Humble or Arrogant Experts?
Contents Updated: Thursday, August 05, 1999
Authority
Experts can speak with justified authority when they are expert in a mature science like chemistry about which a great deal is understood. When subjects are semi-mature they tend to be quite humble, realising that there is so much which is not understood that they had better not risk looking a fool in a few year’s time by proclaiming too assuredly today. Now curiously when experts are speaking about virgin fields of discovery they consider that they run no risks by saying almost whatever they like because it will be decades if not centuries before anything is discovered likely to contradict them. So it is that ordinary punters are daily fooled by the authority with which some expert or another pronounces on subjects about which no one knows anything at all.
Science went through a curious phase about a hundred years ago when it seemed that the fundaments of the basis of the material world had been revealed by nineteenth century science. Scientists were often emboldened by their success to declaim on any subject they liked, whether it fell into the category of those that had been well explored or not. Physicists thought that the nature of matter had been revealed and, not to be outdone, experts in a quite different and hardly explored field had to expatiate with the same confidence as the physicists. Eugenicists knew nothing about human inheritance but undeterred they formulated theories of human improvement that were to have dire consequences for the next century.
More Humble
Oddly the people who had made real discoveries were to find also that their confidence was unwarranted. The physicists began to discover more particles than they needed and the simplicities of cause and effect began to evaporate. Even they had to get humble and accept that they knew little really about the world. The eugenicists however had nothing to hold them back. Their theories were theories of prejudice not measurement and led to immigration quotas and sterilisation of immigrants to the US as well as plain genocide under the Nazis.
Today’s geneticists know far more about genetics than their predecessors of a century ago and today they are much more humble. The profound effect of genes is being established and the prospect is that the whole of the human genome will be mapped, allowing doctors to know precisely what capabilities and defects anybody might have. Along with this knowledge goes the realisation that the genetic code is immensely complicated and that much of it is subtle. The genetic code in long sequences is quite unstable and therefore easily mutable so that the influence of the environment can be more profound than might have been thought. Genetic discoveries have not helped to resolve many moral and medical problems.
Steve Jones
Steve Jones, a professor of genetics at the University of London is a man who knows that humility is needed in genetics, not bold declamations which will attract the propagandists and achieve a certain popular notoriety. In his book, The Language of the Genes, based on the BBC’s Reith Lectures in 1991, he warns that the apparent potential of the Human Genome Project for curing our ills has to be countered by our lack of knowledge about the subtleties of genetic interactions and interactions between genes and the environment. A plain example is the old one of the protection given by the defect called sickle cell anaemia against malaria. Thus, in ignorance but besotted by our enthusiasm for gene therapy, we might attempt to eliminate a faulty gene and find horrors arising elsewhere. Or we might find that we have also eliminated one of the genetic factors that produce genius, say.
Still the main feature of the book is an analogy between the development of languages and the evolution of humans. Most modern European languages have a common root and examining them all closely throws light on not just the common root but the growth of each individual language. In a parallel way, the interrelationship of species which have emerged from a common stock illuminate their development and confirm the nature of that development. It is evolution; descent with modification as Darwin called it.
It will still be a very long time before the more subtle consequences of the genetic code are worked out. Merely having the map is just the start. So do not listen to those demagogues who expound without doubt and who assert without reason. They are the ones who like to claim they are the real experts.
Comment
From Will
Thanks for an interesting and useful site! I have concern however about your suggestion that science of the last century thru immaturity produced the horrors of eugenics. Social Darwinism was a philosophical not simply scientific blunder. Perhaps I’m reading too much into your piece but a clear distinction of unwarrented confidence in partial knowledge from the way that the partial knowledge was misused for political and ideological aims is appropriate. The majority of scientists of the last century did not support the inhuman eugenics programs that brought science into disrepute in the eyes of the nonscientific world.
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