Right All Along

It seems inevitable that a new understanding of human origins, and especially the origins of something as fundamental as speech, will inspire new ideas about what it is to be human. At the same time, there will be a group of people who prefer not to be inspired and will insist, “This proves what I’ve been saying all along.” I saw that the New York Times in-house conservative, David Brooks, had just such a reaction the other day. Science, he reported ($here$) , has now proven that

there is a universal human nature; that it has nasty, competitive elements; that we don't understand much about it; and that the conventions and institutions that have evolved to keep us from slitting each other's throats are valuable and are altered at great peril.

Can it really be that all this effort to understand the nature of human origins has merely proven that Edmund Burke and The National Review were right all along? If so, this makes the first time in the history of science that a new understanding has simply confirmed an existing tradition rather than upending it.

Had one of the Times’s liberal columnists tried his hand at claiming scientific support for his political positions he could have written it is now proven that

human nature displays great diversity; that it has admirable, supportive elements; that we have good instincts about it, and that the conventions and institutions that have evolved to put one group over another are limited and can always be improved.

Brooks and his imaginary counterpart both offer half truths, meaning not just that they are false and misleading, but also that they are designed to sell rather than explore or inspire further inquiry. Half truths reassure by doing the manipulative work of a lie while concealing the surprise of a full truth.

Brooks finished his sales pitch by saying:

This is a big pivot in intellectual history. The thinkers most associated with the Tragic Vision are Isaiah Berlin, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Friedrich Hayek and Hobbes. Many of them are conservative.

But science does not “pivot” (turn in place); it transforms. Copernicus can be said to have restored an old Greek idea that the earth moved around the sun but by the time Kepler, Galileo, and Newton had finished polishing that speculation there was a brand new view of the planets, the motions that send them orbiting the sun, and the gravity that orders the motions. Our world view did not pivot; it changed.

Similarly, atoms may be traced to Democritus, but by the time Einstein, Rutherford, Bohr, and Dirac were done testing the idea, Democritus was as outdated as Ptolemy. We had a changed view of what is fundamental to matter and energy.

Science’s power to transform rather than merely pivot between one position and another emerges from its hybrid nature. Science crosses a thinker’s subtle reasoning with a doer’s gross practicality. The thinker, alone in a library, may begin with explanatory insights but the structure of imagination is not the same as the subject matter’s. Soon enough the thinker dreams of things that are not. Meanwhile, the doer takes what is to hand and acts, but because possibilities are never to hand the doer never dreams of things that could be.

Science takes that thinker’s dreaming and tests it with a doer’s observations of what is. If the test does not support the dream, it is time for the thinker to think again. If the test does support the dream, it is time for the doer to find another test. Eventually the doer finds a test that sends the thinker back to searching for an explanation of what the doer found. This process of explaining, testing, thinking, explaining, testing, thinking… is the mystery that has made science a fountain of transformative ideas.

So when a salesman comes along and says that the latest science proves what he has been bringing to your door lo these many years, don’t wonder what magic elixir the wise salesman has to offer, ask what happened to science’s transformative power.

(The last couple of posts ran a little long, so I’ll finish this thought tomorrow.)

Comments

[TLTB]

I recommend reading Chomsky's "New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind" or Jenkins' "Biolinguistics."

Both do a great job of illustrating what Chomsky calls the "methodological dualism" that plagues language (and really all cognitive) research. It seems we are incredibly resistant to the idea that the exact same scientific methods used to investigate the physical world should also be used to investigate humans "from the neck up" (which is all Chomsky and colleagues have tried to do). It really is phenomenal. Even noted biologists like John Maynard Smith who clearly know what science is and how it should work when it comes to studying the rest of the world become guilty of fundamental misunderstandings of science when they start talking about the investigation of language or other mental systems (note how he sided with the ultra-Darwinist position of Pinker and Bloom over Chomsky on lg evolution).