March 23, 2006
In the twentieth century, a period of great scientific advancement, instead of having science and technology at the center of the intellectual world — of having a unity in which scholarship included science and technology along with literature and art — the official culture kicked them out. Traditional humanities scholars looked at science and technology as some sort of technical special product. Elite universities nudged science out of the liberal arts undergraduate curriculum — and out of the minds of many young people, who, as the new academic establishment, so marginalized themselves that they are no longer within shouting distance of the action.
Yet it's the products of this educational system that go straight from their desks at university literary magazines to their offices in the heart of the cultural establishment at our leading newspapers, magazines, and publishers. It's a problem that's systemic and not individual. Unless one is pursuing a career path in science, it is extremely difficult for a non-science major at a top research university to graduate with anything approaching what can be considered an education in science. I recently talked with a noted Italian intellectual, who is as familiar with string theory as he is with Dante, and writes about both in his philosophical novels. In appraising this situation, he argued for restraint and compassion. 'They just don't know,' he sighed, 'they just don't know.' He might well have added, they don't even know that they don't know.
Somebody needs to tell them. Otherwise, we wind up with the center of culture based on a closed system, a process of text in/text out, and no empirical contact with the real world. One can only marvel at, for example, art critics who know nothing about visual perception; 'social constructionist' literary critics uuninterested in the human universals documented by anthropologists; opponents of genetically modified foods, additives, and pesticide residues who are ignorant of genetics and evolutionary biology.
As examples, one need only read with astonishment, but not surprise, recent essays in The New York Times Book Review coining pejoratives such as "evolutionism" and "scientism" to critique the set of ideas that inform this edition of Edge. These essays appear not to be driven by any apparent scientific knowledge or expertise, but by a need in the writer to confirm deeply felt superstition-based ideas and/or pre-conceived political models. The message: science is not welcome. But apparently what is welcome is that which writers ignorant of science don't know about their subjects.
And, according to Daniel C. Dennett, such pieces are examples of the sin of Xism:
When you can't stand the implications of some scientific discipline X, but can't think of any solid objections, you brand them instances of the sin of Xism and then you don't have to take them seriously! What next? A review that warns about the pernicious ''meteorologism'' that keeps scolding us about global warming, or the ''economism'' that has the effrontery to inform us that the gap between rich and poor is growing?Social-constructionist 'intellectuals,' and perhaps even the 'radical ism-ists' culture warriors of The New York Times Book Review might counter that science itself is but one more 'superstition.' But as Sir John Krebs points out below, Dawkins won't have any of this cultural relativism. Krebs quotes one of his favorite passages, not out of The Selfish Gene but from the book River Out of Eden:
Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I'll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes are built according to scientific principles and they work. They stay aloft and they get you to a chosen destination. Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications such as the dummy planes of the Cargo cults in jungle clearings or the bees-waxed wings of Icarus don't.
In this edition of Edge.org you will find:
(a) the complete 1 hour and 22 minute audio, available in two formats. You can listen to it as online streaming audio, or you can download it as an mp3 (75 MB) file and play it on your computer, iPod, etc.
(b) the 12,000-word transcript of the audio which each of the participants has lightly edited.
Stream it. Download it. Listen to it. Print it out. Read it!
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1 comment:
I liked this qoute:
"Dawkins’s emphasis on the ethereal commodity called “information” in an age of biology dominated by the concrete molecular mechanisms is another courageous stance. There is no contradiction, of course, between a system being understood in terms of its information content and it being understood in terms of its material substrate. But when it comes down to the deepest understanding of what life is, how it works, and what forms it is likely to take elsewhere in the universe, Dawkins implies that it is abstract conceptions of information, computation, and feedback, and not nucleic acids, sugars, lipids, and proteins, that will lie at the root of the explanation."
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