Judith Curry is Professor and Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Curry’s blog is well worth reading for reliable commentary on climate science and more general matters of science practice and of public policy in its relationship to science. One of her recent articles, More scientific mavericks needed, is a short discussion of three articles or essays on the need for mavericks in science in the modern limited sense and also in economics. Professor Curry’s article, begins with a quote from one of those articles, We need more scientific mavericks:
Agencies claiming to support blue-skies research use peer review, of course, discouraging open-ended inquiries and serious challenges to prevailing orthodoxies. Mavericks once played an essential role in research. Indeed, their work defined the 20th century. We must relearn how to support them, and provide new options for an unforeseeable future, both social and economic.
Curry is right to endorse this view which is presented in that article as a consensus view of highly-regarded British scientists including some Nobel laureates. She has written before about the need for dissenters to keep the scientific processes working properly, reasoning from the general principles of those processes. She herself is now considered by some to be a dissenter on the matter of human-caused and disaster-laden global warming because she has pointed out the need to understand the 16 years or so where the actual temperature increase in atmospheric temperature (or possibly flattening of that temperature) has been at or below the extreme low-end of the plausible increase patterns as the major climate models have forecast them.
God’s Creation is dynamic in two ways:
- It is dynamic in itself, and
- It seems still more dynamic because of the various ways in which our knowledge of this dynamic Creation has grown and deepened and become more sophisticated—at a very rapid pace in recent centuries.
At some gut-level and often at a fully conscious and rational level, men have known of the first, the dynamic nature of reality itself, but the second source of dynamics has come into view only by an increase in historical experience. We can learn much from the writings of Aristotle and from the Bible but only when we understand their total context including the purposes of their authors. Something similar can be said about the writings of Einstein and Arrhenius and Chaitin.
In my writings, I’ve presented the second source of dynamic activity as the formation of the human mind which, updating Aquinas’ claim a little, develops by various processes as the underlying brain shapes its neural connections and develops systems of neurons to better encapsulate the world around us, including not only the concrete realms of created being which we can sense and study directly but also the abstract realms of created being (think of the underlying abstract `stuff’ described by quantum mechanics or even pure mathematics).
It takes a flexible mind, one which can shape itself to empirical knowledge, to understand Creation by the best standards of any age. In fact, there are few with minds flexible enough to work across a variety of fields of knowledge and they don’t seem much welcome in established institutions. See one of my essays from 2008, Ways of Thought in the Modern West, for a discussion of some insights which the historian Carroll Quigley expressed in The Evolution of Civilizations (reprinted by Liberty Fund). In Quigley’s view, instruments grow up in new civilizations to serve various needs, including pure and applied science in recent centuries. Over time, these instruments tend to rigidify into self-serving institutions which exclude those who can solve the serious problems which will rise eventually. There is now no reason, nor was there ever a reason, to believe that the physical sciences would be immune from this process, this rigidification into institutions which defend themselves rather than seeking truth or serving a greater cause or an entity such as a civilization or the Christian Church.
The problem is showing itself in science in the modern sense of physics and chemistry and biology and a few others, but it’s been a major reason for civilizations or more local cultures collapsing when their problems were solvable. It affects all fields of human thought and action, theology and philosophy and literature and such areas as national security agencies. In the article Why Dianne Feinstein Can’t Control the CIA, Phillip Giraldi, himself a former CIA officer, tells us:
Government bureaucracies, like many private sector businesses, are initially created in response to a perceived need either to do something or provide a service. The Department of Defense in its current incarnation rose out of the developing Cold War in the post-Second World War environment, while the CIA was created to prevent a second Pearl Harbor. But as bureaucracies mature they become less and less connected to their founding principles as circumstances change and they fail to adapt. They then go into a self-defense mode that makes maintaining jobs, budgets, and political turf in Washington their top priority. This compulsion to protect equities is the reason we are currently hearing of alleged CIA spying on a largely disengaged Senate committee in an attempt to forestall any accountability for torture and rendition policies that many believe to be war crimes.
Mostly lost in translation is the fact that the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, like CIA, is also a stale bureaucracy, one largely inhabited by senators who have been in place for many years. Committee staffers reflect their sense of entitlement, believing themselves untouchable as they bask in their celebrity since 9/11. In short, they too are prone to go into self-defense mode about what they have and have not done, making Sen. Dianne Feinstein no hero for opportunistically attacking the CIA for spying on her committee. Her attempts to shift the blame for now-discredited and abhorrent activities in which her committee was almost certainly complicit are obvious, though this in no way exonerates the Agency.
There is a very large-scale problem, especially at times in history when contradictions and stresses have built up because new knowledge of our world hasn’t been properly integrated into a good and plausible—albeit ultimately time-bound and culture-bound—understanding of our world. The empirical knowledge gathered in recent centuries didn’t fit into any traditional understandings of our world Heroic efforts were made to put huge volumes of new wine into small and old wineskins. The containers tore apart and yet many in such fields as theology and philosophy still insist on the goodness of those wineskins. Great physicists, even Poincare, tried to deal with the discoveries and theories of Planck and Einstein in such a way but physics as a whole was strong enough and youthful enough to move forward. I don’t see reason to believe that contemporary physics, or other fields of science, could deal so well with truly revolutionary understandings of our physical world.
And there is no unified understanding of our world, certainly not one which sets it in the context of a greater Creation—unless my understanding proves to be good enough to found a new Christian Civilization or revive the decrepit West.
Even the limited understandings of disciplined scientific thinkers seem like shards of glass and not like pieces of an intact window or a coherent mosaic. See my book Four Kinds of Knowledge for my take on the nature of human knowledge, and the truer nature of knowledge which underlies it.
As matters stand, the institutions of Western Civilization have constructed various ghettos of thought and attitude and, as discussed above, there are signs that physicists and chemists and biologists are now doing the same—though those ghettos are not so well populated as those of theology and philosophy and literature. To mention national security issues again, we can examine the past 20 years of American treachery toward a Russia struggling out of the mess the Bolsheviks had made and it’s pretty reasonable to conjecture this has happened at least partly because so many have made careers out of opposing and hating Russians. (This is most certainly not an original speculation; some who work in the field, including some who have personal or national reasons to dislike Russia, put it forth as a definite factor in the way things are.)
In any case, many resources are controlled by ghettoized communities of knowledge and thought and creative art. Mavericks are on the outside, sometimes struggling to survive. We mavericks can console ourselves with the thought that we are living in reality while the ghetto-dwellers hold on to often magnificent but no longer valid understandings of reality from prior centuries, but we can also grow bitter in our poverty of income and resources. The time-scales in the prior sentence can be adjusted to describe the situations of maverick scientists in the maturing generation if no one manages to find a way to support them.
It’s the way of the world. We can conjecture, without too much abuse of just-so reasoning, that there are advantages to creatures conforming to established ways of thought and behavior during the relatively stable periods, good or bad, which dominate the timescape of this world. It’s likely that the human race has evolved so that most men and women will try to minimize risk and energy expenditure. I’ll not elaborate on this issue. In any case, most human beings tend to settle into habits which can become so strong as to doom those creatures when surrounding conditions change.
I am not saying, nor is Professor Curry saying nor the British scientists, that it would be desirable or even possible for every scientist or every poet or every composer to be a maverick in the way of Einstein or Eliot or Stravinsky. We need a mixture of human types where all legitimate types respect each other, where all valid ways of being scientists or literary men or philosophers or government intelligence analysts are provided for. That is how evolution shaped us as a race, a mixture of risk-adverse and risk-seeking creatures, conforming and dissenting creatures. We should assume this is a good thing in this world and we should take care of all those who serve the survival and advancement of the human race.