Science meets "the Clouds"

It seemed like a good idea at the time...

An excellent WIRED essay by Jonah Lehrer warns that Breaking Things Down to Particles Blinds Scientists to Big Picture:

Functional MRI has been used to study all sorts of sexy psychological properties. You’ve probably seen the headlines: “Scientists Discover Love in the Brain!” and “This Is Your Brain on God!” Such claims are often accompanied by a pretty silhouette of a skull, highlighted with splotches of primary color. It’s like staring at a portrait of the soul. It’s also false. In reality, huge swaths of the cortex are involved in every aspect of cognition. The mind is a knot of interconnections, so interpreting the scan depends on leaving lots of stuff out, sifting through noise for the signal. We make sense of the data by deleting what we don’t understand.

What’s disappointing here isn’t just that these early fMRI studies are overhyped or miss important facts. It’s that this mistake is all too familiar. Time and time again, an experimental gadget gets introduced — it doesn’t matter if it’s a supercollider or a gene chip or an fMRI machine — and we’re told it will allow us to glimpse the underlying logic of everything. But the tool always disappoints, doesn’t it? We soon realize that those pretty pictures are incomplete and that we can’t reduce our complex subject to a few colorful spots. So here’s a pitch: Scientists should learn to expect this cycle — to anticipate that the universe is always more networked and complicated than reductionist approaches can reveal.

Look at genetics: When the Human Genome Project was launched in the early 1990s, it was sold as a means of finally making sense of our DNA by documenting the slight differences that encode our individuality. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the project has mostly demonstrated that we are more than a text, and that our base pairs rarely explain anything in isolation. It has forced researchers to focus on the much broader study of how our genes interact with the environment.

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Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.” The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.

Exactly. Lehrer's piece points to a concern I've long had, especially as science (or more accurately SCIENCE! to separate the popular impression from the real practice) is too-often embraced as an all-purpose answer for just about any question or ailment.

To be fair, that popular impression is shaped by the generally terrible state of science journalism. I can't count the number of times I've seen the following situation take place:

Scientist: Well, we've discovered this gene that, in some cases, occurs more frequently in people with stunning flatulence.

Headline: Science cures farts!

So there's that. But Lehrer's correct in that many parts of the modern science community do often mistake the forest for the trees and miss some important connections. Some of this arises from the fact that scientists are a professional culture made up of people who tend to be pretty good at taking things apart and analyzing them, sometimes down to minute levels. Add years of scientific training and constant socializing with people of similar bent, and the trend becomes exaggerated.

We often forget that, of course, because the sciences do make stunning discoveries and accomplish amazing things. All too often, we like our would-be solutions simple, so science is a useful, essential tool that has led to fascinating revelations becomes science is THE answer.

I've often thought, after talking with scientist and soon-to-be scientist friends of mine, that scientific education would be improved by incorporating it more closely with history, both in replicating milestone experiments and in examining the ways science has held up, defended and shattered its own assumptions throughout history. 

Because it's a telling story (Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is a good place to start). Scientists throughout history emerge as an interesting casts of characters with a staggering amount of intelligent ideas. They're also tied up in their own assumptions, cultural myths, power struggles and greed. On top of that, for all their prescience, they're not particularly more immune to dogma than any other person.

Being aware, for example, that all the finest scientific minds in Europe once dismissed tales of blazing rocks falling from the sky as peasant superstition might lead to better questioning of today's theories and a willingness to better examine the world outside one's own corner.

A better science — tomorrow's, I hope — will seek to connect with more understanding from other fields, especially those where things are vague and complex, while creating a more versatile breed of knowledge-seekers who search for many useful tools instead of one perfect one.

This is because, in reality, science is excellent in some areas, useful but limited in others (sociology and psychology come to mind) and ill-suited entirely to others still. Science can't tell us who to fall in love with or how to run our governments and things usually ends up really, really badly when people believe that it can (hello, eugenics). It is a human endeavor — an indispensable tool, but not the only one — for facing the masses of clouds which surround our lives.

Comments

[Brainwane]

Book recommendation! Roy Porter's "The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity" shows in every chapter the limitations of human thinking, fighting and slipping and grasping awkwardly for smaller and larger truths. It's an entertaining set of case studies for Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions."