werner@aecom.YU.EDU (Craig Werner) (06/10/88)
Somehow the following got separted from its reference. I beleive that it consists of the middle third or so of a Natural History column appearing within the last year or so by Stephen Jay Gould. What follows was tangential to his article, but of course hits the primary problem of sci.bio right on the head: --------- Popular misunderstanding of science and its history centers upon the vexatious notion of scientific progress -- a concept embraced by all practitioners and boosters, but assailed, or at least mistrusted, by those suspicious of science and its power to improve our lives. The enemy of resolution, here as nearly always, is that old devil Dichotomy. We take a subtle and interesting issue, with a real resolution embracing aspects of all basic positions, and we divide ourselves into two holy armies, each with a brightly colored cardboard mythology as its flag of struggle. The cardboard banner of scientific boosterism is an extreme form of realism, the notion that science progresses because it discovers more and more about an objective material reality out there in the universe. The extreme version holds that science is an utterly objective enterprise (and therefore superior to other human activities), that scientists read reality directly by invoking the scientific method to free their minds of cultural superstition, and that the history of science is a march toward Truth, mediated by increasing knowledge of the external world. The cardboard banner of the opposition is an equally extreme form of relativism, the idea that truth has no objective meaning and can only be assessed by the variable standards of different communities and cultures. The extreme version holds that scientific consensus is no different from any other arbitrary set of social conventions, say the rules for Chinese handball set by my old crowd on 63rd Avenue. Science is ideology, and scientific "progress" is no improving map of external reality, but only a derivative expression of cultural change. These positions are so sharply defined that they can only elicit howls of disbelief from the opposition. How can relativists deny that science discovers external truth, say the realists. Cro-Magnon people could draw a horse as beautifully as any artist now alive, but they could not resolve the structure of DNA or photograph the moons of Uranus. How, reply the relativists, can anyone deny the social character of science when Darwin needed Adam Smith more than Galapagos tortoises, and when Linnaeus matched his taxonomy to prevailing views of divine order. These extreme positions, of course, are embraced by very few thinkers. They are caricatures constructed by the opposition to enhance the rhetorical advantages of dichotomy. They are not really held by anyone, but partisans THINK that their opponents are this foolish, thus fanning the zealousness of their own advocacy. The possibility for consensus drowns in a sea of charges. The central claim of each side is correct, and no inconsistency attends the marriage once we drop the peripheral extremities of each attitude. Science is, and must be, culturally embedded; what else could the product of human passion be? Science is also progressive because it discovers and masters more and more (yet ever so little in toto) of a complex external reality. Culture is not the enemy of objectivity but a matrix that can either aid or retard advancing knowledge. Science is not a linear march to truth but a tortuous road with blind alleys and a rubbernecking delay every mile or two. Our road map is not objective reality but the patterns of human thoughts and theories. -- Craig Werner (future MD/PhD, 4 years down, 3 to go) werner@aecom.YU.EDU -- Albert Einstein College of Medicine (1935-14E Eastchester Rd., Bronx NY 10461, 212-931-2517) "Time flies when you're streaking out N. gonorrheae."