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Unit 8 DEBATING THE UNKNOWABLE
The
greatest
of
all
the
accomplishment
of
twentieth-century
science
has
been
the
discovery of human ignorance. We live,
as never before, in puzzlement about nature, the
universe, and ourselves most of all. It
is a new experience for the species. A century
ago,
after the turbulence caused by
Darwin and Wallace had subsided and the central
idea of
natural
selection
had
been
grasped
and
accepted,
we
thought
we
knew
everything
essential about
evolution. In the eighteenth century there were no
huge puzzles; human
reason was all you
needed in order to figure out the universe. And
for most of the earlier
centuries,
the
Church
provided
both
the
questions
and
the
answers,
neatly
packaged.
Now,
for
the
first
time
in
human
history,
we
are
catching
glimpses
of
our
incomprehension. We can still make up
stories to explain the world, as we always have,
but
now
the
stories
have
to
be
confirmed
and
reconfirmed
by
experiment.
This
is
the
scientific
method, and once started on this line we cannot
turn back. We are obliged to
grow up in
skepticism, requiring proofs for every assertion
about nature, and there is no
way out
except to move ahead and plug away, hoping for
comprehension in the future but
living
in a condition of intellectual instability for the
long time.
It
is
the
admission
of
ignorance
that
leads
to
progress,
not
so
much
because
the
solving of a particular puzzle leads
directly to a new piece of understanding but
because
the
puzzle
--
if
it
interests
enough
scientists
--
leads
to
work.
There
is
a
similar
phenomenon in
entomology know as stigmergy, a term invented by
Grasse, which means
wander
about aimlessly, but when more termites are added,
they begin to build. It is the
presence
of
other
termites,
in
sufficient
numbers
at
close
quarters,
that
produces
the
work: they pick up each other's fecal
pellets and stack them in neat columns, and when
the columns are precisely the right
height, the termites reach across and turn the
perfect
arches that form the foundation
of the termitarium. No single termite knows how to
do
any
of
this,
but
as
soon
as
there
are
enough
termites
gathered
together
they
become
flawless
architects,
sensing
their
distances
from
each
other
although
blind,
building
an
immensely
complicated
structure
with
its
own
air-
conditioning
and
humidity
control.
They work their
lives away in this ecosystem built by themselves.
The nearest thing to a
termitarium that
I can think of in human behavior is the making of
language, which we
do
by
keeping
at
each
other
all
our
lives,
generation
after
generation,
changing
the
structure by some sort of instinct.
Very
little
is
understood
about
this
kind
of
collective
behavior.
It
is
out
of
fashion
these
days
to
talk
of
but
there
simply
aren't
enough
reductionist
details
in
hand
to
explain
away
the
phenomenon
of
termites
and
other
social
insects:
some
very
good
guesses
can
be
made
about
their
chemical
signaling
systems,
but
the
plain fact that they exhibit something
like a collective intelligence is a mystery, or
anyway
an unsolved problem, that might
contain important implications for social life in
general.
This
mystery
is
the
best
introduction
I
can
think
of
to
biological
science
in
college.
It
should be taught for its strangeness,
and for the ambiguity of its meaning. It should be
taught
to
premedical
students,
who
need
lessons
early
n
their
careers
about
the
uncertainties in science.
College students, and for that matter
high school students, should be exposed very
early, perhaps at the outset, to the
big arguments currently going on among scientists.
Big
arguments
stimulate
their
interest,
and
with
luck
engage
their
absorbed
attention.
Few
things
in
life
are
as
engrossing
as
a
good
fight
between
highly
trained
and
skilled
adversaries. But the young students are
told very little about the major disagreements of
the
day;
they
may
be
taught
something
about
the
arguments
between
Darwinians
and
their opponents a
century ago, but they do not realize that similar
disputes about other
matters, many of
them touching profound issues for our
understanding of nature, are still
going on and, indeed, are an essential
feature of the scientific process. There is, I
fear, a
reluctance on the part of
science teachers to talk about such things, based
on the belief
that
before
students
can appreciate what
the
arguments
are
about
they must
learn
and
master
the
and I have in mind several examples
of contemporary doctrinal dispute in which the
drift
of
the
argument
can
be
readily
perceived
without
deep
or
elaborate
knowledge
of
the
subject.
There
is,
for
one,
the
problem
of
animal
awareness.
One
school
of
ethologists
devoted
to
the
study
of
animal
behavior
has
it
that
human
beings
are
unique
in
the
possession
of
consciousness,
differing
from
al
other
creatures
in
being
able
to
think
things
over,
capitalize
on
past
experience,
and
hazard
informed
guesses
at
the
future.
Other,
animals
(with
possible
exceptions
made
for
chimpanzees,
whales,
and
dolphins)
cannot
do
such
things
with
their
minds;
they
live
from
moment
to
moment
with
brains
that
are
programmed
to
respond,
automatically
or
by
conditioning,
to
contingencies in the environment,
Behavioral psychologists believe that this
automatic or
conditioned response
accounts for
human mental
activity
as well,
although
they
dislike
that
word
On
the
other
side
are
some
ethologists
who
seems
to
be
more
generous-minded,
who
see
no
compelling
reasons
to
doubt
that
animals
in
general
are
quite
capable of real thinking and do quite a lot of it
——
thinking that isn't as
dense as