The history of science has been a series of blows to the ego of humanity. Copernicus showed us that our home, Earth, is not the centre of the universe; it’s just another planet. Darwin showed us that our species, Homo sapiens, is not special; it’s just another species of animal. But, although our planet is not special among planets, and our species is not special among animals, we still believe that certain individuals among us are special. For example, we scientists have our great heroes, such as Newton and Darwin.
When I learned that Wallace had discovered evolution by natural selection independently of Darwin, and Leibniz had discovered calculus independently of Newton, I began to doubt the received view of heroic science. I started making a list of independent discoveries, as I stumbled across them. Independent discovery appeared to be common. Then I realized that it was likely that others had independently discovered the commonness of independent discovery. A search using the query “Leibniz Newton Darwin Wallace” soon brought me to Lamb and Easton’s book, Multiple Discovery: The Pattern of Scientific Progress.
Multiple Discovery is a very thorough study of independent simultaneous discovery in the history of science and technology. It seems that there is almost no instance of a great discovery or invention that was not discovered independently and simultaneously. In addition to a careful historical study, Lamb and Easton present a theory to explain multiple discovery, which they call evolutionary realism. They also argue that their conclusions extend to other areas of culture, such as art. They present a convincing attack on what they call “the heroic theory of scientific development”. A chapter is devoted to the implications of their work for priority disputes and competition in the scientific community.
It’s unfortunate that this excellent book is no longer in print. My PhD studies in the philosophy of science began when this book was first published, yet I only recently discovered the book. Why is this work not better known? Maybe the answer is in the 1964 book, Resistance to the Systematic Study of Multiple Discoveries in Science, but I’m having trouble finding a copy of it.
Filed under: Evolution, Philosophy of Science | Tagged: evolutionary realism, heroic theory, progress, science
This is my favorite Turney blog post so far. And I’ll repost a small bit on my blog, thus, fighting the Resistance to the Systematic Study of Multiple Discoveries in Science, at least in a small way.
I don’t know what this 1964 book says, but I bet that we should “follow the money.” Research is very much funding-driven, and to get funding, you must argue that without the funding, such and such study could not be carried out… but what if multiple people are investigating the same things… then why should Canada waste dollars getting its researchers to be there first? Let other pay for the expensive research.
That’s, of course, only a small bit of the explanation.
Another explanation is that researchers are trained to have a huge ego. I honestly did not have much of an ego at all when I started my Ph.D. Then, I learned the hard way that if you don’t claim to be the best, you will be at a disadvantage against those who do. This is true, at least, until you get some kind of permanent job, but, by then, you’ve been trained to think that you are a superior being. (Ok, I’m pushing it, but you see my point.)
I’m reading Voyaging and The Power of Place (two volume biography of Darwin by Janet Browne). I love scientific biographies and this is undoubtedly among the best. She makes the very good point (a bit orthogonal to, but supportive of anti-heroic theories of scientific discovery) that Darwin didn’t do all the work, by any means. Because of his class status, got a lot of help from hither and yon.
It sometimes seems as though (Platonic?) “truth” were being “channeled” through these people through the circumstance of history.
I also enjoy scientific biographies. I haven’t read Janet Browne’s books, but Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal interleaves a fascinating biography of Darwin with a well-written survey of the field of evolutionary psychology. Wright cleverly applies the ideas of evolutionary psychology to Darwin’s own life, as a scientist, husband, and father. It’s a nice twist on the usual biography. I think Darwin might have appreciated the irony.
Daniel Lemire writes- Research is very much funding-driven
No its not.
Its driven by an independent yeoman class.
The really big advances of science such as Newton were made by men operating independently of financiers, politicians and theocrats via relatively moderate levels of wealth sufficient to provide them with just enough leisure and independence to pursue their interests.
For more discussion of this, please see:
http://tinyurl.com/2hjvpz
Kuhn has many nice perspectives on the “Heroic” model. Not least his famous one that discovery itself must be seen in many ways as subjective. So not only must we reject the idea of Heroic discoverers, we must reject the idea of Heroic progress itself!
I think his particular view on multiple discovery was that an entire field only become receptive to change after it built up a critical mass of crisis, so it is crisis which defines discovery, not any person, or even any particular idea.
Most surprising to me was that reading The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in full for the first time reconciled me in large part to the Heroic model, for discoveries if not discoverers. Kuhn is not really the critic of the status quo I imagined.
According to Kuhn, while revolutions periodically happen in science (***and are intrinsic to the nature of knowledge***) it is not revolution which is most important to science, but consensus. In fact Kuhn _defines_ science to be consensus (which only periodically changes in revolutions.)
What he explains to me is that we must focus our minds, whether on one person, or one theory, if we are to explore it fully. There is just not the time to consider every shade of misapprehension leading to a new discovery. And once a consensus is formed the important thing is to move on (until crisis demands a re-think.)
Until there is consensus people spend all their time justifying basic premises and no progress can be made (all the more so exactly _because_ no one perspective captures the whole truth.) That focus always shifts eventually, and all our Heros of science become fools in the end (soon Newton will become the fool and Leibniz have his day?), but for science focus itself is always necessary.
BTW according to Kuhn linguistics would be a pre-science, awaiting the consensus which will make it a science.
I hadn’t heard the idea that science = consensus. That’s an eye-opening concept that I’ll have to let sink in…
I hadn’t heard the idea that science = consensus. That’s an eye-opening concept that I’ll have to let sink in…
Kuhn’s philosophy of science is highly controversial. A good discussion appears here:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/
This article gives quite a balanced summary. However it does rather miss the perspective of Kuhn’s paradigm as a distribution of examples, which is relevant to the distributional models of knowledge (Vector Space Model etc) presented elsewhere in this blog.
There was thread which touched on some of the same issues on sci.lang last year:
http://tinyurl.com/ytdc7z
It is also relevant to some issues I posted about in the Hutter Prize group recently:
http://tinyurl.com/yop63l
The book “A People’s History of Science” by Clifford Conner is actually very relevant. I discovered this a couple of years ago in Pittsburgh’s airport (that city is full of little surprises like that :-). The author is no Howard Zinn and his proclamations to that effect can be a bit tedious at times, but as a source of raw information and quotations, it’s actually pretty good.
Pick it up and take a look, to find out about the statue of the fictitious “hero” that invented the compass in an Italian town, about Jethro Tull and his “made in China invention”, about Boyle and his famous law which might have been invented by a technician (the equivalent of a grad student today) and who wrote in his journal that in order to become a natural philosopher you have to “go to such a variety of mechanick people (as distillers, drugists, smiths, turners, &c.) that a great part of his time, and perhaps all his patience, shall be spent in waiting upon tradesmen [...] which is a drudgery greater than any, who has not tried it, will imagine”, or about Cotton Mather who got the credit for the invention of inoculation, even though he wrote that he got the idea from an African slave and was heavily criticised about his source, eventually writing “I don’t know why ’tis more unlawful to learn of Africans, how to help against the Poison of the Small Pox, than it is to learn of our Indians, how to help against the Poison of Rattlesnake.”
These are just some random examples; take a look at the book for more. As I heard a VP recently say, “this is marketing, and should not be confused with reality.” :-)
The book has an official website and a fairly complete Google Books preview.
See also Kevin Kelly’s The Technium: Simultaneous Invention.
A deconstruction of heroic science and the genius cult in science can also be found in Ludwik Fleck’s “Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact“. Fleck’s ideas are similar to Kuhn’s (who indeed mentioned Fleck’s book in the preface to Structure of Scientific Revolutions as a recent discovery). Fleck’s observations and theory seemed to me to be “deeper” and more insightful than Kuhn’s, and if I had to recommend one over the other, I’d choose Fleck.
See also: Convergent Evolution and Multiple Discovery