I shall argue that the ideas of the educated lay public on the nature of
scientific inquiry and the intellectual character of those who carry it out are in a state of dignified, yet utter, confusion. Most of these misconceptions are harmless enough, but some are mischievous, and all help to estrange the sciences from the humanities and the so-called 'pure' sciences from the applied.
Thus spake Sir Peter Medawar OM FRS, probably the most lucid and wide-ranging living writer on science and related matters. He is also one of the greatest modern biologists and his discovery of acquired immunological tolerance laid the foundations for all the transplants of kidneys, hearts, lungs and bone marrow that are virtually routine procedures nowadays. This work earned his team the 1960 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine, shared with the recently deceased Australian Macfarlane Burnet. New Scientist (April 12, 1984) featured a lengthy profile of Medawar's life and career which makes fascinating reading alongside Pluto's Republic (OUP 1982) a 350 page omnibus of his best popular writing.
This jewel in the crown of the intellectual establishment might have become a Lebanese peasant if not for the foresight of his grandparents. His father was a Maronite Christian, born in a village north of Beirut and his parents wanted their son to have an English education so he was packed off to London. He boarded with an English family and married the daughter of the
house, "a very large, very intelligent, very funny woman". Sir Peter Medawar stands over the two-meter mark and likes a joke. Asked by a customs official in New York whether he planned to overturn the United States constitution, Medawar replied that he did not intend to do so and could only hope that he would not do it by accident.
He was born in Rio de Janeiro and became properly English the hard way, as a boarder at Marlborough College, a great public (private) school. He recalled that the children were "a disagreeable, hopeless lot of people. I really can say of my public school, I think I was uniformly unhappy from beginning to end, surrounded by pedants and pederasts". Two good things came out of this unpromising environment; he picked up a love of cricket and he had the good
fortune to learn biology from a former pupil of J. Z. Young, a leading zoologist at Oxford. Encouraged by this teacher he followed Young to Magdalen College where he in due course he became a fellow and spent from 1932 to 1947, "in Oxford, man and boy, for 15 years".
Alarmingly clever even as an undergraduate, he sometimes knew too much for his own good. One of his zoology classmates was among the very few co-eds in Oxford at that time. She approached him in the library to ask the meaning of 'heuristic' (word had got around that he knew something about philosophy). He thoughtlessly provided the answer instead of obtaining vital information (name and phone number) and proceeding from there. Fortunately, the future Lady Jean Medawar was made of the right stuff; she forgot the answer and went back to ask again. Clearly a fast learner, young Medawar offered to provide some lessons on philosophy, which are probably continuing to this day. Resistance from Jean Taylor's family had to be overcome before the nuptials; they were not impressed by his prospects and they darkly warned her "Eastern people age very early".
The Scientist
Robert Temple's New Scientist article charts Medawar's career as a succession of glittering prizes, constantly associated with brilliant co-workers, the best laboratories and important problems. As a young graduate he went with Jean to work in Howard Florey's laboratory, just as penicillin was burgeoning. This was the kind of environment that could shape a career and clearly it did, aided of course by Medawar's own prodigious capacities and enthusiasm. At the start of the war he was called up by the recruiting board but he was graded D because he had flat feet and he was too tall to fit into an aeroplane or a tank. He continued with teaching and biomedical research, including some crucial work on nerve regeneration and burns, leading to his interest in grafting and the problems of tissue incompatibility and immunological tolerance which eventually led to the Nobel Prize.
In 1947 he took a chair in zoology at Birmingham. Solly (later Lord) Zuckerman assisted in this move as a result of an association formed at Oxford. As Medawar recalls "He is the most delightful drinking companion in the Western world. His first thought on getting to Birmingham was to make the place more agreeable to live in, and this meant attracting his own pals and populating Birmingham with his drinking companions". For his part, Medawar provided a lectureship for one of his brightest pupils, Rupert "Bill" Billingham who became his closest long-term collaborator. When he moved to University College, London, he took Billingham and also Leslie Brent, a superb experimentalist who developed a technique to inject newborn mice intravenously.
He was my nicest pupil, and he was determined to work with me. And so we took him on. His PhD task was to discover immunological tolerance and win me the Nobel Prize for Medicine. And he did (with Billingham). We worked together in complete harmony and covered ground at a huge rate. We all got on well and we were strongly synergistic: the three of us as a team did much better than the sum of the three of us working singly.
All three shared the Nobel Prize with Macfarlane Burnett who had predicted the discoveries that they made.
In his capacity as an advisor to the Oxford University Press, Medawar helped the infant science of ethology (animal behaviour) on its way by persuading the press to publish Niko Tinbergen's first major book The Study of Instinct (1951). He also put a huge effort into editing the text (unknown to Tinbergen at the time) though he insists that this input be confined to the English expression. Later he successfully urged the Nuffield Foundation to provide funds for Tinbergen to continue his work, eventually resulting in his Nobel Prize in 1973.
The Author
Parallel with the brilliant research career is another, the life of the humanist and humanitarian, the rounded scholar (aptly enough, Medawar in Arabic means 'to make round'. It may even mean 'little round fat man' but this is less appropriate). This side of Medawar responded with enthusiasm to Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies and a firm friendship resulted from a meeting of the two men in 1946. Years later he wrote that he was envious of people who had not yet read The Open Society because they had such a treat in store when they did get around to reading the two volumes (800 pages including 200 pages of notes in smaller print).
This second career draws heavily on the first but far transcends it in scope and general interest. He began modestly with a collection of essays, The Uniqueness of the Individual (1957) which was greeted "with total silence" due to the lack of interest by literary intellectuals in books by scientists or about science. In contrast, The Future of Man, the Reith Lectures for 1959, was very favourably received. It was followed by The Art of the Soluble (1967) including a memorable demolition of Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man ("it is the style, which creates the illusion of content"). Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought (1969) was based on a series of lectures to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. "They explained Popperism as simply as I knew how - part of my indebtedness to Karl".
This was a heavy load of extra-curricular work for a man fully committed to an exacting career at the frontiers of biology, not to mention a growing family of four young Medawars. The strain told in 1969 when he collapsed with a serious stroke while delivering an oration at Exeter. He recovered to continue work, despite a lasting partial paralysis. For all of his criticism of the anti-rationalism of the Romantic movement he emulated one of Blake's precepts "Nor shall my pen sleep in my hand..." though occasionally in earlier days the hand held a cricket ball. He turned out regularly with a village green team of mendicant musicians and enjoyed some success as a slowbowler. The cover of Pluto's Republic shows him demonstrating the grip he used to deliver his flighted, bouncing off-spinners.
Advice to a Young Scientist appeared in 1979. With his wife he co-authored The Life Sciences (1977) and Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Zoology (1984). Most recently he wrote The Limits to Science (1985), explaining why it is unreasonable to expect science to provide answers to certain types of questions such as "How will everything end?" and "What are
we all here for?".
Pluto's Republic, out in paperback in 1984, is a particularly welcome addition, containing the whole of The Art of the Soluble and many of the essays in the collection The Hope of Progress, both currently out of print. It also contains the important essays on induction and intuition in scientific thought, several essays not previously collected in book form and some new pieces. The contents range far and wide, including some vigorous polemics with Arthur Koestler following Medawar's review of The Act of Creation, comments on some recent books on the state of the art in cancer research and an essay on 'type A' behaviour and heart disease.
Readers should be warned that Medawar's writing might give offence to some people. He is formidable in polemics and does not hesitate to give the thumbs down signal to ideas that do not stand up to criticism. His exchange with Koestler is an example and one gains the impression that he would rather have a (verbal) fight than a free lunch. This can give the appearance of intolerance and high-handedness but the more likely explanation is his
determination to be understood. He has castigated the line of thought, which runs "Profound writing is hard to understand, this writing is hard to understand, therefore this writing is profound". He traces the origin of this unfortunate error to Emmanuel Kant who worked in great haste (in fear of death) and wrote important works without achieving a high level of clarity.
Some of Medawar's essays dealing with the nature of science will be particularly useful when the debate on Australian education gets past the issues of funding and class sizes to consider aims and methods. Medawar's thoughts on science are essentially the ideas of Karl Popper, made concrete by a life spent on the shop floor, unconfused by the smokescreens created by
professional philosophers of science who are almost universally justificationists in the sense described in "Agreeing to Disagree" (Monthly Review, October '85). They are concerned with science as a body of confirmed, verified, warranted or in some sense justified beliefs and
consequently they are quite unable to grasp the fertility of a theory which explains how knowledge grows without ever being positively justified.
Philosophy of Science
In "Two conceptions of science", a Henry Tizard Memorial lecture, Medawar tried to clarify the "state of dignified but utter confusion" which afflicts most people regarding the nature of science and scientists. It is commonly accepted that there is something about science which sets it apart and creates some kind of divide from the arts and humanities This may result in
a running battle between the 'two cultures' but more often there is no communication at all. At the other extreme, some disciplines make desperate and misguided efforts to bring their methods into line with some idea of scientific method.
Medawar criticises two misconceptions of scientific thought, two contrasting theories which are virtually polar opposites, on the one hand the 'romantic' or 'poetic/intuitive' school of thought, on the other the 'rational' or analytical' model. The romantic view emphasizes the unpredictable and inspirational nature of creativity, the leap of imagination which results in a novel solution or a dramatic advance in understanding, the "Eureka" or "Ah-Hah" reaction described by Arthur Koestler in The Act of Creation. The contrasting analytical view is dominant in the official portrait of science. It places its emphasis on observation (especially precise and accurate
observation), on the accumulation of data and the use of facts to provide warrants for the probability, soundness or degree of justification of theories.
The official view of science leans heavily on the assumption that there is a method or process of induction, whereby scientific knowledge can grow, starting with the unbiased observation of the regularities which exist in the world around us. "Science advances in a definite pattern. First and foremost scientists must make observations. These observations must be careful and accurate; and the results of more and more observations accumulate...". All secondary students in NSW used to be told that in the massive Messel textbook. It is painfully true that observations accumulate but it does not follow that knowledge is advanced automatically by this process and the notion that we do learn by the accumulation of data is both false and dangerous. It is logically and psychologically impossible to make any sort of observation without reference to some theory and apart from being impossible, attempts to achieve this 'ideal' procedure, this 'advance in a definite pattern' call for the repression of the imaginative and
critical faculties so that the scientist is reduced to the level of a recording machine (or one of Kuhn's normal scientists).
As Medawar explains in numerous essays, Popper's theory of science emphasises the complementary roles of tradition, information and imaginative criticism in the growth of knowledge, thus resolving the tensions and antagonisms which flow from adherence to partial and narrow views of science. The hypothetico-deductive scheme, foreshadowed by Whewell, Jevons and Pierce in the nineteenth century, completed by Popper in the twentieth, is aptly described by Medawar as the most important methodological discovery of modern thought. For this reason he has no doubt that Popper provides the most useful and true account of scientific growth that is currently available, an account which he spelled out in a series of lectures, published as a book titled Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought. These provide an introduction to the scandal of the modern philosophy of science where an informal but powerful demarcation agreement ensures that scientists take no notice of the philosophy of science and people in the philosophy of science used to take little interest in science.
Medawar notes that a scientist asked to comment on scientific method "will adopt an expression that is at once solemn and shifty-eyed: solemn, because he feels that he ought to declare an opinion; shifty-eyed, because he is trying to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare". Those who have thought about these things enough to have an opinion that is worthy of interest are likely to be Popperian even they have never directly encountered his books. Popper's ideas are more popular and better understood among working scientists than they are among professional philosophers because the latter are mostly concerned with justification of beliefs rather than the growth of knowledge.
People who concern themselves with justification rather than growth often cannot appreciate the nature and importance of open or unsolved problems in science, that is, problems which signal that the existing state of knowledge is incomplete or inadequate. This puts them in a difficult position when, for example, Creationists or "creation scientists" as they like to be called, exploit open problems to discredit the theory of evolution in favour of some much less likely scenario. The creationists claim that unsolved problems in the detailed mechanism of evolution indicate the failure of biological science and maybe the whole of science itself.
Open problems as the growing points of science
But open problems are not the shame of science; they are its growing points. If they do not exist they have to be created by criticism and by experimental tests which can be regarded as a special kind of criticism. The Popper/Medawar theory of knowledge can be clarified if we get rid of the customary architectural image of knowledge, which makes much of the need for firm foundations. The edifice of science is often depicted as a building that needs strong foundations otherwise the chains of inference and reasoning that proceed from our first principles will fall down, like a house built on sand. "Give us rocklike foundations so that we may build strongly to withstand the storm and tempest of disbelief".
The more appropriate image of scientific knowledge is that of a hot-air balloon, tethered to the earth with mooring lines. The "earth" is the empirical or observational base. These "foundations" do not hold the balloon up; they prevent it from floating away as it is prone to do if people lose
interest in experimental tests and practical applications. After Hegel or thereabouts it became fashionable in some circles for metaphysicians to cut the ropes and let the balloon drift where it would. Empiricists in the tradition of David Hume became obsessed with the need to avoid this
situation and so they tried to banish all talk of metaphysics from polite society (except talk about getting rid of it). This created serious problems in the positivist (anti-metaphysical) philosophy of science because, as R G Collingwood and others pointed out, there is no way to avoid making use of many untestable propositions along with the testable theories of science.
Those who do not have the capacity to detect metaphysical propositions and subject them to criticism are the slaves to whatever form of metaphysics they have unconsciously assimilated.
That is the reason for the importance of Popper's theory of metaphysical research programs, recently unveiled in the third volume of The Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery. This theory works like a microscope, bringing into view or into sharp focus ideas that were previously invisible or indistinct so that they can be subjected to criticism if they appear to be causing problems. Foundationists or justificationists of the empirical kind want to bring the balloon to earth by filling it with the ballast of factual verification but this will not have the desired effect and it certainly will not advance the frontiers of knowledge. Progress usually calls for new ideas rather than additional information; sustaining the metaphor, the balloon needs to be driven higher by the "hot air" of conjecture and speculative thought, controlled but not stifled by
imaginative criticism and tests.
The "accumulation of facts" school has a lot to answer for, including over-specialisation and narrowing of interest among scientists, the mythology of the "two cultures" of science versus the humanities, and the alienation of several generations of Romantic poets from science and
rationality. No doubt over-specialisation is rife but it does not have to be seen as the inevitable situation in modern science, it can be regarded as a result of laziness, bad teaching and the defective "foundational" theory of knowledge.
One of the problems worldwide is the fact that tertiary education has expanded faster than the tradition of liberal scholarship and critical inquiry. People once complained that the expansion of primary education mainly served to lower the height of graffiti daubed on walls; one might say
that the growth of tertiary education has made the graffiti more radical. Countless thousands of students have emerged from the colleges with some information and paper credentials but little insight into architecture of the house of intellect and scant understanding of the housekeeping that is required to keep it in order. Not to mention the labour that is required to
extend it. Of course the outlook is not uniformly bleak and as long as writers like Medawar are on the job there is always the hope of progress.
Improving the world
Medawar has forthright views on the use of technology to improve the world. He also considers that the traditional division of "pure" and "applied" science is unhelpful, probably deriving from the same perverse cast of mind that created the "romantic versus rational" dichotomy between imaginative and critical thinking, allied with the old Anglo-Saxon class distinction between science (for amateur "gentlemen") and technology (for grubby professional "players"). The traditional view, preserved jealously by pure scientists, is that researchers of high calibre should be allowed to follow their interests wherever they will, either in the belief that this is what the universities and the life of the mind are all about, or in the confident expectation that eventually fundamental work will pay off at the practical level. Medawar concedes
This procedure works; that is, it works sometimes, and it may be the best we can do, but might not the converse approach be equally effective, given equal talent? That is, to start with a concrete problem, but then to allow the research to open out in the direction of greater generality...I can see no reason why this approach if it were to be attempted by persons of the same ability, should not work just as well as its more conventional
counterpart. Research done in this style is always in focus, and those who carry it out, if temporarily baffled, can always retreat from the general into the particular.
It is increasingly accepted that science should have some strategic role to play in education but misconceived ideas about science have made it hard to work out what that role might be. A vacuum is waiting to be filled in the theory and practice of education, and Medawar's book should help to fill it. The "piling up the data" theory has to be put in its place because it
promotes over specialisation, as though the person who spends the most time digging the most narrow trench will get further in the field. At the same time outsiders are discouraged from trying to find out what the scientists are up to, for how can they ever find the time to get into the trenches and master the accumulated store of inforrmation?
The alternative "hot air balloon" view of science may be more helpful and realistic. Rival theories do not depend on the sheer weight of evidence (most of the evidence can be used to support opposing theories), nor do they gain credibility by longevity alone. They need to compete for survival under critical scrutiny and tests. Five types of test can be applied: the test of
evidence, the test of internal consistency, the test of consistency with other well-tested theories, the check on the problem (does the theory actually solve the problem, or just skirt around it) and the check of metaphysics (the least understood at this stage). With this view of
knowledge people like Leonard Woolf could claim that he could become an expert in any field with three months of concentrated study (between running the Hogarth Press, writing Fabian tracts and socialising in Bloomsbury).
More realistically we might follow the advice of Jacques Barzun in The House of Intellect.
With a cautious confidence and sufficient intellectual training, it is possible to master the literature of a subject and gain a proper understanding of it: specifically, an understanding of the accepted truths, the disputed problems, the rival schools and the methods now in favor. This will not enable one to add to what is known, but it will give possession of all that the discipline has to offer the world.
There is much talk of the modern explosion of knowledge. This is mostly an explosion of publications, some of which advance our knowledge but only by a very small amount. Many do not even do as much as that. The existence of high quality science reporting in popular magazines (New Scientist etc) nullifies the despairing belief that the frontiers of science are receding ever further from view. These publications make Barzun's aim (if not Woolf's) entirely feasible for anyone who wants to keep informed of the main lines of scientific advance; to keep track of the balloons which float in the air, tugging at their mooring lines, while on board the balloons the infernal Popperian dialectic of conjecture and refutation rages, day and night.
Originally printed in a slightly different form in the Melbourne Age Monthly Review, July, 1989
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