The confrontation of expert
knowledge, says eminent biologist Richard Lewontin, is a constant in the
operation of a democratic society. Recalling Plato's distinction between
the true knowledge of technicians and the arbitrary opinion of rhetoricians
in Gorgias, Lewontin asserts that the modern form of 'techne' is science,
an episteme that has gone far beyond practical concerns of "how to" to
encompass the very question of how the world is made. Like Plato, the founding
fathers of the United States privileged technical knowledge over rhetoric,
and believed that the electorate should be educated in this tradition.
What neither Plato nor the founding fathers could have anticipated, in
Lewontin's view, is the current situation in which the immense apparatus
of knowledge that we call scientific knowledge is available only to a restricted
elite.
Lewontin argues that in spite of the need to understand
science in order to make decisions in a democratic society, the general
population is not equipped
to do so. Since few read scientists' work directly, scientific knowledge
is necessarily mediated. The educated scientific elite, operating as a
social
organization of a certain socio-economic class, calls on society for financial
support, all the while maintaining significant autonomy as an organized group.
Congress votes to give financial resources to scientific institutions; from
there, peer reviews--scientists evaluating fellow scientists--determine allocations,
creating what Lewontin calls a "democracy of the elite."
With respect to the content of scientific knowledge,
there is much that cannot be understood because its claims can often be
contradictory to what all our
senses tell us. Neil Sporer has quipped, for example, that if you haven't
been confused by quantum physics, then you haven't understood it. Similarly,
string
theory--which contemplates simultaneous movement in upward of ten dimensions--can
only be understood as a series of elaborate metaphors. This inevitable
reliance on metaphor is problematic, because it becomes difficult to parse
which of
its elements are fundamental to, and which should be stripped from, the
concept it seeks to describe. This difficulty of metaphorical explanations
is further
compounded by their use as a simplifying tool (e.g., in textbooks), which
can tend to result in the communication of accepted ideas at the expense
of addressing
important issues under debate.
All of this, Lewontin urges, should lead to a "healthy skepticism" about
what scientists say.
First, the public should beware of universal statements.
Fashionable since the time of Newton, who meant for his ideas to be universal
laws,
a universalist
approach to knowledge has taken precedence over a systematic understanding
of parts. Lewontin warns that there are no "laws" as such in biology,
despite a few popular misnomers (e.g., Mendel's "laws"); even the
law of all life from life must be contextualized as a truism of recent life
since the advent of the universe.
Second, science faces the pressure of seeming relevant
to human economic and political concerns. In order to convince the public
of the merit of their investigations, scientists often adopt rhetoric that
appeals to social sensibilities. War rhetoric, in particular, surfaces
in connection with scientific pursuits as an important means of generating
funds (e.g., the "war" on cancer). Likewise, "genomania"--the
exaggerated focus on genetics as the ultimate determinant of human life--is
not the invention of the media, but rather of scientists themselves. Lewontin
argues that genotype does not specify the organism in the absence of a
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environment; it
is the environmental circumstance that finally determines the expression
of the organism.
Moreover, it is now believed that, somewhere between nature and
nurture, a third and intermediary category of random "developmental
noise" leading to idiosyncratic development must be added
to the picture of how an organism comes into being.
Third, scientists don't want to take as part
of their problematic things that they don't know how to do. They
don't, for example, know how to approach the
question of why people are living longer without explaining this phenomenon
as an increase in life expectancy due to scientific advances, from
immunizations
to chemotherapy. Lewontin rejects this proposition, claiming that the respiratory
diseases that principally plagued the nineteenth century slowly leveled off
without overwhelming medical explanation. People are no longer
dying from these same
early causes of death, which has led to the facile conclusion that people are
living longer, but Lewontin doesn't believe that science can actually claim
responsibility for this longevity.
In short, scientists can do little more than
construct "perfectly plausible
stories" about how we came to be, but no more. Such explanations can be
understood but cannot, by their very nature, be proven to be true. Our past is
in the past; any attempt to reconstruct our history must be recognized as "sheer
conjecture."
Returning to the separation between rhetoric
and scientific knowledge, Lewontin observes how closely linked
they are in contemporary society. Scientists
form a cooperative enterprise among themselves and with the press to bring
to the
public what they want to say. Within this arrangement, there is little
tolerance for the ambiguity inherent to the scientific process.
A science reporter,
for example, has no possibility of publishing a story that reports on uncertainty.
When salaries and job security depend on publication, reporters will "go
along with the game" of telling what scientists want them to tell. Plato's
de facto distinction between scientists and politicians has, in effect, broken
down.
Is there any remedy for this predicament? Lewontin
calls on science teachers to reject textbooks that do not tell
important truths and to allow science
to be as complicated and sophisticated for their students as it is by
nature. Scientists,
he reiterates, often "magnify and dramatize" their findings in order
to procure funds. They are, after all, "social organisms" with social,
emotional, and financial needs to pursue their research. Lewontin calls on individuals
to resist the temptation of believing scientific claims that "given enough
time and money, we will know 'x,'" if only because of the average life-span
of mammalian species. Why, Lewontin asks, should humans be exempt from the only
law of nature we know aside from "all life from life," namely, the
law of extinction? There is much we won't know, Lewontin concludes. Knowing this,
he cautions us to "be skeptical, always be skeptical."
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