Back to index   The contribution of the Scientific Method to Liberal Values CHARLES GORDON CLARK, July 2006   Substance of a talk given to the Brecon Political and Theological Discussion Group, 15th June 2006   LIBERAL AND ILLIBERAL The first general election at which I was eligible to vote was that of 1959, despite having been at the time of the 1955 election not just in the army but a National Service officer. In 1959 I was a member of the Dorking Young Liberals, and as I had just obtained a degree in modern history I was asked to give a little talk on liberalism. The meeting was in a church hall, with a very ecclesiastical looking lectern. So as I had just started studying theology I said that I was taking my text from the book of the prophet Isaiah: "the liberal deviseth liberal things, and by liberal things shall he endure". I still feel that this gnomic Authorised Version rendering makes a good introduction to liberalism, as something rather difficult to pin down. It's like trying to define "democracy". The natural sciences are straightforward; "liberalism" is not. So I thought that today it might be better to focus on what is illiberal. To ask, What fuels illiberalism, in church and state? And, how does the scientific method, how do scientists, help us combat this illiberalism? Why do they sometimes fail? There are and have been illiberal scientists, just as there are and have been illiberal religious believers and political leaders. I'm going to take a largely historical approach, because this contribution to liberalism has been very similar ever since the rise of modern science from about 1500 onwards. And despite how I began, I want in no way to imply that "liberalism" is confined on the political scene to parties with the word "liberal" in their title.   AUTHORITY The first illiberal thing I want to consider is excessive reliance on authority. The medieval reverence for the authority of the Aristotle/Aquinas synthesis is well known, and the travails it caused for Galileo. But in 1556, before Galileo was even born and only a dozen years after Copernicus published De Revolutionibus ­ sensibly on his death bed ­ the pioneer Welsh-born scientist and mathematician, Robert Recorde, wrote an important text for the scientific method and its liberalism. In an astronomical primer, The Castle of Knowledge, he said: "No man can worthily praise Ptolemye, his travel being so great, his diligence so exacte in observations, and conference with all nations and all ages, and his reasonable examination of all opinions, with demonstrable confirmation of his owne assertion, yet muste you and all men take heed, that both in him and in al mennes workes, you be not abused by their authoritye, but evermore attend to their rasons, and examine them well ever regarding more what is saide, and how it is proved, than who saieth it: for authority often times deceaveth many menne." His measured approach was more disciplined than the early jeu d'ésprit of his French near contemporary Peter Ramus, who is alleged to have made his name as a young man defending the thesis: "Everything that Aristotle has said is false". Why are we not surprised that Ramus died as a Protestant martyr? Liberalism is only possible when there is no inspired and authoritative text privileged from any criticism, no interpretative authority whose last word cannot be questioned. But there is a constant temptation to want to defer to such authority, and this operates in science as much as in religion or politics. Scientific authority doesn't have to be ancient to have unfortunate consequences if deferred to too readily. Jump three centuries to the 19th century debate on the age of the earth; was it to be decided by analysis of sedimentary processes, as had been foreshadowed by Leonardo da Vinci and upheld by Charles Lyell, whose Principles of Geology drew together the recent advances in geological understanding? Or was the age of the earth to be decided by the implications of the evolutionary processes being elucidated by Lyell's friend and follower Charles Darwin? Both approaches surely needed the earth to be hundreds of millions of years old. Or maybe, as John Joly suggested, it could be worked out from the salinity of the ocean? Another approach had been pioneered by Buffon in the 18th century: trying to assess the rate of cooling of the earth. Lord Kelvin, doyen of late 19th century physicists, assumed that the earth had been cooling ever since its formation, and that it had no continuing internal source of heat. So by using measurements of heat flow he calculated the age of the earth at 20-40 million years. Such was Kelvin's world wide authority as the greatest living physicist that, despite what geologists wanted, attempts to estimate the age of the earth were put back by 20 or so years. Then the Curies discovered that radioactive decay produces heat as a by-product and the role of uranium, potassium and thorium in heating the earth was realised. The rate of decay of a whole range of radioactive isotopes have allowed ever more precise dating of the age of rocks and of the earth. We can be tolerably sure now that the earth is about 4.56 billon years old. The good moral of this story for us here is to know that Kelvin gracefully accepted the new findings when an old man, and that Joly wrote the first standard work on Radioactivity and Geology. It is surely a liberal process when existing authority bows to the authority of new information.   SOCIAL PREJUDICE The second thing that I want to suggest fuels illiberalism is the pressure of existing social attitudes. The natural sciences should work against this, but have not always done so. Stephen Jay Gould discussed this in the context of the support of scientists for the inferiority of non-white races. Writing about the scientific arguments in the 19th century for different races being at different stages of development, he said: "We like to think that scientific progress drives out superstition and racism [but] science did not influence racial attitudes. Quite the reverse; an a priori belief in black inferiority determined the biased selection of "evidence". From a rich body of data that could support almost any racial assertion, scientists selected facts that would yield their favoured conclusion according to theories currently in vogue Scientists tend to behave in a conservative way by providing "objectivity" for what society at large wants to hear." [Ever Since Darwin p. 201ff] I want to give an early example of a scientist going along with this particular existing social attitude, belief in non-white inferiority, but otherwise operating in a liberal way. He was a highly distinguished 19th century surgeon, Dr. William Lawrence, FRS. He's someone in whom I have a particular interest, who from time to time surfaces today as an alleged predecessor of Darwin. As quite a young man, translating from the German Blumenbach's Comparative Anatomy, he proposed the adoption of the word "biology" into the English language for the science of life. Not long after, he gave lectures at the Royal College of Surgeons which profoundly shocked the conservative world of the years after Waterloo, when the most important thing seemed to be not to provoke a French style revolution in Britain. But Lawrence was one of the young doctors, especially the surgeons, who believed Britain had much to learn from French advances in science and medicine. They founded the journal The Lancet to propagate their ideas. Lawrence also thought the way the Royal College was run was quite out of date, and proposed sweeping, more democratic, changes. Worst, he could be found addressing revolutionary public meetings. His striking lectures did not cause too much trouble when they were delivered in 1816 but when they were published with a firm defence of observation not tradition, and suggestions that the Bible was not the last word on how man came to be what he is, there was trouble. He was attacked not just by his own profession (the Royal College of Surgeons was traditionally a very conservative establishment), but from pulpits and in newspapers. The very influential Quarterly Review in a long article in July 1819 commented on "the evil consequences arising to society from the unguarded adoption of Lawrence's views". They may have been thinking of the phrase: "the phenomenon of life and mind result entirely from the bodily structure, and consequently death, which destroys the bodily structures, destroys the whole of man." Again, "That life then is immediately dependent on organisation, appears to me, physiologically speaking, as clear as that the presence of the sun above the horizon causes the light of dayI say, physiologically speakingbecause the theological doctrine of the soul, and its separate existence, has nothing to do with this physiological question, but rests on a species of proof altogether different. These sublime dogmas could never have been brought to light by the labours of the anatomist and physiologist. An immaterial and spiritual being could not have been discovered among the blood and filth of the dissecting-room" But along with this superb stuff went a rehash of illiberal racial attitudes, in form based on alleged physiological differences but really on the stock prejudices of the 18th century. It was anyway not a subject on which he had any real expertise. Sadly, Lawrence was cowed by the opposition to his lectures, and withdrew them. (They were pirated extensively in Britain and in America, and the Lord Chancellor dissolved an injunction Lawrence had obtained after it had been argued in court that the lectures were so blasphemous Lawrence could not have copyright in them.) And not long after, this radical surgeon who had railed against the conservatism of the medical authorities and especially that of his own branch, joined the establishment and became a renowned conservative for the rest of his long life. I think there were private reasons ­ like Lydgate in Middlemarch he married a woman with social ambitions and felt constrained to lead the successful professional life which would enable her to gratify them. This is a sad example of a scientist abandoning his attitude under pressure; for the rest of his life Lawrence seems to have recorded no comment on the great topics of evolution and man's nature, not on "Origin of Species" or the subsequent debate. But the earlier part of the sad tale also points the moral that the scientific approach must be whole-hearted, that there shouldn't be areas, as in Lawrence's case with the racial stereotypes, which remain unexamined because conditioned by social attitudes. A variant of this vitiation of a scientist's work by unthinking adoption of social prejudices is given by Stephen Jay Gould, when he discusses Cesare Lombroso. This Italian physician published in 1876 a theory about "born criminals", essentially apes living in our midst, throwbacks to a previous evolutionary stage. Here the social prejudice was reinforced by a twisted application of evolutionary theory, and is an early illustration of the slippery slope which led through the eugenics movement to the horrors of the Nazi extermination of those they considered inferior humans. Gould comments that "The proponents of biological determinism argue that science can cut through a web of superstition and sentimentalism to instruct us about our true nature. But their claims have usually had a different primary effect; they are used by the leaders of class-stratified societies to assert that a current social order must prevail because it is the law of nature The claims of determinists have always turned out to be prejudiced speculation, not ascertained fact" and when acted on have worked against social reform. [Ever Since Darwin]. This kind of approach lives on in popular notions of criminal genes or chromosomes; nowadays the problem tends to be with the popular media who pander to their readers' prejudices, rather than using their influence to enlighten the public. Scientists have a hard time to controvert misinterpretations which make good copy, theories proclaimed by the media as scientific fact, such as the totally unproven link between the MMR vaccine and autism. That issue has highlighted the question of "balance". Surely as much time must be allowed on the radio or in the papers to either side of the argument ­ surely that's the liberal approach? Actually not, when the evidence is so overwhelmingly on one side. That is the "soft liberalism", or "woolly liberalism" so often wrongly condemned when liberals want a balanced approach to the facts on either side of an argument. The scientific method certainly considers all claims, but it weighs the evidence and the balance comes down on the side of the proved facts. When discussing these issues the other day I was told by someone who would like to think of himself as liberal that though he didn't believe in creationism himself it should certainly be taught in schools as an alternative to evolution. That is woolly illiberalism, not scientific liberalism.   REFUSAL TO FACE FACTS For the third thing which fuels illiberalism is of course an unwillingness or blank refusal to accept facts, a cavalier attitude to facts, results, consequences. Combating this is, perhaps, the greatest gift of the scientific method to a liberal approach in any area of life. And where not swayed by extraneous factors like social prejudice, scientists have historically shown an admirable willingness to accept proven facts, or hypotheses and theories which have been either experimentally tested or shown to have overwhelming evidence to support them. We've seen this with the debate over the age of the earth. One of the best examples is the next great advance in earth sciences: the theory of plate tectonics. The speed with which this revolutionary concept was accepted once the relevant facts had been adduced and the evidence marshalled is striking. Talk to any geologist over 65, and they will say that they had to unlearn much between Harry Hess's "Essay in Geopoetry" of 1960 and the synthesis achieved by 1968 and overwhelmingly accepted. A last mention of Stephen Jay Gould: he told how when he was a graduate student in the early 60s his distinguished stratigraphy professor "nearly orchestrated a chorus of Bronx cheers from a sycophantic crowd of loyal students" when "a visiting Australian drifter" came among them. The professor "experienced a rapid conversion just two years later and spent his remaining years joyously redoing his life's work." [Ever Since Darwin, p 160] So many different pieces of geophysical evidence pointed in the same direction. So many puzzling features of the present and of the geological record were clarified; enormous impetus was given to further research. Of course as a scientific writer pointed out recently in the context of plate tectonics, it is "hard to believe in the existence of something one can't experience directly". The breakthrough comes in "discovering that the idea that it exists makes sense of a number of disparate phenomena while not simultaneously making nonsense of something else." The idea; the evidence from as many different phenomena as can be located. Surely in politics and in religion illiberalism usually is fuelled by not considering all the phenomena, all the things that may be evidence, because some are inconvenient. It is all the more acute when the issue is something where scientific facts and evidence are relevant. We have seen this problem highlighted in the last few years by the attitude of the United States administration to climate change. The factor guiding their response to scientific warnings and explanations appears not to have been a respect for scientific facts and evidence, but a concern for the short term interests of business, and specifically the interests of energy producers. Social and philosophical liberalism is always hampered by evidence being swept under the carpet, whether it's a question of, say, the consequences of a high rate of imprisonment to deal with crime, or religious assertions like "such and such a doctrine has been believed always, everywhere, by everyone", "such and such a practice has always characterised Christianity".   NATIONALISM A fourth cause of illiberalism, relevant perhaps to the attitudes of the current US administration, is excessive nationalism. Modern science has been distinguished by international cooperation, not competition. American scientists have made an admirable stand for liberalism by going along with their colleagues around the world, rather than with the desires and perceived interests of their own government. To take the historical perspective I am following, consider some of the contacts between scientists in Britain and France. The Royal Society of London and the Académie des Sciences of Paris have cooperated closely from their foundations in the 1660s. For the crucial observations of the transit of Venus in 1761, the Paris Académie received vital cooperation from British government agencies ­ although the two nations were in the middle of the Seven Years' War. The Napoleonic wars again disrupted this cooperation. The idea of an English MP in 1790 that there should be a system of international weights & measures was taken up by Talleyrand, but the war meant that the French went ahead with the first international scientific conference held in 1798-9 with only their then allies and not the British. But at least Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy and Spain were involved in the establishment of metres and kilograms. Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society for over 40 years from 1778, had been (like, say, Linnaeus in Sweden) at the centre of the international scientific network. In 1800, when the war was well established, the French Institut (which had replaced the Académie) asked Banks to obtain passports from the British government to allow two French ships to follow a scientific expedition in the South Seas. Banks was glad to help, saying that scientists "ought not to hate one another because the armies of our respective nations may shed each other's blood". Edward Jenner, the discoverer of the correct method of smallpox vaccination, put it more pithily at the same time: "the sciences were never at war". In 1802, Jenner's clergyman nephew was one of those who took the opportunity of what proved to be the brief peace in the Napoleonic wars to go to Paris to promote, as he put it, the practice of "the Benefits of the Providential discovery of my relative". Later he wrote to France appealing for the release of British prisoners, as Banks had done. Banks claimed that by 1806 he had not only secured the release of more than ten British men of science; he had also intervened for the release from one of the horrible prisons of Naples of the French geologist Dolomieu. If you read Patrick O'Brien's sea stories you will remember that his surgeon, scientist, and spy Stephen Maturin went to Paris during the war under safe conduct for a meeting of the Institut. Readers perhaps think this far fetched, but there were in fact real-life examples of this: Humphry Davy, who had already been awarded Napoleon's prize for galvanism in 1808, applied in 1813 for a French passport to study the extinct volcanoes of Auvergne. He received it, and also attended meetings of the Institut and performed experimental work in France. In the next generation the former army officer and keen rider to hounds Roderick Murchison was the first geologist, perhaps the first scientist, quite deliberately to use his discoveries to make himself not just a celebrity, but an international celebrity. We smile today at the way the "King of Siluria" got on with the Czar of Russia, the King of Prussia, and the society figures of most European countries ­ but the fact remains that he had a completely international approach to science, and helped to propagate this. A souvenir of his internationalism is with us today. Having named the Silurian system from the rocks in Wales and had a share with Adam Sedgwick in naming the Cambrian and the Devonian, he was perfectly happy to propose a name from Russia, the Permian, for the earliest division of the Palaeozoic.   SELF IMPORTANCE A fifth consideration, which is perhaps inevitable after mentioning Murchison. Illiberalism feeds on the self-importance of those with power or position, and their obsession with what is big and impressive. Science, taking all nature and all mankind for its province, shows that small things, people, causes, are as important as big ones. This means, first, that people must have the freest access to learning. I started with Robert Record writing in English as early as reign of Mary Tudor. It's true that important works of science continued to be written in Latin for generations: Harvey's De Motu Cordis, Newton's Principia, Linnaeus' Systema Natura (but who would have been able to read Swedish outside Scandinavia?) However Galileo and Descartes wrote some of their most important works largely in the vernacular deliberately to bring ideas of natural philosophy to a wider public. And the Royal Swedish Academy used Swedish from its founding in 1739. The most striking example of scientific concern for the humble must be Darwin's worms. (I expect some of you have read Adam Phillips' little book of that name; if you haven't, do.) Darwin's biographers tell how soon after Charles returned from the voyage of the Beagle he went to visit his uncle and father-in-law to be, Josiah Wedgwood. "Charles now strolled, and uncle Jos showed him some disused ground where lime and cinders, spread years before, had disappeared into the soil, leaving a layer of loam. "Jos assumed that the worms had done the work, although he thought such gardening trivia of little consequence to a young man working on a continental scale. Charles disagreed, and from this unprepossessing beginning sprang a lifelong interest in the humble earthworm ­ a tiny unsung creature which, in its untold millions, transformed the land as the coral polyps did the tropical sea." [q.43 from Desmond & M] Darwin returned to worms 40 years later when exhausted by religious controversy. Adam Phillips says that in this small scale work and drawing out its implications Darwin was engaging in "a combination of indirect argument and the gradual accumulation of knowledge provided over time by scientific experiment." Drop "scientific" and it's an admirable recipe for liberalism.   SOCIAL POSITION My sixth example of illiberalism is connected with my first two, excessive reverence for authority and susceptibility to social pressures. It is valuing people for their position in society, not their abilities and attainments. One of the excellent strands of liberalism in the church has always been "the career open to talents": Wolsey the butcher's son becoming Cardinal of York. It was an aspect of the western church which was perhaps reduced but certainly not altogether lost when the new national churches were established at the Reformation. A detail of scientific history which I appreciate is that scientists have always in the end been valued for what they know, not for who they are by birth, formal education, or worldly position. A good example is Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, the greatest pioneer of microscopy. He came from a family of tradesmen, had no fortune, received no higher education or university degrees, and knew no languages other than his native Dutch. His father was a basket-maker, and his mother's family were brewers. He was a draper in Delft; also a surveyor, a wine assayer, a minor city official, and the trustee of the estate of the deceased and bankrupt Jan Vermeer. At some time in his thirties he learned to grind lenses, made simple microscopes, and began observing with them. Five or so years later he began writing to the Royal Society of London, letters which over 50 years (he lived to be 91) have remained among the most important items in the Transactions of the Royal Society. Once again I must acknowledge the failures to qualify this. Most people now know the story of William Smith and "the map that changed the world", thanks to the popular book of that name. The cold shoulder which Smith received for years from the Geological Society because as a surveyor he was a species of tradesman, not a gentleman, is sad; but when the magnitude of Smith's achievement became realised the society made more than ample amends. It was Smith who received the first Wollaston Medal, "the Oscar of the world of rocks". It is he, not Roderick Murchison or Charles Lyell or even James Hutton, who is now recognised as the "father of British geology". Of course there were no professional scientists in Leeuwenhoek's day, no professional geologists during most of Smith's working life. When James Joule, who was a brewer, began working to find the mechanical equivalent of heat there were professional physicists. Joule's name is now the international unit of measurement of energy, thanks to the experiments he conducted, not in a laboratory but in his brewery cellar. But again he had to fight for years for recognition from the scientific establishment. When he announced the results of his findings on at a meeting of the chemical section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1843 he was met by silence. The Royal Society rejected his paper, but once again prejudice gave way before meticulously presented facts. By 1850 Joule had become an FRS. One of the physicists who was at first sceptical was William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, whom we saw being converted late to the continuing creation of heat in the earth; earlier over Joule's discoveries he had been again eventually won over by the authority of proved facts. I suppose I should acknowledge the long undervaluing of the achievements of women: Rosalind Franklin was for years not sufficiently honoured for her contribution to the understanding of DNA; another who might have received a Nobel prize if she had been a man is Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered quasars. I'm not claiming that over the years this respect for a scientist's achievements, irrespective of their background, can be shown to have made for a more liberal approach in any particular area of public life. The dominance of the upper classes, of the traditionally educated, was withering for many causes. But I am sure that the contribution of this aspect of science helped the gradual weakening of an illiberal attitude to the value placed on people.   SUSPICIOUS MINDS One more example of illiberalism; I promise it will be very brief, and the last. Politics have so often been dominated by suspicion of the motives of others. This is not unknown in religion. And sometimes it is justified; Machiavellian behaviour is often the route to worldly success, liberalism rarely the way there. But I'm sure that in general people's suspicion of the motives of politicians is unfair, as is suspicion of the motives of scientists. I was saddened the other day to hear the would be liberal I referred to earlier assert, in the context of the MRA debate, that scientists always had ulterior motives and so must have in this case. Scientists, at their best, assume each other's good faith; indeed, science cannot operate without this. Normally, there has been mutual trust among the social group of scientists; hence the hard judgment on lying scientists, on fabricated evidence. Cyril Burt lost all credibility in the 70s, doctoring his studies of identical twins. And wasn't there a Korean doctor, just the other day, who fell from grace in the same sort of way by lying about his success in cloning? This is not to say that scientists are credulous about claims their fellows make; far from it. The notion of peer review is absolutely crucial to the acceptance of a new scientific hypothesis. The scientific press has a key part to play. I like to think it's not coincidental that the former long serving editor of Nature, the leading British scientific journal, John Maddox, has been for some years a leading supporter of the Brecon & Radnor Liberal Democrats!   Well ­ I seem to have reverted to party politics. To end: a predisposition to liberalism seems to have been a lasting factor in my life in the 50 years since I first voted Liberal. For nearly 30 of those years, my understanding of the Christian religion and my commitment to it reinforced this attitude. For the last 10 of those years, when I have been doing without Christian belief and praxis, I have increasingly found that my rather jejune understanding of science and the scientific method has had the same effect. CHARLES GORDON CLARK, July 2006