REFLECTIONS ON SCIENCE AND THE HUMANITIES
Making science accessible
This reflection is about "The Wonderful Mistake", by Lewis Thomas (1).
(I do not have permission to post Thomas's essay on the web.)
Lewis Thomas (1913-1993) was, like Roald Hoffmann, a scientist who turned writer well into his career. Thomas trained and practiced as a physician, and served as Dean of Yale Medical School and New York University School of Medicine, and as President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute. He also found time to write creative essays for the New England Journal of Medicine, including “The Wonderful Mistake.” His essays were collected in several books, the first of which, The Lives of a Cell (2), won the National Book Award. The scientific community prizes spokespersons like Thomas, because their work makes science accessible to non-scientists, thus allowing them to better understand the world around them, as well as to share the sense of wonder that comes with understanding nature by way of science’s discoveries.
The basic idea of this playful essay, that copying errors during DNA replication are the raw material of evolution, is as secure as it was thirty years ago. On the other hand, the notion that DNA was always the hereditary material has taken some knocks. In light of many recent discoveries, RNA now appears to be the most likely candidate as the first repository of information that an organism needed in order to make a new organism. RNA is also a good candidate as the basis of the first catalytic molecules, most of which today are protein-based enzymes. Scientists cannot prove all this yet, but it is the current best synthesis of new results from many areas, including the discovery of modern enzymes made entirely of RNA (so-called ribozymes), and of the RNA-based catalytic center of ribosomes, those molecular jacquard looms that weave today’s proteins. In Thomas’s time, many of RNA’s roles were still awaiting discovery.
The displacement of DNA by RNA as both the first information-storage medium and the basis of the first specific catalysts is quite an upheaval in our views of life’s origins. Yet it does not require any great shift in our general picture of evolution by natural selection from the fruits of random genetic and environmental change. It is testament to the strength of the scientific approach that such a dramatic shift can be accommodated into a world view entirely based on currently accepted scientific findings, both old and new.
Such shifts in thinking are hard to understand if you do not know how science works. In fact, challenges to science, such as the demand that special creation be taught on even footing with evolution in public schools, often reflect the proponents’ ignorance of even the more basic of science’s tenets and tools. I will have more to say about such challenges, but for now, I want to focus on Thomas’s essay, and the kind of writing it exemplifies.
Even readers with little science education can appreciate essays like this one. Although DNA replication, the duplication of all DNA as preparation for cell division, is quite complex, Thomas has no need to get into technical details in order to reach his goal of surprising you with the imperfections of the process and presenting their consequences. Thomas gives this deceptively light essay a quiet power by including you and me among the consequences of DNA mistakes. Even without much technical detail, the essay informs us, and evokes wonder.
With writers like Thomas around, I often wonder how otherwise informed people can sometimes know so little about science. As a university faculty member, I was often appalled at the lack of awareness among my humanities colleagues of even the most important science, and the most basic mathematics. Many scientists would be ashamed of being equally ignorant of the humanities, though some are. I also heard the complaint from non-science colleagues that science and math are inaccessible to anyone outside those fields. I saw mistrust of science’s findings by those who said that they could not understand them. They accused science of playing the gray eminence who commands respect and imposes beliefs that are not to be questioned. Quite the contrary, it is of crucial importance to science that its findings be questioned exhaustively; otherwise, scientific facts, laws, and theories would not be self-correcting. That’s how scientific knowledge becomes more accurate.
In that sad category of things I wish I had asked, I wonder how many of those colleagues ever read articles in the science section of the New York Times, or subscribed to that very accessible little weekly, Science News, or for more determined and critical readers who want to see some evidence, Scientific American. While there are plenty of good reasons to pursue a career in a field outside of science, there is no excuse for being a scientifically uninformed citizen. With science and technology affecting our lives in many crucial ways, there are plenty of good reasons for being informed, and abundant resources for getting there.
The scientific community has long prized the work of fluent communicators like Lewis Thomas (biology and medicine), Stephen Jay Gould (biology and evolution), Steven Weinberg (physics and cosmology), Carl Sagan (space science), and John McPhee (any field he feels like writing about). The New Yorker has great articles about science, technology, and medicine, including profiles of their practitioners, often showing off their brilliance and their humanity. Scientists cry out for their work and motivation to be understood by the citizenry, and communicators like Thomas make it possible. No matter what your field of interest, and whatever your level of scientific knowledge, with a little browsing, you can find science writing at a level that can inform you and show you the wonders of our world that science discovers.
Within academia, some of the most vocal, hostile, and often uniformed critics of science called themselves postmodern thinkers, or postmodernists. If you know anything about literary criticism, then you have heard about postmodernists. If it is new to you, then I offer this view, based on my own readings of and about postmodernism. Literary criticism, at its best, refers to analysis of literature. When a student writes a paper about an assigned poem or short story, that’s literary criticism. But in an interesting literary work, there is a lot to write about, and each potential focus can be thought of as a school of literary criticism. The critic’s focus might be on how the plot develops, or on the structure or organization of the work (structural or formalist criticism), how the work reflects the life and concerns of its author (biographical criticism), the apparent motivations and mental states of the characters (psychological), how the work echoes common myths and symbols (mythological), how the reader’s experience and stage of life alters her or his view of the work (reader-response), just to name a few30.
Postmodern criticism (also called post-structuralism and deconstructionism), focuses on what are claimed to be the inevitable, inescapable contradictions or inconsistencies of any work of language, which allow multiple interpretations of a work. In my opinion, they often go very far into the right-hand pull hitter’s favorite target (left field) to find alternative interpretations of relatively traditional literature. They often give the impression that any interpretation is as good as another, even if filled with inconsistencies.
These critics are right at home with the works of postmodern writers, who are in a sense the offspring of the critics, by using such devices as changing settings, inconsistent characters, and intentionally illogical plots. Like some experimental music, these works frustrate the expectations of traditional readers, who want a novel to take them somewhere interesting, introduce them to vivid characters, and tell them a story.
I started by saying, “Literary criticism, at its best ... .” At its worst, literary criticism seems hardly to be about literature at all. In the arcane and impenetrable journals of the field, critics write primarily about what other critics have written, in what can become an endless downward spiral towards complete incomprehensibility. The writings of postmodernists have reached the greatest depths of impenetrability, and it does not seem to matter to them whether their articles can be fathomed. In fact, in 1996, physicist Alan Sokol concocted and published a paper (3) in the postmodernist journal Social Text, just to see if the editors would, in his words, "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions." He described his own paper as "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense", and as "structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathematics and physics." The article was immediately approved and went right into print, suggesting that the editors could not distinguish contrived nonsense from their typical publications. But then, given the underlying assumptions of postmodernism, perhaps it makes no sense to ask whether something makes sense.
So how does a school of literary criticism become hostile to science? Why are the analysts of texts talking about science, anyway? In what might seem comparable to using a catapult to wipe your nose, some postmodernists decided that everything is a text (science is a text, nature is a text, a person is a text), and that it makes sense to apply the tools of postmodern literary criticism to all sorts of things that we would not normally call texts. As you might expect from the tenets of postmodernism, its followers are particularly hostile to scientific claims of truth, objectivity, and universality, and have written what they seem to think are scathing criticisms of science. In their view, no type of inquiry, including science, can give us absolute inconsistency-free truth, or absolute objectivity, or complete universality; therefore, any picture of the world is as good as any other, and a view based on science’s findings should not get privileged treatment over views based on religion, myth, legend, witchcraft, astrology, political convenience, and the like.
The postmodernist movement, now essentially dead, went almost completely unnoticed by scientists and the general public. Why? Perhaps one important reason is that, during its heyday, you could not open widely circulated magazines and find clear, accessible prose about postmodernism and its critiques. Oddly—or perhaps not so oddly—postmodernists did not seem to produce or prize their communicators the way scientists do.
Why were there no postmodernists who wrote for general audiences? Long ago, I came to suspect that, in academic literary criticism, accessibility is a liability. The best of literary criticism appears as unselfconscious writing about literature in top literary magazines such as The New Yorker. There you will find interesting, readable essays about literature—novels, poetry, authors, genres. Purely and simply, these magazines feature good writers finding interesting things to say about literature. But for academics who are not successful in publishing creative works, nor in writing vividly about literature for widely circulated journals like The New Yorker, perhaps the only path to job security is by way of those impenetrable technical journals, and by following that downward spiral into incomprehensibility.
If this movement was primarily buried in halls of ivy, did it have any impact on society? In my opinion, it did have unfortunate effects, by way of its impact on academia. In my career as a university teacher, I met many fine teachers of literature who took it as their mission to open the world of literature to their students. They were wide-eyed promoters of the great writers of old and of today. Their love of literature glowed warmly and brightly within them. They were enthusiastic teachers, and not so worried about how many scholarly articles were on their resumés.
Unfortunately, even well before they approached retirement, some of these devoted teachers were branded as deadwood by the heavily, but often inconsequentially, published faculty that were becoming their colleagues. For some of the postmodern generation, who were forced into demonstrating scholarly potential in their fields, literary criticism became a smoke-screen behind which to earn tenure and a stable academic position. If the pressures to publish just about anything, along with the under-appreciation of inspired teaching, were preventing literature departments from breeding the next keepers of the flame of literary appreciation, then movements like postmodernism indeed had a long-lasting deleterious effect.
Footnotes
1) The Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas, Bantam Books, 1974. "The Wonderful Mistake" is also available in some anthologies—search the web for them.
2) For clear descriptions of schools of literary criticism, see “Critical Perspectives and Literary Theory.” in Literature and Its Writers, Anne Charters and Samuel Charters, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001, p. 2071 (yes, that's right, page 2071).
3) The original “parody” article is "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", Social Text #46/47, pp. 217-252 (spring/summer 1996). Available at http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html.
