|
[Ed. Note:
Dr. Philip S. Skell is a member of
the National
Academy of Sciences (NAS), the most
prestigious group of scientists in the United
States. He is the Evan Pugh Professor of
Chemistry Emeritus at Pennsylvania State
University. (see full story of recent SBOE vote
here.) The letter below is reproduced from
what he sent us and will be posted on our
website. It originally appeared October 9,
2008 in
Politics and the Life Sciences.]
+++
Earlier this year, the National Academy of
Sciences released the latest version of
Science,
Evolution, and Creationism. This
booklet is no doubt intended to inform the
public - and teachers - of developments within
biology. Like its earlier versions, however, it
conflates the history of living organisms on
Earth over the past 3.5 billion years with the
advances of the last century made by
experimental biologists.
Experimental biology has dramatically increased
our understanding of the intricate workings
within living organisms, which accounts for
their survival, showing how they maintain their
coherent functioning despite the myriad assaults
on them coming from their environments. These
advances in knowledge are attributable to the
development of new methodologies and
instrumentations, unimaginable in the preceding
centuries, applied to the investigation of
living organisms.
These advances are not due to studies of an
organism's ancestors that are recovered from
fossil deposits. Those rare individual organisms
that have been preserved as fossils are
impressions in stones that, even when examined
with the expertise of paleontologists, cannot
reveal the details that make the amazing living
organisms function. To conflate contemporary
scientific studies of existing organisms with
those of the paleontologists serves mainly to
misguide the public and teachers of the young.
An examination of the papers in the Academy's
premiere journal, The Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, as well as many
other journals, supports the crucial distinction
I am making. Examining the major advances in
biological knowledge, one fails to find any real
connection between biological history and the
experimental designs that have produced our
cornucopia of knowledge of how the great variety
of living organisms perform their functions. It
is our knowledge of how organisms actually
operate -- not speculations about how they may
have arisen millions of years ago -- that is
essential to doctors, veterinarians, farmers,
and other practitioners of science today.
The misguided emphasis on biological history has
produced an unremarked change in the mission of
the Academy, which was chartered during
President Lincoln's administration to advise on
matters of science and technology, and for
which, over the years, it has credibly
maintained a membership of persons renowned in
those fields.
The focus on the history of ancient organisms
has, perforce, connected the Academy with the
additional fields of history, philosophy,
metaphysics, and even theology. While these
arenas are of great import in defining our world
views, one might reasonably raise questions
regarding the expertise of Academy members in
any of these areas, and their value in advancing
the biological knowledge the public expects. For
example, is it really a matter of science when
an eminent scientist like Einstein speculates
about metaphysical questions such as why there
is something rather than nothing in the
universe? Can expertise in science and
technology guide us to definitive answers to
such questions?
It is widely accepted that the growth of science
and technology in the West, which accounts for
the remarkable advances we enjoy today in
medicine, agriculture, travel, communications,
etc., was coincidental with the separation
several centuries ago of the experimental
sciences from the dominance of the otherwise
important fields of philosophy, metaphysics,
theology, and history. Yet, the Academy's new
booklet posits that, without the study of
ancient biological history, guided by a
reductionist philosophical or theological
position that we might call "Scientism", our
students will not be prepared to engage in the
great variety of modern experimental activities
expected of them. The public should view with
profound alarm the unnecessary and misguided
reintroduction of speculative historical,
philosophical, and religious ideas into the
realms of experimental science, coming from
various sources, including this current
publication of the National Academy of Sciences.
Are we perhaps setting the stage for a return to
that earlier, worldview-bound, pre-modern type
of science, only this time with the substitution
of Scientism for the earlier worldviews?
Even when stripped of all "Scientistic"
ideology, history is more appropriate in
astrophysics and geology than in biology. For
example, the radiations arriving at our
detectors inform us of the ongoing events that
occurred billions of years ago in distant parts
of our universe that have been traveling for all
this time to reach us. The rock formations of
concern to geologists have resided largely
undisturbed in their essence since their
formations. But the fossils fail to inform us of
the nature of our ancient living antecedents
because they have been enormously, and
essentially, transformed into stones that give
us only a minuscule and often misleading
impression of their former essences, and thus
are largely misleadingly irrelevant to modern
biology's experimentations with living
organisms.
Historians who describe the social and political
events of earlier times face a similar problem
and are keenly aware that the histories they
write are to a great extent informed by the
ideologies they employ to conjure up the lost
details they describe, a process known as
historicizing. A similar process is employed to
explain the causal relationships of fossils to
one another and to our present diversity of
living organisms. Can we rely on such
ruminations about the past to lead us to a
prediction of the evolution of the ambient flu
virus so that we can prepare today the vaccine
for next year's most virulent strain? No! Do we
depend on our knowledge of Hittite economics to
order our twenty-first century economics?
In 1942 Nobel Prize winner Ernst Chain wrote
about his discovery (with Florey and Fleming) of
penicillin, and of the development of bacterial
resistance to that antibiotic, that neither of
those discoveries was significantly guided by
Darwin's and Wallace's theory about the
evolution of the diversity of living organisms
over the ages. The same can be said about a
variety of other twentieth century discoveries:
the discovery of the structure of the DNA double
helix, the characterization of the ribosome, the
mapping of genomes, research on medications and
drug reactions, improvements in food production
and sanitation, the development of new
surgeries, and other developments.
Additionally, I have queried biologists working
in areas where one might have thought the
Darwinian paradigm could guide research, such as
the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and
pesticides. Here, as elsewhere, I learned that
the theory had provided no discernible guidance
in choosing the experimental designs but was
brought in, after the breakthrough discoveries,
as an interesting narrative gloss.
The Academy's new booklet has three inserts,
highlighted in yellow, on pages 5, 6, and 9,
which are offered as proof of the value of
evolutionary theory for medicine, agriculture,
and industry, that fail to support the claims:
they totally neglect to address the matter of
the essential experimental designs scientists
require, offering instead vague statements about
evolution. The essence of the evolution theory
is the hypothesis that historical diversity is
the consequence of natural selection acting on
variations. Regardless the verity for explaining
the biohistory, they provide no guidance to the
experimenter, concerned for example, with the
goal of finding, or synthesizing, a new
antibiotic, or how it functions to disable a
disease-producing organism, what dosages are
required, and which individuals will not
tolerate it. Studying biohistory is, at best, an
entertaining distraction from the goals of a
working biologist. To further illustrate the
point, consider a question faced by a scientist
with concerns about cancerous tumors. He/she
observes that such tumors are extensively
vascularized by the host and asks why this
occurs. This results in questioning what leads
to the formation of those blood vessels, a study
that it is hoped will produce some procedure for
frustrating that development, hopefully
starving-to-death the tumor. Can any of this
scientist's guidance come from studying the
fossils, the stony impressions of our
antecedents? No!
It is noteworthy that Darwin's and Wallace's
theory of evolution has been enormously
aggrandized since its publication in 1859 by the
remarkable process of subsuming to itself,
through the writings of neo-Darwinian
biologists, many of the experimental discoveries
of the twentieth century. This is so despite the
fact that those discoveries were neither
predicted nor heuristically guided by the
theory.
The overselling of the theory of evolution by
means of this illegitimate incorporation of
later discoveries may have done a grave
disservice, both to those two nineteenth-century
scientists, and to modern biology. Their
insights synthesized a remarkable explanation
for our historical biological development, which
led to the consequent impacts on current
worldviews.
Darwin and Wallace would surely have recoiled
from the revolting contentious arguments that
now envelop current biology; conditions so
different from those displayed within the sister
sciences, physics and chemistry. The difference
between the advances of twentieth century
chemical and biological sciences is worth
noting. Chemists have depended largely on
geological sources, which they have separated
into the hundred or so elements, and have then
devised a great variety of schemes for
synthesizing millions of new complex
arrangements of these elements, giving to the
public medicines, fertilizers, plastics, etc. of
great utility. Biologists, on the other hand,
have recognized that their natural sources are
living organisms, each of which is a unique
individual, each consisting of extraordinary
complex molecular combinations in configurations
that provide coherent functioning and
reproduction. There are no two identical genomes
in the biocosm. Modern biologists have been
engaged in experimental studies that have begun
to reveal the details of how living organisms
function and reproduce. These studies, if not
derailed, indicate that further advances of
great utility can be expected from experimental
biology during the twenty-first century.
It is unseemly and scientifically unfruitful
that the major focus of some biologists has been
on the war between those who hold that the
history of those unique organisms is purely a
matter of chance aggregation from the inorganic
world and those who hold that the aggregation
must have been designed for a purpose. The
Academy's new booklet appears to be focused,
with its emphasis on historical biology, on
winning this battle.
The core background needed for students'
understanding and participation in future
developments within biological science is not
the immersion in historical biology but a
concentration on 1. What living organisms
inhabit our Earth; 2. How they reproduce their
unique characteristics over time and maintain
their coherent functions over their lifetimes;
and 3. How they interact with one another.
Outside of biological science, it is certainly
true that the education of our young in matters
related to development of their worldviews is
sadly neglected -- to their and society's
detriment, since such studies serve to define
the matrix, structures, and evolution of our
societies and cultures. This neglect speaks
urgently for a significant restructuring of
educational curricula as a whole to include
introductions to philosophy, metaphysics,
cosmology, history (including biological
history), and comparative theologies. In this
way, students could have a deeper understanding
of the forces buffeting them and the nature of
the damaging pestilential war currently
infecting biological science.
Philip S. Skell is Evan Pugh Professor of
Chemistry Emeritus
Pennsylvania State University and
Member, National Academy of Sciences
+++
[Note: You may direct comments to:
newsletterfeedback2009@strengthsandweaknesses.org] |
