Monday 30 January 2012

Sell-by date: are old science books still worth reading?

As an outsider to the world of science I've recently been struck by an apparent dichotomy that I don't think I've ever heard discussed, namely that if science is believed by non-practitioners to work on the basis of new theories replacing earlier ones, then are out-of-date popular science (as opposed to text) books a disservice, if not positive danger, to the field?

I recently read three science books written for a popular audience in succession, the contrast between them serving as the inspiration for this post. The most recently published was Susan Conner and Linda Kitchen's Science's Most Wanted: the top 10 book of outrageous innovators, deadly disasters, and shocking discoveries (2002). Yes, it sounds pretty tacky, but I hereby protest that I wanted to read it as much to find out about the authors and their intended audience as the subject material itself. Although only a decade old the book is already out of date, in a similar way that a list of top ten grossing films would be. In this case the book lists different aspects of the scientific method and those involved, looking at issues ranging from collaborative couples (e.g. the Curies) to prominent examples of scientific fraud such as the Chinese fake feathered dinosaur fossil Archaeoraptor.

To some extent the book is a very poor example of the popular science genre, since I found quite a few incorrect but easily verifiable facts. Even so, it proved to be an excellent illustration of how transmission of knowledge can suffer in a rapidly-changing, pop-cultural society. Whilst the obsession with novelty and the associated transience of ideas may appear to somewhat fit in with the principle that a more recent scientific theory always replaces an earlier one, this is too restrictive a definition of science. The discipline doesn't hold with novelty for the sake of it, nor does an old theory that is largely superseded by a later one prove worthless. A good example of the latter is the interrelationship between Newton's classical Law of Gravitation (first published in 1687) and Einstein's General Relativity (1916), with the former still used most of the time (calculating space probe trajectories, etc, etc).

The second of the three books discusses several different variants of scientific practice, although far different from New Zealand particle physicist Ernest Rutherford's crude summary that "physics is the only real science. The rest are just stamp collecting." Stephen Jay Gould's first collection of essays, Ever Since Darwin (1977), contains his usual potpourri of scientific theories, observations and historical research. These range from simple corrections of 'facts' – e.g. Darwin was not the original naturalist on HMS Beagle – to why scientific heresy can serve important purposes (consider the much-snubbed Alfred Wegener, who promoted a precursor to plate tectonics long before the evidence was in) through to a warning of how literary flair can promote poor or even pseudo-science to an unwary public (in this instance, Immanuel Velikovsky's now largely forgotten attempts to link Biblical events to interplanetary catastrophes).

Interestingly enough, the latter element surfaced later in Gould's own career, when his 1989 exposition of the Early Cambrian Burgess Shale fossils, Wonderful Life, was attacked by Richard Dawkins with the exclamation that he wished Gould could think as clearly as he could write! In this particular instance, the attack was part of a wider critique of Gould's theories of evolutionary mechanisms rather than material being superseded by new factual evidence. However, if I'm a typical member of the lay readership, the account of the weird and wonderful creatures largely outweighs the professional arguments. Wonderful Life is still a great read as descriptive natural history and I suppose serves as a reminder that however authoritative the writer, don't take accept everything on face value. But then that's a good lesson in all subjects!

But back to Ever Since Darwin. I was surprised by just how much of the factual material had dated in fields as disparate as palaeontology and planetary exploration over the past thirty-five years. As an example, Essay 24 promotes the idea that the geophysical composition of a planetary body is solely reliant on the body's size, a hypothesis since firmly negated by space probe data. In contrast, it is the historical material that still shines as relevant and in the generic sense 'true'. I've mentioned before (link) that Bill Bryson's bestseller A Short History of Nearly Everything promotes the idea that science is a corpus of up-to-date knowledge, not a theoretical framework and methodology of experimental procedures. But by so short-changing science, Bryson's attitude could promote the idea that all old material is essentially worthless. Again, the love of novelty, now so ingrained in Western societies, can cause public confusion in the multi-layered discipline known as science.

Of course, this doesn't mean that something once considered a classic still has great worth, any more than every single building over half a century old is worthy of a preservation order. But just possibly (depending on your level of post-modernism and/or pessimism) any science book that stands the test of time does so because it contains self-evident truths. The final book of the three is a perfect example of this: Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, in this case the first edition of 1859. The book shows that Darwin's genius lay in tying together apparently disparate precursors to formulate his theory; in other words, natural selection was already on the thought horizon (as proven by Alfred Russel Wallace's 1858 manuscript). In addition, the distance between publication and today gives us an interesting insight into the scientist as human being, with all the cultural and linguistic baggage we rarely notice in our contemporaries. In some ways Darwin was very much a man of his time, attempting to soften the non-moralistic side to his theory by subtly suggesting that new can equal better, i.e. a form of progressive evolution. For example, he describes extinct South American mega fauna as 'anomalous monsters' yet our overtly familiar modern horse only survived via Eurasian migration, dying out completely in its native Americas. We can readily assume that had the likes of Toxodon survived but not Equus, the horse would seem equally 'anomalous' today.

Next, Darwin had limited fossil evidence to support him, whilst Nineteenth Century physics negated natural selection by not allowing enough time for the theory to have effect. Of course, if the reader knows what has been discovered in the same field since, they can begin to get an idea of the author's thought processes and indeed world view, and just how comparatively little data he had to work with. For example, Darwin states about variations in the sterility of hybrids whilst we understand, for example that most mules are sterile because of chromosomal issues. Yet this didn’t prevent the majority of mid-Victorian biologists from accepting natural selection, an indication that science can be responsive to ideas with only circumstantial evidence; this is a very long way indeed from the notion of an assemblage of clear-cut facts laid out in logical succession.

I think it was the physicist and writer Alan Lightman who said: "Science is an ideal but the application of science is subject to the psychological complexities of the humans who practice it." Old science books may frequently be dated from a professional viewpoint but can still prove useful to the layman for at least the following reasons: understanding the personalities, mind-sets and modes of thought of earlier generations; observing how theories within a discipline have evolved as both external evidence and fashionable ideas change; and the realisation that science as a method of understanding the universe is utterly different from all other aspects of humanity. Of course, this is always supposing that the purple prose doesn’t obscure a multitude of scientific sins...

Thursday 1 December 2011

Questioning habits: monastic science in the medieval period

It’s not usual for a single book to inspire me to write a post, but on seeing a double page spread in Australian science writer Surendra Verna's The Little Book of Scientific Principles, Theories and Things I knew I had to investigate further. Published in 2006, this small book does just what it says in the title, being a concise chronological history of science from Ancient Greece to the present. So far, so good, except that after a fair few BC and early first millennium AD entries, I found that the article for AD150 was followed by one dated AD1202! Having double-checked there weren't any pages missing, I realised that the author had followed the all-too-common principle of 'here's the Dark Ages: nothing to see here; better move along quickly'. Therefore I thought it might be time to look into what exactly what, if anything, was happening science-wise during this thousand year gap, and why there appeared to be a sudden growth in scientific thought at the start of the thirteenth century.

Although much is known of the contemporary Muslim practitioners of natural philosophy such as Alhazen and Avicenna, I want to concentrate on Europe, as the era seems to contrast so profoundly with the later periods of scientific growth in the West known as the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Although historians have recently reappraised the Dark Ages, rebranding it 'early medieval', it's fairly obvious that post-Roman Britain and mainland Europe rapidly fell behind the scientific and technological advances of Middle- and Far-Eastern cultures. An obvious example can be shown by the Crab supernova of AD1054, which despite being recorded in non-Western literature (hardly surprising, since for some weeks it was four times the brightness of Venus) it has not been positively identified in any contemporary European chronicles. Is it feasible that no-one was observing the night sky over Europe, or was the 'guest star' simply too frightening to fit into their world picture?

The Catholic Church is considered the usual suspect for the lack of interest in scientific thought, but if anything the problem seems to have been on the horizon several centuries earlier. Although there were Ancient Greek philosophers such as Democritus and Empedocles whom we might consider experimenters, early Christianity adopted much of the mysticism and philosophy of thinkers such as Pythagoras and Plato. Therefore the culture of the early medieval period was ingrained with notions of archetypes and ideals: with a pre-arranged place for everything within a stultifying hierarchy, there was no need to seek deeper understanding of the physical world. What little astronomical observation there was had predominantly timekeeping and calendric purposes, such as for finding the date of Easter, whilst being at the same time completely intertwined with astrology. Therefore any attempt to understand developments in natural philosophy of the period must take into account various facets of human thought that are today considered completely separate from the scientific method.

However, this isn't to say that the era was completely devoid of intellectual curiosity. The eighth century English mathematician (and a deacon with decidely monastic habits) Alcuin of York could be said to have discussed ideas in the proto-scientific mould, who in addition developed a teaching system intended to propagate rational thought. What led to the pan-European interest in the methodologies we would recognise as key to science, such as detailed observation and careful experimentation, is usually traced to the translation of long-forgotten Ancient Greek texts from Arabic to Latin by such figures as the twelfth century Italian scholar Gerard of Cremona. Although Gerard wrote mathematical treatises and edited astronomical tables (no doubt at least in part for astrological use), the rapid dissemination of Ptolemy and other classical giants led to a chain reaction that should not be underestimated.

An early pioneer of the empirical process was Gerard's English near-contemporary and Bishop of Lincoln Robert Grosseteste, whilst the thirteenth century produced such luminaries as Dominican friar Albertus Magnus in Germany and the English Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, followed in the fourteenth century by fellow Franciscan William of Ockham, and so on. The fact that the translations of ancient texts made a rapid journey around Europe shows that Rome was not opposed to new ideas, although the arrest of Bacon in later life, possibly for writing unauthorised material, suggests that thought censorship was still very much the order of the day.

As can be noted, most of these men were either monks or senior clergy. The obvious point here is that nearly all of secular society was illiterate, which combined with the cost of books in the age before printing meant that only those within the Church had access to a wider world. I assume that this is an irony not lost on those who consider Western religion as antithetical to intellectual novelty (eat your heart out, Richard Dawkins!) Counter to this stereotype, there does seem to have been a form of academic competition between monastic orders, in addition to which chemical and biological experimentation was conducted in fields ranging from the production of manuscript pigments to herbal medicine.

Binham Priory, Norfolk, England
The eleventh century equivalent of a scientific laboratory: the remains of Binham Priory in Norfolk, UK

Of course by the eleventh and twelfth centuries the notion of formally inculcating knowledge, including elements of natural philosophy, was dramatically enhanced via the first universities. Starting in Italy, the new foundations removed the monopoly of the monastic and cathedral schools, thus setting into motion, if somewhat hesitantly, the eventual separation of scientific learning from a religious environment (and of course, Church decree).

So how much could it be argued that from a scientific viewpoint the European Dark Ages weren’t really that dark after all? Compared to the glories of what was to follow, and to a lesser extent the tantalising fragments we know about Ancient Greek thought, the period was certainly a bit grey. But there were definitely a few candles scattered around Europe, whilst such hoary old clichés as everyone believing the Earth to be flat should long since have been consigned to the dustbin of history, Monty Python notwithstanding. So if you are planning to write a history of science, why not undertake a bit of original research and find out what was happening during that much-maligned millennium? The truth, as always, is much more interesting than fiction.