rel="nofollow" href="#ue733a33d-718d-43e2-917d-028f1c7b823a">Paleoanthropology: The Most Contentious Science
Science and Experimental Evidence
INTRODUCTION
The history of science is boring; the traditional version, that is, with its stately progression of breakthroughs and discoveries, inspirational geniuses and the long march out of the darkness of ignorance into the light of knowledge. This is the story as it is often presented in museums, textbooks and classrooms; but it is an invention, a typically Victorian piece of bowdlerized mythmaking. The real history of science is far messier, more nuanced and complex, and much, much dirtier. This was true of the earliest scientists, and it is still true today. According to Nobel prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman, speaking in 1999: ‘You’d think that scientists would have a degree of saintliness that would be almost unbearable. It doesn’t work that way. The competition goes on at all levels – the international, the national, the institutional, and finally the guy across the hall.’
The ancients, too, knew that conflict was inevitable in science. The father of medicine, Hippocrates, in his 4th-century BCE work, The Law, wrote that, ‘There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance’, while according to Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century CE, ‘This only is certain, that there is nothing certain; and nothing more miserable and yet more arrogant than man.’
This book surveys more than 25 feuds from the history of science and technology, from the very beginnings of science in the Early Modern Period (roughly 1500–1750) to recent feuds in areas such as genomics and human evolution. Some feuds were little more than cordial disagreements over points of theory but many were vicious and prolonged, and some, all-consuming. The stakes were often great – eternal glory, Nobel prizes, untold wealth, personal ruin, even life itself – and the details often unedifying. Collateral damage ranged from blighted careers to electrocuted elephants. The range and variety of the feuds makes it hard to generalize, but each story is revealing in its own way: about key scientific debates, but also about how science works.
Face off. An engraving after Joseph Nicolas Robert-Fleury’s 1847 painting, Galileo Before the Inquisition. Galileo’s scientific ideas were attacked by many, but it was only when he inadvertently triggered a feud with his former patron Maffeo Barberini, aka Pope Urban VIII, that he found himself on trial for his life.
The feudal system
Science was characterized by feuding from the very beginning. Its roots were in alchemy and magic, and while some alchemists and magi collaborated, in the main they toiled in isolation, guarding their secrets, denigrating the efforts of others and hoping that they alone would be the first to achieve the ultimate prize – the Philosopher’s Stone, transmutation of lead into gold, the Elixir of Life, the restitution of ancient wisdom. As natural philosophy took its first steps towards the scientific world view with the astronomical discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, relations between the great men of the day were as often defined by fear and loathing as respect and admiration. Johannes Kepler served as an assistant to the great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, but the two fell out at least once in the short time they knew each other, while Tycho also carried on a bitter feud with rival astronomer Ursus (see pages 164–165) and was cordially despised by Galileo.
Matters did not improve when the baton of natural philosophy passed to England in the late 17th century, where Sir Isaac Newton, perhaps the greatest scientist of all time, was also perhaps the most argumentative. Even his famous phrase, ‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’, which appears to encapsulate everything that is humble, noble and gracious about science, may have been little more than a dig at a short-statured enemy (see pages 180–181). Why is science such a dirty business, and what does this long history of dispute say about the nature of science?
Foibles and mistakes
Scientists are people too, although this is easily forgotten thanks to the way science is typically portrayed in the media (see pages 136–139). The work they do is carried out in a social context like any other human endeavour. Scientific ideas themselves emerge from and are often representative of this social context. While the Victorian historiography of science tended to obscure these simple facts, more recent historians of science appreciate that it can only be understood in the light of them. ‘We have come a long way from acceptance of the conventional Victorian belief in the disinterested scientist engaged in the objective pursuit of Truth,’ comments Tony Hallam, a professor of geology and palaeontology (historically two of the more contentious sciences), ‘to a less lofty but more realistic one which takes account of the existence of a whole range of social interactions within the scientific community as determinants of scientific theory.’
Naturally, then, science is prey to the same foibles, insecurities and mistakes as any other field. Just as in politics or sport, there will be personality clashes and power grabs, misunderstandings and betrayals; and, just as in these fields, the people who rise to the top, who achieve the most, are likely to be driven and bloody-minded. As astrophysicist Virginia Trimble points out: ‘nobody who does something earthshaking is likely to be easy to get along with. You only achieve things like that by being more single-minded than your friends and relations are likely to regard as totally reasonable.’
Nasty, brutish and smart
Above and beyond this, however, the nature of science means that conflict is built into its DNA. Science in its purest form is a process of trial and error: hypotheses are formed through observation and experiment, and then these hypotheses are tested with further observation and experiment. If they are supported, they become theories – ‘true’ models of how the world works, perhaps even laws of nature – but even the most solid theory can be revised or overturned if new evidence comes to light (see pages 98–101). This ideal of the scientific method has led some theorists of science to apply Darwinian ideas of natural selection to science itself: ideas are engaged in a constant battle for survival, in which only the fittest will prosper. If science really is so combative by its very nature, it is only to be expected that conflict will result. When the natural proclivities of driven, single-minded individuals are added to this, a combustible mixture results.
Scientists are defined