The Trouble With Science by Robin I. M. Dunbar

The Trouble With Science Reviews

• 
  Judyta Szacillo

  Good stuff: this book is a great guide through the ages of human thought on how to define science and how it should be done. The Author also discusses the natural roots of human curiosity and how it evolved to be a much less natural scientific method, and how it is endangered by other human activities and mental states like organised religion, political ideology, herd instinct, or little scope for intuitive understanding.
  
  Bad stuff: despite the Author’s reassurances that he appreciates the value of humanities and social sciences, he seems to be on a path of war against them. To an extent, it is understandable: he must have read lots of postmodernist nonsense in preparation of this book, and I can appreciate how that can put anyone on edge. He was also writing in 1995, when sciences were in a much worse position than they are today: school programmes were underfunded, A-Level entries were falling, and British universities struggled to find appropriate candidates.
  
  However, none of this is the case today. A-Level uptake in sciences is on the increase, and universities get loads of funding for STEM subjects while humanities and social sciences have been subject to funding cuts year after year for the last two decades. Perhaps that is why I feel about the Author’s prejudiced attitude so strongly. For he has failed to follow his own advice that one should immerse in a culture in order to understand it from the inside, and he has repeatedly extended his experience with postmodernist thought onto all humanities and social sciences.
  
  No, Mr Dunbar, humanists are not totally ignorant of sciences. They are known to visit science museums. Many of them apply scientific methods in their research as well. Postmodernist intellectual stupor is not all that there is!
  
• 
  Simon Mcleish

  Originally published on my blog
  here in May 1999.
  
  The title of Robin Dunbar's book leads one to expect some kind of attack on science; instead, it is actually a defence, his major criticisms of the supporters of science being reserved for those involved in education. His major target is the fashionable sociological view of science as subjective and relativistic, purely a product of Western culture.
  
  The main thrust of his attack is to produce evidence of a similar mode of thought in other cultures, both past and present, and even in animal behaviour. He also illuminatingly discusses the various philosophies of science which have been influential in recent years, as well as the nature of religion (because primitive religions are frequently compared to science as providing an explanation of the world around us).
  
  The second major subject area covered in the book, which leads into the attack on the British educational system, is an examination of the ways in which the culture we live in views science. Dunbar looks at several kinds of evidence: the standards by which the media in general reports science (and his verdict is that these are astonishingly low), the amount of coverage in the media (vanishingly small), the attitudes of legislators (publicly supportive but slow with financial backing), as well as the attitudes in educational establishments, both schools and universities.
  
  All this criticism will, of course, be meaningless if he doesn't offer some way to improve matters. Dunbar views scientific theory as a complex entity; there are, to start with, different levels of explanation, from quantum mechanical at one end to biological/ecological at the other - each process at one level is explicable (to some extent) by processes at lower levels, and at each level we tend to see emergent properties as predicted by the mathematics of complex systems. (It would be foolish to directly describe the mechanics of evolution in terms of the motion of subatomic particles, for example.) At each of these levels, science proceeds by formulating theories which have several important properties. These include explaining past and current experimental results and suggesting new avenues of experimentation. New evidence builds up to go with each theory, and as experimental results begin to conflict with the theory (there are several reasons why they will do so, such as increasingly sophisticated experiments), the theory is either modified or a revolutionary new one takes its place.
  
  Together with this theory of science - to which the brief description above hardly does justice - Dunbar suggests changes in scientific education. He thinks that school science teaching should begin at the largest scale, with biology, and that other kinds of science are introduced as the pupil begins to be interested in the other types of explanation, and these can be referred to processes they have already been studying. Since this would lead to a lower level of achievement attainable in physics and mathematics in particular, he also suggests longer degree courses.
  
  I find it difficult to believe that science in general would benefit from such changes. (It does seem likely to me that the general level of scientific understanding among non-scientists might increase.) The first reason for this is purely personal: it would have been pretty hopeless for me. Biology and chemistry were the best-taught of the sciences at my school, but I never enjoyed biology at all and was far more interested in mathematics and physics (I tended to learn by reading at home). The second reason is that biology is a particularly controversial part of science, and so such a change would meet opposition from all sorts of pressure groups: religious groups, those opposed to classroom dissection (a rather wasteful way to kill lots of animals), and the like. Personally, I feel it would be more constructive to change the nature of the teaching at school so there is more emphasis on the explanatory power of science than on the experimental and cataloging side (in physics/chemistry and biology respectively). This may reflect my mathematical background as Dunbar's suggestion does his biological one, but I think that understanding explanations of how things work (and what makes a good explanation) will be more useful in later life, whether a pupil goes on to study science or not. After all, science is about explanations; why shouldn't scientific education also be about them?
• 
  Maurizio Codogno

  Robin Dunbar è soprattutto noto per il suo eponimo numero, circa 150, che indica il massimo numero di "amici", nel senso di persone con cui si può interagire seriamente. In questo suo vecchio libro, che inaugurò la collana "La lente di Galileo" di Longanesi, Dunbar si occupa però di un altro tema, ancora oggi al centro dell'attenzione: la perdta dello status che la scienza e gli scienziati avevano avuto tra l'Ottocento e il primo Novecento, guardando le cose soprattutto dal suo punto di vista britannico. Le colpe, a suo dire, sono varie. Da una parte sono nate intere teorie che rifiutano le premesse del metodo scientifico, definendolo solo una tra le tante possibilità - il famigerato relativismo. I politici tendono a vedere solo il tornaconto immediato, e chi gestisce i media prefersice di gran lunga il sensazionalismo. Ma anche gli scienziati hanno le loro colpe, per non riuscire a comprendere che la gente comune non può sguire un progresso che è sempre più matematico e fuori dal mondo comune, e non possono lasciare il campo ai divulgatori (mi fischiano le orecchie...) che non hanno la passione e speso nemmeno le competenze necessarie per una vera spiegazione dai temi. La traduzione di Laura Serra mi è parsa corretta ma antiquata: nulla di preciso, solo una mia sensazione.