Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the
core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time
intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the
world. You also can have a deeper understanding of how everything
works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein,
Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.


I'm not saying you're more intelligent than Aristotle, or wiser. For
all I know, Aristotle's the cleverest person who ever lived. That's
not the point. The point is only that science is cumulative, and we
live later.


Aristotle had a lot to say about astronomy, biology and physics. But
his views sound weirdly naive today. Not as soon as we move away from
science, however. Aristotle could walk straight into a modern seminar
on ethics, theology, political or moral philosophy, and
contribute. But let him walk into a modern science class and he'd be a
lost soul. Not because of the jargon, but because science advances,
cumulatively.


Here's a small sample of the things you could tell Aristotle, or any
other Greek philosopher. And surprise and enthral them, not just with
the facts themselves but with how they hang together so elegantly.


The earth is not the centre of the universe. It orbits the sun - which
is just another star. There is no music of the spheres, but the
chemical elements, from which all matter is made, arrange themselves
cyclically, in something like octaves. There are not four elements but
about 100. Earth, air, fire and water are not among them.


Living species are not isolated types with unchanging
essences. Instead, over a time scale too long for humans to imagine,
they split and diverge into new species, which then go on diverging
further and further. For the first half of geological time our
ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each
one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria. Aristotle was a
distant cousin to a squid, a closer cousin to a monkey, a closer
cousin still to an ape (strictly speaking, Aristotle was an ape, an
African ape, a closer cousin to a chimpanzee than a chimp is to an
orang utan).


The brain is not for cooling the blood. It's what you use to do your
logic and your metaphysics. It's a three dimensional maze of a million
million nerve cells, each one drawn out like a wire to carry pulsed
messages. If you laid all your brain cells end to end, they'd stretch
round the world 25 times. There are about 4 million million
connections in the tiny brain of a chaffinch, proportionately more in
ours.


Now, if you're anything like me, you'll have mixed feelings about that
recitation. On the one hand, pride in what Aristotle's species now
knows and didn't then. On the other hand an uneasy feeling of, "Isn't
it all a bit complacent? What about our descendants, what will they be
able to tell us?"


Yes, for sure, the process of accumulation doesn't stop with us. 2000
years hence, ordinary people who have read a couple of books will be
in a position to give a tutorial to today's Aristotles: to Francis
Crick, say, or Stephen Hawking. So does this mean that our view of the
universe will turn out to be just as wrong?


Let's keep a sense of proportion about this! Yes, there's much that we
still don't know. But surely our belief that the earth is round and
not flat, and that it orbits the sun, will never be superseded. That
alone is enough to confound those, endowed with a little philosophical
learning, who deny the very possibility of objective truth: those
so-called relativists who see no reason to prefer scientific views
over aboriginal myths about the world.


Our belief that we share ancestors with chimpanzees, and more distant
ancestors with monkeys, will never be superseded although details of
timing may change. Many of our ideas, on the other hand, are still
best seen as theories or models whose predictions, so far, have
survived the test. Physicists disagree over whether they are condemned
forever to dig for deeper mysteries, or whether physics itself will
come to an end in a final 'theory of everything', a nirvana of
knowledge. Meanwhile, there is so much that we don't yet understand,
we should loudly proclaim those things that we do, so as to focus
attention on problems that we should be working on.


Far from being over-confident, many scientists believe that science
advances only by disproof of its hypotheses. Konrad Lorenz said he
hoped to disprove at least one of his own hypotheses every day before
breakfast. That was absurd, especially coming from the grand old man
of the science of ethology, but it is true that scientists, more than
others, impress their peers by admitting their mistakes.


A formative influence on my undergraduate self was the response of a
respected elder statesmen of the Oxford Zoology Department when an
American visitor had just publicly disproved his favourite theory. The
old man strode to the front of the lecture hall, shook the American
warmly by the hand and declared in ringing, emotional tones: "My dear
fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years."
And we clapped our hands red. Can you imagine a Government Minister
being cheered in the House of Commons for a similar admission?
"Resign, Resign" is a much more likely response!


Yet there is hostility towards science. And not just from the green
ink underlining brigade, but from published novelists and newspaper
columnists. Newspaper columns are notoriously ephemeral, but their
drip drip, week after week, or day after day, repetition gives them
influence and power, and we have to notice them. A peculiar feature of
the British press is the regularity with which some of its leading
columnists return to attack science - and not always from a vantage
point of knowledge. A few weeks ago, Bernard Levin's effusion in The
Times was entitled "God, me and Dr Dawkins" and it had the subtitle:
"Scientists don't know and nor do I - but at least I know I don't
know".


It is no mean task to plumb the full depths of what Mr Bernard Levin
does not know, but here's an illustration of the gusto with which he
boasts of it.


"Despite their access to copious research funds, today's scientists
have yet to prove that a quark is worth a bag of beans. The quarks are
coming! The quarks are coming! Run for your lives . . .! Yes, I know I
shouldn't jeer at science, noble science, which, after all, gave us
mobile telephones, collapsible umbrellas and multi-striped toothpaste,
but science really does ask for it . . . Now I must be serious. Can
you eat quarks? Can you spread them on your bed when the cold weather
comes?"


It doesn't deserve a reply, but the distinguished Cambridge scientist,
Sir Alan Cottrell, wrote a brief Letter to the Editor:- "Sir: Mr
Bernard Levin asks 'Can you eat quarks?' I estimate that he eats
500,000,000, 000,000, 000,000 quarks a day."


It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of
ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast
ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics. In
Britain, that is. I believe the same is not true of our more
successful economic competitors, Germany, the United States and Japan.

People certainly blame science for nuclear weapons and similar
horrors. It's been said before but needs to be said again: if you want
to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but
equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most
powerful tools to do so. The trick is to want the right things, then
science will provide you with the most effective methods of achieving
them.


An equally common accusation is that science goes beyond its
remit. It's accused of a grasping take-over bid for territory that
properly belongs to other disciplines such as theology. On the other
hand - you can't win! - listen to the novelist Fay Weldon's hymn of
hate against 'the scientists' in The Daily Telegraph.


"Don't expect us to like you. You promised us too much and failed to
deliver. You never even tried to answer the questions we all asked
when we were six. Where did Aunt Maud go when she died? Where was she
before she was born? . . . And who cares about half a second after the
Big Bang; what about half a second before? And what about crop
circles?"

More than some of my colleagues, I am perfectly happy to give a simple
and direct answer to both those Aunt Maud questions. But I'd certainly
be called arrogant and presumptuous, going beyond the limits of
science.


Then there's the view that science is dull and plodding, with rows of
biros in its top pocket. Here's another newspaper columnist, A A Gill,
writing on science this year in The Sunday Times.


"Science is constrained by experiment results and the tedious,
plodding stepping stones of empiricism . . . What appears on
television just is more exciting than what goes on in the back of it
. . . That's art, luvvie: theatre, magic, fairy dust, imagination,
lights, music, applause, my public. There are stars and there are
stars, darling. Some are dull, repetitive squiggles on paper, and some
are fabulous, witty, thought-provoking, incredibly popular . . ."


The 'dull, repetitive squiggles' is a reference to the discovery of
pulsars in 1967, by Jocelyn Bell and Anthony Hewish. Jocelyn Bell
Burnell had recounted on television the spine-tingling moment when, a
young woman on the threshold of a career, she first knew she was in
the presence of something hitherto unheard-of in the universe. Not
something new under the sun, a whole new KIND of sun, which rotates,
so fast that, instead of taking 24 hours like our planet, it takes a
quarter of a second. Darling, how too plodding, how madly empirical my
dear!


Could science just be too difficult for some people, and therefore
seem threatening? Oddly enough, I wouldn't dare to make such a
suggestion, but I am happy to quote a distinguished literary scholar,
John Carey, the present Merton Professor of English at Oxford:


"The annual hordes competing for places on arts courses in British
universities, and the trickle of science applicants, testify to the
abandonment of science among the young. Though most academics are wary
of saying it straight out, the general consensus seems to be that arts
courses are popular because they are easier, and that most arts
students would simply not be up to the intellectual demands of a
science course."


My own view is that the sciences can be intellectually demanding, but
so can classics, so can history, so can philosophy. On the other hand,
nobody should have trouble understanding things like the circulation
of the blood and the heart's role in pumping it round. Carey quoted
Donne's lines to a class of 30 undergraduates in their final year
reading English at Oxford:


"Knows't thou how blood, which to the heart doth flow, Doth from one
ventricle to the other go?"


Carey asked them how, as a matter of fact, the blood does flow. None
of the thirty could answer, and one tentatively guessed that it might
be 'by osmosis'. The truth - that the blood is pumped from ventricle
to ventricle through at least 50 miles of intricately dissected
capillary vessels throughout the body - should fascinate any true
literary scholar. And unlike, say, quantum theory or relativity, it
isn't hard to understand. So I tender a more charitable view than
Professor Carey. I wonder whether some of these young people might
have been positively turned off science.


Last month I had a letter from a television viewer who poignantly
began: "I am a clarinet teacher whose only memory of science at school
was a long period of studying the Bunsen burner." Now, you can enjoy
the Mozart concerto without being able to play the clarinet. You can
be a discerning and informed concert critic without being able to play
a note. Of course music would come to a halt if nobody learned to play
it. But if everybody left school thinking you had to play an intrument
before you could appreciate music, think how impoverished many lives
would be.


Couldn't we treat science in the same way? Yes, we must have Bunsen
burners and dissecting needles for those drawn to advanced scientific
practice. But perhaps the rest if us could have separate classes in
science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of
thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory
experience.


It's here that I'd seek rapprochement with another apparent foe of
science, Simon Jenkins, former editor of The Times and a much more
formidable adversary than the other journalists I've quoted, because
he has some knowledge of what he is talking about. He resents
compulsory science education and he holds the idiosyncratic view that
it isn't useful. But he is thoroughly sound on the uplifting qualities
of science. In a recorded conversation with me, he said:


"I can think of very few science books I've read that I've called
useful. What they've been is wonderful. They've actually made me feel
that the world around me is a much fuller . . . much more awesome
place than I ever realised it was . . . I think that science has got a
wonderful story to tell. But it isn't useful. It's not useful like a
course in business studies or law is useful, or even a course in
politics and economics."


Far from science not being useful, my worry is that it is so useful as
to overshadow and distract from its inspirational and cultural
value. Usually even its sternest critics concede the usefulness of
science, while completely missing the wonder. Science is often said to
undermine our humanity, or destroy the mystery on which poetry is
thought to thrive. Keats berated Newton for destroying the poetry of
the rainbow.


"Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule
and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine - Unweave a rainbow
. . ."


Keats was, of course, a very young man.


Blake, too, lamented:


"For Bacon and Newton, sheath'd in dismal steel, their terrors hang
Like iron scourges over Albion; Reasonings like vast Serpents Infold
around my limbs . . ."

I wish I could meet Keats or Blake to persuade them that mysteries
don't lose their poetry because they are solved. Quite the
contrary. The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle,
and anyway the solution uncovers deeper mystery. The rainbow's
dissection into light of different wavelengths leads on to Maxwell's
equations, and eventually to special relativity.


Einstein himself was openly ruled by an aesthetic scientific muse:
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is
the source of all true art and science", he said. It's hard to find a
modern particle physicist who doesn't own to some such aesthetic
motivation. Typical is John Wheeler, one of the distinguished elder
statesmen of American physics today:


" . . . we will grasp the central idea of it all as so simple, so
beautiful, so compelling that we will all say each to the other, 'Oh,
how could it have been otherwise! How could we all have been so blind
for so long!'"


Wordsworth might have understood this better than his fellow
romantics. He looked forward to a time when scientific discoveries
would become "proper objects of the poet's art". And, at the painter
Benjamin Haydon's dinner of 1817, he endeared himself to scientists,
and endured the taunts of Keats and Charles Lamb, by refusing to join
in their toast: "Confusion to mathematics and Newton".


Now, here's an apparent confusion: T H Huxley saw science as "nothing
but trained and organized common sense", while Professor Lewis Wolpert
insists that it's deeply paradoxical and surprising, an affront to
commonsense rather than an extension of it. Every time you drink a
glass of water, you are probably imbibing at least one atom that
passed through the bladder of Aristotle. A tantalisingly surprising
result, but it follows by Huxley-style organized common sense from
Wolpert's observation that "there are many more molecules in a glass
of water than there are glasses of water in the sea".


Science runs the gamut from the tantalisingly surprising to the deeply
strange, and ideas don't come any stranger than Quantum
Mechanics. More than one physicist has said something like: "If you
think you understand quantum theory, you don't understand quantum
theory."


There is mystery in the universe, beguiling mystery, but it isn't
capricious, whimsical, frivolous in its changeability. The universe
is an orderly place and, at a deep level, regions of it behave like
other regions, times behave like other times. If you put a brick on a
table it stays there unless something lawfully moves it, even if you
meanwhile forget it's there. Poltergeists and sprites don't intervene
and hurl it about for reasons of mischief or caprice. There is mystery
but not magic, strangeness beyond the wildest imagining, but no spells
or witchery, no arbitrary miracles.


Even science fiction, though it may tinker with the laws of nature,
can't abolish lawfulness itself and remain good science fiction. Young
women don't take off their clothes and spontaneously morph themselves
into wolves. A recent television drama is fairytale rather than
science fiction, for this reason. It falls foul of a theoretical
prohibition much deeper than the philosopher's "All swans are white -
until a black one turns up" inductive reasoning. We know people can't
metamorphose into wolves, not because the phenomenon has never been
observed - plenty of things happen for the first time - but because
werewolves would violate the equivalent of the second law of
thermodynamics. Of this, Sir Arthur Eddington said.


"If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is
in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for
Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation
- well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your
theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can
give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest
humiliation."


To pursue the relationship between werewolves and entropy would take
me too far afield. But, since this lecture commemorates a man whose
integrity and honesty as a broadcaster is still an abiding legend 30
years after his death, I'll stay for a moment with the current
epidemic of paranormal propaganda on television.


In one popular type of programming, conjurers come on and do routine
tricks. But instead of admitting that they are conjurers, these
television performers claim genuinely supernatural powers. In this
they are abetted by prestigious, even knighted, presenters, people
whom we have got into the habit of trusting, broadcasters who have
become role models. It is an abuse of what might be called the Richard
Dimbleby Effect.


In other programmes, disturbed people recount their fantasies of
ghosts and poltergeists. But instead of sending them off to a kindly
psychiatrist, television producers eagerly hire actors to re-create
their delusions - with predictable effects on the credulity of large
audiences.


Recently, a faith healer was given half an hour of free prime time
television, to advertise his bizarre claim to be a 2000 year-dead
physician called Paul of Judea. Some might call this entertainment,
comedy even, though others would find it objectionable entertainment,
like a fairground freak show.


Now I obviously have to return to the arrogance problem. How can I be
so sure that this ordinary Englishman with an unlikely foreign accent
was not the long dead Paul of Judea? How do I know that astrology
doesn't work? How can I be so confident that the television
'supernaturalists' are ordinary conjurers, just because ordinary
conjurers can replicate their tricks? (spoonbending, by the way, is so
routine a trick that the American conjurers Penn and Teller have
posted instructions for doing it on the Internet! See
http://www.randi.org/jr/ptspoon.html).


It really comes down to parsimony, economy of explanation. It is
possible that your car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy, but
if it looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and
performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible working
hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine. Telepathy and possession by
the spirits of the dead are not ruled out as a matter of
principle. There is certainly nothing impossible about abduction by
aliens in UFOs. One day it may be happen. But on grounds of
probability it should be kept as an explanation of last resort. It is
unparsimonious, demanding more than routinely weak evidence before we
should believe it. If you hear hooves clip-clopping down a London
street, it could be a zebra or even a unicorn, but, before we assume
that it's anything other than a horse, we should demand a certain
minimal standard of evidence.


It's been suggested that if the supernaturalists really had the powers
they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out
that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental
physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they
wasting their talents doing party turns on television?


By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our
brains drop out. I'm not asking for all such programmes to be
suppressed, merely that the audience should be encouraged to be
critical. In the case of the psychokineticists and thought-readers, it
would be good entertainment to invite studio audiences to suggest
critical tests, which only genuine psychics, but not ordinary
conjurers, could pass. It would make a good, entertaining form of quiz
show.


How do we account for the current paranormal vogue in the popular
media? Perhaps it has something to do with the millennium - in which
case it's depressing to realise that the millennium is still three
years away. Less portentously, it may be an attempt to cash in on the
success of The X-Files. This is fiction and therefore defensible as
pure entertainment.


A fair defence, you might think. But soap operas, cop series and the
like are justly criticised if, week after week, they ram home the same
prejudice or bias. Each week The X-Files poses a mystery and offers
two rival kinds of explanation, the rational theory and the paranormal
theory. And, week after week, the rational explanation loses. But it
is only fiction, a bit of fun, why get so hot under the collar?


Imagine a crime series in which, every week, there is a white suspect
and a black suspect. And every week, lo and behold, the black one
turns out to have done it. Unpardonable, of course. And my point is
that you could not defend it by saying: "But it's only fiction, only
entertainment".


Let's not go back to a dark age of superstition and unreason, a world
in which every time you lose your keys you suspect poltergeists,
demons or alien abduction.


Enough, let me turn to happier matters. The popularity of the
paranormal, oddly enough, might even be grounds for encouragement . I
think that the appetite for mystery, the enthusiasm for that which we
do not understand, is healthy and to be fostered. It is the same
appetite which drives the best of true science, and it is an appetite
which true science is best qualified to satisfy. Perhaps it is this
appetite that underlies the ratings success of the paranormalists.


I believe that astrologers, for instance, are playing on - misusing,
abusing - our sense of wonder. I mean when they hijack the
constellations, and employ sub-poetic language like the moon moving
into the fifth house of Aquarius. Real astronomy is the rightful
proprietor of the stars and their wonder. Astrology gets in the way,
even subverts and debauches the wonder.


To show how real astronomical wonder can be presented to children,
I'll borrow from a book called Earthsearch by John Cassidy, which I
brought back from America to show my daughter Juliet. Find a large
open space and take a soccer ball to represent the sun. Put the ball
down and walk ten paces in a straight line. Stick a pin in the ground.
The head of the pin stands for the planet Mercury. Take another 9
paces beyond Mercury and put down a peppercorn to represent
Venus. Seven paces on, drop another peppercorn for Earth. One inch
away from earth, another pinhead represents the Moon, the furthest
place, remember, that we've so far reached. 14 more paces to little
Mars, then 95 paces to giant Jupiter, a ping-pong ball. 112 paces
further, Saturn is a marble. No time to deal with the outer planets
except to say that the distances are much larger. But, how far would
you have to walk to reach the nearest star, Proxima Centauri? Pick up
another soccer ball to represent it, and set off for a walk of 4200
miles. As for the nearest other galaxy, Andromeda, don't even think
about it!


Who'd go back to astrology when they've sampled the real thing -
astronomy, Yeats's "starry ways", his "lonely, majestical multitude"?
The same lovely poem encourages us to "Remember the wisdom out of the
old days" and I want to end with a little piece of wonder from my own
territory of evolution.


You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in
a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a
substantial book. I'm talking, of course, of the DNA in your
cells. Textbooks describe DNA as a blueprint for a body. It's better
seen as a recipe for making a body, because it is irreversible. But
today I want to present it as something different again, and even more
intriguing. The DNA in you is a coded description of ancient worlds in
which your ancestors lived. DNA is the wisdom out of the old days, and
I mean very old days indeed.


The oldest human documents go back a few thousand years, originally
written in pictures. Alphabets seem to have been invented about 35
centuries ago in the Middle East, and they've changed and spawned
numerous varieties of alphabet since then. The DNA alphabet arose at
least 35 million centuries ago. Since that time, it hasn't changed one
jot. Not just the alphabet, the dictionary of 64 basic words and their
meanings is the same in modern bacteria and in us. Yet the common
ancestor from whom we both inherited this precise and accurate
dictionary lived at least 35 million centuries ago.


What changes is the long programs that natural selection has written
using those 64 basic words. The messages that have come down to us are
the ones that have survived millions, in some cases hundreds of
millions, of generations. For every successful message that has
reached the present, countless failures have fallen away like the
chippings on a sculptor's floor. That's what Darwinian natural
selection means. We are the descendants of a tiny elite of successful
ancestors. Our DNA has proved itself successful, because it is
here. Geological time has carved and sculpted our DNA to survive down
to the present.


There are perhaps 30 million distinct species in the world today. So,
there are 30 million distinct ways of making a living, ways of working
to pass DNA on to the future. Some do it in the sea, some on
land. Some up trees, some underground. Some are plants, using solar
panels - we call them leaves - to trap energy. Some eat the plants.
Some eat the herbivores. Some are big carnivores that eat the small
ones. Some live as parasites inside other bodies. Some live in hot
springs. One species of small worms is said to live entirely inside
German beer mats. All these different ways of making a living are just
different tactics for passing on DNA. The differences are in the
details.


The DNA of a camel was once in the sea, but it hasn't been there for a
good 300 million years. It has spent most of recent geological history
in deserts, programming bodies to withstand dust and conserve
water. Like sandbluffs carved into fantastic shapes by the desert
winds, camel DNA has been sculpted by survival in ancient deserts to
yield modern camels.


At every stage of its geological apprenticeship, the DNA of a species
has been honed and whittled, carved and rejigged by selection in a
succession of environments. If only we could read the language, the
DNA of tuna and starfish would have 'sea' written into the text. The
DNA of moles and earthworms would spell 'underground'. Of course all
the DNA would spell many other things as well. Shark and cheetah DNA
would spell 'hunt', as well as separate messages about sea and land.


We can't read these messages yet. Maybe we never shall, for their
language is indirect, as befits a recipe rather than a reversible
blueprint. But it's still true that our DNA is a coded description of
the worlds in which our ancestors survived. We are walking archives of
the African Pliocene, even of Devonian seas, walking repositories of
wisdom out of the old days. You could spend a lifetime reading such
messages and die unsated by the wonder of it.


We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are
never going to die because they are never going to be born. The
potential people who could have been standing in my place but who will
never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara - more,
the atoms in the universe. Certainly those unborn ghosts include
greater poets than Donne, greater scientists than Newton, greater
composers than Beethoven. We know this because the set of possible
people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In
the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I that are privileged to be
here, privileged with eyes to see where we are and brains to wonder why.


There is an appetite for wonder, and isn't true science well qualified to
feed it? It's often said that people 'need' something more in their lives
than just the material world. There is a gap that must be filled. People need
to feel a sense of purpose. Well, not a BAD purpose would be to find out what
is already here, in the material world, before concluding that you need
something more. How much more do you want? Just study what is, and you'll find
that it already is far more uplifting than anything you could imagine needing.


You don't have to be a scientist - you don't have to play the bunsen burner -
in order to understand enough science to overtake your imagined need and fill
that fancied gap. Science needs to be released from the lab into the culture.