The Faber Book of Science (3 page)

The last few paragraphs may prompt readers to ask why they should bother to know about science if it cannot help to resolve moral
or religious questions. The best answer is that science is, simply, what is known, and the only alternative to it is ignorance. Coleridge (whatever his opinion of Sir Isaac Newton’s soul) saw this clearly:

As science has grown, so, inevitably, has the ignorance of those who do not know about it. Within the mind of anyone educated exclusively in artistic and literary disciplines, the area of darkness has spread enormously during the later twentieth century, blotting out most of modern knowledge. A new species of educated but benighted being has come into existence – a creature unprecedented in the history of learning, where education has usually aimed to eradicate ignorance. The most highly gifted members of this new species have generally been the most forthright in regretting their deprivation. ‘Exclusion from the mode of thought which is habitually said to be the characteristic achievement of the modern age’ is, lamented the distinguished American literary critic Lionel Trilling, ‘bound to be experienced as a wound to our intellectual self-esteem.’

More recently, however, ignorance of science has acquired a degree of political correctness. The Green movement, blaming science for global pollution, has contributed to this. So has feminism, which has demonized science as the embodiment of the male will-to-power. Even supposing these attacks were justified, however, they would not constitute reasons for relinquishing science, rather the reverse. Countering the pollution that political misdirection of science has caused can only be achieved by scientific means. Even at its most basic level, the monitoring, protection and conservation of
endangered
plant and animal species is inevitably a scientific endeavour. Nor does the feminist complaint that science is dominated by male aims and attitudes justify the neglect or rejection of science by women. On the contrary, it makes urgently desirable the increased involvement of women in scientific education and research. This is the view put forward by one of the most cogent of the feminist critics, Evelyn Fox Keller, in her book
Reflections
on
Gender
and
Science
(1984). Herself a mathematical biophysicist, and a biographer of the Nobel prizewinning geneticist Barbara McClintock, Keller sees
scientific knowledge as ideally ‘a universal goal’, rather than the expression of destructively masculine drives.

A text that has been utilized to reinforce feminist and other disparagements of science is Thomas S. Kuhn’s
The
Structure
of
Scientific
Revolutions
(1962). This popularized the idea that scientists are not really as rational as they suppose, but follow cultural trends, shifting from one paradigm to another for reasons that have nothing to do with objective truth. A criticism of Kuhn’s book often voiced by scientists is that in describing how beliefs came to be held it leaves out of account the question of their truth or falsehood.

The effect of these various devices for discrediting science has been to allow ignorance to appear not merely excusable but righteous. Teachers at British universities will know that most arts students happily forget what little science they learnt in their schooldays. Even if you are prepared for this, however, the extent of their ignorance can come as a shock. Recently, in an Oxford literature seminar, I cited John Donne’s lines, where Donne observes that no one at the time he was writing (1612) knew how blood gets from one ventricle of the heart to the other. I asked the class how, in fact, it does. There were about thirty students present, all in their last year of study, all outstandingly intelligent, and none of them knew. One young man ventured haltingly that it might be ‘by osmosis’. That the blood circulated round their bodies, they seemed unaware.

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. On this issue, Sir Peter Medawar is worth quoting, since he is well qualified to judge, and he disagrees. Commenting on the career of James Watson, the young American who became world famous in 1953 when, with Crick, Wilkins and Franklin, he discovered the molecular structure of DNA, Medawar says:

Medawar’s remarks caused a considerable rumpus, especially his claim that scientists had something to be clever about whereas arts students had not. Surely, he was asked, he did not intend to imply that Shakespeare, Tolstoy, etc. were not proper subjects for cleverness? Less attention was paid to his claim that science could bring happiness, and not just to geniuses but to people of ordinary ability. Yet that was surely the vital part of his message. If young people are to be wooed back to science, it will not be done by telling them that if they continue to spurn it, Britain will face economic decline (true as that may be). But if scientists demonstrate by their writing that Medawar’s promises of pleasure and self-fulfilment are true, they will not lack recruits.

The new generation of popular science-writers, whose work I have drawn on in this anthology, are the advance guard of that campaign. If readers ask, as they well might, what I, a professor of literature, think I am up to editing a science anthology, my answer is that I have done it for pleasure, self-fulfilment and (in Coleridge’s words) ‘the
gratification
of knowing’.

A few hours before his death, this old man told me that he had lived a hundred years and that he felt no physical pain, only weakness; and thus, seated on a bed in the hospital of Santa Maria Novella [in Florence], without any movement or symptom of distress, he gently passed from life into death. I carried out the autopsy to determine the cause of such a calm death and discovered that it was the result of weakness produced by insufficiency of blood and of the artery supplying the heart and other lower members, which I found to be all withered, shrunken and desiccated. The other postmortem was on a child of two years, and here I discovered the case to be exactly opposite to that of the old man.

Why are the bones of great fishes, and oysters and corals and various other shells and sea-snails, found on the high tops of mountains that border the sea, in the same way in which they are found in the depths of the sea? In the mountains of Parma and Piacenza, multitudes of shells and corals filled with worm-holes may be seen still adhering to the rocks, and when I was making the great horse at Milan a large sack of those which had been found in these parts was brought to my workshop by some peasants. The red stone of the mountains of Verona is found with shells all intermingled, which have become part of this stone. And if you should say that these shells have been and still constantly are being created in such places as these by the nature of the
locality or by potency of the heavens in these spots, such an opinion cannot exist in brains possessed of any extensive powers of reasoning. Because the years of their growth are numbered upon the outer coverings of their shells; and both small and large ones may be seen; and these would not have grown without feeding, or fed without movement, and here [embedded in rock] they would not have been able to move… The peaks of the Apennines once stood up in a sea, in the form of islands surrounded by salt water, and above the plains of Italy where flocks of birds are flying today, fishes were once moving in large shoals.

The eyes of all animals have pupils which have power to increase or diminish of their own accord, according to the greater or lesser light of the sun or other luminary. In birds, however, the difference is greater, and especially with nocturnal birds of the owl species, such as the long-eared, the white and the brown owls; for with these the pupil increases until it almost covers the whole eye, or diminishes to the size of a grain of millet, preserving all the time its round shape. In the horned owl, which is the largest nocturnal bird, the power of vision is so much increased that even in the faintest glimmer of night, which we call darkness, it can see more distinctly than we in the radiance of noon.

A bird is an instrument working according to a mathematical law, which instrument it is within the capacity of man to reproduce, with all its movements. A bird maintains itself in the air by imperceptible balancing, when near to the mountains or lofty ocean crags. It does this by means of the curves of the winds, which as they strike against these projections, being forced to preserve their first impetus, bend their straight course towards the sky, with divers revolutions, at the beginning of which the birds come to a stop, with their wings open, receiving underneath themselves the continual buffetings of the reflex courses of the winds.

It has dealings with human intelligence and sometimes displays an intelligence of its own; where a man may desire it to be stimulated it remains obstinate and follows its own course; and sometimes it moves on its own without permission or any thought by its owner. Whether one is awake or asleep, it does what it pleases; often the man is asleep and it is awake; often the man is awake and it is asleep; or the man would like it to be in action but it refuses; often it desires action and the man forbids it. That is why it seems that this creature often has a life and intelligence separate from that of the man, and it seems that man is wrong to be ashamed of giving it a name or showing it; that which he seeks to cover and hide he ought to expose solemnly like a priest at mass.