1. Hidden Histories of Science

Science was never pure.

Historiography, the formal writing of history, has several forms, reflecting the different faces of history. The dominant historiography of science, however, gives science a straight chronology from Greek natural philosophers fumbling around in the mud to astronomers looking through the Chandra telescope to the edge of the universe. There is room in the historiographer’s narrative for those who spoil his story, the dissenters, the frauds, the ideologues, the politicians, the careerists, the victims, the exploited, the charlatans and those who use science to condone their dark world view. Their stories are the hidden histories of science. And they are everywhere.

Science is a canvas on whose surface is sketched all the forms of the human shape. Other narratives reveal these different sides of science, holding mirrors up to science, reflecting uncomfortable social and historical truths about itself. These narratives show science in its glorious and shameful entirety, making old secrets explode as brilliantly as a supernova.

Science needs these revisionist stories from outside. Its own history painted it as a pristine profession, outside ordinary experience, whose knowledge is only bestowed on the privileged few. Kuhn called this professional history development-by-accumulation, each advance piled upon the last. This Great Men Making Great Discoveries narrative serves an ideological purpose; the view of a progressive accumulation of knowledge gives a historical framework to the work of its practitioners.

The historiographical narrative serves a mythic purpose. In this sense myth is a story by which a culture (in this case, science) explains fundamental truths about itself. Historiography is one way of upholding this myth. And myth serves ideology. Myths of science serve scientism: science has been the uninterrupted creation of objective knowledge for mankind’s benefit. Where there is a myth, however, there is an anti-myth: science has destroyed man’s ties with nature and given us nuclear weapons and anthrax. Myths and anti-myths are dangerous. Their exposure is vital.

Before I go on, I want to say that I am an outsider to science. I have an encyclopedic ignorance of scientific facts and concepts. As well as being an outsider to science, I am an outsider to philosophy, history, sociology and cultural studies. I am a generalist, with a background in journalism, a profession I chose because I was interested in lots of areas, but couldn’t find one that exactly fitted. With journalism, I figured I could touch upon them all, but now I have realised that journalism is a culture of its own, which uses other disciplines in pursuit of its own philosophy.

For me, it is not lapsing into impractical idealism to say the most important philosophical aim of journalism is to tell the truth to power and to keep in check of powerful elites. And science, in its academic and corporate culture, is an elite, which hasn’t had as much accountability as politics or business. For me, this is a vital function of science journalism, which should be more than simple explanations of how things work.

Three years ago, as an undergraduate, I took a similar module to this one, which looked at the main trends of philosophy of science and focused on issues in contemporary science. This time, I bring more knowledge of the world practical experience of science journalism, and more knowledge of science.

I knew Helena’s perspective. An avowed Marxist and former nun, her opinions come from a definite standpoint. I agree with her historicist beliefs, as outlined in the essay Grand Narratives: Then and Now. I believe that history is a coherent story, and that story can be told confidently and accurately. It anchors much of my though and I have never found an event or person or situation that cannot be understood from a historical perspective. I part company on different issues, however.

But I can’t examine the world with a value-free perspective either. And my observations have some effect on my own worldview, which, through education and experience, has evolved into moderate conservatism. As an ideology, conservatism has been overshadowed by the brash vulgarity of the New Right. It has, mistakenly, been thought of as a thin veil for selfishness, inequality and economic exploitation.

Not so. Although it has had an often-inglorious history, I empathise with the core values of conservatism: principled political realism, a theory of limits, a view of society uncorrupted by naïve, idealistic aspirations of a utopia. It tries to come to terms with the humanity’s core conflicts: between spirit and matter, individual and society, governed and governor, free enterprise and state regulation, between groups, between states. It is opposed to change on preconceived ideological grounds.

Conservatism knows the fundamentally flawed human nature cannot be changed by social change. My religious background reinforces this view. The grand narrative of Catholic history is embedded in my psyche. I was told man was inherently evil. I still believe it. Running alongside stories of science and society are narratives of religion. These narratives are my narratives, and have been since I was a child. They still contribute significantly to my worldview.

Along with these perspectives, I like looking at events from a historical perspective, one that is rich in lessons and parallels for the present, as well as showing the roots of current crises.

Last term’s Science and Society module viewed aspects of science from a historical perspective, uncovering assumptions about science that others in the class took as tacit in their training, assumptions I took as unquestionable givens.

As well as serving an internal ideology of science, myths of science vibrate with equal power through wider society. Classes showed the historical difference between science and technology, how Darwinism has been manipulated for social ends, the language based nature of science and, of most interest to me, the different narrative accounts of the history of science.

I enjoyed learning about the various ways of writing narrative history, and the overall purpose of narrative, the placement of order on a series of events. Straight historiography is little more than names and dates, and the creation of a scientific canon. Newton’s physics were overturned by relativity, but Newton’s place in the canon is assured. Within this historical narrative, as Andrew Ross wrote in Science Wars, the creators of the new paradigm are characterised as the natural successors in the field. Afterwards, the scientific history is re-written in a manner described by Kuhn as Orwellian. Conflicts and nuances disappear down science’s memory hole.

More sophisticated narratives of history include a structural narrative, analysing the economic, political, philosophical and class structures shaping the era’s events. Another version is the pointillist version, taken from the style of impressionistic painting, where pieces of history, politics, culture and art from a historical period are combined to produce an overall picture of the era.

A look at various philosophies of science in this module would, I hoped, give a insight into the powerful philosophical structures that influenced science throughout history. These structures can, with other interpretations, shine a light on the nature of science. The philosophies are often ignored in discussions on science. I believe that an understanding of a professional culture’s philosophy cuts to the heart of the discipline.

The myths of science come through in science’s own testimonies. These narrative accounts of science are questionable. Evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould said the images, ladders and cones, used to illustrate the history of life give misleading meanings.

The formal, professional, institutionalised narratives of science, the scientific research paper, offers a distorted narrative of the scientific process. From introduction through aims, methods, findings, conclusions and, finally, to discussion, the scientific paper is arranged to reflect what science says are its logical thought processes. But, as Peter Medawar wrote in Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud? , this structure encodes the powerful preconception that the researcher has no idea what the experiment will reveal and the knowledge he or she finds will be unexpected. This is wrong. Of course, the researcher expects a predicted result. But the existing structure has an ideological agenda, reinforcing the myth that scientists – objective, rational, logical – are unbiased investigators of the natural world.

These myths must be decoded. I want to pull open the pressure-locked door to the laboratory and show the world inside. I want to show the glory of science, how its truths are constructed, but also how science is served by the same malicious vices that dominate all other human endeavours. Alongside the ideal aspirations to absolute truth and untainted knowledge, there are more base instincts: greed, jealousy, hatred, careerism, cold ambition, backstabbing, betrayal. I want to show how scientists are marred and driven by the dark and noble forces that simultaneously drive all aspects of human endeavour. Viciousness and virtue exist alongside each other in the world of science.

These views are not to be confused with an antiscientific attitude. Or a science bashing agenda. Or angry and blind iconoclasm. They are an effort to show the multifaceted nature of science.

Science stories come from an elite, ideologically driven perspective. I don’t believe it is a discipline apart from others. Truths need to be told from positions outside science. From this historicist perspective, using the various types of historical narrative, stories of science can be told from outside the ideologically driven perspective of science itself. These stories can prevent the uncomfortable realisations from being airbrushed out of the history of science: the conspiracies and cover-ups, the false starts and falsehoods, the myths and mistakes. The hidden histories.
 
 

2. Pragmatic Realism

There is a downside to my background. Because of the lack of scientific training (or ideological conditioning), I often don’t know what to believe. I am too mired in relative judgments. I am hesitant and unsure to say how things are in the world. I need something to shove up against the randomness and babble existing all around me in the age of advertising with their relentlessly vivid, visceral, ephemeral narratives.

I envy the scientists in the class whose training gives them an empirical basis for their judgements about the world. It seems a stable grounding.

It’s overstating it to say I’m completely undecided: it’s worse out in the world. Anti-science and pseudoscience pervade our culture. I term anti-science doctrines undermining science from a political standpoint. Pseudosciences are belief systems aping science to enforce their authority. There are further important aspects of anti science in particular I will examine in the next section.

I don’t mind these anti-science and pseudoscience as elements in entertainment. Science fiction has had an important speculative function for society and science, reflecting an era’s societal attitudes to science and technology. But now they are entire belief systems, political beliefs, ideological apparatuses. This is serious. How did it happen?

Gerard Holton offers a persuasive reason in his book Science and Anti-Science. After the Soviet Union’s terminal decline, a conference of academics was held to discuss the flowering of mystics, clairvoyants, and astrologers that occurred after Glasnost. Once the cracks in the old order appear, alternative belief systems emerge. Their beliefs are amplified, as more people include it in their worldview. The breakdown of the Soviet Union was a perfect example of the collapse of a modern world-view, one that had put science at its centre. After it crumbled, some of the people were easily seduced by the forces beckoning from the edge of the scientific landscape.
 
 
 
 

Correctly, he states that it is a "symptom of a long-standing struggle over the legitimacy of authority of conventional science". Anti-science is though of as a solely contemporary ill. No. It is nothing new. There are patterns in history. Holton quotes a book about the rise of the Greek enlightenment in the sixth century BC where rationality overcame mythological thinking. The tide turned again soon after, and teaching astronomy or doubting the supernatural became dangerous.

Science has defended itself well, its philosophies adapting to circumstances, its arguments evolving through time. Compte wanted to ask only questions science could answer. The philosophy was positivism and the only knowledge that science can observe and measure. "Experiments are the only form of knowledge," said the physicist Max Planck. "The rest is poetry, imagination". What I find interesting about positivism is that it acts as an external representation of what science thinks of itself. This self-reflection emerges when science’s methodology and epistemology is questioned. It becomes science’s default philosophical position.

Philosophical thinking has advanced, however, Positivism just generates islands of isolated information. It is like a detective visiting a murder scene, marking the individual pieces of evidence, but who can see no patterns emerging from all the blood. There is no overall structure. There is no synthesis.

I want a more encompassing philosophy of science. I like to think I am a realist. Not just in science but in everything else. I prefer literature and film that is grounded in realism. It connects the human actors with their environment and their social structure. During the lecture on the different epistemologies of science, I agreed with the pragmatic approach, similarly described as critical realism.

This is far removed from the rubbish of subjectivism. Philosophers have been divided into two general categories: developed a near crippling obsession with the existence of the material world and those who don’t care. I’m with the second camp. I find subjectivist arguments futile and foolish. They tackle nothing. They solve nothing. On this point, William James, one of the founders of pragmatism, is unnervingly accurate. His centered opinions are refreshingly realistic. He is worth quoting at length:

"It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. There can be no difference anywhere that doesn't make a difference elsewhere - no difference in abstract truth that doesn't express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen (sic). The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one".

(As an aside, James was a depressive and his research into free will arose from a desire to escape from his depressive state. Philosophies of science are bear the mark of their human creators, too.)

Emile Durkheim said pragmatism is an attack on pure speculation and theoretical thought. This philosophy is much needed. I find my opinions articulated well in its writings. There is an external reality. Science is the best way of uncovering aspects of this world, even though, ultimately, science will never completely get to the end – the larger the searchlight, the greater the circumference of the unknown. It doesn’t believe in absolute truth, or fixed meanings, or a final end result: science is always progressing. The scientists themselves are human, working in a community with its own social conventions and values, through which their work is filtered. (I got to argue this point more fully in the debate on Science Wars; more of which later.)

Still, I have reservations about pragmatism. The first is the demotion of rationality. Although experience is paramount, it informs and is informed by rationality. They are not at the same level, but have an interaction that is expressed in Carl Hempel’s standard definition of the scientific method, the hypothetico-deducto method, in which theory and experiment, rationalism and empiricism constantly interact.

Also, I don’t like pragmatism’s conception of history. As Durkheim says, it takes too many liberties with history. These faults can be explained by locating pragmatism in its historical context. James has said it’s an anti-intellectual philosophy, a view that betrays its historical origins. Pragmatism is an American philosophy, originated at the turn of the 20^th century, part of a New World Order, which eliminated what they saw as the useless speculation of European philosophy. In this context, practicality was preferred to intellectualism. As I see it today, I don’t think pragmatism is anti-intellectual. I see it as a response to idle intellectualism.

Despite these cultural and social factors, science does not fall into incommensurability, which to me is the philosophical equivalent of confused despair. Although different perspectives are fallible, when they are crosschecked a more objective view reveals itself. It’s the best science can offer.

It is a middle of the road opinion. I try to stay realistic. I try to stay grounded. When people adopt extreme positions, I am immediately suspicious and cynical. I am worried by their reactionary motives.

On mixed-up school of philosophy is postmodernism. I think it’s fuelled by reactionary motives against long intellectual traditions. It’s boosted by glib rhetoric. Its abstract theories are convoluted to the point of pain. James would have had no time for postmodernism. Theories lost in abstraction would be a waste of effort. But their opinions are useful in one way. They can help scientists crystallise their opinions, offering sophisticated defenses for science. This doesn’t happen often. Instead, science hides behind positivism.
 
 
 
 

I think this retreat to positivism betrays a lack of philosophical training among scientists. Even popular science writers, those spokespeople for science, seem philosophically blinkered. Popular books on the philosophy confine the philosophy to Bacon’s induction, Popper’s falsification, Kuhn’s paradigm shifts and Lakatos’s research programmes. There is Robin Dunbar’s The Trouble with Science, and AF Chalmers’s What is This Thing Called Science. Then it’s straight into Feyerabend’s methodological anarchism. All the descriptions are all from inside science. There is no sense of history.

They call Feyerabend a colourful character, one of the most hatefully ambiguous character shorthands ever conceived. Colourful. The word’s meaning has patronising overtones. Colourful means not serious but entertaining. Clowns or jesters. Or else colourful is a euphemism for someone whose opinions are too radical. Either way, the connotations are demeaning.

Anyway, I don’t think anything goes. The method of science, albeit heavily qualified and compromised, does work. It has generated knowledge. And when his body started falling apart, Feyerabend ran to science. After this, nobody can seriously argue for methodological anarchism.

3. The Politics of Anti-Science

Anti-science evolves. One era’s charlatan is another’s visionary. In the mid nineteenth century, Mesmer performed his experiments on animal magnetism, where volunteers were put into trances. Mesmer was dismissed as a fraud, but his work has been recently re-evaluated. As it turned out, hypnotism could help reveal a non-Freudian view of the unconscious, which could give rise to a powerful enabling form of knowledge. An enlightening hidden history of science.

Within my qualified belief in pragmatism, I will look at pseudoscience and anti-science. For me, pseudoscience is a belief system that apes elements of science – methods, aims, conclusions – to add authority: spiritualism, palmistry, homeopathy, ESP. Far more dangerous is anti-science, which masquerades as science to undermine science. And it does so in an insidious and underhand manner for political motives.

The forces that make people believe in spiritualism are more varied and messy than a fundamental mistrust of science. There are personal factors at work here too. They don’t bother me as much. My concerns run deeper than pseudoscientific sideshows.

"We must not become preoccupied with surface phenomena," echoes Holton. There are real dangers of anti-science, which Holton articulates well. He also says it’s connected to more obvious dangers: nationalism, fundamentalism, and the celebration of violence. And these forces emerge when a world order or worldview falls.

The serious threat to science is not the pseudoscientific gibberish, but the "nonsense that manages to pass itself off as an "alternative science" and does so in the service of political ambition (his italics)".

And he’s right. There are powerful anti-scientific views masquerading as science. Look at ecologism or the Greens, a political movement taking its name from science. As an ideology, it is relatively new, but it has a deep historical resonance with romanticism and its naturalistic backlash against science.

Like the flowering of pseudoscience when the former Soviet Union broke down, the Greens emerged in a time of social turmoil. The disillusionment with the achievements of socialist parties, the demise of communism, increase in voter volatility and apathy, May 68, the peace movement of the early 80s – all socio-political circumstances contributing to the rise of the Greens.

Environmental fears also contributed. The threat of global warming and the depletion of the ozone layer became central concerns of ecologism. Although ecologism claims these events are scientifically true, science has not fully explained either phenomenon. Global warming may not be man-made: the earth could be on one of its cycles of increased temperature. Also, those campaigning on the back of the Greenhouse effect underestimate the biosphere’s ability to adapt to different environmental circumstances.

The anti-GM food lobby in Ireland manipulated the news agenda in their favour, but their work is supported by scant and controversial science. This is symptomatic of a wider trend in environmental journalism, which often veers into environmentalism. On an issue like GM foods, where there is a degree of uncertainty, the politically motivated anti-scientists sabotage science in the name of hard-line environmentalism. Environmental science is reduced to Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis.

This ecological fanaticism is not only anti-scientific, it is anti-human. At its extreme, biocentrism says men are equal to bacteria. A notorious example was an announcement by the radical US Earth First! organisation that the AIDS virus was welcome because it would trim human populations, helping the recovery of the biosphere.

From a historical perspective, ecologism has had unpalatable associations in its archaeology. Nazi rhetoric on nature as a source of moral guidance and their policies on ruralisation have contemporary echoes in environmentalism. A conveniently overlooked hidden history of ecologism.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Also, reporters and commentators moan about the earth’s disappearing biodiversity, without realising that biodiversity, on its own, serves no function. Greenpeace manipulated the news agenda for years. I can sympathise with their seemingly genuine concerns, but they falsified data about the pollution that would be released when the Brent Spar oilrig was dumped. This is more insidiously dangerous than palmistry. They use the historical traumas associated with science to fuel the anti-myth about destructive science. And pseudoscience thrives on this foundation. The harmless pseudoscience feeds on the harmful antiscience.

The use of anti-science for political gain arises again in discussions of the Evangelical movement in the US, which I will discuss in the section on science and religion. On a wider and more horrifying level, anti science and political ambition and ideological tyranny combined most tragically in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

4: Lysenko and the Tyranny of Science

Holton called Lysenkoism a virulent form of anti-science. Helena said it’s often been misunderstood and used to illustrate themes from the history of science, such as the dangers of mixing ideology with science, or the consequence of politically driven science agenda.

On any more sophisticated level of analysis, Lysenkoism fails to hold up any as an example of any of these naïve themes. It’s wide-open to misreadings. It becomes shorthand for unexamined assumptions about the history of science. Its effects are more subtle than Dr Mengle’s experiments, or the eradication of Einstein and Freud’s theories in Nazi Germany. A pity, because the Lysenko affair reveals much about the nexus of forces – political, ideological, personal, social – all shaping science for their own ends.

These misreadings go beyond scientific illiteracy. They present the more worrying and widespread historical ignorance. The lessons of history are vital. History can predict the future. History can tell us fundamental truths. Science needs interpreters of its history. "One of the most important roles for the socially responsible interpreter of history, wrote historian Hayden White, is to "expose the fictitious nature of any political programme based on an appeal to what ‘history’ supposedly teaches". That is why it is so important to read Lysenkoism so closely.

Marxism is part of this century’s intellectual architecture. I admire its ambition, its vast historical sweep, and its striving for totality of experience. As a pragmatist, however, I tend to do my admiring of its theory from a safe distance, and judge Marxism in practice, or, more correctly, the practice that stemmed from Marxist philosophy.

Even though it was not an example of Marxist science, Lysenkoism has become the disastrous result of the ideal of proletarian science, when the idealism collapses beneath base motives. Marxism, ironically, is the best way to understand this legacy of Marxism. Its encompassing view sees the structures and social agents that combined so tragically. Underlying structures are unexamined.

In other analyses, Lysenko becomes the one villainous individual who takes the blame for the social and scientific catastrophe. Historical subtleties are lost.

Lysenko emerged when the Bolsheviks wanted to apply dialectical materialism to biology. Lamarckism and Morganism both said they were in the interest of the working class, but they were characterised as foreign and bourgeoisie. The system needed a solely Soviet biology. The conditions were in place. They needed a catalyst.

The catalyst was Lysenko, an agronomist from the Ukraine. He was thin with a gaunt face, high cheekbones and intense eyes. He was thin-lipped. His face was all sharp angles. He seemed thoughtful and cold at the same time. He had the correct Marxist credentials. He was painted as peasant scientist, working barefoot in the fields of the Ukraine and Azerbaidzahn.

He was uneducated. But he was shrewd and he capitalised on the prevailing political culture to promote his theories. His ideas were old ones. Plant selectionists used the same theories in the previous two centuries. At its core, his vernalisation was an old idea, rejected long ago, but Lysenko embroidered the theories with Marxist rhetoric and dialectical materialism.

He surrounded his flawed work with ideological fervor. He claimed to revolutionise socialist agriculture. He was surrounded by sycophants. Stalin loved his calculated combination of ideological aggression and peasant humility, once interrupting one of Lysenko’s speeches with cries of "Bravo, Comrade Lysenko, bravo". The papers loved him.

He was a bad scientist. He messed up his methods. He was not consistent. He didn’t use statistics. He didn’t understand the basics of agronomy. He falsified data. He drew enormous conclusions from tiny sample sizes. He said geneticists were lost in the realm of theory. He emphasised the practical results of scientific research. He only reported successes. He could be anti-intellectual when faced with criticism. He cast his critics as dissenters. An ideological demagogue, Prezent, hooked up with Lysenko. He moulded Lysenko into an ideological icon for his own ends.

(As an aside on the nature of history, the combination of Lysenko, Prezent and Stalin, while not the only ones involved, show me that men can’t but influence history – after conditions put them in power.)

As Lysenko rose, supported by Stalin, serious biological science fell. Lysenko opposed genetics, but not all geneticists (initially at least) opposed Lysenko. One celebrated Soviet geneticist NI Vavilov cared about agriculture. He didn’t see Lysenko as his enemy. He praised his efforts and offered his encouragement. He wanted to tie socialism to science.

In other ways, he was completely opposed to Lysenko. Vavilov favoured careful research, searching the world for varieties of plants. He came from a wealthy background. He was well educated and sophisticated. He spoke several languages. He dressed in a starched tie and collar. He wasn’t the right type of Stalinist scientist.

Lysenko made him his opponent. Vavilov’s colleagues wrote false denunciations to save themselves. Vavilov fought back, because he thought genetic science was to be overshadowed. He criticised Lysenko’s lack of culture and his violent intolerance. In 1940, he was arrested for espionage and leading a revolutionary organisation. His death sentence was reduced to twenty years. He died in prison of malnutrition. For the rest of his life, Lysenko and his family maintained he was not responsible for Vavilov’s death.

In 1948, the once silenced criticism of Lysenko began to come out. It came to a peak in 1948, but he countered with a letter to Stalin, pitched perfectly to Stalin’s ideological prejudices. Despite the low output from his methods, he convinced Stalin to let him continue his work. That year, he was appointed leader of Soviet biology. Stalin banned genetics in the Soviet Union. The conditions that put Lysenko on a pedestal are becoming untangled, but the personalities remain, and the individuals still shape the history of Russian science. And Russian science and scientists suffered the worse consequences.

The teaching of genetics was banned. Genetic laboratories were closed. Geneticists had to recant their views. They had to work on other subjects. Three thousand were sacked. Several committed suicide. It was almost 20 years before Lysenko was overthrown. Stalin died, taking Lysenko’s political support with him. Genetics still suffered. There were enormous gaps in discontinued journals. Books had been removed, or their texts had been revised. There was no tradition in the university. Role models were dead or disgraced.

In all these ways, Lysenko was shaping society and science to his own aims. He wasn’t being swept along by history or in the spirit of the times. "What went wrong," wrote Helena Sheehan "was that the proper procedures for coming to terms with such complex issues were short-circuited by grasping for easy slogans and simplistic solutions and imposing them by administrative fiat." I agree up to a point. I think she is too easy on Lysenko. It is not enough to explain it away as solely the temper of the times. I think she underestimates the sinister human forces at work. For me, what went wrong is what inevitably goes wrong. Human vice, human vanity, human weakness – all the darker sides of human nature combined to corrupt their ideological tradition.

Certainly, science cannot be kept from politics or philosophy, no more than any other sphere of human endeavour. Lysenko came to the fore in conditions that were not shaped by him. After that, he shaped the conditions. He shaped the history. He caused the deaths of thousands. That is his moral price he and everyone else at the time must carry and those who must come to terms with their history. Moral outrages are constant over time and situating them in their historical contexts won't ease the conscience of those who pulled the trigger, or whose rhetoric sent scientists to the gulags. I think individual conscience bears the consequences of their actions. Lysenko’s stunning lack of integrity as a scientist is dwarfed by his lack of humanity.

The affair shows how science is wide open to ideological manipulation. It shows the danger of science serving only one worldview.

It gives the more tragic historical example of scientists being executed in a collision of rampant scientism, ideology debased into tyranny and careerism and fear overcame humanity. While the Lysenko tragedy occurred at its own time in history, I believe the dark drives behind the affair are not particular to that time or place. They are constants throughout history. For me, this context is the best place to see those forces shaping science for their own immoral ends. The idealism of the 20s that tried to unite Marxism and science was gone, overshadowed by a Stalinist darkness. All that remained was the corpse of a biologist in the freezing wastes of a gulag, and a geneticist in the dank cellar of the Lubianka, the Moscow secret police, with a gun pressed against the back of his neck.

5: Science from outside Science: the Science Wars

I admired Soviet scientists’ respect for history. I loved the shocked reaction of the audience in the meeting in the 1930s Britain when they spoke on the importance of history. Their English counterparts saw history as secondary to benchwork. They had a hobbyist’s interest. History threw up amusing anecdotes and colourful characters. But the Soviets put history at the core of their view of science. They did not see the truths history showed about themselves. And the methods for finding historical truths are the same as those for finding scientific ones: the practical and theoretical interaction between sources and theory.

Bernal, Haldane and Caudwell got the lesson. Bernal and Haldane were scientists, and they offered balanced critiques of science. Caudwell put science, history, philosophy, sociology, economics into a unified and interconnected whole. They saw science in society. There are not many of them left. What has filtered down are the wildly polarised science wars debates. There are few subtleties and much bombast. They gave a rich, expansive history as a vast interacting nexus of societal forces. There are few who put science in this context today. Which is not only a shame, but a betrayal of history.

But Bernal and Haldane were both pathetically inactive during the purges. They were like confused children when their cherished ideology crumbled, leaving only the worst aspects of the human character. One ironic and important point was highlighted by historian Robert Young is that had Bernal, Caudwell and Haldane been Soviet citizens, they would have been purged.

Anyway, the Soviet scientists visit to Britain in the 1930s gives a historical backdrop to the science wars. The science wars debate tied together several strands from the rest of the course, some of which I’ll include in this discussion: the sociology of knowledge, who can talk about science, the repressed in science (I still am not sure if they’ll rise).

For the Science Wars debate, I was on the side of the journal Social Text. Overall, I was arguing from the position I believe in – even though I overstated a lot of points and shirked answering some of the opposing positions. I found the points made by Niamh about the misuse of scientific language in deconstructionist discourse indefensible, and, thankfully, I didn’t have to defend the theory that e=mc2 is a sexist equation.

Overall, the debate contained my own views. I believe that science is the best means of discovering external truths about the natural world. But these truths are expressed and articulated and recorded by humans in language. The truths are filtered through their values and cultural community. Values change. Truths change.

One element that worried me was the subtle difference apparent discrepancy between believing in social constructivism and the belief in external reality. Baseball gave me the answer, with its balls and strikes being, at the same time, real and socially constructed.

I called Sokal and Gross and Levitt the Oliver Stones of science. They see conspiracy everywhere. They never acknowledge their own flaws. They assume their perspective is right. Other disciplines have no idea about science and can’t talk about it. Sokal does say there is room for science studies, but the barely concealed sub-text says that these studies must be deferential to science – like the soft institutional analysis that are the Mertonian norms.

Still, I sympathise. It’s not easy when the values and routines of your profession are questioned. In my last year of my journalism degree, a class in political economy of journalism revealed some of the structures manipulating and distorting a profession I felt was entirely free. I absorbed these criticisms, but I didn’t lose faith in the profession, and, unlike Levitt et al, I didn’t come out in a barrage of anti-intellectualism. They have not reached that stage yet. But they will. They have to, because anti-science, pseudoscience, and attacks on science are not going away. As science diversifies more, becomes more mathematics-based, it will become even more impenetrable and distant. And science must, therefore, offer more sophisticated defenses.

I was pulled up on a view of postmodernism. I said it was old hat. To qualify, it has been around for thirty years, and all academic disciplines have had to defend themselves. Science is not the only one. History, literature, and philosophy have been plagued by postmodernism also. Science feels it most, because of its view of itself as a superior discipline.

Again, lessons and patterns are found in history. I enjoyed looking at the history of physics to challenge Sokal. Examples are everywhere. His weak justification that science leads to objective, rational truth, filtering out social and cultural factors is refuted everywhere in his own backyard. Truths in physics are not absolute. They blend into new truths. Newtonian mechanics segued to relativity, which segued to quantum mechanics.

The development of quantum mechanics did not proceed solely on scientific grounds. It was not grounded in rationalism. Historical, social, political and ideological forces combined to influence its formulation.

After WW1, in the German Weimar period anti-science was rife. Science moved towards a culturally rooted German science (which emerged under the Nazi regime). Funding went to scientific fields with cultural relevance. Scientists moulded themselves into the prevailing cultural structure with its irrationalist and subjectivist mood. They changed from natural scientists to folk practitioners. And physicists made the biggest cultural adaptation. Their work focused on the seemingly irrational and subjectivist quantum mechanics.

Cherished myths of rationality, objectivity and absolute truth are harshly judged by stories from history. Catchphrase conclusions about absolute truth cannot be drawn from their narratives. Their truths are unsettling and unsubtle and revealing and enlightening. And they show science as corrupted and compromised as other parts of society – especially in times of violent social trauma. I have already shown what happens to science in a tyrannical dictatorship. But I suspect many of those involved in the science wars don’t read history books.

The most frustrating thing I read is that other disciplines can’t talk about science. Some (and some is an important qualification) scientists think they can enter these fields and think they are delivering devastating refutations. Gross and Levitt’s book is a malignant mishmash of unsophisticated history, amateurish sociology and an underdeveloped understanding of philosophy. They use no primary sources. They rely on tired critiques of methodology. Their views on constructivism, feminism and postmodernism seem oblivious to the deep debates about these issues that have taken place in other fields. Their views come down to a weak combination of bad scholarship and no nonsense logical positivism. Sad.

Social Text is just as sad. I defended Social Text for publishing his hoax article, but its inclusion was inexcusable. Their justifications were laughable, often retreating behind the high-level humanities speak Sokal parodied so successfully.

The worst thing about the Social Text skirmish is that the other genuine essays published in that edition were forgotten, although they were subsequently collected in the book Science Wars. One valuable point was made by Steve Fuller, who said scholars from outside science often make better criticisms of science. They have no vested interest in illusionary values like absolute truth, objectivity and untainted rationality. These are the vital nuances lost in debates controlled by blinkered contributors, like Lewis Wolpert, who offers one reason why sociologists criticise science. He says they are jealous. An infantile argument.

More sophisticated stuff is found in the work of some sociologists of knowledge. The much-maligned Bruno LaTour has said science has nothing to fear from science studies. And he’s right. His studies in laboratories connect with the experience of some scientists. After the debate, Hazel, who has done post-graduate research, said she agreed with how scientific facts are communally decided by higher-ranked scientists, one of LaTour’s main points.

Sociologist of science Harry Collins respects science, too. He said he once stopped a sociological study of science because he could not fully understand the science. Much of Donna Haraway’s observations about science bearing the sign of masculinity are overshadowed by radical positions like eco-feminism. Their positions, with their subtle shades of meaning, get lost in the newsworthy scrap between scientists and sociologists.

Donna Haraway writes well about gender and science. Overall, science is a male ecology. There are the obvious quantitative differences between the numbers of males and females taking science, a problem that attracts simplistically superficial solutions. Helena highlighted the fundamental problem: the psychological associations within science and their related gender connotations. Evelyn Fox Keller in Reflections on Gender and Science points out the obvious sexually loaded distinction between hard and soft science. It is a symptom of the wider gender schism in science.

What interests me is how this division is reflected in language, which itself reflects and shapes thought. The language of medicine is influenced by the masculine-centered history of western medicine. Pasteur’s work on disease introduced a range of militaristic metaphors: war, fight, combat, defend. Masculine metaphors reflecting a masculine history.

War is another masculine zone. Gender codes break through in the language of the scientific aspects of war. The physicists who worked on the atomic bomb wondered if their ghastly creation would be a boy (obliterate a city) or be a girl (a dud). As it turned out, the Hiroshima bomb was called Little Boy, and it was indeed a boy, baptised in a kiloton of blood.

Whole disciplines have been skewered by gender bias. Prof. Noel Sheehy said the history of psychology was not only a male field, the samples used to construct knowledge were, until the 1950s, exclusively male. Haraway describes how primatology bears the marks of its history. Primates are an excellent example. They exist between nature and culture. They fall within the broader science of zoology, but they are tied up with humans and human history. Other disciplines claim primates as their own: primatology, anthropology, linguistics, medicine, and psychobiology. Different disciplines argue about their identity and role: psychiatry and zoology, biology and anthropology, genetics and psychology. Each draws different stories from primates. Different disciplines, within science and the humanities, pull primatology in several directions, each bearing the mark of their cultural and socio-historic background. Haraway herself admits to having emotional, political and professional stakes in the production of primate knowledge.

There is no single narrative. Primatology is a section of biology, which is historical and narrative, with a plot and structure. It fashions the facts found from humans. Monkeys apes and humans merge in primatology inside elaborate narratives about origins, natures and possibilities. Primate Visions brilliantly destroys myths of science for one discipline. She calls their narratives potent fictions of science.

The science wars have been dismissed as a juvenile turf war. But turfs are being invaded. And it’s not just social scientists claiming the methods of science to draw conclusions about the world. Science is moving into the social sciences, with fields such as evolutionary psychology and sociobiology.

During the debate, Tim made an excellent point. He said science has, for centuries, boasted of its unparalleled achievements. Now it’s taking a fall and it is hitting out. None of the criticisms are directed inward. There is no self-reflection behind the defensiveness. While the Social Text skirmish has passed, the science wars will continue as science continues to learn vital truths about its nature.

A week later, the debate had an apt postscript. On assignment for another class, I had to interview a geologist about his work. He spoke about geo-physics and geomorphology. He explained sediments and stratigraphy. The phone rang. He talked down the line about his bad back and how medicine had given no relief. He then made an appointment for homeopathy and acupuncture treatment. When science fails, even the anointed turn to alternative belief systems.

6: Crumbling Catholicism and Creationism’s Crusade

Religion has been a constant narrative through my life. The influence has not been overtly negative. I hadn’t an overbearing Catholic childhood. I have no horror stories. But I had an intensely Catholic education. Catholic teaching pervaded my primary education. I went to a secondary school named after a saint, run by priests, with compulsory religious education. The teaching became more subtle, but the messages remained essentially the same. I have internalised almost all of their teachings. Catholicism remains vivid, its ethics granting an inescapably potent moral force, its imagery filling the iconography of my imagination.

Catholic narrative is told in a series of stories and parables, into which its themes are encoded. And the themes echo through my everyday life: guilt, penance, retribution, and redemption. Characters and settings in those narratives still resound with a powerful symbolic force: the road to Damascus, the garden of Gethsemane, Golgotha,

Pontious Pilote, the Blessed Virgin, Satan, Judas and Jesus and the Twelve Apostles.

Christianity is a narrative into which other narratives can be included. Centuries have found spiritual solace in Catholicism. In the first week’s lecture we spoke about the transition from the medieval to the modern world. This change marked the beginning of the secularisation of knowledge, as education and the basis of knowledge itself moved away from religion. Tarnas is insightful about this era. Although these were discussions in the medieval period, they take place all the time today, especially if you’re like me and you grow up with Catholicism.

Even with a liberal arts education and teachings in science, Catholicism’s grand narrative has always been my grand narrative. The various elements in my mindset do not make a harmonious whole. Earlier, I preached about pragmatism, so these religious beliefs seem out of place. I have never had a religious experience. I have never had an epiphany. I neatly put science and religion into their compartments. Science explained the natural world. Religion guided me through it.

It’s the way it’s always been for me. I’m beginning to ask the hard questions. I have not yet thought through one of the basic problems of the thinking religion and science are complementary belief systems: if I believe in empirically verifiable facts, how can I believe in God? I have not questioned it in this way before. The debate forced me to face these vital spiritual questions.

Religious belief relied on faith. Religion relied on revealed truth. The glories of God were revealed once you had faith. These glories could be found in science, too. The physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who produced the first unified theory of electricity and magnetism, uses molecular structure as an argument for the existence for God. On molecules and evolution, he writes that molecules have not evolved because they were there since the beginning of time. "They are essential constituents of the image of Him who in the beginning created, not only the heaven and the earth, but the materials of which heaven and earth consist." William Reville takes a similar view in the Irish Times. I take consolation in such stories. They help me shirk making a decision. Until now, I’ve avoided making the decision with cowardly cop-outs. If scientists can believe in God and science, I tell myself, then so can I.

A trauma in a person’s life, I believe, sends them towards religious sanctuary, or it destroys their religious beliefs. There are not many, I suspect, who have questioned deeply their beliefs and thought through other philosophical options. Certainly, I don’t have any knowledge of another system of ethics, which is in any way comparable to Christian ethics.

One of the contributions to the debate on science and religion said religious belief was equal to believing in dragons or wizards or other creations of legend. Glib arguments like these miss subtle points. Narratives of legend drew their imagery from Christianity. They were narrative conduits through which their teachings could be coded. Christian teaching comes through on an obvious level in Arthurian legends, their white knights angels on earth, their Camelot a heaven, and Lancelot who fell from grace. And they all searched for the Holy Grail, which would grant them salvation and retribution. Dragons and knights have their origins in dualistic Christianity. They embody the Manichaean struggle between light and dark, good and evil. These are not high-end literary interpretations. They are easily encoded.

Scientific endeavour can be framed in religious terms. In his lecture on Science and Colonialism in Ireland, David Attis said the Puritan view of science was an attempt to regain the knowledge lost when man fell from grace. In the class debate, Una raised what I think is an important point, how amoral science can be read from a Christian perspective. The physicist Oppenheimer, who directed the Los Alamos, New Mexico, laboratory during the development of the first atomic bomb, said physics had sinned by creating the bomb.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Yet, two years’ ago, Lewis Wolpert said in Dublin that scientists acted morally in the creation of the atomic bomb. Welcome to Wolpert’s world of professional scientific ethics – stunted and shortsighted, arrogant and unaccountable. As well as being an inadequate philosophy of science, positivism is ethically barren. Science must bear the moral burden of its freedoms. For Oppenheimer, as well as the nuclear fall out, he understood the moral fall-out – guilt and suffering.

Science has used religion to give it meaning and symbol. Science has drawn on religion for some of its popular metaphors. The trenchant atheist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins called his book River out of Eden. NASA scientists looking for a user-friendly hook said the pictures from its Cobe satellite would be like looking into the face of God. English writer Martin Amis described the destructive capabilities of nuclear weapons "biblical in their anger". Donna Haraway in Primate Visions described how astrophysics used religion to reinforce the triumphant chronology of their discipline. They used apes to link the Garden of Eden with space. In my readings on the history of science, I was struck by the uncanny similarities between the hagiography of the saints and the historiographical accounts of scientists.

Religious images haunt me and underdeveloped analysis leaves me afraid to let go. I won’t take the easy path, dismissing it as a system of spiritual tyranny and oppression. I see so many people of my age and older rejecting Catholicism without any sophisticated analysis. Or any level of analysis greater than an element of teenage rebellion. They say they have lost the faith they have not yet fully examined. Even though I have not yet fully analysed my religious beliefs, Catholicism’s myths, parables, stories, legends and symbols hit me with an unmatched mythic and moral force. I still look to it for the moral force that science or any other fast-food philosophy could not provide. When I begin to lose faith, the old scare stories come back, not the childish fear of fire and brimstone, but the threat of overbearing spiritual emptiness. I can’t let go just yet.

After the debate, there were many points to think over. Una spoke of future conciliation between science and religion, something she argued will occur. On some levels this is happening already. Witness the rise of Scientology, with its mix of pseudoscience (e-meters, machines helping you get rid of past traumas), and spirituality. The use of science in its name gives the religion a serves a powerfully sloganeering purpose. Other cults are drawing their inspiration and imagery from religion, nature and science.
 
 

The debate on religion and science often focuses on historical flashpoints: Galileo, the Scopes trial. Other incidents are ignored. Last term, we had a lecture on the Turin Shroud, a religious artifact and the most scientifically tested object in history. Science proved it was false. The shroud’s iconic and symbolic power was not dented. Agenda-driven scientists (pro and anti) have argued over the methodology for testing. There is an enormous body of shroud literature. One archaeologist, Ian Wilson, converted to Catholicism after studying the shroud.

Examining the debate from a cosmological angle is beneficial. But there is so much to trawl through. Astrophysicists are constantly discovering new aspects to cosmology. It is always tempting to fall back on the weak defense of the God of the Gaps, a position I lapse into for reassurance.

The separation of scientific truth and revealed truth, the compartmentalising of science on one hand and religious values on the other, the scientists who believe in God – these are fragile arguments, I know, desperate grasps for justification of a world-view I’m outgrowing. But I’m trying to think them through. Dismissing them without serious reflection is a betrayal of my background. It deserves serious reflection. And it will get it. There will be no Damascus-like turning from Catholicism. There will be no instantaneous revelation. There is only the hope of an epiphany.

But, these are my spiritual struggles. Creationism has a different crusade. Its politics of anti-science are compounded by religious fervour and evangelical rhetoric. "I call it Mickey Mouse mentality," said Judge Brawell Been, in Dallas, Texas, referring to the theories of Charles Darwin. "Monkey mythology methodology monopoly, mysterious musings and mundane dreams of all this monkey business!".

Creationist beliefs attract conceited disdain. Creationism only attracts cretins. Creationism is confined to a bunch of isolated rednecks in Alabama outposts. These beliefs are not only arrogant; they are dangerous. While Judge Been made his 15,000 strong audience whoop and cheer, the then President Ronald Reagan, capable of the most hapless gaffes, said, in the same city, he "had a great many questions about evolution," adding "schools should be even-handed on the issue".

I don’t think this was Reagan at his inept worst. A seemingly off-hand comment like this could win him 50 million votes. Creationism is part of the New Evangelical Right, the Moral Majority, who have astonishing wealth, power, and access to the mass media. One of their more modern tenets says voting is a spiritual duty. "Out of the pews and into the polls," said the Rev. Jerry Falwell, whose TV show Old-Time Gospel Hour outstripped Dallas in the eighties. "Not voting is a sin. Repent of it"
 
 
 
 

Their repentance could swing a presidential election. As a consequence, no US politician will explicitly dismiss its doctrine, leaving creationism as a unchallenged anti-scientific ideology, motivated by political ambition. Their wants are unambiguously anti-scientific: no book but the Bible, Genesis or Darwin. As a belief, it is almost laughable. As a mass political movement in the earth’s most powerful nation, it is frightening. Science needs to contest it. But can it challenge creationism’s deeply entrenched ideology, its political influence, its ties with power and money. Can it?

7. Weltanschauung

A worldview evolves. Experience and insight continually refine it. There is no closure, a concept worthy of the worse of US daytime television. But everyone needs grounding in the worldviews that have gone before.

This module gave me the basics. It allowed me to synthesise my moderate conservative philosophy with a pragmatic philosophy of science. Last term’s Science and Society exposed some myths of science, but I had nothing to draw together these loose strands of criticism. Pragmatism gave me the worldview. It allowed me to balance rationalism and empiricism (while leaning heavily towards empiricism). It showed me how I could take a constructivist view of science without being subjectivist. It revealed those who are repressed by science, but didn’t prompt a wild backlash against science. It allowed me to balance the success of science with its flawed practitioners and epistemological limits. To this perspective, I have added a deep historicist belief, one made stronger by this module.

As a science journalist, this basis is vital and valuable. While it does not have to be scrapped or dismissed, science can be critically repositioned. There are narratives capable of reflecting all aspects of its nature. I have a philosophy within which I can tell these narratives and expose the myths. On this professional level, I got what I wanted from the module.

As a Catholic with a crumbling faith, however, the module has had an unpleasant side. My neat compartmentalisation of science and religion does not hold up to logical scrutiny. The module has forced me (at last) to confront this intrinsic aspect of my worldview. On a personal level, it has left me worried, shivering at an uncertain spiritual threshold.

ENDS

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MSc in Science Communication   School of Communication   Dublin City University