Blogs / Cosmic Variance

I’ve mentioned several times, on this blog and my old one, how much I admire Ian McEwan. For my taste, his writing is some of the finest around, and I particularly love his meticulously crafted, deeply flawed and twisted characters. But it’s not just his fiction of which I’m a fan. McEwan is a clear thinker and advocate for a reason-based view of the world; something I’d admire in anyone, but find particularly notable and refreshing in a literary giant, far removed from the world of science.

In last week’s Guardian, as a tribute to Richard Dawkins, McEwan has a wonderful, beautiful and, ultimately, sobering essay on the idea of nurturing a scientific literary tradition. I have read it three times so far and find myself drawn back to it for multiple reasons.

The essay begins with an explanation of the role of the canon in classical literature, describing some of its greats and the importance of understanding them as a precursor to fully grasping modern literary works. As McEwan puts it

In part, it is a temporal map, a means of negotiating the centuries and the connections between writers. It helps to know that Shakespeare preceded Keats who preceded Wilfred Owen because lines of influence might be traced.

The central question of the essay is whether science writing can provide a parallel to this, and if so, then what precisely might its role be. Here, McEwan’s language is fluid and seductive, making a case that the history of scientific ideas, no matter what their outcomes, provides a crucial tool in shaping modern progress

We need to remember the various discarded toys of science – the humours, the four elements, phlogiston, the ether and, more recently, protoplasm. Modern chemistry was born out of the futile ambitions of alchemy. Scientists who hurl themselves down blind alleys perform a service – they save everyone a great deal of trouble. They may also refine techniques along the way, and offer points of resistance, intellectual cantilevers, to their contemporaries.

I say all this somewhat dutifully, because there actually is a special pleasure to be shared, when a scientist or science writer leads us towards the light of a powerful idea which in turn opens avenues of exploration and discovery leading far into the future, binding many different phenomena in many different fields of study. Some might call this truth.

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But if we understand science merely as a band of light moving through time, advancing on the darkness, and leaving ignorant darkness behind it, always at its best only in the incandescent present, we turn our backs on an epic tale of ingenuity propelled by curiosity.

Isn’t this beautiful? Non-scientists with this kind of thirst for scientific knowledge and an understanding of the thrill of the chase and the nature of the discipline are a gift to us. If they can understand and value what we do while finding beauty, poetry, history and intrigue in it, it gives me, at least, real hope for bringing our message to the public.

After several historical examples of the scientific literary tradition (Voltaire on smallpox inoculations; Anton van Leeuwenhoek on spirogyra; Huxley’s public lecture – “On a Piece of Chalk”; Darwin), McEwan turns to Dawkins.

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. There has never been a science book quite like it. Drawing on the work of a handful of scientists, it bound together genetics and Darwinian natural selection in a creative synthesis that amazed even those few who were already familiar with the concepts. It hastened a sea change in evolutionary theory, it affected profoundly the teaching of biology, it enticed an enthusiastic younger generation into the subject, and spawned a huge literature, and eventually a new discipline – memetics. At the same time, and this is the measure of its achievement, it addressed itself without condescension to the layman. It did so provocatively, and with style.

McEwan makes the case that “The Selfish Gene stood at the beginning of a golden age of science writing” and goes on to add a list of later works to his scientific literary canon. These include some that I’ve read, including a few that are among my all time favorites, and others that were either on my reading list already or, if not, most certainly are now. What I find most impressive is that, behind the central theme of the essay, which itself I find fascinating, it is crystal clear that McEwan has devoted considerable time to educating himself about science, both modern and historical. It is also clear that he considers this to be as essential a part of being educated as any of the other bodies of knowledge that help make him the intellectual that he is. This is an attitude that is so often lacking even in those who are accomplished in other areas (I frequently encounter it among some of my own colleagues) and it brightens my day whenever I come across it.

At the end McEwan becomes practical, and dwells on the concrete role that an appreciation for science, reason and the workings of the natural world has in today’s society. Discussing Dawkins’ well-known attitudes to religion, McEwan eloquently comments

Few of us, I think, in the mid-1970s, when The Selfish Gene was published, would have thought we would be dedicating so much mental space to discussing religious faith in this new century. We thought that since it has nothing useful at all to say about cosmology, the age of the earth, the origin of species, the curing of disease or any other aspect of the physical world, it had retreated finally to where it belongs, to the privacy of individual conscience. We were wrong. A variety of sky-god worshippers with their numerous, mutually exclusive certainties (all of which we must “respect”) appears to be occupying more and more of the space of public discourse. Increasingly, they seem to want to tell us how to live and think, or inflict upon us the strictures they choose to impose upon themselves.

And this is where the essay becomes less of an appeal for a beautiful, important intellectual tradition – that of scientific literature – and more of a rallying cry for rationalism. McEwan understands the dangers of replacing knowledge with orthodoxy and empiricism with faith, and sees, crucially, that it is not only the job of the scientist to battle superstition and nonsense, but that of all educated people. As he concludes

We can take nothing for granted, for totalitarian thinking, religious or political, will always be with us in some form or other. For this reason alone, we should nurture a living scientific literary tradition.

Indeed we should.