"Engaging the Third Culture"
by Phillip E. Johnson
A Review of
The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution
by John Brockman (Simon & Schuster, 1995)
John Brockman is a Manhattan literary agent who represents scientists
who write books for the general public. The Third Culture is a collection
of taped interviews with 23 scientists, many of whom are clients of Brockman's
agency, about their own scientific theories, about what they think of each
other, and above all about their common ambition to be recognized as the
true intellectual leaders of modern culture.
Among those represented in this volume are biologists Richard Dawkins,
Stephen Jay Gould, George Williams, Brian Goodwin, Lynn Margulis, and Niles
Eldredge. In consciousness studies there is the fabled Marvin Minsky, along
with Roger Schank, Daniel Dennett, Nicholas Humphrey, and the mathematician
Roger Penrose. In the much-hyped field of complexity, we find Murray Gell-Mann,
Stuart Kauffman, Christopher Langton, J. Doyne Farmer, and Daniel Hillis.
Then there are the cosmologists: Martin Rees, Alan Guth, Lee Smolin, and
Paul Davis. Despite the absence of some superstars like Hawking, Crick,
and Weinberg, this is a splendid lineup.
Brockman's title refers to C.P. Snow's famous division between literary
intellectual and scientific intellectuals, groups which are said to inhabit
different mental worlds. Snow predicted the emergence of a "third culture"
of scientists capable of communicating with non-scientific intellectuals,
but Brockman's authors intend to replace the literary intellectuals rather
than to cooperate with them. The opening sentence of this volume read like
an announcement of a hostile takeover: "The third culture consists
of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through
their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional
intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining
who and what we are."
Whether the scientific writers are displacing other kinds of intellectuals
may be debatable, but there is no doubt that they are producing very good
books about science that have more intellectual substance than is suggested
by the term "popularization." Scientists have learned to write
in plain English not only to communicate with the public, but also to make
sense to other scientists across disciplinary boundaries. Sometimes important
new ideas are best discussed outside the specialized research communities
where the main concern is to fill in the details of the current ruling theory.
To pick the most famous example, Darwin's Origin of Species was written
for the public and achieved a popular success. According to Daniel Hillis,
"Many of the scientists who write popular books do so because there
are certain kinds of ideas that have absolutely no way of getting published
within the scientific community."
Brockman's scientists express their basic viewpoints succinctly in the
interview format, and provide candid comments on the value of each other's
ideas. The effect is rather like sitting in on a cross-disciplinary seminar
at the highest level. Reasonably well-informed readers will find these interviews
particularly valuable for understanding the basic difference in outlook
towards evolution between Gould and Dawkins, for example, or between Roger
Penrose and the advocates of "strong AI." Strong AI is the reductionist
doctrine that was most colorfully stated by Marvin Minsky: the human mind
is "a computer made of meat."
The interviews are illuminating, but they do not do very much to support
Brockman's claim that scientists are pushing literary intellectuals aside
and seizing control of the cultural high ground. Brockman's intellectual
agenda is mainly limited to the well-worn naturalistic theme that "complex
systems -- whether organisms, brains, the biosphere, or the universe itself
-- were not constructed by design; all have evolved." We all know that
scientists like to think that way, and that any attempt to introduce God
or the concept of design into a scientific discussion is likely to be repulsed
with the emphatic assertion that "science" is defined by its commitment
to methodological naturalism. That kind of intellectual rule-making does
not tell us whether the scientists have actually demonstrated that
design is absent from nature or whether they have merely assumed it.
Many Christian academics who want to reconcile their theism with contemporary
scientific knowledge rely on making a distinction between "methodological"
and "metaphysical" naturalism. Their point is that scientists
are only dismissing the possibility of a supernatural Designer from science,
and not from reality. A multitude of slogans can be called into service
to support this distinction: the Bible is not a scientific textbook, science
deals with the "how" and leaves the "why, to religion, Christians
must at all costs avoid resorting to an embarrassing "god of the gaps,"
and so on. Together, these slogans enforce a fundamental rule of contemporary
intellectual life: theists who aspire to be tolerated in the academic world
must accept the conclusions of "science" at face value, even if
they suspect that the conclusions are influenced as much by philosophy as
by empirical evidence, and they must do their theologizing from that bedrock
foundation of neutral, unchallengeable "fact."
The distinction between methodological and metaphysical naturalism seems
pointless to the metaphysical naturalists who dominate contemporary science,
however, and no hint of it appears in Brockman's interviews. To mainstream
evolutionary scientists, the validity of naturalism as a worldview has been
confirmed by the success of science in providing all those unchallengeable
facts that even theists dare not dispute. That is why Daniel Dennett can
say that the strong AI position is "a very conservative extrapolation
from what we know in the rest of science." If the unintelligent accumulation
of random mutations by natural selection built all complex biological adaptations,
then this Darwinian mechanism must also have built the human brain -- and
hence the mind and its consciousness. How then could the mind even conceivably
be something human intelligence cannot duplicate?
The key assumption in that chain of reasoning is that natural selection
had to have made the wonders of biology because no scientifically acceptable
alternative has been proposed. But for all the certainty with which the
brain scientists assume the vast creative power of natural selection, it
seems that some of the biologists who actually study evolution have their
doubts. Two of the biologists interviewed by Brockman (Brian Goodwin and
Lynn Margulis) explicitly reject the neo-Darwinian model when it is extended
beyond the modest finch-beak and peppered-moth-color examples where it finds
its only empirical support. Other apparent critics of Darwinism such as
Stuart Kauffman and Stephen Jay Gould seem to reject Darwinian orthodoxy
at some times and accept it at others, but their ambiguities may be deliberate.
According to the irrepressibly candid Daniel Hillis, there is "a strong
school of thought in biology that one should never question Darwin in public,"
because "the religious right are always looking for any argument between
evolutionists as support for their creationist theories." In such a
delicate political situation, we might expect skepticism about orthodox
Darwinism to be expressed with less than perfect clarity.
From a naturalistic standpoint, arguments between evolutionary scientists
about the adequacy of the neo-Darwinian mechanism in no way cast doubt upon
the philosophical claim that the possibility of design in biology has been
conclusively refuted. From the point of view of those of us who want to
know whether the non-existence of a designer is supported by evidence, as
opposed to mere philosophical presupposition, the degree of support for
a specific mechanism for generating adaptive complexity is all-important,
and the evidentiary difficulties of the Darwinian scenario are highly significant.
I don't want to emphasize either the explicit or implicit dissents from
Darwinism, however, because the most revealing remark about Darwinism in
The Third Culture comes from a Darwinist of unimpeachable authority,
George Williams. Williams is much less visible to the public than Dawkins
or Gould, but he is more authoritative in the profession than either. Along
with John Maynard Smith and William Hamilton, he is at the summit of the
inner circle of evolutionary biology, in a realm where Gould is regarded
as a gadfly and Dawkins is something of a junior partner. Williams and Hamilton
earned their preminent status by pioneering the gene-centered Darwinism
that Dawkins popularized with such success in The Selfish Gene.
In short, Williams is a topflight authority and as orthodox a Darwinist
as exists. Although his view of evolution is fundamentally the same as that
of Dawkins, he criticizes Dawkins for describing the "gene selection"
version of Darwinism as if the evolving Replicator were "a physical
entity duplicating itself in a reproductive process" -- i.e., something
like a section of DNA. According to Williams, the crucial object of selection
in evolution is inherently non-material:
Evolutionary biologists have failed to realize that they work
with two more or less incommensurable domains: that of information and that
of matter.... These two domains can never be brought together in any kind
of the sense usually implied by the term "reductionism."... The
gene is a package of information, not an object. The pattern of base pairs
in a DNA molecule specifies the gene. But the DNA molecule is the medium,
it's not the message. Maintaining this distinction between the medium and
the message is absolutely indispensable to clarity of thought about evolution.
Just the fact that fifteen years ago I started using a computer may have
had something to do with my ideas here. The constant process of transferring
information from one physical medium to another and then being able to recover
the same information in the original medium brings home the separability
of information and matter. In biology, when you're talking about things
like genes and genotypes and gene pools, you're talking about information,
not physical objective reality.
Perhaps evolutionary biologists have avoided noticing that information
and matter are fundamentally different things because that insight is fatal
to the whole reductionist project in biology. If the message is truly not
reducible to the medium, then trying to explain the creation of the information
by a materialistic theory is simply a category mistake. One might as well
try to explain the origin of a literary work by invoking the chemical laws
that govern the combining of ink and paper, and then proposing speculative
hypotheses about how those laws (with a boost from chance but without intelligence)
might have generated meaningful sentences.
Neo-Darwinism is a theory of small-scale variation, not a theory of
information creation. When Darwinists pay any attention to the information
problem, they are satisfied to announce that new genetic information emerges
mysteriously from a black box labelled "mutation." This fundamental
gap in the theory seems to be tacitly recognized among scientists, which
is why there is so much interest in looking for new physical laws that might
explain where the information comes from. But if a new kind of theory is
needed, why are we so fervently urged to believe in the old one?
When members of a specialized research community aspire to be the interpreters
of reality for everybody, and announce their authority to redefine "who
and what we are," they invite other intellectuals to examine their
assumptions. Perhaps the heuristic assumptions that the researchers have
made for specific purposes are not suitable for other purposes, and lead
to error when carried too far. Doctrines which nobody in the scientific
community dares to challenge may come under critical scrutiny from outsiders
who do not have the professional mindset. I wonder if the ambitious scientific
intellectuals of the third culture are prepared for that to happen.
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