Edward O. Wilson: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998)

Edition: Little, Brown, 1998
Review number: 1125

Edward O. Wilson is best known as the author of Sociobiology, an early attempt to look at the social structures of human beings alongside those of other animals (he began his career as a researcher into the biology of the ant). The theme of Consilience is related - it is also about extending ideas of a particular kind into areas where they are not common or, to some people, welcome to go. The word "consilience", which literally means "jumping together", has been resurrected by Wilson to mean a unity of knowledge, or, more accurately, of ways to approach problems. The book is a manifesto arguing for the extension of the methods of science into the social sciences and the humanities, even to the interpretation of fine art and to ethics and religion.

This is not, of course, a new idea. Some of the weirder products of the popularisation of Newton's work, for example, were half-baked attempts to derive laws like his in other fields, driven by the idea that once the initial positions of particles were fixed, mathematics would determine their positions for the rest of time. More respectably, many philosophers have tried to base their ideas on mathematical style derivations, most notably Spinoza, Hobbes, and Descartes. However, this is not quite what Wilson means; his manifesto is based on a particular aspect of the way that science works.

One of the most powerful mechanisms in scientific thought is reductionism, which basically means looking at some aspects of a process in isolation from the whole, and in particularly designing experiments to test ideas about these aspects alone. The idea is that once the simplified versions are understood, explanations can be brought together to decipher the more complex. (Wilson points out that critics of reductionism typically ignore the last part, the synthesis back into increasingly complex explanations of the original process.)

There is a hierarchy of reduction in science; biology can (in principle) be reduced to chemistry, which (in principle) can be reduced to physics. (In principle because in many cases a detailed reduction would be too complex to carry out, or some small points are not yet understood; but nevertheless no one doubts the possibility. No one would want to attempt to document every chemical reaction which goes on in a cell, but everyone would expect the processes that happen to be fundamentally chemical in nature.) This relationship between different branches of science is what Wilson means by consilience, and his view is that the social sciences are the next step up in the chain from biology, particularly as the biological underpinnings of brain functionality become better understood. His feeling is that individual psychology will then become reducible to biology, and then that sociology and anthropology will be reducible to psychology.

This is not likely to seem particularly controversial to a scientist, especially given that (as Wilson points out) this kind of reductionism is the most successful kind of explanation known to the human race. However, from the social science side it must come as a shocking attempt to usurp long cherished methods and ideologies (from Marxism to postmodernism). Wilson doesn't soften the blow, ridiculing the achievements of academics in these areas to date - drawing attention, for example, to the evident inability of economists to predict the downfall of the Soviet system. He is clearly knowledgeable about these areas, but frustrated with their inability to move on away from exploded ideas such as those parts of Freudian psychology contradicted by modern studies of the brain. To Wilson, the issue is quickly increasing in importance and urgency, for he suspects that an integration of economic and sociological thought with science will be a necessary part of any viable solution to the world's environmental problems.

Consilience is very clearly written, in a style which manages to combine precision and accessibility. A reader would not need to agree with Wilson's thesis to be impressed, but he is also an able and convincing debater. A fascinating read for anyone with an interest in the future directions of either science or the social sciences.

Thomas S. Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)

Edition: University of Chicago Press, 1970 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1101

Of the thousands of books written about science during the twentieth century, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the one which has caused the most controversy. It is a famous account of how (in Kuhn's opinion) science actually works, as opposed to the way in which scientists think that they work, and it acts as a summary of Kuhn's ideas; much of the rest of his writing is basically a series of historical case studies which back up and illustrate this summary.

The general view of science is that it proceeds by accretion, new facts gradually allowing theory to become a closer approximation to reality. Kuhn proposed a different model: a generally accepted paradigm determines not just what questions are investigated but how facts are perceived by scientists. However, anomalies appear and grow in importance, until a period of confusion is ended by a revolution which establishes a new paradigm.

The main reason that this is controversial is basically that it seems to make science a matter of opinion rather than fact, especially because of what Kuhn says about the way that the facts change or appear to change when the current paradigm changes. Summaries of Kuhn's arguments tend to make what he says more alarming than it actually is, and I found The Structure of Scientific Revolutions far more convincing than I expected.

Part of the problem with this kind of analysis of science is that the pattern of scientific communication has changed over time, as private letters and public books gave way to refereed journal articles, which in turn are now giving way to the exchange of pre-prints, electronically or otherwise. This is a factor unconsidered by Kuhn - though he was surely aware of it - and in my opinion makes it difficult to compare scientific practice even across relatively short periods as is necessary for this kind of study.

The major idea that Kuhn has which is difficult to agree with is that there is no such thing as scientific progress, that the paradigms are more or less equivalent as explanations of the universe. He explicitly says that there is no rational reason why, in a time of crisis with a current paradigm, one of the competitors to replace it is chosen rather than the others. (The evidence he gives for this is the frequent inability of a new paradigm to predict even some well known facts accurately, as with the century it took for a correct derivation of the moon's orbit from Newton's theory of gravity.) It is, I suppose, an almost inevitable consequence of Kuhn's feeling that a paradigm embodies its own special world view, as then two paradigms would have concepts far enough apart to make them impossible to compare meaningfully. The standard interpretation of issues like the moon's orbit would be that it can take time for a new theory to be properly understood, especially when, like Newton's, it uses unfamiliar mathematics.

However, it seems to me (and to many who have been involved in the practise of scientific research) that there is one very important property of a paradigm which Kuhn minimises: its explanatory power. By pre-supposing that this is unimportant, he anticipates his own conclusions. A scientist's perception of a paradigm is that it should be a model of the phenomena being investigated, and in particular that it should match with investigations already carried out. Exceptions can be made (as in the case of the moon) but they are just that: exceptions. Kuhn objects to this characterisation on the grounds that problems investigated under one paradigm are quite possibly meaningless under another, but I would expect that many would not be; Einstein's theory of general relativity would be useless as a model of the universe under gravitation if it failed to explain the path of a thrown ball on Earth, or the motion of the moon, as well as the Newtonian theory it replaced. (He specifically objects to the common characterisation of the relationship between these two theories that says that Newton's laws approximate to Einstein's when velocities and energies are low, because they make incompatible underlying assumptions, but to say the predictions of the motions of bodies are approximately correct seems to me to be perfectly valid.) Thus, any paradigm which is a candidate to replace one under crisis should explain almost all the well known facts already explained together with some of the more problematic areas. (Another reason for the word "almost", as well as the difficulties in correctly applying new paradigms is that those pushing them may in their enthusiasm make erroneous measurements, as Galileo seems to have done when he reported that pendulum swings take a uniform time even for large displacements even though this is true only when the angle of swing is small.) This more traditional description has the advantage that it preserves the idea of progress towards the goal of describing the universe (not in the more unfortunate cultural sense in which scientific progress is often taken, and which is probably one of the reasons behind Kuhn's rejection of the concept). Another factor which Kuhn doesn't mention which tends to influence the acceptance of a new paradigm (at least when it is mathematical in nature) is the feeling among researchers that it is elegant and beautiful.

Even after forty years, Kuhn's book is thought provoking - more so than reports of his arguments elsewhere. Most readers are unlikely to agree with all his ideas, but it is definitely better to read them here at firsthand.

John D. Barrow: The Universe That Discovered Itself (1987, 2000)

Edition: Oxford, 2000 (revision of The World Within the World, 1987)
Review number: 1001

Barrow's book, an updated version of The World Within the World, is a philosophical look at the history of science and contemporary scientific ideas with a rather unusual slant. It takes a list of nine statements about the laws of science and how they relate to the underlying reality of the universe, and then sees a general trend up to the work of Newton to establish these statements, followed in the twentieth century by the opposite trend with the development of new theoretical frameworks very different from the Newtonian one. These statements are things like "Space and time exist" or "The world can be described by mathematics", and are a set of basic philosophical assumptions about the universe, informing scientists' attitudes to physical theories.

The Universe That Discovered Itself is aimed at the experienced reader of popular science. Even though brief explanations are given, it would be difficult to follow without a previous acquaintance with relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory, and the anthropic principle among other ideas. With a familiarity with these concepts and an interest in the philosophical, there is much pleasure to be obtained from the book. The title refers to the thought that we, as part of the universe, have discovered a great deal about it, and is particularly appropriate given the quite lengthy discussion of the role of the observer in quantum mechanics and particularly quantum cosmology.

The presentation is typical of Barrow, with each section enlivened by interesting and frequently amusing quotations, including the following anecdote. In an Oxford physics viva in the 1890s, a student was asked to define electricity. His response was that he did know but had forgotten, to which the examiner drily replied, "How very unfortunate. Only two persons have ever known what electricity is, the Author of Nature and yourself. Now one of them has forgotten".

I'm not sure how radical a revision was made to the earlier book, and there are some sections which seem to be less up to date than others, which is a pity. Still, I found The Universe That Discovered Itself a fascinating exploration of the philosophy behind modern physics.

Paul Feyerabend: Farewell to Reason (1987)

Edition: Verso, 1987
Review number: 513

Farewell to Reason is a collection of essays on the subject of relativism. Though they were rewritten for inclusion in this volume, their independent origin still shows in a certain repetitiveness and in disparity of content - some are far more concentrated on a single theme than others (for example, some are criticisms of particular writers).

The essays pick on the same kinds of targets as Feyerabend's book Against Method, and attack the idea that science is a unified whole, with a single overriding method. Karl Popper is singled out for criticism, but much of what is said would apply to anyone who contrasts "scientific thinking" with other modes of thought (this is usually done do dismiss religious ideas).

Most of the criticisms that can be made of Against Method are also appropriate here. The rhetorical style of Feyerabend's argument, his use of Galileo as a paradigm of scientific method, and the use of counter examples from areas not always regarded as scientific such as economics are faults common to both. The essay form adds new problems, and some parts do not fit into the whole terribly well (notably the discussion of Aristotle's philosophy of mathematics, though it is interesting in itself). Neither Popper nor Feyerabend seem terribly convincing to me; while it is obvious that not all scientific thought is uniform, most practising scientists have quite similar ideas about what they are trying to do. These differ in details (such as the precise relationship between theory, experiment and whatever may count as underlying reality), but then philosophy does not interest many and certainly there are few who would let it affect their work.

The most interesting new point is part of the essay on Galileo and the church, in which Feyerabend parallels the attitude of Catholic cardinals then and the scientific establishment today. As the money and administrative side of scientific research grow every larger, it is more and more difficult to be a (successful, rather than starving) iconoclast. For science to have a religious orthodoxy of this kind is a bad thing, and we need people like Feyerabend to continually attack its genesis.

John D. Barrow: Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits (1998)

Edition: Oxford University Press, 1998
Review number: 483

In what is almost a response to John Horgan's The End of Science, Barrow examines the limitations of scientific thought from several different points of view with the aim of working out what science can say about what it cannot say. He skims quickly over some of the problems Horgan talks about, such as the increasing economic cost of scientific experimentation; these limitations are not scientific in nature (non-scientific events such as a change of government may change their nature) and there is little that can be said about them beyond acknowledging their existence.

Barrow is far more interested in the limitations inherent in modern scientific theories, such as the impossibility of knowing what happens outside the edge of the visible universe. He concentrates on the less well known ideas, rather than ploughing once again the well worn furrow of the popular account of relativity and quantum mechanics. His final section is a brief but sensible account of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and its relationship to physics. The problem with this relationship is that it is only possible to determine its nature when the more basic question of how mathematics is embodied in the universe is answered. If mathematical physics is only a description of patterns in the universe, for example, then there is not necessarily any connection. Even if sufficiently complex mathematics is in some way embodied in the universe - you need to have arithmetic with both addition and multiplication - then it is not at all clear what the physical version of a Gödel Undecideable Sentence would be (it would depend on the precise nature of the embodiment, for a start).

Barrow is less polemic than Horgan, more interested in the nature of the various types of scientific impossibility than in ramming home the point that there are limitations to science. Barrow is much more pro-science than Horgan - he is after all a research physicist - which means that his book is less excitingly iconoclastic but perhaps more informative. (The structure of the book also helps here; Horgan's is organised around interviews with prominent scientists which means that his main philosophical points are hidden behind personalities.)

Paul Feyerabend: Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (1975)

Edition: Verso, 1993
Review number: 408

Possibly Feyerabend's best known book, Against Method is basically an attack on the idea that science has a single, monolithic 'method', one which has stood the test of time and produced the 'advances' (the advance of science is a subsidiary target) leading to the science we know today. Instead of the close connection between ideas of rationality and scientific method on which many thinkers would base their understanding of science on, Feyerabend points out contradictory and irrational ideas, to his mind not just part of science but at its very core. They are particularly important, he believes, in the challenging of fundamental assumptions which leads to 'revolutions'.

A major part of the book is taken up with brilliant analysis of the example he uses to underpin most of his argument, the writings of Galileo in which he sought to establish the Copernican system as against the accepted Ptolemaic one, and in particular to prove that the earth moves despite immediate appearances.

Feyerabend exposes the logical poverty and propagandist nature of Galileo's argument most convincingly. However, there are reasons which make it a bad example to use as a paradigm of scientific practice. Firstly, it comes from an early period of modern science in which mathematics was not established as the language of argument. Galileo's writing has a literary nature more akin to what would today be considered philosophy rather than physics (the major work quoted by Feyerabend, the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, is modelled after the Socratic dialogues of Plato). To carry conviction, modern scientific reasoning is expected to be couched in mathematical terms, even if new mathematical ideas have to be introduced to express it. (Strong arguments can be introduced against this, though it is not Feyerabend's theme here; not least of these would be the important question as to why mathematics seems to so successfully model the universe.)

Secondly, few (if any) practising scientists today would cite Galileo as a paradigm for scientific reasoning. A hero, yes, but an example, no. To use him as the principal prop on which to base an attack on the scientific method does not make the attack significantly more convincing, particularly as Feyerabend occasionally tends to follow Galileo into propaganda. He does use examples other than this one, but they are not particularly convincing and often trivial (several optical illusions among them).

Feyerabend does have important things to say, but he has a tendency to make rather too much of them. The way in which scientists work is of course not monolithic, nor has it remained changeless over the last four centuries. Of course the assumptions underlying scientific thought need to be made clearer and are not unchallengeable. Of course scientists do not think as clearly in the heat of the moment as they may do later when formalising what they want to say for public consumption.

John Horgan: The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (1997)

Edition: Little, Brown, & Co.
Review number: 376

John Horgan originally set out to write a book of profiles of the most eminent scientists of the late twentieth century, based on interviews he had carried out as a journalist for Scientific American. But he became fascinated by a theme he perceived in these interviews, the question of whether we might have almost reached the end of what science can discover about the universe.

The first thing he has to do is to define the various ways in which science might end, to establish criteria against which the ideas scientists have about science can be measured, and it is rather unfortunate that this is the least clear section of the book. (This is really because Horgan does not separate this out and state it in an orderly fashion, in one place.)

There may be theoretical limits on what can be known, a physical equivalent of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. The problem with this is that attempts to apply this mathematical result to science are never very convincing, as Horgan points out. He goes on to argue for this point of view in certain branches of science, where the major theories discussed are not empirically testable. This is clearly the case in historical fields of study, such as cosmology and evolutionary biology, where we cannot prove that any particular theories of the origins of the universe and of life are wholly correct, because these were one off events (as far as we know) in the distant past. All we can do is see if the theories we have come up with match up with what we see around us now (the microwave background and the distribution of matter, the fossil record and Earth's ecosystems).

There may be limitations affecting science in general, if a final "theory of everything" is discovered. Then there would be no more fundamental revolutions to come in science; it would only be a matter of filling in the details. This is the attitude that nineteenth century scientists are accused of holding, though (again as Horgan points out) historical investigations have tended to disprove specific allegations (Kelvin's supposed speech in which he said that all that there was left to do was to discover physical constants to more decimal places; the patent office official who resigned because nothing was left to be discovered). There is of course the possibility that a revolutionary new discovery will be made, a new theory will be proposed, but even today, Horgan says, the evidence is against it. There has been a dearth of revolutionary ideas since the sixties; most of theoretical science since then has continued steady development of those of the first half of the century (relativity, quantum mechanics, subatomic structure, the synthesis of Mendelian genetics with Darwinian evolution) or from that decade (DNA, the standard model, the Big Bang). Theories currently touted as the next revolution (such as superstrings and various inflation scenarios) contain ideas that may be inherently untestable. This means that we may be moving into an era of what Horgan calls "ironic science", a term borrowed by analogy from Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, an analysis of poetry in the seventies. Lacking new discoveries to make, scientists move away from traditional science to reinterpret older theories and to discuss metascience. In other words, science loses its independent existence and becomes part of philosophy once again.

The third reason that science may end is that we no longer have the power to invent deeper theories; science becomes beyond human cognitive abilities. There is, after all, no obvious reason why human beings should be able to grasp the universe of which they form part; in fact, the vastness of the universe by comparison with our minds makes it unlikely. The universe is a complex object; why should it be governed by a simple set of rules? Evidence for this point of view comes from the difficulty of grasping current ideas, increasing specialisation and the length of time needed for becoming a fully fledged researcher in a modern scientific discipline.

The fourth reason is more mundane: scientific research is becoming too expensive. Governments, always parsimonious towards pure research, have become even more so since the end of the Cold War. Projects like the Superconducting Super Collider have failed to receive funding because the cost is perceived to outweigh the benefits, and the propaganda value gained from big science projects is less (would the US fund a moon programme today with the same urgency as granted the Apollo project?). In fields like particle physics, bigger and bigger experiments are needed if more fundamental discoveries are to be made, and even then there is no guarantee that they will be made (much of the last twenty years has been spent just confirming the details of the standard model rather than advancing any further). And then applications are not at all obvious; we may not be able to do exciting new things as a result of these experiments, and without applications (results, so far as governments and corporations are concerned), no one is going to fund the research.

The first three reasons are interesting philosophical speculations, but it is the fourth that is in my opinion most likely to bring an end to the scientific search for meaning in the universe. The scientific establishment has naturally attacked Horgan's book, because it is negative about the future of science. Yet we live in a world where science is still to some extent seen as the universal panacea that will bring enlightenment and truth, and eliminate all evils (even though some of these evils, such as pollution, are consequences of earlier scientific 'advances'). In this environment, a negative voice is perhaps a good thing; nobody is attacking science strongly enough to destroy public confidence in it in the way that scientific blunders are doing (through food scares like the BSE crisis, for example). There is a tendency towards arrogance among successful scientists, and many could do with thinking a little harder about what they are doing.

It is this arrogance which comes over most strongly from Horgan's book; the profiles (which still form the bulk of the material) stay in the mind a lot better than the philosophical argument. Either Horgan doesn't like eminent scientists, or they are a uniformly unpleasant bunch of people. I suspect that the truth lies somewhere in between. Scientists are not benevolent, absent minded, white-haired men in white coats; to be successful in the field can require many of the same qualities as it does to be successful in, say, high finance. The way that people look up to scientists, viewing them as a race apart, can breed arrogance; specialism can lead to an obsession with hobby-horses and blind misunderstanding of other fields. On the other hand, a few interviews with people like this are hardly likely to give you high expectations about meetings with others. So the interviews make the book more interesting, but they do present a rather one-sided view of scientists as a group of people.

John D. Barrow & Frank J. Tipler: The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986)

Edition: Oxford University Press, 1996
Review number: 355

It may seem that there is not very much to be said about the anthropic principle, that it is an interesting sideline in the philosophy of science which may have a minor role in explaining why the universe is the way it is. To Barrow and Tipler, it has formed the peg around which a seven hundred page book can be written, one which takes the reader on a survey of cosmology, theology, the future of the human race, and the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence. It is a fascinating book, occasionally rather on the mathematical side for a popular science book.

The anthropic principle, as discussed by Barrow and Tipler, comes in three varieties, with a "Final" form as well as the more familiar "Weak" and "Strong" versions. The Weak Anthropic Principle is hardly contentious. It merely says that the existence of carbon based life is an observed fact, so that the universe must have properties which make such life a possibility. Barrow and Tipler make as strong a case as is possible for the explanatory power of this idea, but I still feel that it is limited. It may explain, for example, that the universe has to be large even if the Earth is the only planet containing life (to have expanded for long enough for galaxies to form and supernovae to occur to create some of the elements we require), but not why the universe happens to be this large. All the principle states is that if it weren't, we wouldn't be here to observe the fact. However, most of what can be inferred from it doesn't actually require the presence of life; the example I've referred to could be deduced just as logically from the existence of uranium. (Life is a sufficiently complex phenomenon that it requires a large collection of such pre-conditions, so the anthropic principle is a convenient summary of many similar explanations.) It also involves the deduction of causes from effects, and that is something which requires a great deal of care, to say the least.

The stronger versions of the anthropic principle are far more contentious, and more closely related to the design arguments used to "prove" the existence of God from the appearance of design in the universe. (These arguments are summarised in an excellent historical overview which forms the first chapter of the book.) The standard strong principle says that life must evolve at some point in the history of the universe, rather than that it just has evolved. As Barrow and Tipler point out, this means that life can be said to be part of the "purpose" of the universe in some way, and this doesn't make much sense without the deduction that life must at some point have a measurable effect on the whole cosmos. This point leads into a lengthy discussion of just what this effect could possibly be, which is fascinating but extremely speculative. The first point made is that it is very difficult to imagine any way in which a species confined to a single star system could affect the universe. So interstellar travel is a necessary development, and that requires intelligence. This is the motivation behind the authors' formulation of what they call the Final Anthropic Principle, which states that intelligence must at some point arise and never die out.

The discussion of how interstellar (and, indeed, intergalactic) travel could be developed is fascinating and seems convincingly feasible. Their ideas are based on the theoretical von Neumann machine, which is basically a machine which can create replicas of itself. A von Neumann machine could be made a space probe that seeks out a star likely to have the resources to enable replication (using a strategy based on analysis of the Polynesian colonisation of the Pacific islands), and then copies itself. Given sufficient processing power to be considered intelligent and a sufficient density of planetary systems - considered likely in current astronomy - this would amount to colonisation of the galaxy by intelligent systems over a period of several thousand years.

In fact, these arguments are sufficiently convincing that they are used to support the idea that there is no more advanced race of beings in the galaxy than humanity, because we should now have been contacted by probes of this sort. (Even if they did not want to directly contact other forms of life, the action of such a probe on reaching the solar system would probably be detectable.) The idea that we are alone in the galaxy, however, contradicts the equally convincing "Copernican Principle", that there should not be anything particularly special about the Earth - we are just a small planet orbiting a typical star in a typical part of the galaxy. The only way to reconcile this with the idea that a society only slightly more advanced than we are would have contacted us - and Barrow and Tipler estimate that von Neumann probes will be economically viable in a few centuries at most - is to argue that some catastrophe almost always destroys a civilisation between two and six hundred years after the Industrial Revolution (or its equivalent). This pessimism may seem justified in a society facing possible nuclear devastation, social disintegration and ecological disaster.

The authors do not dwell on this. It is really a long - and fascinating - digression. The main thread of the argument is rejoined with a discussion of the end of the universe in which some form of intelligent life has basically colonised the whole, and is trying to circumvent in some way the 'heat death' predicted by thermodynamics. This part is necessarily very speculative (cosmologists do not even agree on the broad details of how the universe will end), but certainly represents just about the only feasible way in which life could affect the whole universe.

The Anthropic Cosmological Principle is an extremely complex book, and is exactly the kind of science book I enjoy, finding a peg to discuss a large number of fascinating ideas that turn out to be connected despite appearances. The earlier chapters, about the Weak Anthropic Principle, are solid expositions of material which I've seen before (and which will probably be familiar to most people with an interest in the philosophy of science). The later writing, about the stronger principles, contains much less well-known science. I suspect that these versions of the anthropic principle are probably wishful thinking, the outcome of the desire to feel that we are significant. This doesn't invalidate much of the science contained in the book, which is an excellent one.