royal road of science, The

Spectator, The, Oct 24, 1998 by Appleyard, Bryan

Gould writes, for example, of the unsung work of the curators of natural history museums. They are, he says, laughed at because they deal merely with fragments of extinction. But:

I have never met a curator who would not prefer the happier task of restoring a remnant to vitality. Nearly anyone in this line of work would take a bullet for the last pregnant dodo.

This is a moving and noble sentiment that joins the present to the past in a single, benign chain. There is, of course, a malign chain -- humans drove the dodo to extinction and we now do even worse damage to the spectrum of biodiversity. But Gould's task is to fight pessimism by making it clear that we can choose to be better. Thomas a Becket was murdered at Canterbury Cathedral, he says, but it remains the finest Gothic building in England. He cannot have seen Lincoln - but, again, we need not quibble.

This possibility of human choice is not just feel-good hand waving. It lies at the heart of his case against the hard Darwinians who would explain and excuse all human behaviour in the name of evolution. As for the potential path of genocide and destruction [he writes] let us take this stand. It need not be. We can do otherwise. Consciousness and its offspring, culture, change everything. Science is not separate from society and people are not nature's puppets. Gould's essays are a superbly literate expression of a warm imagination that takes delight not in reduction but in the expansion of our imaginations to encompass the diversity of things.

The weakness in this vision is that Gould is just too nice. His vision is true of science and of that of many of his heroes, but it is not true of science as a whole. The cold confidence of Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins or the inane scientism of Lewis Wolpert are the true faces of contemporary science. And the empty neophilia of so much of our present culture is the expression not of integration but of fragmentation. The issue Gould does not address is the possibility that his vision of science, like his version of Darwinism, may be dissident. And the Gould essay that I want to read is the one that asks the question: how do we survive science if its insights, like those of hard Darwinism, are proved or believed to be right?

Gould's advocacy of the institution of science is, in fact, the advocacy of an old and beleaguered scientific culture, one which was content to accept the authority of the non-scientific imagination. That authority has gone to be replaced by that of a new, ahistoric and illiterate priesthood. Gould is a good man in a bad world but, like many good men, he does not quite realise how bad it is.