Review -- This Idea Must Die

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.