FEATURE

  What is great about science?

Prof. B. M. Hegde,

hegdebm@gmail.com

“You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him discover it in himself.”

Galileo

Science, like religion, has become so dogmatic that any view that does not fit into the accepted views of the “greats” in science is outright rejected. Many thinkers feel that time has come for science to be kept at a respectable distance from governance in any democracy. The original definition of secularism was that the Church in Europe had to be separated from the government. We need to reinvent a scientific secularism if our civilization has to survive. I have been, from time to time, reminding the powers that be that all that is labeled as science need not necessarily be the truth. There are so many loops within the loops in science, influenced by the vested powerful groups that distort the scientific views. It is all the more dangerous in the filed of western medicine which, we in India, accept as gospel truth. People in the west are now having second thoughts about their own science. Thinkers have been opposing those ideas for a very long time.

Paul Feyerabend, writing in his book, Against Method, has this to say which supports my long held belief in the same arena. “Science is neither a single tradition, nor the best tradition there is, except for people who have become accustomed to its presence, its benefits, and its disadvantages. In a democracy it should be separated from the State just as Churches are now separated from the State.” Paul is not any ordinary man either, to be ignored! He replaced his good friend, Karl Popper, who used to rule The London School of Economics for decades as its unrivalled mentor and the Professor of Philosophy of Science. Later Paul became the Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley and Professor of Philosophy of Science at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. His other books are Philosophical Papers and Farewell to Reason. He died in 1994.

For a country like India it is all the more relevant. To give one small example: while we have 67 million hungry children dying by thousands daily even in 2012, because we have neither the will nor the money to given them food, we seem to be very generous in giving thousands of crores of tax payers money for the Moon Mission! Many, many such ridiculous “so called” scientific enterprises are encouraged by the governments obsessed with the scientific research mind set in preference to simple live and let live efforts for the hapless poor masses. In our civilization today, the poor end up paying for their poverty with their lives. Today’s scientific research, more so in medicine, is driven by the vested interest industries. Minds shackled by grants and merit awards can never ever think out of the box. They are like frogs in the well. 

We were interviewing professors for a Technology Institute the other day. It was a shocking experience to sit there and listen to the arguments of the “great” brains from our so called premier institutes who were under the false impression that ONLY repetitive, copy cat, me-too research papers of the conventional type published by the “international journals” were to be the yardstick for promotion, the teaching experience of decades (appreciated by students) not withstanding. In reality neither science nor rationality or research papers are universal measures of excellence. “They are particular traditions, unaware of their historical grounding,” feel thinkers in the field. 

The problem with scientific research in our country is that the centres of excellence and the universities depend on team work for their grant getting research where loyalty to the group, adherence to tradition, the restrictions of publication, the peer review process and the fear of losing further grants will come in the way of free thinking. Any one who breaks out of this immurement gets thrown out of the group. Most people, of course, can not and do not think out of the box. The few who can are afraid to lose their status, honour and chance of getting awards and prizes. They hang on to go with the flow. The cumulative effect of all these is the mundane repetitive research that we churn out year after year!

Karl Popper’s The Logic of scientific discovery, Thomas Samuel Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and John OM Bockris’s The New Paradigm all espouse similar philosophies. The paradigm shifts are not linear phenomenon but are modified by non scientific societal needs. Writing in his classic The Limits of Science Peter Medawar, a Nobel Laureate has this to say: “I am a professional scientist and a lover of science; there could be no greater misunderstanding of the purpose of this book that it is in any way anti-science. This is just to exculpate science from the reproach that science is unable to answer those ultimate questions. But that does not mean that science is not great, I argue. Those questions that science is not able to answer are the ones that science is not designed to answer.” He compares science to a railway engine not designed to fly. If we want to former to fly it will simply not be able to do that. To me this looks like a very naïve argument. Science is only a method and if that is the tool to get answers from nature it should not be designed for a particular task. If that is designed that way it can never claim the pride of place that it occupies today!

Western science today rules the roost all over the globe. The reason is not that western science has any inherent rationality but power play.  The colonizing nations thrust their will on the colonies and their science served them to produce weapons of destruction for their victories. Western science so far has created very efficient instruments of death. Some of our shallow thinkers feel that the third world would be starving now but for western science, green revolution etc! What they forget is that the troubles, in the first place, were created by western concept of development. One good example in the new world is enough to prove this point. “For centuries the Cuahuila Ameri-Indians never exhausted the natural resources of Southern California deserts and lived in the midst of plenty”. They had discovered more than sixty kinds of edible plants and many more with powerful medicinal properties. Western science did not do that. Today, with all modern science and evidence based medicine only a handful of white families live there with great difficulty! Western medicine probably succeeded partially in controlling infections but the over all results of decades of scientific research has resulted in western medicine being the leading cause of death in the USA today.  Reductionist drug molecules damage the human system while herbal medicines work like food inside the human system to heal the system without damaging the system in the bargain. Western science is one of the many roads to human wisdom and not the ONLY one.

Bruce Lipton, one of the leading cell biologists of the conventional science, goes a step further to demand for a new paradigm in science lest we should all perish with our present scientific thinking. Civilizations are made up of societal consciousness. Nuclear Third World War would be the end of human kind on the planet. Does any one doubt that this possibility is the fall out of reductionist thinking in science? We have nothing to fear the death of our old civilization based on outdated thinking in science and rationality. We need a new consciousness of unity in diversity. We have to treat the cultural auto-immune diseases threatening to annihilate human kind with radical surgery to usher in a new ear of unity, compassion and camaraderie. The newer communication methods might escalate the spreading of this new message faster than in the past where information could not spread this fast. 

The scientific theories and newer discoveries in future should be all in the internet for a true “peer review” by thousands of minds rather than the “scientific” impact factor of the cloistered scientific journals of today where a handful of peer reviewers with closed minds decide the fate of a new thinking! The citation index and the impact factor of the latter kind of research published on the internet would be surpassing and unprecedented. Our ancestors for eons had survived in this hostile world with their ingenuity and their scientific and rational thinking. It does not behoove us today either to question their authenticity or their antiquity citing our western scientific models, which are at best “designed to move on one track only like a railway engine and not designed to fly” as noted above by Peter Medawar. Our ancient wisdom was all powerful and was not confined exclusively to the railway track. Our ancient wisdom has stood us in good stead through centuries and has survived this long, based on the more reliable observational research. It is unwise to reject anything just because it is old and hug anything new because it is new and, therefore, better!

“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” 

Isaac Newton