The Trouble with Science [Paperback]

Titles are important, and it's not often publishers get them wrong. The trouble with this one is that it too easily gives the wrong impression. Something like "The Trouble with Our Attitude to Science" would be more accurate, if more long-winded. Whatever the title's failings, there's no question about the success of the book's contents. Robin Dunbar gives his own take on the nature of science and along the way comments trenchantly on that particular culture war that is the battle between science and anti-science. There's also no doubt over where his sympathies lie: the pursuit of science "entails as much appreciation of the beauty of nature, of the elegance of ideas, as any artistic or literary endeavour."

Of course, science is not only about beauty and elegance, otherwise all sorts of fanciful notions would be clamouring for our attention. There's the little matter of the real world to contend with. Dunbar warns that we "cannot afford the luxury of allowing mystical nonsense to distract us from reality" and he identifies the testing of hypotheses as the "important cornerstone of science" that keeps us honest and in touch with that reality. (One clue that we're not mucking around with relativist hogwash is an epigraph from Wittgenstein: "The world is independent of my will".) "Correlations do not imply causes. The central problem in science, as in everyday life, is how to differentiate between real causal effects and the spurious ones that are due to confounding variables."

As consumers of technologies few of us understand, it's easy to be overawed (in the wrong way) by big science. Some science communicators would be content with a whizz-bang approach. Dunbar is a little more ambitious: "I shall try to show that the methods of empirical science are in fact genuine universals characteristic of all higher forms of life." If it's a stretch to imagine that those higher forms might include humanities students, then it will come as a surprise that he actually begins looking for the "roots of science" in the brains of pigeons. Although "not generally considered to be among the most formidable intellectual giants in the bird world" they can apparently form abstract concepts.

The important distinction he's making is between the content of scientific theories and scientific thinking. Just because the !Kung don't have Newton's laws as part of their tradition doesn't mean they're an unscientific people. In fact, they "have a fine-tuned sense of the reliability of knowledge: they are reluctant to make inferences on the basis of hearsay, preferring direct observation whenever possible." On this account, many much better educated Westerners could learn a thing or two from the !Kung. "Only if we make the mistake of assuming that science is a particular body of theory can we argue that these peoples are not engaged in science."

This book is an eloquent response to that significant minority who think that "science attacks tradition and robs life of its spiritual meaning" (at a recent debate between Polkinghorne and Papineau an elderly gentleman complained, bitterly, that "science was dull" - perhaps he took Robin Ince's science-is-dull routine a bit too literally?). It will appeal to anyone who sees the dangers of organized quackery or any system that seeks to silence its critics (think of the "stranglehold that organized religions have had over the human mind through the centuries"). Sceptics are familiar with so-called treatments such as homeopathy and chiropractic, but even within the university precinct there are "extreme forms within the social sciences and the humanities", infected by the postmodern tendency to "claim that there is no standard against which the validity of any idea can be tested".

A couple of minor quibbles. "All this begs the question... one of the central philosophical problems for the empirical sciences has always been the problem of induction, or Hume's problem." Misuse of "begs the question" is one of my bugbears. A football pundit getting it wrong is one thing, but an author who in the same sentence talks about a "central philosophical problem" should know better. Towards the end of the book (in a chapter called "Divided Loyalties") there is a rather too conventional account of the standoff between reason and emotion: "the human mind was not designed as a rational scientific mind. In a very real sense, we have to work against our natural instincts... Emotion is so deep a part of our psychological make-up that it cannot be so easily rooted out." Damasio has shown (see, for example, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain) that rooting emotion out would not be a very good idea, not for any airy-fairy reason that it would diminish our spiritual lives but because it would seriously impair our rational agency. Many instincts have evolved for very good reasons, and in the right circumstance emotions are often highly rational simply because they have been subjected to millions of years of evolutionary testing.

The old-fashioned dichotomy of reason and emotion certainly fits nicely into his final chapter, but perhaps he should have remembered an earlier comment, that "we tend to think predominantly in terms of simple dichotomies"? To be fair to Dunbar, much of this work on the importance of emotion in decision making has been done since his book was published, and in any case it detracts little from what is a splendid book. "Science as we know it in the Western world is the product of a highly formalized version of something very basic to life, namely the business of learning about regularities in the world." As science is perceived as something increasingly remote from "ordinary" life, Dunbar's message - that "the basic processes that underlie science are neither something especially unusual nor peculiar to one particular culture" - remains vital.

The trouble with science is that it still offends human pride. We know Galileo displaced Earth from the center of the universe and that Darwin showed humans and chimps share a common descent. But science generates resistance from the conservative/romantic right, as a harbinger of destruction of all value, and from the left, as `legitimator of bourgeois ideology'. It is the intellectuals rather than the public at large that are troubled by science (if opinion polls are to be believed) but when it comes to influencing policy, it's not a case of one man, one vote. The intellectuals have more clout. It's to this group that this book is addressed.

The trouble with science is not because empirical thinking does not come naturally to us. The first task Dunbar undertakes is to draw a distinction `cookbook' and `explanatory' science (p.17). Cookbook science is technical, practical observations about the world, rules of thumb that are used by human beings to plant crops, raise livestock and to fashion tools. Dunbar shows convincingly that humans across cultures everywhere (and from a young age) are hard-wired to use the rules of induction. The inductive method is not a western `construct.' Empiricism is genuine `human universal'. (p.58). Explanatory science is the higher-end, `pure' science that sets out to explain the world and doesn't necessarily have any technological utility, such as quantum physics. He overlooks that this type of science does have specific cultural origins. But to me that doesn't matter. Explanatory science does not stand or fall on whether its origins are `western' but whether it is true. That's the answer to the relativists.

The fact is that science that when it comes to explaining the natural world, science has no equals. If you want a practical vindication of the efficacy of science, then the example of the near-disastrous outcome of the Apollo 13 mission will suffice. The crippled spacecraft could not be turned around. So ground control used the moon's gravitational field as a slingshot, which could only be done if the engines were fired at a precise time and place. As we know, there was a happy outcome. And for that we can thank not only the mission controllers and the astronauts but also Newton for having done the necessary maths to allow them to do the calculations.

Why does science work so well that it is able to do this? To say that science rests on whether its propositions can be falsified, as Karl Popper once held, is a misconception. A theory does not stand or fall on whether it fails a single test - the problem of confounding variables makes this test too austere. Science is successful because it is (1) methodical - not just cautious, but long, slow and patient in working through of all of the ins and outs of a hypothesis; (2) that it is able to draw `strong inferences', that is, very precise predictions of stunning accuracy; which is turn (3) reinforced by logical argument. We can see and hear the paucity of logical argument on most days, on the TV, in the newspapers, and in every day conversation, with its use of sloppy arguments, `conclusions do not follow from the premises, non-sequiturs (in which statements are wholly unrelated to anything that went before) abound (p. 108).

So then, although empiricism comes naturally to us, the rigour of explanatory science does not. The reason is that `our minds have been honed by evolution to identify rules of thumb that suffice for everyday purposes as quickly as possible.' (p. 113).

Our brains appear to be better adapted to understanding the social world rather than the natural one. Perhaps this distinction is false: we are part of nature after all. But even if we allow for this, then it still follows that our brains are better at working out other minds rather than unlocking the riddles of physics. Intelligence may have evolved to deal with our social natures, that we all live in societies, of one form or another, and to suss out what others' intentions are is a vital survival skill, both to detect any threat they may pose, and to catch out free riders and other cheaters who are parasitical on the social nature of one's fellows.

How then do we popularize science if it is so far from the realms of common sense or the sort of cookbook, empirical rule of thumb style of reasoning that is reasonably well adapted to our everyday needs? Dunbar does not really provide an answer although the number of good science writers out there who have emerged in the years since this book was first published (1995) shows that it is possible to do this, to render scientific jargon into intelligible prose for the layman. The contrast with the gobbledygook of the `bolt hole' of post-modernism could not be greater.

The book tackles the objections of the ultra-relativist cultural left better than it does the conservative, romantic right. This is not to say that the objections of the latter are well formulated. The complaints of those like Roger Scruton that science robs us of meaning are so vaguely formulated that it's impossible to answer them. But never mind. Most people get on with their lives without being bothered by such things.

For those that are really troubled by science, the only thing that would please them is perhaps to put an end to science altogether. But, as Dunbar cautions, `we are now dependant on science to sustain us in our day-to-day lives. Neither we in the industrialized nations nor those in the developing world could return to pre-industrial agricultural economies without incurring terrible consequences in social and demographic terms' (p. 176). Science may well be troubling. But to do without it would be more troubling still.

I picked up a second hand copy at random in an Oxfam bookshop.

I finished a degree studying the History and Philosophy of Science in 1995, having set out in search of a physics degree. After the fact I read a lot about the conflicts between disciplines that informs Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate" (2002). I read also about the reception of E. O Wilson's "Sociobiology" as so ably described in Ullica Segerstrale's "Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology" (2000). I read some anthropology, some psychology and a lot of journalism tangentially associated with these matters.

When I got to reading Dunbar's book, in 2011, I was thrilled by the quality of the synthesis of so much thinking about science and the way in which the scientific enterprise is unusual as a collective endeavour. Dunbar's book is even handed when engaging with radical opinion that conflicts with his central thesis but he doesn't pull punches. If an opponent's line of argument strains the credulity of informed opinion, he makes that plain.

Crucially, it's just bloody good reading. It's a delightful primer on the frankly fractious contemporary relationship the scientific enterprise, the societies that finance contemporary science and the other cultures in the academy that aren't science and have things to say about science.

I bought five copies at list price for friends just so that he gets some royalties. I'll send him a cheque to boot. A wonderful, wonderful book.