In 1948 physicist Max Planck described the progress of
science as a battle between newly discovered truths and old ideas championed by
senior scientists who fight stubborn, rear-guard actions until they die. It has
been summed up in the memorable phrase, “Science advances one funeral at a
time.” This Idea Must Die attempts to
rectify the process, if not by speeding up the death of old scientists, then at
least by killing off some old ideas. In a series of brief essays, most only a
few pages in length, 175 leading scientists pack their pet peeves into tumbrels
and head them to the guillotine. It makes wonderful reading for those odd
moments when you want to engage with something substantial but are short of the
time or energy to tackle a major paper or book.
Some topics, not surprisingly, are aimed at specialists. As
general readers we probably don’t care much about causal entropic forcing, stationarity,
inclusive fitness, the somatic mutation theory, or string theory. And most of
us, because our minds are boggled, are insulated from concern about an
eleven-dimension theory of the universe. More accessible, if not entirely
riveting, are essays which twist the knife into subjects which few people have
little deep allegiance to any more, such as IQ, the concept of race, the
absolute distinction between nature and nurture, lab mice as valid models for
humans, and common sense. Some essays are useful in clarifying issues, such as Richard
Dawkins’s piece debunking “essentialism,” that is, the search for “essences,” the
unwillingness to accept continuities. This has impeded progress in biology, as anti-evolutionists
hoot about “missing link” species, failing to understand that organisms evolve
continuously, not jumping from type to type, and that in fact what we call
species are simply samples picked out of a continuous stream. Essentialism, the
“dead hand of Plato,” as Dawkins calls it, corrupts our thinking on many other fronts,
too, falsely splitting continuities into segments, as, for example, when we ask
at what point life begins in the development of an embryo, or when a person on
life support is truly dead.
Some essays suggests science may be of two minds about humanity.
On the one hand there are defenses of our species against common aspersions. The
popular notion in psychology, for example, that we are sheep, easily led to
surrender our consciences to authorities, is repudiated as simplistic and a misinterpretion
of the data. Sci-fi dreams about robot companions get their comeuppance by an
MIT professor who reminds us why machines designed as companions, not mere
performers of simple functions but elder-care-bots, nanny-bots, teacher-bots,
sex-bots, are poor, empty fictions. As non-living entities, robots are by
definition incapable of sharing with us what it means to be alive and human. An
artificial intelligence theorist suggests throwing out AI as a title for his
field and replacing it more accurately with “the attempt to get computers to do
really cool stuff.” Machine intelligence is so fundamentally different from
human intelligence, and so much thinner, he says, that no one has even
attempted to reproduce real human intelligence yet.
On the other hand, there are thinkers who are much less impressed
by humanity. The old philosophical chestnut about determinism is dusted off by a
professor who argues that, since everything we think and do is produced by our
physical brains, it follows that all our thoughts and actions are locked into the
laws of physics, making us, in theory, as predictable as the motions of the
planets. There is no free will for us any more than there is free will for a
planet, there are no real choices, everything we do is done under inescapable
compulsion. Because criminals could not help being what they are, he believes, they
should be given the kind of consideration that we now give to the mentally ill.
A psychologist agrees there is no free will but goes a step further, arguing
there is no such thing as the self, on the grounds that no evidence of it has
been found in the lab. And, kicking the corpse, a philosopher discloses that we
barely have cognitive agency at all. Only for a small fraction of time are we in
charge of our thoughts; most occur independent of us as, for example, spontaneous
responses to stimuli, sleeping, daydreaming, zoning out, and Mind Wandering
(his capitals), not to speak of mental dysfunctions that involve loss of
cognitive control, such as illness, intoxication, and various kinds of
obsessive thinking. Even more, he suggests that our sense of identity, the feeling
that we are the same person over time, is an illusion, an adaptive form of
self-deception designed by the organism to achieve its goals. In reality, we
are only cognitive systems, complex processes without an identity.
Some writers cleverly take exception to the premise of the
book, refuting Max Planck with historical examples, insisting that new ideas do
not triumph by replacing old ones, urging “Beware of arrogance! Retire
nothing!” and “Don’t Discard Wrong Theories, Just Don’t Treat Them as True,” or
calling scientific progress an illusion. What other ideas must die? Spacetime,
brain plasticity, carbon footprint, left-brain-right-brain, information
overload, standard deviation, universal grammar, Moore’s Law, altruism,
innateness—the list goes on. Who would have imagined it even possible to doubt,
never mind call for the end of, ideas such as cause and effect, geometry, the
scientific method, culture, or the universe? We are assured that beauty is not
in the eye of the beholder, that humans are not social animals, that bias is
not always bad, that sadness is not always bad and happiness is not always good.
Glancing over the table of contents, the eyebrow rises again and again—but in a
good way, as a sign that the mind is being pried open and that a moment of
enlightenment might ensue.