Against Boundaries 3

I have found Leon Wieseltier’s anti-scientism screed in The New Republic to be thought provoking, to say the least.  In the last post I pointed out this comment from the screed:

This is a fine instance of the incomprehension, and the buzzkill, that often attends the extension of the scientistic temperament to literature and art.

Read that in the light of the following passage from the same essay:

What von Mises and Diamond—and Pinker—deny is that the differences between the various realms of human existence, and between the disciplines that investigate them, are final.

Together those two passages suggest that “scientism” is indicated not only by reductionism or scientific triumphalism, but by any crossing of the boundaries between “the various realms of human existence” by “the disciplines that investigate them.” 

I pointed out in the previous post that this works both ways.  There is a lot of poetry and fiction that focus on science.  Sinclair Lewis’ Arrowsmith comes to mind.  Nathaniel Hawthorne’s unforgettable story “The Birthmark” is another example.  I presented a poem by Szymborska in the last post.  If the boundaries between Wieseltier’s realms is indeed “final”, then surely these are illegitimate works. 

But what about art?  Last summer I returned to the National Gallery in London to view my favorite painting: “Experiment with an Air Pump,” by Joseph Wright of Derby.  It is a very large canvas, and I present it here. 

It almost more cartoon than work of art in so far as it tells a story (if that, with amazing artistic genius.  In the center of the painting is a glass chamber on a pedestal, with a bird inside.  The role of the living creature is to die and so demonstrate that a vacuum has been achieved in the glass. 

On the left of the canvas are three young men and a young woman.  The former are staring intently at the experiment.  The young woman is staring at one of the young men.  She is drawn away both from the experiment and the drama by more ordinary passions. 

On the right, one figure seems to be lost in thought.  Perhaps he is pondering the philosophical and ethical implications of what is taking place.  We also see a more mature gentleman comforting two young girls (presumably their father).  His finger held aloft tells that he is trying to explain what is going on, perhaps to reassure himself that he is doing the right thing. 

One of the young ladies has her head buried in her hands.  The other looks, tearfully but interested, at the dying bird.  We also see a boy holding a rope attached to a bird cage.  It is hard not to come to this conclusion: the bird in the glass is a family pet. 

In the center, just to the left of the pedestal, is the scientist.  He is dressed in a red robe and has long white hair.  He stares out into space while holding the top of the apparatus in his left hand and pumps out the air with his right hand.  He is terrifying. 

This is a view of science from an artistic temperament.  Joseph Wright clearly understands and, I think, appreciates the science that is going on.  He also recognizes a problem.  The passionate desire to understand things as they are is not necessarily in harmony with the more ordinary human concerns.  Atrocities have been committed in the name of science and not only by Nazis.  Many famous experiments could not be repeated today because they brutally abused their subjects.  The farseeing Wright was way ahead of us. 

Science does present a danger to human life, even it is one of the most magnificent expressions of human life.  Science is, in my view, only a specific case of philosophy; and philosophy has always been in tension with morality, politics, and religion.  Just ask Socrates in his last day.  The farseeing Wright reminds us to be wary. 

The moral of his morality tale is not to prohibit science or to draw boundaries between the realms of science and other disciplines.  It is to make sure that everyone is paying attention.  Artists and writers should vigorously invade the realm of science.  Mine its riches for all that they are worth to the poet and painter.  Sound the alarm when something is amiss. 

Meanwhile, scientists should investigate everything.  Not all questions are open to scientific investigation, but we cannot know which is which until some researcher frames her question.  There is no way forward, except for through. 

Critics of scientism are conservative in the worst sense of the word.  They are fearful of the implications of science and want to hobble her.  They are afraid that science will tell them things they don’t want to hear.  They are cowards. 

Culture is More Conservative Than Genes

One of the tacit assumptions behind the academic resistance to evolutionary explanations of human behavior is that culture is easier to change than genes.  According to this assumption, if behavior X is largely or wholly determined by culture then we can change it merely by reeducating people and by modifying institutions.  These are presumed to be relatively easy.  By contrast, to the degree that behavior X is influence by genetic heritage, it will be intractable. 

I have long suspected that the opposite might be the case.  Genetic influences are often highly responsive to environmental information.  Figuring out how and why men are genetically more disposed toward physical aggression might give us some valuable clues as to how to deal with male aggression.  On the other hand, culture can be fiercely resistant to change.  Cultural patterns, or memes, may offer fewer levers for reform to pull and culture may develop precisely to resist both natural and artificial challenges. 

Some evidence that I am right comes from a recent article in Nature. 

If folk tales simply spread by diffusion, like ink blots in paper, one would expect to see smooth gradients in these variations as a function of distance. Instead, researchers found that language differences between cultures create significant barriers to that diffusion.

These barriers are stronger than those for the exchange of genes — a message that might be crudely expressed as: “I’ll sleep with you, but I prefer my stories to yours.”

This suggests that culture is precisely resistant to the kind of diffusion that levels the genetic playing field across human populations. 

In the study, a team of researchers in Australia and New Zealand used the statistical tools of population genetics to investigate variations in ‘The kind and the unkind girls’ across 31 European populations, such as Armenian, Scottish, Basque and Icelandic groups.

“The geographic gradients we found are similar in scale to what we see in genetics, suggesting that there may be parallel processes responsible for mixing genetic and cultural information,” says lead author Quentin Atkinson, who studies human evolution at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

“But the mechanisms aren’t identical,” Atkinson adds. “The effect of ethnolinguistic boundaries is much stronger for the folk tales than for genes.” This fits with recent studies looking at other aspects of culture, such as song2. “Our findings support predictions that cultural variation should be more pronounced between groups than genetic variation,” says Atkinson.

“This supports the view that our cultures act almost like distinct biological species,” says Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, UK, who specializes in cultural transmission. “Our cultural groups draw pretty tight boundaries around themselves and can absorb genetic immigrants without absorbing their cultures.”

The implications of this may be the reverse of the common assumptions.  Genetic diffusion is, let us say, promiscuous.  It is the basis of a general equality in innate human capacities.  Culture, by contrast, creates some of the enormous differences that we observe between different populations and nations. 

It may be the case that any hope for human progress depends largely on the degree to which human behavior is influenced by biology rather than by culture.  This is the opposite of what nearly everyone seems to believe.