Last week, I attended the annual British Society for Literature and Science conference in Reading. As in the previous two BSLS conferences I've been to, this was a fabulous event, an opportunity to renew old acquaintances, chat about common interests, enjoy sumptuous breakfasts...oh, and to hear some excellent panels and plenaries.

However, thinking broadly about the weekend's papers, there seems to me - and I stress that this is my general sense, or thought-in-progress, and may well turn out to be misguided or making a false accusation - to be something of a crack emerging in the interdisciplinary approach to the field of literature and science.

On the one hand, there are those who treat literature and science in an essentially conventional historicist vein. Often focusing on Romantic poets and Victorian novelists, they explore the ways in which particular writers were influenced by scientific ideas in circulation at the time. Which scientists was George Eliot reading when she wrote Middlemarch? How was Wordsworth influenced by Humphrey Davy? Often drawing on archives or letters, scholars in this vein connect ideas or metaphors at work in the creative text with scientific enquiries. This is very interesting and worthy work, but it uses an essentially conventional model of English literary studies, showing the influences upon a writer in an attempt to make better sense of their oeuvre. In this case, scholars look at science, but they might just as easily refer to an author's tour of Venice, or their reading of Milton.

On the other hand, others in the field see the confluence of science and literature as an opportunity to rethink the models of knowledge with which literary scholars work, asking what are (to me) very interesting epistemological questions. What is "science"? Can a scientific "fact" about the world be conveyed to readers via creative works, such as science fiction, or does a fact assume a different status the moment it transfers into a genre other than the scientific journal article? To what degree does scientific writing draw on narrative modes, employing devices such as metaphor, plot, drama, rhetoric in order to produce a stable and persuasive body of knowledge? What sort of knowledge is made available by literary fiction, and can fiction itself therefore be said to be a science of sorts? How can we use recent discoveries in science, such as neuroscience or evolution, to inform our interpretations of literary texts? Without invoking that outmoded postmodern belief that science has no greater claims to reality than any other way of looking at the world, when these sorts of questions are raised they trouble the "two cultures" boundary, broadening the remit of "knowledge" as construed by the sciences and the arts.

It seemed to me that very rarely did the two approaches come together. Presenters were either theorising science and literature, or historicising, but not really making connections across the parallel approaches. This is particularly odd because the matriarch of science and literature (and President of the BSLS), Gillian Beer, stood in the shoes of both the historicist and the theorist in both of her seminal works. Darwin's Plots shows how Darwin's language and rhetoric was essential to the way his argument operates and convinces, and Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter shows how science and literature interplayed in the late Victorian period in a way which makes the "two cultures" differences of the twentieth century seem quite arbitrary. For anyone working in science and literature, these works are founding manifestos of sorts, but in a sense the fact one of the most formidable (but charming) scholars of the present moment wrote them reminds how difficult it is to do this sort of interdisciplinary work in a way that makes best use of science's introduction to literary studies to create a new paradigm for the latter.

If it is to be conducted in the fullest way, I would argue that science and literature must avoid doing two things. On the one hand, it cannot simply seize on scientific texts as just other examples of influential historical documents through which to understand a poem. On the other, it must avoid turning to science in order to claim some positivist legitimacy for literary studies, as if to say that literary criticism is a science just like physics, when in fact if there is a scientific knowledge encoded within literature and literary studies, it is a science of a different sort to that encoded in molecular mechanics. The latter is precisely what the current hot topic of the moment, evolutionary literary criticism risks doing, when at its worst it appears to say that reading Jane Austen can somehow improve your evolutionary survival in society - which is simply to give a gloss of scientific kudos to what is essentially an old Arnoldian argument that reading literature is a moral activity (see Joseph Caroll's Evolution and Literary Criticism).

Labels: British Society for Literature and Science, Literature, Science and Culture

Dr. Frithjof Küpper cites one of his research interests as lying in the "chemical ecology of marine algae and microbes." Basically, Dr. Küpper researches seaweed. However, as Radio 4's recent Material World programme on the subject indicated, the science of seaweed is a highly significant research area.

In a co-authored paper entitled "Iodide Accumulation Provides Kelp with an Inorganic Antioxidant Impacting Atmospheric Chemistry," Küpper and his collaborators published their finding that large brown seaweed releases a form of iodine to protect itself from sunlight or low-lying atmospheric ozone. Consequently, iodine emissions may cause localised clouds to form. Harnessing this effect may make it easier to seed rain clouds in drought-ridden areas, and appreciating the global extensiveness of this biospheric feedback loop may have implications in understanding and tackling climate change.

My reason for this brief post is to highlight the anarchistic nature of scientific discoveries. For whilst the public may respond positively to news about breakthroughs in cures for cancer (the Daily Express carries headlines about one nearly every week) or more fuel efficient cars, they probably care little about the science of seaweed. However, the story admirably picked up by Material World indicates that the majority of science is not headline-grabbing stuff. It is often conducted in niche areas, that may at first glance appear to have no relevance to human society, with the science itself being done purely to satisfy the curiosity of those involved.

This, then, exemplifies one of the myths of scientific research. For asked which project they would prefer to fund, I expect most lay people would choose the cancer cure option. However, science is a holistic enterprise. You cannot necessarily have the cure for cancer, or the solution to the climate change crisis, without understanding esoteric processes in apparently unrelated fields. Although with a limited pot of money funding bodies necessarily prioritise and exclude some research proposals, it is not always possible to predict from which area vital findings are going to emerge.

Indeed, one suspects that many people will have been balked at the $8 billion cost of the new Large Hadron Collider at CERN. What need for an expensive camera designed to take pretty snapshots of elementary particles? Sure, it may provide newspaper editors with impressive photos of small men standing in giant machines (The Guardian recently ran a supplement feature on the LHC), but surely there are cheaper ways to spark the imagination than by producing particulate fireworks? Well, probably the same questions were raised in 1990. Then a chap called Tim Berners Lee came along and, faced with the need to share data among research groups, invented the World Wide Web, by which you are reading these very words. The sciences of seaweed or particles indicate that whilst some sciences may not be appreciated in anticipation of great discoveries, their inestimable value often emerges through hindsight. I suspect that when it becomes operation in August, along with its terabytes of data the LHC will continue to prove this one, vital rule.

Labels: Science and Culture, seaweed iodine

Last Friday, I gave a conference paper on the moon. Well, OK, the paper itself was delivered in an old grammar school, the walls of which were carved with rather elegant seventeenth-century graffiti; but the paper was about the moon, particularly the NASA missions. Recently watching the elegiac documentary In The Shadow of the Moon (which won Best Documentary at the Sundance Festival), I was struck by the reading of Genesis performed by the Apollo 8 astronauts as they orbited the moon on Christmas Eve, 1968. Once back on Earth, the astronauts were astonished to learn that not everyone was happy with this Biblical reading, which they had thought was just “something appropriate” to the context; they were sued, unsuccessfully, by militant atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair.

My paper was about the way in which ideology is apparently neutralised from the context of space, so that a specifically Christian passage is perceived – I argued naively – to apply to all mankind. Likewise, the plaque left by Apollo 11, “We came in peace for all mankind,” belies the fact that the missions were precisely the product of the Cold War, and that Communists probably had a less auspicious sense of the occasion. I argued that these moments maintain the myth of the Enlightenment: that scientific reason is also automatically socially reasonable, being applied for the good of universal humanism. In a sort of quasi-Marxist, quasi-postmodernist reading, I tried to deconstruct the myth of the moon missions as being the pinnacle performance of science for the audience of all mankind. I also looked at 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Norman Mailer’s A Fire on the Moon (1970), showing how the first, though an apparently operatic celebration of scientific progress, is actually as doubtful about science as a universal humanist pathway as is the second, A Fire on the Moon, Mailer’s caustic retrospective on the Apollo 11 mission. In there markedly different ways, both texts encapsulate a comparable uneasiness about the moral universalism of the space missions, an uneasiness which retrospective celebrations, such as A Shadow on the Moon, can elide.

I am hoping to write this into a full journal article, so I don’t want to say any more about it now (though just in case you get the wrong impression, and have not read my other Science and Culture pieces on this blog, I am not anti-science per se, just against unselfconscious science which fails to appreciate that society may not unanimously view science in the same positivistic way as the scientists within it do). However, I did want to provide a video that should, in and of itself, demolish that myth that the moon missions were a pure ambition, untainted by realpolitik, ideology, or crass commercialism. Take a look at the following, an excerpt from CBS News’ contemporary coverage of Apollo 11, and when you have stopped laughing, come back and tell me that the space missions were truly transcendent affairs, not grounded in the reality of Western capitalism:



If my paper was about the dark side of the moon, however, it was pleasant to discover that there is also a humorous side to the moon. When I returned to my computer that evening, the BBC carried a story about a caller to the police who was worried about an unexplained "bright stationary object" in the night sky. Here is the transcript:

Control Room: "South Wales Police, what's your emergency?"

Caller: "It's not really. I just need to inform you that across the mountain there's a bright stationary object."

Control room: "Right."

Caller: "If you've got a couple of minutes perhaps you could find out what it is? It's been there at least half an hour and it's still there."

Control: "It's been there for half an hour. Right. Is it actually on the mountain or in the sky?"

Caller: "It's in the air."

Control: "I will send someone up there now to check it out."

Caller: "OK."

The mystery was soon solved, as the exchange between control and an officer at the scene, makes clear.

Control: "Alpha Zulu 20, this object in the sky, did anyone have a look at it?"

Officer: "Yes, it's the moon. Over."

Actually, of course, it's not so funny when you stop and think about the waste of police resources. But for a brief moment it is worth a laugh at the funny side of the moon.

Labels: Apollo 11, Kellogs, Moon, Science and Culture

There being no Euro 2008 on telly Because I am dedicated student of culture, on Sunday night I went to a debate entitled "What is Art?" which was being run as part of my university's arts festival. The panel comprised a philosopher, two directors of modern art galleries, a theologian, and the director of Resonance FM.

I will not rehearse the debate here, which meandered largely around familiar grounds, but I just wanted to note the way in which the various definitions put forwards in relation to the question might be used to transgress the boundaries between science and art. I jotted down some of the epithets each contributor put forward in answer to the "What is Art?" issue; these included:

• Accident becoming intention: the artist is never quite sure of the destiny of his or her work from the outset, and there is always the sense of the haphazard about art which is then justified as such only after it has been produced
• Reproducing consciousness in others: the artwork acts as a vehicle for the imagination by which the viewer can occupy the perspective with which the artist views a particular aspect of the world
  
• Pleasure: art is that which generates a response that transcends (note the romanticism) or stands beyond further expression or deconstructive analysis
  
• Utility: art can have a public function, either memorialising events to be shared by the community, or by generating a sense of excitement about the potential of a region or city (something the Resonance FM representative completely overlooked when he derided the Angel of the North as worthless kitsch - hardly something that will go down well with the residents of the rejuvenated Newcastle Gateshead, a destination whose numerous cultural sites receive more visitors per capita than London)
• Vision: this one, not surprisingly, was contributed by the theologian, but is probably not too far removed from the ideals of pleasure and reproducing consciousness in others

All of these examples seem fairly mainstream in aesthetic debates, although naturally no one example is capable of containing the full range of what might be, or what has been, considered as art (or, with equal applicability, literature or music). And the one thing missing from the list was ideology: art is whatever a particular culture defines as such because it suits the norms or incarnates the values that the culture wants to perpetuate. Clearly such a view is not one that curators of publically funded galleries can subscribe to. But enough Marxism; I want to focus really on the way in which each argument survives the translation across the disciplinary divide, into the sphere of scientific activity.

If accident becoming intention defines an artwork, does this not also describe Alexander Fleming's petri dishes, left unintentionally on a windowsill but leading to the understood phenomena of antibiotics? If art is the reproduction of consciousness in others, might this not also be the effect of scientific writing, the conventions of which should allow any other scientist to step into the shoes of his predecessor and see the world - albeit within an emotionally neutral framework - as if through his eyes when he conducted the original experiment? Certain scientific writing, such as The Origin of Species, has a clear aesthetic quality, able to generate pleasure in its reader through rhetorical means; but I suspect that the moment when the most dispassionate paper generates new knowledge is not unlike the moment in literature or art when you recognise what you had always known to be true in the world, but never quite so succinctly or elegantly expressed. The ideals of vision and utility pretty much speak for themselves.

I suspect that the most viewed images (artwork?) of the last couple of weeks were not paintings or photographs in a gallery in London, but those astonishing shots captured by the Phoenix lander on Mars, some 35 million miles away. What is so remarkable is the self-consciousness of the shots: here is little Earthbound me, looking at an image taken by a man-made machine, which is looking at itself (or at least its leg), on another world. The pictures are a medium for the mind, vicariously transporting me imaginatively so that I can feel what it must be like to fly (there's transcendence again) beyond Earthly limits, to plant my foot on another world. I am not sure that cognitively, my response to these images is far removed from that which I might have standing before a Picasso. Science might in and of itself possess aesthetic qualities, as a recently-published book entitled The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments implies.

On the other hand, bringing art and science into uncanny proximity encourages me also to note a contrast that might provide my own epithet to use in response to the question "What is Art?" With apologies to Heidegger, I would suggest there is between art and science a general difference between being and becoming.

As I have suggested above, science has many of the same agendas as art, though the methods and tones in which the enterprise is couched seem superficially different. However, the test of success for the process of science is a test of ends, of being; the test of a successful piece of art is one of bringing that art into being, of means floating independently of specific ends. There is no such thing as art, but art describes the process of creating the artefacts which might be given such a name.

The ideal scientific experiment will be replicable numerous times, with no unexpected deviation from the predictions of the model or formula. The model or formula may initially be revealed by accidents like Fleming's mould, but once that process has become known science aims to remove any possibility of the accident happening again; the test of scientific knowlege is its predictive quality: that the same conditions will produce the same state in comparable situations.

Art, however, is a process rather than an end, the becoming about of that entity that might (or might not) be named art once the process is complete. One of the panelists (the one for whom art was defined by its pleasure-giving capacity) noted that he played the accordion very badly, but that he enjoyed the experience of making music, even if his listeners found his results unbearable. Musical notation might be said to be like scientific writing, in the sense that it is a formal recording system that enables anyone able to read the system to reproduce the original product. Except, of course, the whole point of musicality is that there is no such direct correspondance. The accordion player may not be able to reproduce the notes with perfect fidelity, but this does not necessarily mean that the process of reproduction is - for him - unmusical; it is a process of becoming, of discovering a connection between the self and the music that is not definitively posited or founded in the score. One might make a similar point about literary language, in which the creative word floats freely of their author (even if, contra Barthes, the author is not quite dead), such that freshly creative interpretations of the same material are possible, even encouraged.

For the scientist, however, the failure to reach the anticipated end when he conducts an experiment signifies either a failure in the hypothesis, or in the methodology he is repeating, or that conditions not present in that original moment have had an unanticipated effect; such "errors" can, of course, turn out to be very purposive in leading science down new paths. However, the fact that if the second experiment fails to produce the same state of being as the first this must lead to further experiments means that the reproduction is not self-contained, containing within itself its end or purpose.

By contrast, for the accordian player, the fact that he fails to reproduce the notes with the fidelity intended by the composer is essentially irrelevant to his or her personal enjoyment and investment in the process (or becoming) of reaching that end (or being); he or she may want to reproduce the notes more accurately in the future, but the process itself will remain satisfying because it is one of new creation personal to him. Indeed, if the player reaches professional standard, the test of his ability will not be whether he can reproduce the musical consciousness of the composer by translating the score through the medium of the instrument, but the degree to which he or she is also mediating, that is to say, translating and interpreting the music in a newly productive deviation from the original intention.

So what implication does this contrast between being and becoming of science and art have on the question "What is Art?" Essentially, I think, it is to signify that the question what is art can not be grounded in any intrinsic quality of the artefact; nor can it be left ungrounded by talking romantically about metaphysical pleasure that cannot be referred to the mind of the creator or receiver; nor is the idea of utility particularly workable, given that econometrics cannot predict the social value of Guernica as opposed to the latest Damien Hurst installation.

Rather than a top-down approach to the question, by which the art is produced and we then must try to categorise it, the contrast between being and becoming operates in a bottom-up direction: art is whatever is produced with a sense of artistry, or art is the process of generating the thing that has the potential to be named "art." Though a tautology - or hermeneutic circle - it is a feasible definition because it refocuses attention not on the receivers of art but on the producers. The links that bind a viewer to art (or whatever is classified as "art") are potentially unrelated to any quality inherent in the artefact, perhaps intruding through ideology or preconceptions of what good art must do; on my model, there is a very definite connection between the artist and the production (art does not just spring from thin air), and any response to "What is Art?" must attend to the materialities (whether the cognitive processes in the mind of the artist, the nature of the medium being worked) that relate the artist to his creation, not those that flicker between a creation and a viewer.

Additionally, in spite of my contrast between science and art, this does not exclude the former from the potential of the latter: the child's process of discovering that a prism can split light into the rainbow may be treated as the artistic one of the child becoming conscious of a world otherwise hidden; likewise the process of the scientist discovery when something does not happen as expected might also be classed as art under my definition, no matter what the formal properties of the final result. If Fleming's experience of the growth of mould catalysed, for him, a comparable sense of personal growth, the process was artistic, regardless of the aesthetic qualities inherent (or not) in the green goo at the end of that becoming. On the other hand, not all science may be experienced with this cognitive way in the person conducting the experiment, whereas all art, or all science that is art, must be.

Labels: Photography and Art, Science and Culture, What Is Art

Until the BBC iPlayer was released, there would have been no point in blogging about programmes which the reader would have no chance of watching again. But the iPlayer is available, and so too is the exemplary documentary I watched last night: Am I Normal? presented by psychologist Dr. Tanya Byron.

In the hour-long film - a sensible, grown-up film without patronising background music or silly graphics - she explored the fine line between religious devotion and psychiatric disorder. Why is it that Pentecostals who speak in tongues are considered blessed, but schizophrenics who hear voices are institutionalised? Why is it that we pass by the street evangelist, thinking him to be slightly weird, but consider the grey-haired Carmelite nun, silently passing time in a convent, to be harmless?

Byron - an atheist herself - was open-minded about the value of religious belief for some people (statistically, patients with a spiritual background are more likely to recover from psychiatric syndromes than are atheists). But she was quite prepared to damn the cult of faith healing, which lacks any substantial evidence base and which may raise false hope for patients with severe medical conditions best treated by mainstream physical interventions. She was respectful in pressing the values and beliefs of atheists (Matthew Parris) and believers (Jeremy Vine) alike. She witnessed an evangelical song meeting, noting the same symptoms of crowd arousal - raised arms, physical proximity - as occur at football matches and rock concerts. She was intrigued by a trained psychiatrist who treated patients by exorcising the dead child spirits by whom they were possessed, seemingly (though no hard data is available) with results akin to those achieved by therapies such as CBT. Byron examined the neuroscience of talking in tongues (neurotheology). This has shown how the neurological system that regulates semantic language does shut down when people are being "possessed" as mediums for the "spirit," proving that they are not deliberate fakes, though it does not (cannot) prove either way the mechanism by which the synaptic action happens in the first place, whether supernaturally Holy or a self-induced behaviour.

This serious and sensitive look at what could have been a greatly divisive issue ought to be well-received by religious believers, atheists and scientists. It did not make grand claims to prove or disprove the existence of God, or to castigate religion as anti-science (though this was implicitly there in the background, in the consistent lack of an evidence base for alternative therapies and faith healing). Rather, it stuck to its remit to expose the conventions by which "normal" is determined, and it concluded with some force that what we classify as psychologically normal - and the normal therapies deployed to treat psychiatric disorders - are generally socially-constructed ideologies.

Because of this, many of the conventions and methods between treatments may be comparable at root. I noted that the psychiatrist-exorcist asked many questions of his patient whilst rhetorically planting ideas; a similar sort of approach is used by mainstream therapy or even by the Eliza chatbot (the latter, a simple artificial intelligence programme, is peculiarly effective at helping interlocutors to express their anxieties). It seems that treating patients with psychological problems may be done effectively through talking with God, inner demons, keyboards, doctors or priests. The challenge science and religion must meet now is to confront the evidence: even if normal and mad are arbitrary categories, there must be one form of treatment that is most effective, for most people, most of the time. One suspects the scientists may be very prepared to explore this. The priests, less so. But with the likes of Tanya Byron moderating, there may be hopes for a start.

Labels: Am I Normal?, religion, Science and Culture, Tanya Byron

Because the broad remit of my research allows such things, since Christmas I have gone beyond the infinite universe of books to write on science fiction film, with my current focus being Stanley Kubrick's 1968 masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Watching this in 2008, and reading about its reception at the time, is a slightly bemusing experience.

As Jerome Agel's contemporary edited collection, The Making of Kubrick's 2001 reports, critics at the time were less than complementary about Kubrick's ten million dollar baby (the contrast with the universal acclaim for Grand Theft Auto IV released today could not be more striking). Some excerpts from the more damning reviews:

You could see it a dozen times and still not understand it. But then, you didn't really expect to understand a movie that took $10.5 million and four years to make, did you?

The guesses of Messrs. Kubrick and Clarke must be as good as ours.

Were 2001 cut in half it would be a pithy and potent film, with an impact that might resolve the "enigma" of its point and preclude our wondering why exactly Mr. Kubrick has brought us to outer space in the year 2001...We hope he sticks to his cameras and stays down to earth - for that is where his triumph remains.

Granted: 2001 is the head flick of all time. Note the faintly resinous spoor of the audience, the people fighting at intermission to get those 50-cent chocolate bars, the spaced-out few who contemplate the curtain for long minutes after the movie ends.

The tedium is the message.

That last piece of pithy genius is from Joseph Gelmis, but in a second review, having watched the film again, he acknowledges one of the problems reviewers of the film at the time faced:

When a film of such extraordinary originality as Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey comes along it upsets the members of the critical establishment because it exists outside their framework of apprehending and describing movies. They are threatened. Their most polished puns and witticisms are useless because the conventional standards don't apply. They need an innocent eye, an inconditioned reflex and a flexible vocabulary. With one exception (The New Yorker's Penelope Gilliatt), the daily and weekly reviewers offhandedly dismissed the film as a disappointment or found it an ambitious failure.

Gelmis's first review in Newsday (April 4, 1968) classified it precisely in these terms. However, his second review admired the fact that it "uncompromisingly demands acceptance on its own unique terms." Unfortunately, as Gelmis noted, such a refusal to buckle to the audience's demands for simple plot and exegesis meant that its stark originality did not make sense except on a second or third viewing.

But this is precisely why I am so surprised by all the negative reviews from 1968. Because, in 2008, one can only ever watch 2001 for the first time having already seen it many times before. This is to say that anyone who has ever played Frontier Elite to the soundtrack of the Blue Danube Waltz, or seen adverts for the Apple Macintosh, or watched Star Wars or Star Trek or last year's science fiction hit Sunshine has already experienced Kubrick's vision. It is hard to overemphasise how odd seeing 2001 retrospectively is; its visual coinage has been in the cinematic economy for four decades now, and numerous shots first witnessed in 1968 set off echoes in the head today. It is therefore impossible to read the contemporary reviews objectively, without a sense of historical irony: unless, like Gelmis, they were prepared to watch it a second time, they would all be proved wrong.

However, before one gets too heady with schadenfreude, one is brought down to earth with a bump. Kubrick's aesthetics may have survived in the cinematic medium, but the vision of science has not been realised by 2008 in reality. At the time, that famous dissolve in which the spinning bone morphs into a rotating space satellite signified the compression of technological development. A year before man actually did land on the moon, space travel and intelligent computers must have seemed a mere frame in history in the future. Looking back today, we are reminded that 2001 did not see the rise of artificial intelligence nor space exploration.

Indeed, a year earlier we'd all been terrified by millennium bugs infecting cranky dumb machines. That AI has failed to come to fruition as Kubrick and Clarke anticipated can be seen not as endorsing the fact that the human mind is so advanced no machine can match it, but that the human mind is so limited that it never can invent a machine to match it. For the twenty-first-century spectator of 2001, perhaps the most profound message is that Clarke and Kubrick, writing in the heyday of the space race and the Eliza chatbot, wrongly judged the acceleration of scientific development. In the twenty-first century the chronology of history and the future-time of the novel have switched places. Thus HAL becomes not so much the potential nightmare we want to avoid, but more symbolises the dream we may not ever realise, due to our own limited knowledge in comparison with that represented in his omniscient but fictional mind.

A similarly depressing story is told by 2001's vision of space travel. Famously, this is presented as being entirely mundane. It involves talk about freeze dried sandwiches ("What's that? Chicken?" "Something like that. Tastes the same anyway."), inane birthday greetings from mum and dad, lounging on sun beds. However, as we know from the Columbia disaster, space remains a risky and colossally expensive business. It is the specialist enterprise of big government, not space tourists (though Virgin Galactic may be seeking to change that).

Space science today is mundane, but in a significantly different way to that which Kubrick imagined. Until it was taken over by images of galaxies colliding - admittedly a pretty exciting firework, though not of our making - the BBC space section was reporting news of the Galileo satellite launch. Space is going to give us better sat nav so that we don't get stranded down country lanes on the way to the Dog and Duck. In comparison, the grand voyages to Jupiter and beyond the infinite seem - in the finite historical timeframe that separates 1968, 2001 and 2008 - a sorry world away.

Labels: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick, Science and Culture, science fiction

I recently presented a conference paper on science fiction, considering the theoretical problems of reading retrospectively, after its one-time futuristic visions have now been technologically realised. In one of the examples I used, contemporary reviewers of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds were impressed by Wells' evolutionary imaginings of how the Martians might look, and how they might be defeated by bacteria; they enjoyed his novel presentation of heat rays, tripods and flying machines. But they do not seem to have focused much on how the invasion narrative was intended as a critique of Victorian society in his present, showing how quickly the veneer of civilisation would drop away under the stress of war. However, modern readings now emphasise the novel as a social satire, an approach given added plausibility since World War One did indeed bring Victorian civilisation almost to its knees, through the use of poison gas and flying machines.

In a lecture presented to the Royal Institution entitled "The Discovery of the Future," Wells ascribed to creative writers (himself included) the ability to discern the future with a near empirical accuracy. Like a palaeontologist who by piecing together fossil fragments is able to reconstruct prehistory, the creative writer is able to assimilate the ideas of the present and project a reliable scientific vision of the future. Whilst in the postmodern age of textual relativism such a view seems always suspect, Wells is not unique in holding this perspective on science fiction, though he is rare in the objective force of his argument. Wells would, I suspect, have got on with the recently departed Arthur C. Clarke, who similarly argued in his essay "Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination" that good science fiction should be grounded in extrapolations of present reality, unless it was to become mere fantasy.

However, it seems clear that science fiction does not have any strong claim to predictive validity. Any judgements it makes are given empirical weight only with the benefit of hindsight. In order to seem predictive, science fiction only needs to be lucky once. Star Trek's communicator device seems not unlike a contemporary mobile phone, and so Star Trek is taken as a good predictor of the future. But where are the holodecks, warp drives, and voice-activated computers? Certainly, all these sorts of things will come to pass eventually - virtual reality, space travel, intelligent-type machines. But in reality they will come about not because Star Trek made them so, and not primarily because science has been inspired by the series, but because when they come to be we will recollect the fiction and structure the contemporary technologies according to its earlier, fictional versions. If science fiction seems to present an accurate picture of the future, it is principally because fiction is always going to be reframed in terms of the present.

The reason for this excursion into literary theory of science fiction is that the recent debate about the embryology bill currently being legislated in Parliament has also employed a science fiction text in considering the ethics of the present. The bill would allow scientists to create human-animal embryos for research purposes. Cytoplasmic embryos containing 99.9% human DNA, and the remainder animal, would be grown in the lab for a few days, and then be harvested for stem cells to be used in research into cognitive degeneration diseases: Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, Motor Neurone Disease.

However, whilst the scientific research that would be allowed by the legislation is specific and with particular medical benefits, the reaction to the bill - orchestrated by the Catholic church - has been anything but subtle. Particularly grabbing the headlines was the Easter sermon of the Archbishop of Edinburgh, Cardinal Keith O'Brian. He polemicised:

This bill represents a monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human life.

In some other European countries one could be jailed for doing what we intend to make legal.

I can say that the government has no mandate for these changes: they were not in any election manifesto, nor do they enjoy widespread public support.

The opposite has indeed taken place - the time allowed for debate in parliament and indeed in the country at large has been shockingly short.

One might say that in our country we are about to have a public government endorsement of experiments of Frankenstein proportion - without many people really being aware of what is going on.

Many excuses are being made for this present legislation, particularly that cures will soon be found for various diseases which afflict mankind through this legislation.

My objection to the Cardinal's squeals of objection lies in his use of the terms "monstrous" and "Frankenstein" as a catch-all phrase designed to prevent engagement with his argument on any logical grounds, instead invoking the spirit of innate disgust. Given my introductory discussion about the retrospectivity of science fiction, what happens when Frankenstein is introduced into a debate like this (as it has previously been in relation to Genetic Modification, in the form of "Frankenfoods")?

The use of the "Frankenstein" metaphor disrupts logic. It prevents readers and listeners from considering what the science's future really is - immediate and specialised, to grow cells for a few days in a petri dish - and expands it in a limitless bubble of blind ambition. As we inevitably reconstruct the present science in terms of the past text, it seems as if Mary Shelley definitively predicted this would happen, that scientists in a laboratory in Newcastle would try to tamper with life in a grand way (they are, objectively, not doing this - simply manipulating a few cells not whole human bodies). Therefore, any other such claims made in the fiction take on empirical weight as the definition of where science will inevitably, with absolute predictive truth as envisaged by Wells, want to travel morally in its discovery of the future.

Like a giant and unilateral weight, the fiction text is dropped on the science to make a number of associative predictions. The Cardinal invokes sexual deviancy: "The norm has always been that children have been born as the result of the love of man and woman in the unity of a marriage." Frankenstein indeed insinuates a slightly incestuous relationship between Victor and Elizabeth; because Frankenstein was right about scientists tampering with life, it must also be right about the horror of a society in which heterosexual monogamy is no longer an automatic given. The Cardinal challenges us to allow life "to triumph over these deathly proposals"; given the connection with Frankenstein, the implication is that if we fail to prevent the legislation we are performing the moral equivalent to Frankenstein's graveyard robberies. Because one aspect of Frankenstein's legacy appears to have come true, so must all the other aspects of the text.

Rereading Frankenstein, though, as I currently am, I am struck by how much more nuanced it is. Frankenstein is far from pure evil, which is why he is such a compelling and interesting figure. His ambition is directed to the best of purposes, to "renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption." This is a reading which would also apply to the scientists, but the focus in the Cardinal's argument is not on them personally, but on the hideous objects - hybrids of life and technology - which they create. Does the Cardinal not think that scientists doing the work have themselves weighed carefully and personally the ethics of doing this research against the ethics of failing to pursue research which will almost certain provide great medical benefits? In the novel there are numerous cases of ambition and intent for far less admirable and transient ends than those of Frankenstein - financial gain, sexual desire - even if Victor's methods are the most distasteful. Victor Frankenstein may confront the reader with a moral case, but he is far from simply morally corrupt. Frankenstein is a dialogue in the life sciences, not a diagram against it. It is also a science - in the broadest sense - of human life, human nature, human passion and desire, and where the limits of the desire that drives civilisation should be curtailed.

Frankenstein is a wholly appropriate text to bring to the debate about embryological research, and the biosciences generally. Its nuances make it an ideal philosophical abstraction by which we can think through the ethics of science in a general sense, outside of the frantic contexts of our current time. However, it needs to be done in a way that treats the narrative with the complexity it deserves, not just extracting those elements which seem to mesh, with absolute predictive force, with where science is in the present. Constructing the present in terms of the past is a dangerous business, because we are doomed to carry out only the lessons from it which stand out most starkly. Those who oppose embryological research need to read carefully the fictional texts that they choose to use as empirical evidence; they should not unreflexively extract those moments that seem to suit their singular ends so well in the present.

Labels: Cardinal Keith O'Brian, embryology, H.G. Wells, Science and Culture, science fiction

Dinah Birch's Times Literary Supplement review of Brian Aldiss's latest Science Fiction Omnibus cites a "piercingly brief story" by Fredric Brown, called "Answer." It is brief. But if it is piercing, this is not wholly to do with its succinctness, but has much to do with its prescience. Written in 1964, there's something very disturbing, sublime and aweful, about this description of the internet, as it was then not known. The story is probably still in copyright, but - what the heck - I loved it so much, and it's so brief, that I invoke the interests of "fair use" (and wider dissemination) to reproduce it here:

Dwan Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.
He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe -- ninety-six billion planets -- into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.
Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment's silence he said, "Now, Dwar Ev."
Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.
Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. "The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn."
"Thank you," said Dwar Reyn. "It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer."
He turned to face the machine. "Is there a God?"
The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay.
"Yes, now there is a God."
Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.
A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.

The large part of my current research involves looking for the ancestors of the concept of the cyborg, or posthuman (see N. Katharine Hayles or Donna Haraway). It's academic, dense, and theoretical - a quest for the roots of an idea that is ideologically very old, though the shiny technological manifestations of it are superficially, shinily novel (think The Terminator, The Matrix, the human genome project). But my circuitous (forgive the pun!) philosophy is brightened by anecdotal moments which connect past - an age before the internet - to present, in a way that reminds in an instant that the human imagination has long transcended the limits of its environment, without the need for virtual reality helmets or the hyperlink. Which leads me to one other prescient factoid I recently discovered: the idea of the hyperlink, the structuring of information by association of content rather than alphabetical order, is almost unanimously traced back to Vannevar Bush, with his Memory Extender. The date he first raised the idea: 1933 - before even Alan Turing, let alone Tim Berners-Lee.

Labels: Answer, Fredric Brown, Science and Culture, Vannevar Bush

I've just been skimming through the Royal Society's 1985 report into the Public Understanding of Science. Just over twenty years since it was published, I have not got time to go through the detail with a fine-tooth comb and observe how many of its recommendations have been taken up. A couple of details I did pick up, however: the recommendation that all universities introduce some form of "general studies" to allow students to learn from experts from disciplines other than their main one; and the idea that all science PhDs should be required to produce a brief publicly accessible report into their research (such as a press release) as a requirement of graduating. Neither of these proposals have been taken up directly across Higher Education. However, the key buzzword of academia today is very definitely interdisciplinarity, bringing together ideas and academics from different departments (even different faculties); in relation to the second point, the UK Grad programme includes training on writing press releases and publicising research. Whether these are a result of the Royal Society's influence, I don't know, but I expect the report contributed towards the atmosphere of positive change.

As for the findings of the public understanding of science in relation to the media, the picture is more pessimistic. Take a look at these examples of Bad Science, and you will see that fundamentally things have not changed in two decades.

Labels: Public Understanding of Science, Royal Society, Science and Culture

I commented a couple of months ago about how Darwinian evolutionary theory is now so firmly entrenched in my mind that I cannot conceive of life working in any radically different way. However, that is not to say that my amazement at the natural world is in any way diminished (and, in large part, my photoblog is a celebration of the environment). Reading geneticist Mark Ridley's Mendel's Demon: Gene Justice and the Complexity of Life, I come across the following description of mitosis:

Eukaryotic cells have a distinct method of cellular reproduction. The genes and other cellular components first double up inside the cell. A special machinery of cables forms inside the cell, and they mechanically pull the two sets of genes into the two opposite halves of the parent cell. A membrane then forms between the two halves and division is complete. Such is the normal process of cell division, called mitosis, for instance in a growing plant or animal.

As a literary critic, I am aware that much of my seduction by this passage is triggered by Ridley's investment of agency in the cells, and his use of humanising metaphors: they "first double up"; "a special machinery forms"; "they mechanically pull." In fact, there is no such thing as "they" in a cell, which is simply a biological component, not a conscious or semi-conscious identity. It is only from the human perspective (and especially that of a popular science book) that it appears remarkable that cells pull sets of genes apart in a game of biotic tug-of-war from. From the gene's eye view of the world, though, there is nothing intentional or teleological about the act; it is an entirely mundane process that gets on with its cellular housekeeping while someone is eating, or opening a window, or just walking dully along (apologies to Auden).

Nevertheless, even when you escape from the framings and manipulations of text, there is something close to miraculous about watching this process - which happens billions of times a day, and has done so for billions of years - effortlessly in the action of creating life.

Labels: Mark Ridley, mitosis, Science and Culture

In Italo Calvino's famous meditation on the relationship between novelists and readers, If On a Winter's Night A Traveller, comes a warning about the fundamental trap of a literary research thesis:

A girl came to see me who is writing a thesis on my novels for a very important university seminar in literary studies. I see that my work serves her perfectly to demonstrate her theories, and this is certainly a positive fact - for the novels or for the theories, I do not know which. From her very detailed talk, I got the idea of a piece of work being seriously pursued, but my books seen through her eyes seem unrecognisable to me. I am sure this Lotaria (that is her name) has read them conscientiously, but I believe she has read them only to find in them what she was already convinced of before reading them.

In science, you carefully choose the dataset on which you will run a test for a hypothesis, selecting a target which will provide results most efficiently and with the minimum of uncontrolled variables. But, ultimately, the dataset chosen by the scientist should be entirely irrelevant: the data must be independent of the conclusion if the scientific theory is valid. In the apocryphal story, Newton may have been standing under an apple tree when he reasoned the theory of gravity, but that theory applies equally whether the observational data is falling apples or dropped bombs. Were the theory to stop being applicable in a comparable situation - under a plum tree, for example - then the theory would have been falsified, such that we would need to recognise either that the theory must be fundamentally wrong, or that it requires modification in order that it apply (or appreciates why it cannot apply) equally for different varieties of fruit (or, more realistically, in the extreme conditions of entities such as black holes).

In literary study, however, the division between theory and data is less clear cut, as the Calvino passage makes clear in its parody. Currently researching some of Umberto Eco's semiotic theories, I notice that although deconstruction claims itself as a method applicable across all texts and language - since it places language as the very centre of our way of being in and knowing the world - most often the texts to which it is applied are always already open to deconstructive readings: works that are self-referential, embrace paradox rather than conclusiveness, are conscious of their being as texts. Thus Barthes examines some stories by Edgar Allan Poe, but not the editorial correspondence from the New England Magazine in which many of them were published.

And literary writers such as Italo Calvino (or A.S. Byatt, Umberto Eco, John Fowles), conscious of the ways in which the academy will appraise their texts, deliberately pre-empt and parody those modes of criticism. Thus texts such as If On a Winter's Night adopt what I call the critically sarcastic attitude. A Lotaria, or other academic reader, comes to the work from a pre-conceived theoretical angle, finds that the text deconstructs itself (or performs according to the predictions of some other theory), and thus the text can do nothing but applaud that critic ironically: "Well done," it says, "of course such and such a theoretically knowing symbol/structure/tone/philosophy etc. was there. I put it there. I knew you would come looking for it."

I am not a poststructuralist myself, though I am aware that I regularly (often subconsciously) dip into its toolbox in my analysis of texts, just as I do Marxism, psychoanalysis, historicism, or the close readings of new criticism. However, though I do not have a single preconceived critical angle, in my research I still risk falling into the Lotarian trap.

Without giving my game away too much (anonymity matters, as does the intellectual property of my original idea in my thesis), I am examining the use of a particular metaphor in literary fiction and science. Now hovering on the brink of its third year, my research is well-developed, most chapters are drafted or written, my ideas are well-honed and focused. Among other things, I am going to be looking at four novels and a couple of films which use my metaphor. However, to select these - effectively my dataset - I discarded tens of other novels which I read over the previous two years which did not happen to contain the image or symbol for which I was looking. It is therefore inevitable that I will give the impression that I "read them only to find in them what [I] was already convinced of before reading them." This is where Chapter One: The Introduction comes in, and I realise only now that in spite of it being only a small component, it is probably the most important single chapter of my thesis, since it is this that will make-or-break it in a viva.

If I fully admit the qualifications, and paradoxes of my research there, then what follows will stand or fall by the internal logic of the framework I publicly have set myself; I admit my theory works only within the orchard of texts in which I have chosen to wander. If I fail to recognise the inherent limits of my methods, however, then a single plum dropped by the examiner will falsify it, showing my data to rely wholly on my theory, rather than existing independently of it. The moral of my experience, and Calvino's story, and The Lotarian Trap, is that literary theory becomes a bad pseudoscience when it seems to explain both apples and plums.

Labels: If on A Winter's Night a Traveller, literary theory, Postgraduate Diary, Science and Culture

In an era in which science is under threat from religious fundamentalism, medical quackery, and general scaremongering, there has been a scientific backlash against all forms of thinking outside the scheme of rational empiricism. This is evidenced in the Channel 4 documentary entitled "Enemies of Reason," in which Richard Dawkins chases down such "primitive" beliefs and outmoded ways of thinking which "impoverish our culture." Likewise, in the United States, the biologist Jerry Coyne recently asserted at Edge magazine:

We don't reject the supernatural merely because we have an overweening philosophical commitment to materialism; we reject it because entertaining the supernatural has never helped us understand the natural world. Alchemy, faith healing, astrology, creationism—none of these perspectives has advanced our understanding of nature by one iota.

The economic and political reasons for this polarising antagonism are understandable (see this previous post). However, in historical terms this total rejection of supernaturalism can be challenged. The first half of my research thesis examines the history of supernaturalist encounters from within - rather than opposed to - mainstream empirical science. It shows how, from Athanasius Kircher's Mundus Subterraneus, through the nineteenth-century's Society for Psychical Research, through James Clerk Maxwell's thermodynamic demon, to Marvin Minsky's demonic model of consciousness, rationalists have engaged with the supernatural when science reached the limits of Enlightenment methods of enquiry. And whilst science since the Enlightenment has driven us through multiple technological revolutions in a remarkably short span of time, it is worth remembering (as Coyne clearly has not) that for the majority of human history supernatural ways of interpreting the world have been the dominant ones, and human knowledge and technology still developed over this far longer period, albeit much less spectacularly.

In my view, then, the distinction between scientific and supernatural epistemologies is not quite so polar as scientists such as Dawkins or Coyne make out (though I appreciate their motivations). I should add that my argument does not assert that supernatural methods are in any systematic way better than rational ones, nor that things like ghosts or demons or astrological effects exist in reality, only that thinking that they might exist and using alternative methods working under that assumption can produce insights normal science would struggle to reach were it to follow its normal tangents. Once the alternative approaches map out the new ground, often quarantined from normal practice by being labelled "thought experiments" or "placeholder terms," science invariably assumes control once again in matching, or falsifying the match between, hypothesis and reality. I have to be supremely careful in my research that whilst re-evaluating the historical value of supernatural modes of enquiry, I also demarcate the limits to it, where rational science takes over with its time-honoured methodological reliability.

The best way to tackle the assertion that supernaturalism is the equal to science, would be through systematically deconstructing supernaturalist claims and exposing them as empirically unreliable, whilst allowing that in special cases supernaturalism offers a subtle sub-set of the methodologies at its disposal. Nevertheless, given the level of scientific illiteracy among the general public, the influence of a press generally insensitive to the difference between good and bad science, and, in my own field, the belief among postmodern academics that science is a relativistic and ideological epistemology, it is very tempting to do a wholesale demolition job of supernaturalist beliefs, and lose the subtlety of their merging with rationality. Thus the acerbic tone adopted by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt in their critique of postmodernist theory, tellingly entitled Higher Superstition; the aggressive manner adopted by Richard Dawkins; the patronising voice adopted by popular defenders against Bad Science, such as Ben Goldacre and David Colquhoun.

But when I read the response to Dawkins' programme by Neil Spencer, the Observer's astrologer, I realised that in spite of the nuances of my research it can be very difficult to avoid taking this directly oppositional stance in the public sphere, when the claims made are so obviously empirically false, and the tone of the supernaturalist thinker is just as acerbic as that of the scientist about which he complains. Inspired by the methods of Goldacre and Colquhoun, I tried to deconstruct his counter-attack in which he asserts the value of superstition, astrology, and alternative medicine. I start with astrology:

There was the usual objection to astrology dividing people into 12 Sun signs, and my usual reply: that's eight more than the Myers-Briggs personality test used by commerce. Actually, astrology's basic personality types number 1,728.

Rather than "more being better," one would expect that a personality model that divides people into four types will be more reliable than one that uses 1,728, since even a randomised response to the Myers-Briggs test would give a subject a 1-in-4 chance of being placed in the correct category (although as I understand it the test actually uses 16). It is not feasible that I fit neatly into one of 1,728 personality types, whereas all standard personality tests do not give absolute categories, but percentages which allow for people to straddle groups. Further, the Myers-Briggs test relies on subjects answering questions about themselves, and draws conclusions from that data based on aggregate samples of a large population. By contrast astrology draws conclusions from the stars, and applies them to people based on nothing more than the coincidence of their birthday. Rather than people determining the range of possible personalities (which is what we do tacitly in everyday life when meeting another person for the first time, with a large degree of success), astrologers cherry pick from a pool of personalities and apply them to people according to the rigid and arbitrary rule of celestial mechanics. As Dawkins showed, a reading for one star sign such as Capricorn has the same predictive value for an individual of a different zodiac, as for the person actually born in January.

But if the numbers game does not work, there's always the name game:

Am I bothered by Dawkins calling me names? Not really. I'm in some esteemed company - Resurgence publisher Satish Kumar, and Dr Peter Fisher, clinical director of the Royal Homeopathic Hospital (and the Queen's physician) - also fall under Dawkins' stony disapproval.

Declaring himself unaffected by being called names, he nevertheless decides to name them instead, assuming we will be impressed where he was not. So, in keeping with this intelligent tactic, let us name names back at him: Pinker, Crick, Maxwell, Darwin, Kelvin, Einstein...Actually, rather than going on with this squabbling, which is conducted on the level of a playground argument, lets switch to some serious empirical scrunity:

Homeopathy's supposed cures are, according to Dawkins, merely the result of the placebo effect. 'It's our own minds that cure the pain,' he concludes. How that explains why animals respond to homeopathy isn't confronted.

I'm not sure which study Spencer was thinking of in asserting that animals respond to homeopathy. It certainly wasn't the large-scale, double-blind, placebo controlled trial on dairy herds in Sweden in 2003, which found no evidence of effect, but a "considerable risk to animal welfare" in the continuing use of the treatment. Nor was it this study from the Veterinary Record in 2006. Or this one from Oslo. Or this from Canada. In fact, if you use Google Scholar to search for "homeopathy animal placebo," you will be hard pressed to discover any of the evidence Neil Spencer cites (or, rather, fails to cite, given that he gives no further references).

But wait a minute. Clearly I am the one being silly by looking for such scientific studies at all. Perhaps the failure to detect any difference between placebo and homeopathic remedies is precisely that:

Everything must be subject to randomised, controlled double-blind trials, just like medical drugs - 'drugs that work' as Dawkins insists.

Now instead of tackling Spencer by evidence, I'm just getting angry. That bloody medical science, always so pernickity when deciding whether or not to produce expensive quantities of a drug and release it into a large medical population; so annoyingly demanding in its tests for the effectiveness of alternative therapies. There is certainly a case for containing the burden of proof on medical trials, and separating responsibility for testing from the pharmaceutical companies which produce the treatments (Goldacre himself comments on this in The Guardian this week). But in the meantime, I'm not sure I trust the coin-toss method.

Though having said that, according to Spencer, we are not certain of getting better even by drugs which have been subjected to such a lengthy, scientifically controlled testing process:

The medical profession admits that the success of approved drugs can be as low as 60 per cent.

True. But according to a study in the quacks' journal Homeopathy, the success rate of that alternative therapy is around 70 per cent, so not much better than mainstream medicine. (Though the study asked patients who had paid for and received homeopathic treatment - with no placebo control - whether they thought their condition had improved. Surprise, surprise, having handed over wads of cash, many of them did.) And when you consider that most mainstream medicine will often be treating otherwise chronic, life-threatening illness, whereas homeopathy will tend not to be used by people lying incapacitated in intensive care wards, the apparently lower success rate of some approved drugs is understandable.

Finally, keeping the argument at its markedly unsubtle ebb, we get back to names again:

Galileo was, after all, astrologer as well as astronomer. Likewise Johannes Kepler, who was preoccupied with Pythagorean mathematics and Platonic solids. Isaac Newton was fascinated by alchemy, as was Robert Boyle, father of chemistry.

It is noticeable that all these scientists date from before the eighteenth century, and it is entirely consistent with theories of paradigm shift that the new scientific methodology did not immediately replace the old, supernaturalist speculations. Today, four hundred years on, and having consistently proved its superiority, one would hope that the scientific revolution has been completed.

Nevertheless, the fact that it has not remains interesting; in the esteemed company of Boyle and Newton, I am intrigued by astrology and alternative therapy too, or I would not be dedicating a substantial chunk of my thesis to it. Likewise, the Times Higher this week reports of the nine "psi" research groups across UK universities. As parapsychologist Chris French explains, "The fact is that the majority of the population does believe in this stuff, and a sizeable minority of the population claims to have had direct experience of the paranormal. If psychologists have nothing to say about this topic, they are missing out on a broad part of human experience." Indeed, Dawkins' own programme featured a psychologist interested in the depth of belief in water dowsers; comically, they continued to believe they could dowse, despite their success rate being exposed as no better than would be expected by chance. I was disappointed Dawkins as an interested scientist did not ask the follow up question, which is that dowsing outside the laboratory conditions must have some effect, given its survival into the twenty-first century. Possibly water dowsers are excellent interpreters of natural signs, such as increased vegetation or changing lie of the land, and might well use this entirely explicable if implicit method, rather than explicitly a twitching branch, to predict where water might run. Learning how they become so expert at interpretation would be fascinating, as indeed was Derren Brown's analysis of the manipulations of "cold reading" used by spiritualists at seances (believe me, once the illusionist reveals the subtle pressures they exert on an audience, those who continue to do it believing they are actually communicating with spirits seem nothing more than silver-tongued salesmen).

As serious researchers correctly suggest, there is no doubt that astrology, supernaturalism, ghosts are part of human culture. Whether they exist or not in the physical world, they undeniably exist for half of us in the mind, which is why even the most rational of scientists sometimes use them in thought experiments to provoke the scientific community into debate. They are therefore worthy of physical, psychological, and in my case literary study, and it is this significance that proponents should assert. Were they to do so, they would make opponents like Dawkins appear to be attacking a straw man, and one moreover which allows itself to be subjected to the same rigorous empirical enquiry as the more mainstream science of which he is an exponent.

But this will never happen, so the view has to remain thus: it is interesting that humans fall for it; it is interesting that it once was thought to work; it has generated some valid knowledge in the past. But just as I could use a flint to light a fire, but prefer a match, true science has a way of getting things done which alternative therapies and superstitious beliefs simply cannot match. This is why I, like Dawkins or the other defenders of reason, find it hard to otherwise than to mock and patronise the absurd beliefs and false claims of a "primitive" such as Spencer.

Labels: astrology, Bad Science, Enemy of Reason, homeopathy, Richard Dawkins, Science and Culture

In The Origin of Species, having laid the foundations for his theory of natural selection, Charles Darwin performs a spectacular inversion as he introduces that new term. Rather than continuing to build up an evolutionary edifice, he wonders how it could ever have been otherwise:

If during the long course of ages and under varying conditions of life, organic beings vary at all in the several parts of their organisation, and I think this cannot be disputed; if there be, owing to the high geometrical powers of increase of each species, at some age, season, or year, a severe struggle for life, and this certainly cannot be disputed; then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their conditions of existence, causing an infinite diversity in structure, constitution, and habits, to be advantageous to them, I think it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variation ever had occurred useful to each being's own welfare, in the same way as so many variations have occurred useful to man. But if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterised will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offspring similarly characterised. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity,
Natural Selection.

In my own, muted way, I feel I have undergone a similar process of reversal. Not only do I know evolution to be the only valid theory of natural history, I cannot conceptualise any feasible alternative.

Darwin's Galapagos finches have become mythical creatures which according to popular lore provided him with the crucial evidence for natural selection. In fact, Darwin collected the various finches on a whim, and failed to keep his usual meticulous catalogue of which island each came from. It was John Gould who ultimately reconstructed the evidence, demonstrating that the variously shaped beaks were adapted for islands predominant with food sources of nuts or insects. For Darwin, it was not finches but pigeons which provided the empirical foundation for his thinking about variation; indeed, Darwin became something of an anorak with respect to them:

Believing that it is always best to study some special group, I have, after
deliberation, taken up domestic pigeons. I have kept every breed which I
could purchase or obtain, and have been most kindly favoured with skins
from several quarters of the world, more especially by the Hon. W. Elliot
from India, and by the Hon. C. Murray from Persia. Many treatises in
different languages have been published on pigeons, and some of them are
very important, as being of considerable antiquity. I have associated with
several eminent fanciers, and have been permitted to join two of the London
Pigeon Clubs. The diversity of the breeds is something astonishing. (Origin of Species, Chapter 1)

For myself, though, researching a thesis chapter on the advent of modern biology, it has been chaffinches rather than pigeons which have taken the stage in my evolutionary theorising. Looking at those garden birds out of our kitchen window (whilst chasing Darwin's beloved pigeons away from the feeders) I realise how inconceivable now it is that life could work through any mechanism other than the undesigned evolutionary one.

The earth has existed for 4.5 billion years, of which life has been around for about 4 (give or take a few million) and multicellular organisms for 1 billion. The age of the earth is an empirical fact based on radiometric dating , one which no data of the last hundred years has disproved (though data out yesterday revealed that the Earth's diameter has shrunk by a whole five millimetres, indicating how powerful are the instruments of modern geoscience). Yet even for the 10 000 years that young-earth creationists believe the world to have existed, their arguments propose that the same template of finch pecked at the grass of Eden the way mine do today, a mere ruffle of a feather of change between Adam's birds and my own. Watching my window over the course of a year, seeing young chaffinches arrive in Spring, and the old, tattered white-winged crow appearing no more in winter, this static view of creation seems grotesque, utterly unnatural. Leave an apple on the table, and it goes brown before your eyes, and wait a few weeks, and it begins to rot under the power of invisible bacteria; seasons change, and I know the sun gets weaker in winter, though I cannot see it having moved further away; seeds from our bird feeders occasionally drift on the wind, and where they land, seedlings emerge from the soil.

I have always trusted Darwinian as opposed to religious accounts of creation, and as I have gradually come to understand the former I have heard no evidence to fundamentally challenge that trust. But I realised today how unalterably impossible it will be for me ever to look realistically at the finch as an alien of intelligent design in a world of flux and dispassionate change. Darwinism has become, for me, a kind of belief, as something I know but cannot finally prove; crucially, however, I cannot prove it no because the data is not there, but because the evidence for it is so vast and cannot reasonably be encompassed by a single human mind. The best view on Darwinian evolution I can obtain is looking through my kitchen window. And if I say looking at the finches I believe evolution rather than creationism, this is because the former is so much more in harmony with the tunes and rhythms of the nature I can see and understand in action all around me.

Labels: creationism, Darwinism, evolution, Science and Culture

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian's redoubtable Bad Science columnist, has been dealing with some classic hysteria about electrosmog radiation caused by Wi-Fi. First up is the Independent, with Julia Stevenson describing how she "fought back back after being diagnosed by her naturopath with overexposure to Wi-Fi and mobile phone frequencies." I know what a naturalist is. I know what a psychopath is. Dare I ask what a "naturopath" is? Best piece of bad science goes to engineer and homeopath Gary Johnson, who peddles a therapeutic device:

The heart of the unit is a programmed microprocessor unit that produces a holograph field that is amplified through an internal aerial system. This protection field protects the human system from the negative effects of EMR,” says Johnson. He says he has had great success in alleviating patients’ symptoms, and claims the unit offers unlimited protection from any negative electromagnetic emissions in a 700-square metre radius.

I know maths G.C.S.E.s are not what they used to be, but surely newspaper sub-editors should know that you cannot have a square circle. And what the hell is a holograph field? Oh, that's right, it's that thing they have on Star Trek. Anyway, Goldacre and the commentators responding to his post do a comprehensive demolition job on this article.

That a broadsheet newspaper should give space to this tripe is bad enough. That the BBC's Panorama should also generate hysteria over the Wi-Fi radiation worming its way into our children's brains is simply unacceptable. Goldacre does not have to work to hard to point out that the science was used to provide a technical gloss to essentially a sensationalist piece of tabloid journalism:

“Ooh its well into the red there,” says reporter Paul Kenyon, holding up the detector (19 minutes in). Gosh that sounds bad. Well into the red on what? It’s tricky to calibrate measurements, and to decide what to measure, and what the cut off point is for “red”. Panorama’s readings were “well into the red” on “The COM Monitor”, a special piece of detecting equipment designed from scratch and built by none other than Alasdair Philips of Powerwatch, the man who leads the campaign against WiFi. His bespoke device is manufactured exclusively for Powerwatch, and he will sell one to you for just £175. Alasdair decided what “red” meant on Panorama’s device. So not very independent then.

But why should it take Goldacre to come down on the BBC? Their own editorial policy on accuracy and facts states that:

We should report statistics and risks in context, taking care not to worry the audience unduly, especially about health or crime. It may also be appropriate to report the margin of error and the source of figures to enable people to judge their significance. This may involve giving trends, taking care to avoid giving figures more weight than can stand scrutiny. If reporting a change, consideration should be given to making the baseline figure clear. For example, a doubling of a problem affecting one in two million people will still only affect one in a million.

I have suggested before that we need for scientific evidence the same sort of protection not unlike libel laws. But if media producers such as the BBC cannot get it right, despite being as close to being an objective and reliable reporter as any organisation can be (and to be fair, the claims were attacked on the BBC's own Newswatch), I am not sure what more legal support could do. Of course, my depression could just be the result of those pesky wireless waves...

Labels: Bad Science, Science and Culture, wi-fi radiation

I remember in primary school being tasked to write a description of our house. Believing myself at that early age to possess a creative imagination (I no longer have such presumptions – I am a critic, after all), I started my piece: “A small, red brick house. A narrow path. A blue door. A kitchen, in which I am surrounded by wonderful smells.” I can recall the passage so well because of the response of my teacher when marking this, which was to cross out the first three phrases and to write at the bottom: “Verbs!” In retrospect, my teacher had probably been marking them late at night after a couple of whiskeys, and so was not in the best frame of mind to judge fairly what I thought to be a piece of literary innovation. The phrase circulating photographic circles is that all ordinary photographers know the rules, but the great photographers know when to break them, something I was naively doing with prose in these early years (and something I manage to do only occasionally with my photos).

Perhaps in what follows, then, I am missing the point much as my English teacher did back then (though I have a mug of tea in hand to my teacher’s whisky), but reading Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations I am sorely tempted to break my personal rule never to write in the margins of books. For it seems that once one attains the status of a French theorist, the rules of grammar go out the window and, unlike in my childhood story, there seems to be little aesthetic reason for it.

Master of the aphorism, his sentences regularly lack verbs, as if dispensing advice from a French Sinai: "The hatred by an entire civilisation for its own foundation." "The vertigo of a flawless world." It's all very lulling, and I could cope with such conclusions if they were used sparingly, but as it is, sprinkled like pepper across the pages, I sniff with the suspicion that these rhythms of decisiveness are being used to close down a paragraph, in the hopes that the reader will forget that there has been little by way of logical argument to substantiate that conclusion. Statements are thrown in without any empirical (in the loosest sense of that word) justification. For example, summing up a thousand years in a single sentence, Baudrillard tells us that in the medieval period “There is no such thing as fashion in a society of caste and rank, since one is assigned a place irrevocably, and so class mobility is non-existent.” Try telling that to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, who, though a mere cloth cutter, has married so cunningly that she is able to display her dress in gaudy show of her new social status:

Hir coverchiefs ful fyne weren of ground;
I dorste swere they weyeden ten pound
That on a sonday weren upon hir heed.
Hir hosen weren of fyn scarlet reed,
Ful streite yteyd, and shoes ful moyste and newe.

Should Baudrillard have told her that she was not subject to fashion, nor socially mobile, I know who would have won the war of words (just look at what happened to the pardoner).

Then, in the manner of a scientific paper, metaphor is cut from a language which instead seeks to create logical and contingent links between a hypothesis and its outcome. So we are told that “concrete is a mental substance; it allows, just like a concept, phenomena to be organised and divided up at will.” No, Jean, concrete is not a mental substance. Would you buy a house made from Builder’s Qualia? Is my brain pebbledashed and my psychology sand and stone? The analogy, if one were explicitly made as analogy, might be valid, even interesting. Concrete might for the postmodern architect be the building material which finally allows him to develop the abstract designs that act as physical correlates for the intellectual activity of the people who inhabit them. However, this insight is one I can decipher only by overcoming that comic hurdle, in which Baudrillard appears to claim, in a magician’s illusion of a radical, provocative analysis, that concrete is mind, rather than is like mind.

But whereas this connection may be incidental (the sort of thing contemporary novelists such as David Lodge and A.S. Byatt have manipulated in their parodies of such academic writing), other connections – or, rather, elisions of connection – are more morally suspect. For example, we are told that Watergate is not a scandal, but a "scandal effect concealing that there is no difference between the facts and their denunciation (identical methods are employed by the CIA and the Washington Post journalists)." In one sense, that placed in parentheses, he is right, and the recognition that the methods of investigation and dissimulation were essentially the same is a potent one. However, there is a moral difference which is blurred here, and in this case it is the moral dimension which is the most important: the journalists were performing the role they were expected to play in society, a role they had worked hard to fulfil, whilst Nixon abused the role society expected of him, the role to which society elected him. It is too easy to read postmodern cultural analysis like this, and to jump to the conclusion that since everything is relative then there can be no ultimate value systems or scales.

But since everything is relative according to the poststructuralist, then by their own logic they should make clear what things are relative to what, something Baudrillard does not do. The methods of Nixon and the journalists are relative to each other, but the morality of method employed by Nixon is relative to his position as President, and has not the same moral status as that of the work of Woodward and Bernstein. It is this sort of category mistake which leads people into the belief that science is only one narrative – a story about climate change or the development of species – relative (and relation of) others, such as the creation myth or that of a left wing conspiracy to undermine capitalism. They suggest that because Einstein overturned Newtonian mechanics that this shows all science is relative, and therefore just as inconclusive as more metaphysical ways of interpreting the world. But Einstein supplied a suite of theories that applied in very special circumstances relative to Newton's; his theory does not open out in a way which shows all science to be relative to everything else (though naturally science works under conditions of probability rather than absolute certainty). It is this misconception, one which arises from postmodern theory such as that practiced by Baudrillard, which lies at the heart of many of the misrepresentations of science that I have commented on before:

• A Polarised PhD: The Creationism and Science of Marcus R. Ross
• They Call it Science
• Dawkins' Dilemma

Labels: Baudrillard, literary theory, postmodernism, Science and Culture, simulations

I just had to share this, because watching it bleary-eyed first thing this morning, I was unable to fathom whether these guys were serious, or glorious April fool's day jokers (with that ambiguity, I hope you appreciate the pun in the title!).



Of course, if they were genuine Creationists, did they notice the irony that the handy tab at the top, and the circular design, adapt it equally well to the hands and mouths of apes? Or that the friendly, curved and edible banana is actually a sterile mutant version of inedible, wild varieties of the fruit? Or that the majority of the world's bananas are pollinated by bats, and not eaten by man? Wonderful!

Labels: Intelligent Design, Science and Culture

What connects the call of a chimp, Mozart's The Magic Flute, and early anthropological field recordings of South American tribal song? One answer, of course, is that they are all forms of communication; but, according to the lecture I attended on Monday night, they are also all items for enquiry by the developing sub-discipline of evolutionary musicology. So, in the case of the former, it is argued that music is a manifestation of communicative survival tactics in the wild. Mozart's Magic Flute, with its repeated refrains and its systematic drawing on previous works, can be seen as an example of memetics (memes being to culture what genes are to the biological body). And the tribal song demonstrates the importance of listening to audible culture in studying group behaviour, as well as simply observing it.

As with many uses of science in cultural analysis, I am never quite convinced that the science is not simply providing an elaborate gloss on what were already well-established critical modes of enquiry. For example, is it really revolutionary to suggest that Mozart drew on his antecedents in developing his later work; isn't the study of the influences in discrete packets labelled memes simply a nice terminological way of saying what we always knew intuitively?

The lecture went on to look at Wagner in relation to nineteenth century evolutionary thought, which saw him as the apogee of musical genius. Just as a human embryo goes through stages from the simple cell to the tadpole like to the mammalian to the humanoid, he was argued to have "recapitulated" the entire history of Western classical music, developing from the old something radically different and thus standing at the head of that evolving cultural tree. He was music's fittest survivor, the pinnacle of the incessantly upwards trajectory of the Western canon. As with the Mozart, I'm not sure - and neither was the lecturer - that the translation of scientific models as metaphors for a cultural condition does much more than rework existing value judgements. And, of course, in the case of Wagner and his exemplification by Nazism we see evidence of the deeper risks of asserting "scientifically" one cultural personality as unambiguously superior over others.

But whilst I was not particularly taken by the ideas in themselves, what interested me thinking about them in relation to literary studies was the fact that the idea of a "genius" still exists in musicology at all. As I commented in my post on Darwin, "Revolution or Evolution", the "great man" view of history which sees a genius as transcending the socio-economic conditions in which he or she lived is now discredited by most historians. But it seems that the idea that a man can single-handedly embody the entirety of Western music, can be elevated unambiguously to the top of its scale of achievement, still remains in music study.

Further, I was fascinated by the fact that music studies, or some branches of it, have this teleological model of music history, in which the move from plainsong to Bach to Mozart to Wagner is seen, retrospectively, as linear and upwards moving. In contrast, I am reading Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence at the moment, and his theory argues that literature (or poetry) works through a kind of anti-teleological drive. The new poet must strive to "swerve" from his ancestors, to break from them rather than building upon them. Thus the modern American poets are attempting to break from the Romantics; the Romantics were overawed by the influence of Milton; Milton can be traced back to the greatest poet of them all, Shakespeare. Whereas Wagner stands at the apex of music studies in the mid-nineteenth century, in the Bloomian model of literature it has been downhill all the way from Shakespeare in the sixteenth.

You don't have to agree with Bloom's argument, which relies on a slightly faddish Freudian model, to feel that this general idea of literature as a regression to origins is a fair one. All of us have heard some variant on the conversation: "Dickens was a great genius" and the deadening retort, "Yes, but he wasn't Shakespeare, was he." I suspect a similar parody might be found in art history, with the Renaissance artists the triumph against which all modern art, great though it may be, is indexed.

So what is it in music as an aesthetic and historical phenomena that has allowed this teleological, upwards trend to be brought into play, whereas in literature and the visual arts we observe the reverse? This is a broad question, and I don't have the expertise to answer it today. What I would suggest tentatively, though, is that it has something to do with the transience of musical performance, as opposed to the permanence of the Sistene chapel ceiling or of the First Folio. The latter artefacts have passed from their origins virtually unchanged; we read King Lear as Shakespeare wrote it, and as we read in a sense Shakespeare is as alive for us today as he was then. We know our classics in their physical form as being much the same as they were when they flowed off the pen or the paintbrush. In contrast, to hear Mozart's Magic Flute in a live performance is to be aware that he has passed, that this is a restaging of a work of history rather than a reliving of it; in contrast, for the nineteenth century audience to see a Wagner piece during his lifetime, was to hear something more perfectly of its moment. Wagner was the fittest survivor because, unlike Mozart, he still lived and breathed for the nineteenth-century audience. (In this frame, I would make a slightly flippant connection with cooking: we only ever talk about today's top chefs, and never about their ancestors from whom they necessarily inherited, because we cannot know them except through a different sense, through reading a recipe book rather than tasting the food. Likewise, to see a historical score of music does not provide the same immediate experience as to hear it.)

I would also suggest that music has a more limited set of structures, forms and instruments than literature. Because of this, when Wagner deploys his orchestra in a way that draws on or rejects the Beethoven symphonic method, it is clearer precisely how the tradition - call it the "memes" if you will - are being reworked in the later work. In contrast, where did this image in Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner come from:

I watched the water-snakes:
They moved in tracks of shining white
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.

It took John Livingston Lewes an entire chapter in his The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination to trace some of the possible ancestry of this vision in Coleridge's reading over previous decades. Even then, the links are tenuous at best, and Coleridge's creativity still seems somehow plucked from the air, as much as dredged up from the textual mud of tradition. The meme of "hoary flakes" resists being decoded.

I expect these comparisons and contrast have not passed unnoticed (and I may revisit Daniel Barenboim's 2006 Reith Lectures to get more clues). But it is something to think about nevertheless, as I start to think about research after my PhD.

Labels: evolutionary musicology, Science and Culture, Wagner

On the day when Chinese scientists announce that they have developed a way of remotely controlling pigeons through implants in their brain, I go to a lecture by the world's first human cyborg, Professor Kevin Warwick. Talking at Newcastle Life Centre on the subject of "Pride: The Rise of the Robots," Warwick suggests that humans should be ashamed rather than proud of their intellectual and physical capacities in comparison to computers. The most vocal and optimistic prophet of cybernetics this side of the Atlantic, as Marvin Minsky has been to the American audience, Warwick predicts that as cyborg and artificial intelligences are developed, un-modified humans will become something of a sub-species.

Animatedly, he suggests how incredibly large the memories of the internet are, how vast its stores of knowledge, and how small and innacurate seem our own in comparison. If only we could slot an extra drive into our brains! But my memory is actually rather good in the fields for which it was designed. For example, if I want to find the website of my friend Will Smith on Google, I have to go through the hundreds of search results discussing the actor, before I come across the right one; the collective memory of the internet is larger than mine, but also cumbersome. By contrast, when some one mentions to me in the office "Do you know the web address of our mate Will?" I know immediately which Will he is referring to, because of the context, and I can immediately point him to the website he is interested in, because unlike the computer I have only remembered that relevant one rather than the hundreds that don't interest me.

Next, Warwick grumbles that he has thoughts buzzing quickly through his head, and yet if he wants to communicate those thoughts to the mind of another, he has to use slow and cumbersome medium of speech. If only, in an argument with his wife, he could transmit directly what he was thinking, rather than the words coming out all wrong as they have a habit of doing. However, I would point out, the slow nature of communication also ensures editing, and although this editing may be poorly performed under pressure, by and large it gets us by very well. Much better, in fact, than if we were to communicate via a digital telepathy. Frankly, when having an argument with my girlfriend, I would rather not know the babble of thoughts running through her head, and would rather argue about the one or two lines of thought that actually emerge from her mouth (sometimes even then rather too quickly and loudly for my liking!).

How about sight, then? It does seem a shame that we can only see in three-dimensions, doesn't it? Why not ultrasound or infra-red, why can we not compute in multiple dimensions - it would make quantum physics a lot easier? I wonder whether in thinking of what the human could be or do, Warwick completely overlooks what the human is now, a case of blindness to our selves no computer could correct. For do I really see only in three-dimensions? When I look at an animated globe, for example, I can see the three visual axes of the country (height, length, breadth), but if the map is coloured red to blue, I intuit immediately a fourth dimension (temperature), and if the map changes as I watch I intuit the fifth dimension of time. Programming a computer to read pertinent information from such a map takes a great deal of time, as it looks at each variety of data mapped onto each physical point; by contrast, I can look at it and immediately know whether I need to take a spare jumper tomorrow, or whether the warm spell is going to last.

Whilst Warwick talked about these potentials as "upgrades," I think, then, that he has been confusing quantity with quality. As we all know when searching online, quantity and quality are not the same things, and though computers can do specific things faster or with more capacity than us, we remain because of our intuitions (what cyberneticians model as heuristics) far better equipped to deal with our daily environments than a computer is, even than a cybernetically modified organism would be.

Having said that, one startling clip of film Warwick showed was of a patient suffering from Parkinson's disease. Typically of the syndrome, he lapsed into uncontrollable spasms, but after receiving a neural implant which "corrected" the erratic electrical activity in his brain, he was able to stand, walk, grasp and talk. According to Warwick, this implant is becoming an increasingly standard treatment, and it would be utterly callous of me to reject this treatment as being anything other than an improvement to a debilitating condition caused by flaws in the human mind. Likewise, for the amputee fitted with a robot arm and able to control it using his thought, or for the blind man able to see the outlines of shapes through a camera mounted to a cap and "plugged-in" to his retinal nerves, these cyborgs are undoubtedly upgraded versions of who and, materialistically, what they were before.

My different reactions to the memory and the arm upgrades leave me at a logical crux, however. For if I perceive correct the disabled body as an upgrade, but argued that adaptations to intellect can not be classed as improviements per se, I am retaining a kind of dualism. I, though I think of myself as an empirical materialist, am grasping to the Cartesian a belief that whilst the body is one sort of matter, and can be explained and interfered with by science, the mind, though it also is built by cells following genetic plans, is nevertheless something fundamentally different from the corporeal self, something intangible, untouchable, irreducible, un-simulable.

This is the area of debate in literature and culture I am engaged with at the moment in my research. For whilst Warwick calls modified humans "cyborgs," have we not always been so? Is not the man who picks up a hammer upgrading his arm, or the wearer of contact lenses a technologically modified organism? Cultural theorists such as Donna Haraway or N. Katherine Hayles argue that the human-technology symbiosis in the modern age makes us differ fundamentally from humans in relationships with more primitive, physical tools; they claim that we are now in the age of the "posthuman." I can put down a hammer, my glasses steam up, reminding me that the tool and myself are separate entities; but I forget as I type this that I can see the words only because of my contact lenses, and that as I write I am also linked, subconsciously, to an email facility which is merely in a different virtual point in the network to which I am connected; I do not hear the rattle of a letterbox, do not have to go downstairs, when electronic post slips its way to me.

Immanent in the moment of the revolution they are proclaiming, I remain sceptical. Only with hindsight will the ideals of Warwick come to fruition, or not, and the label "posthuman" seem justified, or simply a clever reiteration of what has always been our relationship to upgrades outside the boundaries of our bodies. And, on the train on the way home, I wonder what possible cybernetic upgrade could have predicted or initiated the brief and surprising flow of inspiration that comes as I look out of the window. Carried by this strange muse, I write 500 inspired words for my PhD in fifteen minutes, whereas for the hours of the day preceding I had been unable to write anything, though I had all the upgrades to my innate learning and writing capacities - the pen, computer, book - before me.

And on that note, here is a clip on the limits of information technology that Warwick didn't show...

Labels: cyborg, Kevin Warwick, Science and Culture

A PhD thesis on the abundance and spread of mosasaurs and marine reptiles in the Cretaceous era sounds (with the greatest respect to the student concerned) pretty typical of the prosaic nature of research degrees, particularly in the sciences. Why, then, has this degree been creating such a stir in the press and across the blogosphere, since the findings were not particularly earth-shattering (no dinosaur destroying asteroids here), and the work of the student was "impeccable" and conducted "within a strictly scientific framework"? The answer is that the student in question, Marcus R. Ross, whilst studying an era 65 million years ago, does not actually believe that there ever was such a time: a “young earth creationist,” he believes that the Bible is a literally true account of the creation of the universe, and that the earth is at most 10,000 years old.

The question posed by The New York Times, which published an article on him, is "Can a scientist produce intellectually honest work that contradicts deeply held religious beliefs?" Cutting through all the fluffy reiterations of the ID vs. evolution argument on their message board, people from both angles seem to agree that you can, and I would side with them. Science PhDs ought to understand issues relating to the nature and philosophical grounding of their discipline. If they are to practice good science, then they must acknowledge that (in the gentlest version of the postmodern theory of science) theories will continually be tested, since they can never be fully and finally proved, although a theory can potentially be demolished (falsified) by a single piece of data that goes against it. If you drop a ball out of an aeroplane, you cannot prove that it will always fall, though if it flies upwards just once, there is something wrong with the law of gravity.

It is thus not intellectually dishonest to hold competing views, and it can indeed be highly productive; evolutionary theory itself was the outcome of Darwin's twenty year struggle to reconcile his belief in God with his witnessing fossils and finches which suggested to him that life developed itself over time rather than being made in a moment. Although in a more fully secular society that Darwin's, in which the "two cultures" seem increasingly polarised, Ross's views seem paradoxical, they need not necessarily be alien to the practice of science. And if Ross's examiners were satisfied that the science he conducted was rigorous and led to reasonable conclusions, developed through coherence with empirical principles established by reference to pre-existing epistemes, then to deny him his doctorate would have been a fundamental breach of his right to hold individual opinions. Indeed, though this seems a peculiarly paradoxical position for the science student, and hits the headlines, it would hardly be news if a creationist theology student was to argue that scientific ways of thinking provide the best system of understanding the natural world, and be awarded a thesis on that basis. Likewise the majority of non-fundamentalists practising religion do not feel that a knowledge of scientific fact in earth/life origins precludes automatically the possibility of god, or devalues religion as a sound moral system - it didn’t for Darwin, and it doesn’t today.

Nevertheless, Ross must have left his supervisor and examiners at Rhode Island University with a dilemma. As argued above, if they had rejected the science student as holding beliefs incompatible with scientific practice (no matter how good he is in the latter), then they would be accused of excluding him on the basis of their own dogmatically held faith, rather than on the empirical evidence of his scientifically-structured arguments. On the other hand, to allow the scientist to gain his doctorate would be to imply that, if university science departments can accommodate him on the basis that he has shown himself a capable empiricist (even admirably suppressing his religious beliefs in that practice), then they should be willing to deal with “sciences” such as ID on their own terms; they should treat its (largely) Christian exponents as pursuing empirically-derived theories, rather than simply dismissing them outright as following a religious agenda dressed in scientistic trappings. Ross had already produced a popular education video on why Intelligent Design is the best account of the Cambrian explosion; now he is a doctor on the subject.

However, as one respondent pointed out, "Negatives of a theory do not prove another theory, nor do they make them legitimate." ID highlights the flaws in evolutionary evidence, but does not provide evidence from its own perspective that bears an equal burden of proof to that which it has dismissed. A double negative does not add up to positive proof that ID must therefore be the right theory. If Ross is today a polarised personality, the positive of empiricism and the negative of creationism embodied within him, here's hoping that, as ID continually fails to discover hard evidence of its own, he becomes proof positive - the rational Doctor Jekyll - that the empirically derived framework is the only one in which to conduct science.

Labels: Marcus J Ross, Science and Culture

I happened to catch the end of Melvyn Bragg's television series Twelve Books that Changed the World the other day, witnessing him stand on the stage of The Globe quoting Shakespeare and standing in the empty hall of Arkwright's cotton mill discussing his patent for a spinning machine. Like Bragg's excellent, regular Radio 4 series In Our Time, picking on the individual books or people who revolutionised science or culture allows him to discuss historical narratives which happen to fit into the 45 minute slots provided by television or radio executives. It represents history in the style of Thomas Carlyle, who famously quoted that "The history of the world is but the biography of great men."

But it is a version of history which, in its synoptic packaging for the popular media, is not shared by academic historians or philosophers. Typically of the postmodern trend in cultural studies, but in this case with much justification, the Whiggish view of human history as a progression through unique scientific personalities or great individual works from base origins to modern civilisation is being overturned in a relativistic trend, one which emphasises social contexts, continuity and the gradual accumulation of ideas. For example, in his excellent survey The Scientific Revolution, Steven Shapin challenges the essence of the concept that forms his title, opening with the ironic statement that "There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it." He argues that there was no such thing as one single identifiable revolution, before which science was occult and after which came about the empirical method, only revolutions. The philosopher Thomas Kuhn has had his phrase "paradigm shift" taken up by the media as a synonym for a distinct change in perspective or knowledge; but go back to his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and you will see that he argues that the concept of a paradigm shift as a sea change in attitudes or knowledge is a false construct: like political revolutions, scientific revolutions do not happen spontaneously but are the most visible and radical outcome of an accumulating pressure by increasing numbers of practitioners against conventional structures of interpretation.

In spite of my agreement with the Kuhnian interpretation of scientific discovery, though, it is still very tempting to have a sense of the great works, and the great men, simply because (just as literary generic terms are necessary irritants) they help us to orientate ourselves on the timeline. Nowhere is this impulse more present for me than in The Origin of Species. As well as falling neatly in the mid-ninteenth century, and therefore providing a central landmark between Romanticism, the Victorian period, and modernism, it is politically neat for me to believe that before Origin of Species there were creationists, and after it came biological rationalism (with those creationists who remain today easily dismissable as belonging, petticoats and parsonages and all, to an era before Darwin's book). However, as I am reading James Moore and Adrian Desmond's thrilling biography, Darwin, I am being encouraged to turn away from my outdated, Whiggish sentiments. The Origin of Species mentions the word evolution only once (though tellingly it, or, more accurately, "evolved" is the final word of the book). But rather than that final word being the launchpad for the new science, as the biography makes clear evolutionism was a common linguistic currency of Darwin's day. Lamarck had proposed a mechanism, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, through which complex and different life forms could be produced, and in Darwin's circle of educators at Cambridge (he was training for theology, but beetle hunting and geology provided his chief pursuits) were plenty of evolutionists and geologists challenging the idea of natural theology, of God as a divine watchmaker. Even without Darwin, then, it is highly plausible to postulate that a similar evolutionary theory would have been developed – indeed, it was the upstart biologist Alfred Russel Wallace who, writing to Darwin about his comparable but independently developed idea, forced Darwin into publishing the Origin earlier than he had anticipated.

But, since we did get Darwin and the gamut of theories that collectively bear his name, was he a "great man"? As Moore and Desmond make clear, he was certainly human: a typical student, at Edinburgh (from which he dropped out) and then at Cambridge, he preferred hunting to university lectures, and spent cash on new gadgets (entomological rather than electronic) when he had none for food. Rather than being a particularly great man, he was the right man, in the right place, with the right interests, at the right time. Time and again, the biography amazes me by recounting the pragmatic chances without which Darwin the naturalist we know would not have become so: he was born into a wealthy family, so he was able to go to university; at university, he had the gentlemanly connections and interests that enabled him to meet J.S. Henshaw (who taught Darwin how to catalogue and understand the biological system) and Adam Sedgwick (who mentored and inculcated an interest in geology); meeting Henshaw, he was recommended to travel the world as the dining companion to Fitzroy, captain of The Beagle. Even then, he was the third choice for the post; had two of Fitzroy's friends not dropped out, Darwin would have continued on his original plan to travel to the Canaries; never setting eyes on the Galapagos, he would have retired to county life, as curate of a rural parish, and had no more impact on the natural world than to kill dozens of game birds each season. As it was, of course, Darwin was able to travel in a five year epic of rock chipping and notebook-jottings, of specimen jars and cataloguing, tracing changes in species and strata across continents. And, putting Darwin in the social context rather than extracting this "great man" from his time and elevating him as a genius, this would not have been possible without a vast infrastructure, built through imperceptible accruing of technology and political change, which on themselves go unremarked, though they are contained by the term Imperialism. England being at her colonial height, ports on every side of every continent were open to The Beagle; governors' houses provided lodgings from which Darwin could foray into the interiors (as Darwin commented in his journal, all over the world "little embryo England's are hatching"); naval networks allowed Darwin to send back his correspondence and collections to his scientific friends in London.

Which leads me, by a circuitous (though hopefully interesting) route, to my original impulse for this post. Which is that it seems to me that with the advent of the internet – itself heralded as a revolution of the late twentieth century – we have something very akin to those networks which allowed Darwin to travel the globe freely in the nineteenth. Being at a university, I know that there must be a Darwin somewhere in our midst, in the right place to make a difference, as Darwin was at Cambridge; what I don't know, what only time will tell, is what discoveries are going to come about because of the technological context, that could not have come without the web, in any other time.

Labels: Science and Culture, scientific revolution

Like a good old Roman bloodbath, there's something spectacular in seeing the seasoned intellectual warriors Terry Eagleton and Richard Dawkins, respectively the United Kingdom's best-known literary theorist and scientist, scrapping in the latest issue of the London Review of Books. Reviewing Dawkins' The God Delusion, Eagleton accuses him of being "theologically illiterate," of producing a "vulgar caricature of religious faith," of "lunging, flailing, mispunching." Anyone who thinks academia is dull, dispassionate and impersonal should think again.

Not having read The God Delusion, I can only comment from the sidelines on this debate, and on Eagleton's review in particular. Eagleton has spent the last forty years exposing the materialist ideology that underlies culture, and so it is surprising that he does not really ask why Dawkins has felt the need to publish the book in the first place. If as Eagleton says "professional atheists" are "the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don't believe there is anything there to be understood," why would Dawkins jump into the melee so unprepared?

In A.S. Byatt's (yes, her again!) Virgin in the Garden quadrilogy, a grumpy, atheist English teacher, Bill Potter, sermonises to his family about the contradictory and placatory myth-making of Christianity. He is enraged and alienated when his daughter marries a clergyman in the second book. But he is equally angry in the fourth when he discovers that his grandchildren are not taught the Bible at school. How, he blusters, can one expect to understand and appreciate Paradise Lost without first knowing Genesis. This is the curious position most atheistic or agnostic literary intellectuals find themselves in. Unable or unwilling to believe in God, we read "in the beginning was the Word" quite literally, for without the Word our culture of literary words would not have assumed the wonderfully multiple shape it has.

Eagleton, a Catholic, points this out to Dawkins. But Dawkins knows and appreciates his literary canon as well (I remember his wonderful readings from Keats at the lecture I attended last year), and he too cannot have failed to notice the centrality of Christianity to it. Even if he adopts the uncompromisingly atheistic position of Bill Potter, he should, like him, surely see the significance of faith. That he apparently does not acknowledge this in his new book suggests that he is fighting so wildly because he has been backed into such a tight corner, and is unable to give an inch of ground.

The majority of Eagleton's essay is a corrective explanation of what Christianity is actually about (in this, he slyly slips his voice, so it is hard to recognise whether he is simply retelling the story as history, or making a statement of personal faith). He concerns himself by studying how religious belief might be alien to science, but he is too brief in his consideration of the reciprocal relationship of how science might be alien to religion, from which Dawkins' argument springs. When he does glance at Dawkins' motives, Eagleton says that The God Delusion arises from "a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in what it can touch, weigh and taste." But when Robert Hooke, perhaps the greatest of the early English empiricists, looked down his new microscrope at the eye of the common fly, he did not see himself as reducing the mystery of God's creation but elevating it, seeing in the thousand elements that constitute the eye the range of minute interventions of God in the natural world. Even after Darwin, there is surely (as Darwin writes in that glorious closing paragraph of The Origin of Species), a greater grandeur in the view of life as continuously evolving under elegantly simple laws, whether these have their origin in a volcanic vent or a being beyond the stars. No, there is no reason why common sense empiricism should lead automatically to a divide from religion.

And, as Eagleton notes, Dawkin's rigid empirical principles apparently desert him as he fails to ask why so many millions of people do hold a genuine belief in God. Even if belief has its foundations in the neurological structures of the brain, as a mechanism for survival, it is definitively in the world, as well as, so believers say, transcendent from it. Why does Dawkins deny even this? There must be another, deeper reason why Dawkins has written this book, at this moment, with such paradoxical ferocity, other than the old "two cultures" schism. From my personal experience, I see something of where Dawkins is coming from. For an agnostic like myself, in spite of my Bill Potter-like appreciation of religion as a textual artefact, I now feel under pressure to reject theology entirely. In the light of conflict in the Middle-East, knowing the brutality of Catholicism in allowing AIDs and dogma to spread in Africa in equal measure, in my fear of the grip evangelicals are exerting on objective knowledge, I cannot help but want to react, as Dawkins has done, by taking a swipe at the systematic whole, even if it means destroying the parts I appreciate for their literary import.

Although F.R. Leavis would disagree with me on this one, literary criticism has less potential than science to improve the world. It is neither literature nor religion which will develop drugs for AIDs (although neither of these things developed the weapons used in the Middle East either). Dawkins, then, must be feeling the heat of religion even more than I do. As he commented to Edge, the "tactically, politically savvy" thing to do would be to occupy the middle of the road between religion and science. His failure to do this has ensured that he has

come in for a lot of criticism from some of my scientific colleagues because...they feel that I'm rocking the boat and, as it were, giving aid and comfort to the creationists. And I think in a way they might have a point because I have heard that some creationists love to quote people like me because it lends weight to their claim that if you are an evolutionist that means that you have to be an atheist.

However, Dawkins continues

I'm concerned with what's true. For me the evolution/creation war is really just a battle. It's a skirmish in a larger war between supernaturalism and naturalism, and I don't think that I'm prepared to compromise on what I think is true in order to win a tactical battle in a skirmish in what I see as a larger war.

I do not agree with Dawkins' tactics. As with all wars, it generates martyrs rather than winning hearts and minds. Like all bad strategies (military or intellectual) it lacks a plan for exit by which one can give ground, gracefully, when the war is at last being won. But the thing that most interests me is that Dawkins knows this. The God Delusion does not spring, as Eagleton suggests it does, primarily from an ignorance of religion but from a fear of it, an anxiety that is fully self-conscious. The God Delusion may not tread lightly in the centre ground of the debate, but it certainly helps to show how extensively that debate has become polarised. The war promises to be long and brutal. At least the punches between Eagleton and Dawkins are going to be confined to the the letters pages of the LRB, and not the back alleys of Baghdad or the classrooms of our schools.

Labels: religion, Richard Dawkins, Science and Culture, Terry Eagleton, The God Delusion

I am waiting for the new version of Blogger to come out of Beta, at which point I will be able to tag and organise my posts into their particular subjects, such as the postgraduate diary, the art reviews and current affairs. I will also create a category for those posts concerned with the perversion of science, which I have long worried about and am now starting to worry, figuratively through my writing about and against it, like an intellectual dog. Such posts include my one on "Dawkins' Dilemma" and "They Call it Science."

Christian religious fundamentalism is second on the list of global issues I fear when I wake in the morning, behind global warming (which, frankly, dwarfs anything else). One welcome, regular reader of this blog noted that he enjoys it because "sooner or later most sites just turn into political name calling rants - not very productive. Therefore, I enjoy the literary aspect of your blog." Unfortunately, the manipulations of scientific facts for ideological purposes, which are are most blatantly manifested in the Intelligent Design movement, are the one "political" issue I cannot leave alone. I am reading Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker at the moment, and I give a little cheer every time he demolishes the arguments from faith which utterly and hilariously misinterpret the scientific data and the academic consensus.

So I will (must) continue to post on these issues as and when I feel like it. But this leaves me with a dilemma. In the right-hand sidebar of this blog you will notice the Irrepressible.Info box, promoting freedom of speech (a freedom which, living in the democratic UK, I happily exercise in my posts). In the left-hand sidebar are the Google Adwords which cover the annual costs of my web hosting. But when you read any of my posts about Darwinism, about two thirds of the ad space is given over to promotions of Intelligent Design, Creationism, and the "Dawkins Demolition Industry."

The Google Adwords system allows me to filter out those adverts I don't want displayed, and I already use this to cut out sites which promise to write essays for students; a clear conflict of interest, I have no qualms about censoring these adverts. But should I do the same for the religious adverts which contradict my attitude towards science? Should my political principles over this one, vital, issue outweigh my democratic belief - which I assert through endorsing the Irrepressible.Info campaign - that everyone has a right to freedom of speech? Or, as I argued in my essay on the Islamic cartoons controversy, since the right to freedom of speech is not absolute, but must be weighed against moral principles, am I justified in taking what I see as a moral stance against those who try to pervert our empiricist culture?

Labels: Intelligent Design, Science and Culture

The television advertisements broadcast in the United States by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, launched partly in response to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth film, are a poststructuralist's paradigm. In the former film, soft-focus, saturated images of children blowing dandelions, and trains trundling down rural railroads, contrast with dull images of third-world farmers pounding grain. This regression, the film suggests, is what a world would be like without oil (no mention of renewable substitutes here). Its punchline hammers the point home in terms every bit as binary blankly binary as Bush's "you're either with us or against us" ('you're either for the war or a terrorist') speech: "Carbon Dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life." The meaning of words change before the eyes of the reader; even the supposedly absolute and permanent formulas of chemistry metamorphose into rhetoric and ideology.

Secondly, the advert signals once and for all the death of the author(ity), even of science, as a quick look at the background of the "Experts" on the board of the CEI reveals. The President of the CEI has a degree in Mathematics and Political Science; Chair of Energy and Global Warming policy is someone with an MSc from the London School of Economics; the Director of Energy Policy is "working part time toward a Ph.D. in American Government from Catholic University." In my PhD course, my graduate school is always emphasising my need to gain transferable skills; but even though I work in an interdisciplinary field across sciences and arts, I would not claim to qualified to speak with a solid foundation of empirical knowledge on the case of the former. But perhaps unlike in the British university system PhDs in "American Goverment" give one the skills to make accurate and objective scientific claims.

Preceeding these technical criticisms, though, my gut reaction is one of utter despair at the inequality in the battle between science and political ideology. As the CEI so stridently asserts, scientists as a body are not sure precisely how fast climate change is taking place. Even as I type this, the BBC Climate Change Model running silently in my taskbar reminds me that climate change may well be happening faster than some scientists think, but that its effects may also have been over-exaggerated. But these are concerns that are quantitative in type; the overwhelming majority of scientists working in the field are agreed that in our earth is experiencing a qualitative revolution in its climate, one that breaks so radically from past events that, regardless of the details, impacts on life are already being felt.

The unfairness of the playing field in which these scientists must compete against the likes of the CEI is that (as I mentioned in my previous post about Richard Dawkins) for scientists to assume the rhetoric of dogma and politics - which they have to do in this most pressing issue - is for them to open the arena to all-comers. Noting just a few coincidental contentions in the broad canvas of scientific consensus, even opponents with little awareness of scientific practice can argue that, having stepped out of their remit for the objective pursuit of knowledge, scientists are legitimate targets on the assumption that the science as a whole is founded on faith (as in Creationism) or warped by liberal politics (as in relation to global warming).

It leaves me deeply depressed for the lack of respect we have for the Baconian enterprise that has constructed a world in which we live longer, can communicate through the internet and, yes, drive cars. In his weekly column in The Guardian, Ben Goldacre tries in vain to correct some of the media's grotesque perversions of scientific evidence. These often assume that one trial on one particular issue (MMR and autism is a favourite), though it has failed the standards of scientific practice, has the same authority as the rest of scientific evidence on the issue put together, even though the silent majority of scientist have been required to meet high benchmarks of double-blind laboratory testing and peer-reviewed publication. A few years ago, Elton John was awarded hundreds of thousands of pounds in libel damages, following tabloid claims that he was bulimic. It seems to me that we need a similar sort of law to protect scientific knowledge from similarly, but more significant, defamatory abuses.

Labels: Bad Science, Ben Goldacre, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Environment, Science and Culture

I knew he would be the one even before I got in to the hall. As people queued up outside, a man stood handing out leaflets. The man who was sat just in front of me when we eventually sat down, took one leaflet then, after a moments pause, another couple. I could see him, at various moments in the lecture, shaking his head solemnly. Then, when he shifted position, I could just glance over his shoulder to read the telling words in the headline of the website print out he was holding: "God..[line break]...Evolution." As the questions began, the man looked desperately around for the attendants stalking the room with microphones and, eventually, he got his question in: "Thank-you for your talk Mr. Dawkins. You think you have answered the 'How,' but what about the 'Why'?..."

Richard Dawkins certainly pulls them in. The conference hall at the Life Centre at which I saw him lecture was packed with 480 people. Having been lecturing for 30 years, as one of our best- known scientists after the publication of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins has a vast spectrum of experience and literature on which to draw. The lecture itself comprised readings, by himself and his wife, the actress Lalla Ward, from some of the most lyrical and passionate passages of his books. Although clearly a model Dawkins had worked on before, it was still entertaining, nice to feel through the delivery which parts of his numerous books he held most pride in. It was, however, towards the unknown of the subsequent questions that expectation was directed. When the issue of Intelligent Design arose, the breath seemed to stop for a moment, in anticipation.

However, there was none of that frisson that sometimes enlivens the moments after a lecture when a sudden incisive question puts the academic on the spot and the encounter (as I commented in my post about Steve Grand) takes on the quality of intellectual theatre. Through a few, clearly well-rehearsed analogies, Dawkins reinforced the grounds for dismissing Intelligent Design on which most people in the room already stood, judging from the applause after his response. Creationism appears little more than a dull ache rather than a thorn in the side of this scientist.

However, he had clearly failed to sway his questioner, who continued solemnly shaking his head for the rest of the evening. It strikes me that he probably never will succeed in contesting his opponents, since the problem Dawkins faces in this country as public enemy number one of Intelligent Design is very paradoxical. Here we have one of the most brilliant public communicators of science, who has perhaps done more than any other to make the deep insights of scientists such as E.O. Wilson available to the general audience through his literary use of metaphor and anecdote. However, he has perhaps been so successful in producing a poetics of evolutionary science that people do not feel compelled to read beyond the superficial rhetoric of "selfish genes," "replicators," "memes." They are not driven to seek fully to understand the science and to recognise that the fact that biology seems to occupy a despotic control over us, consciousness, language and all, is actually a powerful clarion call for us to harness the potential of culture, conscience, literature (and religion?) to subvert the tyranny of our genetic self-centredness. His complaint in the preface to the new edition of The Selfish Gene about those who read the language but who do not engage with the content is plaintive, but I think ultimately futile; even at the hands of those commentatating from a non-religious perspective, he will forever be a victim of his own successful use of metaphor.

When confronted by the challenge of creationism, that claims evolutionary theory as being itself a faith, thus competing on terms comparable with its own Christian beliefs, how should he respond? As the historian Lisa Jardine has pointed out through a very useful historical illustration in the BBC programme A Point of View, the balance is impossibly set: science needs and is expected to produce a great array of evidence for one theory, and indeed should be suspicious of any evidence that fits the theory without any ambiguity whatsoever. As Dawkins noted, as in a court science is directed only towards demonstrating things beyond reasonable doubt, providing explanations that are acceptable, and it neither could not nor should attempt to provide the entire narrative. (Alternatively, as Descartes put it in Discourse on Method, "It is truth very certain that, when it is not in our power to determine what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable.") Creationism contends that it needs only to highlight one ambiguous point in evolutionary theory to open up the space for it to wedge itself as a counter argument, promising what science can not: ultimate belief beyond any doubt whatsoever, with all the enticing possibilities (As Pascal argued, the stakes of infinite life after death are too high to risk holding atheistic doubts in this world). The aesthetic component to Dawkins' achievements leaves him very open to be tackled by competing epistemologies through the emotionally-resonant framework narratives such as Creationism offer.

Should Dawkins then evade this conflict by reversing Creationism's treatment of science as if a religion, and treat religion as if a science? Should he demonstrate the vast extent of evidence in favour of evolutionary theory - genetics, the fossil record, artificial life experiments, the Drake equation, behavioural psychology, biology - and tackle religious assertions on similar terms, showing how, for example, the ark could not have been built because it could not float? The trouble with this approach is that, firstly, it admits that creationism might, in theory at least, have something rational lurking behind the symbolism of the Biblical text, empirical data which might legitimately be applied to evolution. Secondly, it gets mired too deeply in the science, and takes away from Dawkins' traditional position as a communicator to the layman who - most happily in my case - can understand his theories with very little scientific background at all.

Labels: Intelligent Design, Richard Dawkins, Science and Culture

Watching Steve Grand lecturing yesterday, or more specifically watching his answering questions at the end, was like being a spectator at a fencing match, as he deftly parried and stabbed at challenges about the nature of consciousness with his sharp intellect. The creator of the computer game Creatures, once said to be the cleverest man in Britain, was arguing that what we know as consciousness is something of a sham, a highly predictive simulation of the way our world is at the moment we experience it. This "multiple drafts" model is Daniel Dennett's idea in Consciousness Explained, and I have a lot of time for it, as it explains many of the blips in our perceptions. Anyone who has ever tried, with frustration, to draw a coin will know how effectively our mind informs us that a coin is round and thus it is the roundness we try to transfer to paper, rather than the oval we actually see. Grand used the example of your brain tracking an eagle dropping from the sky; because it takes 500 milliseconds for the light from the eagle to reach your eye and pass through the interpretive receptors in your brain, by the time this processing is complete the eagle will not be where it was when you first "saw" it. The world we see, and the world we know, are not one and the same.

The problem I had with Steve Grand's ideas, however, was his argument that if you modelled an electron on a spreadsheet (inputting data for co-ordinates in space, charge, etc.), then modelled enough electrons in combination to form a hydrogen atom, then enough to form a two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom, then enough to form many trillions of these, then you would have "made" water vapour. This, following on only from the fundamental rules you described at the molecular level would, without no further intervention from a deus ex machina (i.e. The Programmer) eventually condense and fall in the form of rain which, eventually, would form a lake, rivers and so on, all behaving almost precisely as rivers do in the real world. It would be so precise, in fact, that the resultant entity, because it follows precisely the same laws of physics at the real thing, simply residing in the software rather than reality, would be a lake. However, the challenge I would make to this is how would I know when I was looking at the digital lake that it was a lake, and not my garden pond, or the Red Sea. In order to know the lake was a lake, I would need to put it in a context that defines "lakiness," namely it is probably large, not artificial, and often exists in the basin between or at the end of river valleys. In order to produce a digital lake that was real enough to be called a lake one would also need to model the environment, including soil, hills, light, sound that permit our senses to interpret it as such.

With a similar level of recursion, how would one define when conscious life has been created artificially? To model this, one would need to take the serial processor of the computer, which would model a parallel processor, which would model evolving life, which would evolve to model consciousness which is, as Grand says, only a simulation anyway. Where, on this long scale of replication, is the oval office where the buck of being stops? It would be easy if we had a firm knowledge of where life - and especially conscious life - begins. It would make ethical issues such as determining whether to withhold the life support of a severely handicapped baby that much more regular and straightforward. Sadly, though, the problem is not, nor will ever be, that easy. Whether it will be cybernetics and artificial intelligence, or discursive philosophies of mind that will come closest to a definition of consciousness, watch this space (it may take a while...).

Labels: consciousness, Science and Culture, Steve Grand