The Most Despised Science Book of 2012 is … worth reading
By Mark Vernon on Friday, January 4 2013, 09:30 - Journalism - Permalink
This piece has just gone up at the Guardian's Comment is free...
Every year, I "give" an award to the Most Despised Science Book of the Year. The 2010 award went to Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini for What Darwin Got Wrong. In 2011, Ray Tallis won with Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity.
My runner-up this time is Rupert Sheldrake's The Science Delusion, though in fact it had a strikingly decent reception for a book also critiquing scientistic dogmatism.
So the winner for 2012 must be Thomas Nagel, for his book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.
Steven Pinker dammed it with faint praise when he described it in a tweet as "the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker". Jerry Coyne blogged: "Nagel goes the way of Alvin Plantinga", which is like being compared to Nick Clegg. All in all, Nagel's gadfly stung and whipped them into a fury.
Disparagement is particularly unfair, though, because the book is a model of carefulness, sobriety and reason. If reading Sheldrake feels daring, Tallis thrilling and Fodor worthwhile but hard work, reading Nagel feels like opening the door on to a tidy, sunny room that you didn't know existed. It is as if his heart said to his head, I can't help but feel that materialist reductionism isn't right. And his head said to his heart, OK: let's take a fresh look. So what caused the offence?
Several things, but consider one: the contention that evolution may tend towards consciousness. Nagel is explicit that he himself is not countenancing a designer. Rather, he wonders whether science needs to entertain the possibility that a teleological trend is immanent in nature.
There it is. The t-word – a major taboo among evolutionary biologists. Goal-directed explanations automatically question your loyalty to Darwin. As Friedrich Engels celebrated, when reading On The Origin of Species in 1859: "There was one aspect of teleology that had yet to be demolished, and that has now been done." But has it? This is the moot point.
The scientifically respectable become edgy when approaching this domain. Read Malcolm Thorndike Nicholson's measured piece on the reaction Nagel's book sparked, published in Prospect. The possibility that the universe wants, in some way, to become conscious will "appear absurd" or "strange", he warns. But bear the anxiety, he doesn't quite continue, and consider the arguments.
I'm considering some of them with Rupert Sheldrake in a series of podcasts, if you'll forgive the plug. But it is striking that they can be aired in relatively kosher scientific circles too. A recent example is Paul Davies's bestseller, The Goldilocks Enigma. Davies argues that the refusal of natural teleology rests on an assumption that nature obeys laws that are written into the fabric of the cosmos. However, quantum physics offers every reason to doubt that this is so. The upshot is that Davies himself favours a universe that contains a "life principle".
So how come teleology is acceptable among cosmologists? It may be that they are used to the basic assumptions of their science being regularly overturned. Biology, though, has had a very good run since 1859. Questioning their science feels like a form of self-sabotage and dangerous. Hence, Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg, reviewing Nagel for the Nation, evoked the spectre of supernaturalism; and Simon Blackburn, reviewing for the New Statesman, jested that "if there were a philosophical Vatican, the book would be a good candidate for going on to the Index".
That was written tongue-in-cheek, but it is a purity argument no less. As Mary Douglas pointed out, secular societies still draw symbolic boundaries to keep the permissible in and threatening stuff out. Those who cross them risk expulsion. The media ritual of the public review offers a mechanism.
As Freeman Dyson recently wrote in the New York Review of Books, contemporary philosophers bow too low to science, mostly because they haven't done any, and have simultaneously lost touch with the elements that made their predecessors so great: the truths held by history, literature, religion. The 2012 award is well earned. We need those prepared to face the flak.
Comments
One must be cautious in suggesting that scientific research should operate according to the will of the masses. This is not to say that scientists should not be responsive to the needs of citizens or, in some cases, their desires but that it is a dangerous path to venture down, and one that must trodden carefully. Their first duty is to the truth - whether it is exciting or dull, welcome or unpleasant - and it must be acknowledged that if too much weight is placed upon the prejudices of the common man this could be obscured. One only has to think of the Scopes Trial. Scientific investigations might sometimes proceed according to what is held to be relevant but science itself is undemocratic. It is - or, at least, it <i>should</i> be - governed by the facts.
Edward Feser has been writing <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=N...">a series of posts</a> in defence of Nagel’s book, by the way, and <a href="http://heterodoxology.com/">Egil Asprem</a> is beginning a series of posts that criticise Sheldrake’s. (The potshot that I took at your review of his book in the latter's comments section might have been harsh - I see that trying to critique materialism in 800 words is like trying to pop up Everest in an afternoon! - but it did feel a bit as if you had called for a more level playing field and then declared that you had won the match...)
Thanks for the links to Feser's posts. He is worth reading (though I have to part company when he gets prescriptive in his natural theology...)
Hi Mark, and Ben too. Re Edward Feser, this reference provides an accurate description of the world view promoted by him:
http://americanloons.blogspot.com/2...
Mark, can the Truth about the human situation be found by studying Western philosophy, literature and religion? Or by even being a supposedly brilliant scientist?
When Franklin Jones studied philosophy, art and literature at Columbia University he was always only interested in finding out what we are as conscious beings (what is consciousness), and what is our relationship to all of this ceaseless arising.
While there he quite literally devoured (his words) the entire Western canon. In his autobiography he describes his graduation day as the unhappiest day of his life - because he had inherited nothing but a bleak mortal vision of what we are as human beings.
On beginning his studies there he writes:
I was deeply impressed by the entire formidable crowd of lecturing "thinkers" there. Columbia seemed like an eminently appropriate, and even ideal, place in which to expand my doubts - but I was puzzled that one of the highest institutions of learning could represent itself as anything but the bearer of Truth. I soon learned that the Truth was always in research in such places. They are not institutions of Truth. They are marketplaces of doubt.
I began to read the deposits of Western culture. And all my idols lost their power. To begin with, I learned that the "Holy Christian Truth" was anything but the real substance of Western civilization. There is a thesis emphasized in all the little bits of thought generated in a university education. In that thesis, the human being is described as necessarily mortal, functionally conditioned, and (at best) "creative" as a social animal. Also, the universe is described as materially prior to conscious life, and it is chronically understood without recourse to religious or Spiritual propositions.
Every book I read and every course I took emphasized this thesis in some unique fashion. This experience very quickly destroyed even the latent image of Jesus that I had stored up in childhood............
........I had fixed my Freedom and Joy into the image of Jesus, and I had long ago given over the support of my Happiness to the church. Now that institutionalized symbol, "Jesus of Nazareth", was wrecked by the same ones who had carried it through time......
......and that fall broke my heart. It drove me into my own vast empty wilderness. .....I had not a single reason for Joy. I found no faith, no inexplicable grace. I saw only the constant drove of merely "civilized" humanity, a long history of illusions sewn up in the single foundation of a muscular mortality. There was only death, a constant ending, a rising fear, a motivated forgetfulness and escape.
I bcame profoundly aware of conflict and suffering everywhere. There was only struggle and disease, fear and longing, self exploitation and emptiness, questions without answers. In every man and woman, I recognized the complex of doubt.......I knew there was not a single man or woman who had overcome the mystery of this death. I knew this education would be a long description of fundamental suffering, since all were convinced of the "truth" of mortality.
Part 2:
Franklin thus began the most extraordinary investigation into the nature of the human condition that has ever been conducted in any time and place.
" No experience posed a barrier to me. There were no taboos, no extremes to be prevented. There was no depth of madness and no limit to suffering that my philosophy could prevent - for, if it did, I would be liable to miss the Lesson of Reality. Thus, I extended myself even beyond my own fear. And my pleasures also became extreme, such that there was a constant machine of ecstasy. I could tolerate no mediocrity, no medium of experience. I was satisfied neither with atheism nor with belief. Both seemed to me mere ideas, possible reactions to a more fundamental (if unconscious) fact. I sought Reality, to BE Reality _ What IS, not what is asserted in the face of What IS.
I read and studied every kind of literature. It would be impossible for me to count the thousands of books and influences I embraced in my years of experimenting. I began to write my reflections. My lecture notes were filled with long passages of my own, where I would write whatever conclusions or impulses rose in me at the time. A continuous argument of internal contemplation began to move in me, such that I was always intensely pursuing an internal logic, distracted or enlarged at times by some idea or experience in my education.
At first they were mainly philosophical notes that developed from a kind of desperate and childish complaint into a more and more precise instrument of thought and feeling. Then I began to write poetry also, and to conceive of works of fiction that would express this dilemma and lead to some kind of solution, some opening, some kind of primary joy.
I becamew a kind of mad and exagerrated young man, whose impulses were not allowable in this medium culture. My impulses were exploitable only in secret extensions of my own humanly-born awareness, or in the company of whores, libertines, and misfits
My father's younger brother, Richard, asked me what I wanted to do with my life. he could see that I lived only abandoned to adventure, and there was no apparent purpose in me. I told him I want to save the world. And I was absolutely serious. That remark totally expressed all of my reasons. Some incredible Knowledge was the goal of my seeking and not any experience I could ever possess."
That goal was of course the rediscovery of "The Bright", the condition in and as which he was born. See http://www.kneeoflistening.com/c1-b...
After his re-awakening as "The Bright" he spent an entire lifetime examining what he called The Great Tradition. Even during his last days.
This reference introduces his consideration. It also provides some materials which describe the origins and consequences of the dismal materialism that mis-informs our "culture"
http://www.adidam.org/teaching/17_c...