wilson - Consilience The Unity of Knowledge, Page 67
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| Martin Rees’ cosmological ouroborus. Another pretty metaphor combining the mythical snake that eternally eats its own tale, and (to my mind) the cross-fertilization of knowledge at one scale of magnitiude that feeds back and informs that at other levels. Somewhere in the middle of the scale, you find humans. |
NOTE: please don’t be derailed by my use of ‘materialistic’
a couple of times in this post – I mean something philosophically specific, not
the favouring of material things or a niave belief in the actual, material,
really real existence of the world as we conceive it. I didn’t get into it here
because its grist for the blogging mill – watch this space for a post on this subject
in the hopefully not-to-distant future.
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