One of my favorite things to do is buy books from a seller of overstocked books. I look for titles I need but then I buy other as they ship for one price no matter the number of books in the lot!
Johnjoe McFadden’s Life is Simple arrived on my “to read” pile in that way, and I am sure glad it did. The book described William Occam’s life and the ways the razor named for him has influenced science. It is a wonderful idea for a book, and the author gave it attention in readable text.
I figured it was going to be a wonderful book, but probably would join the others on my shelf with little attention again until I downsize my library again. But then I found the section focusing on human rights. McFadden makes a very reasonable assertion when he begins it, “Although human rights are not a topic usually discussed in books about science….” I can’t argue with that; save some essays written by scientists, I would agree that few books about science do mention human rights. He finished the sentence with “… they are, I believe, as necessary for scientific progress as experimental methods or mathematics.”
McFadden had my attention.
He finishes the paragraph with these sentences later on page 68:
For science to be transformative, it needs a wider base and a kind of scientific democracy in which wealth and power play little or no role in the competition between ideas. This can only happen in societies that provide each individual with the same fundamental rights, including, of course, the right to be wrong.
Science is as much about ideas as it is about observation. Paradigms shift not because of observation, but because a transformative idea enters a scientist’s mind and a theory closer to truth is created. This does not happen when wealth or power decides what is true. This does not happen if scientists are afraid to be wrong.
In the same way that we can’t argue farms are not necessary because we can just go to the supermarket, we cannot transform science; thus, become healthy, well-fed, and breathing clean air and drinking clean water without the transformative ideas (even the wrong ones) that arise from science.
Later in the book, McFadden is describing heat, especially the theory that phlogiston which was thought to be involved in some way is burning. One might ask “how was phlogiston involved with burning?” as my sentence is vague. My vagueness captures the idea of phlogiston and McFadden claims that bad science “demonstat[es] how easy is to fit any amount of data or observation to a completely wrong model of the world, so long as you have sufficient ingenuity and imagination at your disposal (191).”
This describes one characteristic of wrong ideas, and it is one we see frequently, so must become adept at recognizing it, so we can avoid it. When an idea becomes more complex to it to better accommodate ideas that challenge it, then we can be sure it isn’t science. Or more accurately, it isn’t being treated scientifically by those who advocate for it. Good science recognizes when its ideas are wrong; bad science just adds new details to the theory in what are called “peacock theories.”
I was a biology major and undergraduate student, and I was fortunate to be a student where undergraduate students did research. As an education student in graduate school, I connected some with post-modernism and believed that culture matters in what we believe. I still do. Especially when it comes to education, what we believe about making folks “smart” depends on what they mean by “smart” and some types of “smart” are negatively associated with others. In these ways, education is relative to you culture.
As a biologist, I studied life with mathematics; I counted what I was interested in seeing and I performed statistics to see if differences were real. Science is a product of human culture and language, but it is also grounded in mathematics. McFadden makes the point about they Pythagorean hypothesis (which was known long before Pythagoras) that is “known around the world irrespective of language or culture. It is not relative to anything.”
Science is under siege and it as been for several decades. I expect it is dangerous for those who challenge it for the reasons I summarize from Life is Simple.
- Wealth and power don’t matter.
- Ideas are discarded when they don’t matter.
- Your perspective doesn’t matter.
Some find science distressing for these reasons. I find it invigorating.
Reference:
McFadden, J. (2021). Life is simple: How Occam’s razor set science free and shares the universe. Basic Books.