Experts and Iconoclasts
Contents Updated: Thursday, August 05, 1999
Comedians of Error
"The world would perish were all men learned."
Experts are comedians of error. They claim an authority bounding on infallibility. Yet, from the Eighteenth century to the present day, professors of fossilized remains were wrong and again wrong, not only where evidence was thin on the ground but also often where there was plenty of it.
In contrast, many of the great founders of evolutionary theory were amateurs, self taught or untrained in biological sciences: Darwin was an undergraduate in divinity; Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer with Darwin of the Theory of Evolution, never was a graduate - he was trained as a surveyor; Mendel, who worked out the laws of genetics, was a monk. Amateurs are not tied to the conventions of the professional man. They can be more creative, make imaginative leaps with no worries about reputation - they can think the unthinkable. They can speculate.
Today some experts deliberately reject their professional field to become amateurs in another subject where they can speculate to their hearts content. Fred Hoyle is a well known expert in physics, particularly astrophysics. But Hoyle determined to establish himself as an amateur in the new field, for him, of evolutionary theory. He cast off the mantle of the expert to take on a new and speculative role. And it worked, much to the chagrin of some complacent evolutionists, who have had to take time out to answer Hoyle's conjectures. Hoyle might often be wrong in his new role, perhaps he always is, but he is right to force the orthodox to justify themselves rather than propagating dogmas they have never thought to examine.
Experts are human and subject to the
failings of us all. In fiction scientists are depicted as inhuman fanatics, as dispassionate robots or abstract old dodderers. Rarely are working scientists any of these in real life. Scientists can be passionate about their pet theories despite their training to be objective, but rarely are they fanatical. Great discoveries have been made through scientists engaging in contests over their competing ideas - gladiators of the Bunsen burner! - the fight ends when successful prediction and application establishes one theory over another. But every established theory will eventually be challenged in its turn as new observations are made.
Scientific Freemasonry
This is healthy. What is not healthy is when experts set up a scientific establishment with its own rules of acceptance, a scientific freemasonry from which others are excluded. Theories no longer belong to individuals but to the group, whose vested interest is served by cleaving to them and ridiculing alternatives. New thought is stifled while yesterday's innovation, a dynamic force for progress, becomes a new orthodoxy, and establishment opinion becomes oppressively conservative.
Members of the fraternity and those aspiring to it may even become liars and forgers if status and respect is gained or retained thereby. They falsify results and even create imaginary co-workers in their desperation for approval and recognition. Still worse is when scientists sell their objectivity for pieces of silver - when they are employed by governments and businesses to defend their employers' position and take a partisan view irrespective of the facts. For the general public these are the really dangerous experts.
Thomas Kuhn explains the stability and overthrow of established scientific theories in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Science is conducted within an accepted framework of thought which he calls a paradigm. Everyone is happy with it until at some stage it is challenged - someone has a better idea. Learned professors choke into their port at High Table thinking, All our work is out of date - our research programs are irrelevant. But their defences are ready. They close ranks, rally to the orthodox view and hasten to discredit the innovators.
The leading modern paleontological iconoclast, Robert Bakker, found himself up against the establishment when he urged vigorously that the physiology and lifestyles of dinosaurs should be reassessed. He later expressed it thus: Old theories are tough antagonists in court. The scientific establishment tends to believe that old, accepted views are correct unless shown to be wrong beyond any reasonable doubt. Exactly! Equally good theories find it difficult to get a fair hearing in the experts' court where the scientific establishment supply counsel for the prosecution, officials, judge and jury, all of whom back the conventional view.
Not long ago Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphogenetic fields (which suggests that once something has happened it is more likely to happen again) was violently attacked by many of his scientific peers. The editor of a respected scientific journal virtually recommended that his book should be burned. Sheldrake's theory might prove to be worthless - but only by testing it can we find out. However the allocation of research funds depends upon peer group recommendation and, needless to say, those wishing to test this controversial hypothesis could not get financial support.
Competing Paradigms
Those who defend the old paradigm are the majority of established scientists in the field, at least at the beginning. The revolutionaries, the new thinkers, attack it. Competition takes place and the paradigm holds or it falls. If the latter, the new paradigm becomes accepted and is destined to become the canon in its turn. As T.H.Huxley put it: new truths begin as heresies and end as superstitions.
What then is the lesson of this? Simply to remain open minded. And that does not mean to remain sitting on the fence. Since science progresses through the jousting of different ideas until one is unseated, there is nothing wrong with people defending their theory during the tournament. What is wrong is closing one's mind to the merits of other ideas and, what is worse, closing ranks against them. It is openness, receptiveness, the desire to look at something new, that helps to keep societies and their methodologies healthy. Dogma of any kind puts a straitjacket on the mind and a jackboot on society.
Of course, some proposals will have little merit and will fall quickly when assailed by the evidence - but something is usually gained in the exercise. Bakker, writing about the publication of novel ideas in science, says that even when the revolutionary idea finally proves not correct, the natural tendency to accept orthodoxy unchallenged is beneficially shaken.
Let me give you examples of some comedians of error, some defenders of orthodoxy and some heroes of invention involved in the fields of enquiry most relevant to the subject of this book, paleontology and prehistory.