Science Archives
October 5, 2010
Steve Talbott's genomic dynamite
In the current issue of The New Atlantis, the brilliant polymath Steve Talbott supplies a blockbuster essay, one in a promised series on “The Revolution in Biology.”
For schoolchildren of the last couple generations, it would be difficult to overstate the influence of the science of genetics. Biology teachers and students around the world were positively giddy with enthusiasm generated by the possibilities of DNA sequencing and the mapping of the human genome. There was a strong expectation that this process, once complete, would grant us intricate knowledge of the source code of the human machine, thus providing a truly scientific answer to the ancient question, “what is man?” By digging deeply enough, we would discover that life emerges out of the inanimate.
The fervor spread rapidly into popular culture. The number of times a film or television show or late-night comic has portentously referenced the discovery that the human being and the chimpanzee share 98 or 99 percent of their DNA, is truly immense. The factoid became a kind of catchphrase by which to denigrate the uniqueness of human life.
Mr. Talbott (whose 2007 book Devices of the Soul I reviewed here) in this excellent if very demanding essay basically takes dynamite to the whole thing. Not being a biologist by any stretch of the imagination, I can only hope to give the barest outline of what the essay contains. In bald summary, in contains the adumbration of a wholesale revision of 30 years of genetic science, a stinging rebuke of grandiose expectations that accompanied it, and above all a reproach of the reductionist presuppositions that undergirded these expectations.
June 24, 2011
Talbott on organism
The always challenging Steve Talbott continues his series of sophisticated and searching critiques of the materialism that rules science these days. This rulership he regards as illegitimate, a kind of mental despotism issuing in numerous blunders and follies and, off at the end, throwing doubt on the nobility of the scientific enterprise as such.
Like Lawrence Brown’s majestic and endearingly quirky book Might of the West, Talbott’s examination of science reveals how dependent our idea of causality is upon the wider world as it impinges on us. The observable world only rarely can deliver to our perception a true pattern of causality; mostly the observable world delivers repeatable succession which is suggestive of causality. It is only by a particular method of intellectual abstraction, which Talbott ably describes as analogous to the reduction of a language into rules of grammar, that we can approximate it.
Now no one ever confused the rules of grammar for the language itself; yet this very sort of error pervades modern science.
February 29, 2012
Talbott on randomness
The able polymath Stephen L. Talbott continues his provocative series in The New Atlantis on living organisms — their integrity, their complexity, their subtle immunities to reductionism of the sort that masquerades today as cutting-edge science. Much of the argumentation amounts to carefully-placed shape-charges at the vulnerable points of materialist dogma. The resulting detonations are as marvelous as the placements are cunning. Naturally, these clownish New Atheists will not deign to engage him; since Talbott is manifestly a man of scientific vigor and sophistication, rather than a straw-man in the manner of a knuckle-dragging Creationist, they have little interest in him. Or rather, they have an emphatic interest in not being interested in him. The materialists (unusual for men of science) are a remarkably incurious lot. Talbott, by contrast, resembles the capacious autodidacts of older Western science: in these essays the reader immediately feels that warmth of curiosity, that human wonder, which was so often their hallmark. But the common accompanying modifier “childlike” would be misleading in this instance; for there is nothing immature in Talbott’s thinking. And while he rarely comes off as a hard-nosed polemicist, the damage inflicted by his arguments will be considerable. Must read.