“The Universe—how big are you?”

Originally, this video was set to one of the electronic tunes from A Clockwork Orange. It was fantastic. Sadly, the audio has been disabled due to copyright reasons…but put on some slow, dramatic music in a minor key and watch the video anyway.

Anti-science, or: Jurassic Park—by or about dinosaurs?

Although I’m currently reading Don Quixote, I needed a book this weekend that was physically small enough to fit in my coat pocket, so I have re-read Crichton’s Jurassic Park. Much more involved in scientific detail and discussion than the movie, I always enjoy reading it: It has people being eaten by dinosaurs and it’s thought-provoking; what’s not to love?

There is another side to it, however. To a much greater degree than the movie, partly in its description of the book’s scientists like Dr. Wu, and partly in the commentary by Ian Malcolm, it acts as what I can most charitably describe as a ‘cautionary tale’. Less charitably, it comes off as anti-scientific: Dr. Malcolm explicitly describes science as an outdated and doomed mode of thinking, and the turn of the story gives the impression that his is the message that Chrichton wanted to deliver¹. (From what I have heard of some of his other books, that’s not uncharacteristic of Crichton’s thinking and writing.) As a great fan of reason and scientific thinking, I don’t much like that message, but on the other hand (and for the same reason), it would be irresponsible of me not to at least think about it.

The gist of the story is of course extremely simple: Scientists attempt to play god, things go terribly wrong, they are terribly surprised, and bad things happen. In such brief terms I can hardly fault it. Scientists are just people, after all, with varying motivations; and they work for people who also have varying motivations. Sometimes things go very wrong, and with the power of what Crichton has Dr. Malcom refer to as inherited power, the consequences can today be very far-reaching indeed. But I take exception to this message on two points.

One is that the message presented is that scientific thinking leads to disaster, but the message delivered by the actual plot of the book is that science in the hands of irresponsible con men (like Hammond) and immoral businessmen leads to disaster. That’s fair enough and a point both more nuanced and more true: Science has given us great power for good or for evil, and we must wield it responsibly—but science itself, and scientific inquiry and knowledge, is no more moral or immoral than any other tool. A hammer can save lives in helping to build shelter, or it can be wielded as a lethal weapon, but the hammer itself is neither good nor evil: It’s just a tool. Just like a hammer, science has no inherent morality, and does not make claims to it. Science is a tool for finding the truth about reality—ultimately, what the scientific method is, is an astonishingly wonderful way of arriving at accurate claims of the form If X, then Y. I don’t mean to say that it has no applicability to moral decisions. On the contrary, it is essential, in that we cannot make good moral decisions unless we attempt to predict the consequences of our actions. But ultimately, science tells us what’s likely to happen given certain events and conditions. It doesn’t tell us what should happen. We always have to establish some arbitrary, subjective ground case, a premise for our reasoning—Human happiness is good, It is better to be truthful than to lie, All people are morally equal unless they forfeit that standing by working evil. This is not novel, and no scientist or scientifically inclined person I know has to my knowledge claimed otherwise. This is why we claim to be things like humanists, which does establish a moral basis.

My second objection is that while Crichton appears to rail against science as an endeavour, but the novel serves as a critique against bad science, science executed naïvely. This is of course a fair point, too, but again the message preached and the message delivered don’t seem to be the same. When Dr. Malcolm vehemently insists that the Jurassic Park endeavour is doomed to failure due to the unpredictability inherent in biological systems and predicted by chaos theory, he is leaning on scientific findings (referring, though not by name, to Edward Lorenz’s discovery in attempted weather prediction). But the failing to consider this is not an inherent problem of scientific thinking at all; it’s a failure to use scientific thinking more sophisticated than a Newtonic clockwork universe². We know about chaos theory; we know about intractable problems; we certainly know about error bars.

As this was percolating in the back of my mind, I came across an interesting post by Erin with an even more interesting comment to follow: In brief, pointing out the complexity and difficulty of addressing so apparently simple a question as What is the proportion of land (times their potential yield) suitable for growing crops, as compared to land suitable only for raising animals? —Which I asked, ignorant of the ill-posed nature of the question itself, and how many variables I had failed to control just in asking a question. Here’s a real-world example of a question with every implication of the unpredictability of nature, not to mention ecological consequences (how humanity does agriculture is clearly very significant). (It comes from an unsurprising source: Erin seems to have a knack for raising questions that strike me as good, interesting, and challenging without ever wandering into wingnut territory. It is a valuable knack to have.)

But this unpredictability, the difficulty in even asking the right questions, the limitations of our ability to predict the behaviour of chaotic systems when we cannot measure the variables sufficiently closely or often—none of this means that science is therefore any worse a mode of thinking; on the contrary, science done right comes with error bars and attempts to find its own limitations; a hunger for the unanswered questions. A scientist is never someone who thinks that everything worth knowing is already known—if it were, every scientist on Earth would be out of a job. A scientist is someone who wants to identify areas of ignorance, try to ask the right questions, and find the answers.

And—as always when someone criticises science as a mode of thinking—what else should we rely on? It is true that science today can’t tell us what will happen if we clone dinosaurs, or if we adopt this or that method of agriculture, on a large scale and in the long run—but no other form of knowledge acquisition can even begin to help us, and we cannot go back. (Anyone who thinks that only modern, large-scale agriculture has the potential to harm our environment needs to read Jared Diamond and stop blindly romanticising the past.) Don’t criticise the tool: It is the best, the only tool we have for addressing those issues to which it is applicable. If you wish to leverage criticism, criticise those who use the tool wrongly, who approach it with the wrong presuppositions or premises, who apply it naïvely.

The notion that science as a way of thinking is doomed and a failure strikes me as nothing less than ridiculous and absurd. We don’t need a replacement for it, and whether we want or no, it is too late to go back now. What we may need is a value system and a socio-cultural framework better able to handle it.

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¹ I will continue to treat this as if the character of Dr. Malcolm expresses Crichton’s opinions. I don’t claim to know for sure whether he does. At any rate, this is the message that was communicated to me, whether intended or not, and it is the message I want to address.

² Within the context of the novel, it’s also the result of an awful approach to security. Any computer programmer worth his salt knows that you should never assume that things go wrong, and look for specific, predicted problems; rather, you should assume that things will go wrong, and compare input to specific, predicted, correct values or formats. To name a detail, if the programmers in the novel hadn’t made the very foolish decision of assuming that the number of animals found would ever exceed a given number and stop counting at that point, the unexpected breeding would have been found out.