Wanted to mention a couple of books I’m hoping to read in the near future. One is The Genial Gene by Joan Roughgarden. I mention Roughgarden’s work in 13 Things. She basically believes that the standard theory of sexual selection – how animals determine their mate choice – is all wrong. Roughgarden is reviled by the neo-Darwinists, such as Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne. If you want to get a flavour of her thinking, read this feature in New Scientist. If you want to get a flavour of her new book’s attitude, here’s the dedication:
To those who suffer the persecution of science
One thing’s for sure, feathers will fly when this one comes out!
The second, which I haven’t got a copy of yet, is Fred Grinnell’s Everyday Practice of Science. OK, so the title probably makes you snooze (and the cover's even less exciting than the other one, which is why I haven't put a pic up). The subtitle is, Where Intuition and Passion Meet Objectivity and Logic.
Still snoozing? Come on, this is (IMHO) a much under-explored topic. What makes science work? Is it all about Dr Spock types making logical deductions? As I wrote in my Telegraph piece last month, I really don’t think so.
One thing I didn’t mention in there was just how illogical Copernicus’s arrival at a heliocentric universe was.
Copernicus put the sun at the centre of the solar system by taking the ideas of a Greek astronomer called Philolaos seriously. Those ideas, which involved sacred circles and a “shadow Earth” were so muddled and mystical that Ptolemy, the king of astronomers in Copernicus’s time, called them “incredibly ridiculous”.
Copernicus nevertheless used them as a basis by which to replace the astronomical model of the time – the Ptolomaic Epicycles (dontcha just love how science rewards hubris?!). Even Galileo shook his head at Copernicus’s ability to draw something so successful out of something that made no sense: “there is no limit to my astonishment,” he said.
It’s my as-yet unproven contention that many of the most important moments in science may have come out of left-field, rather than as logical progressions from one discovery to another. Maybe Grinnell has already proved it – I’ll have to read the book to find out, I guess. Anyway, there’s a review of Grinnell’s book here.
A little taster:
Of course, generating new knowledge about the world, and then getting the scientific community to recognize it as knowledge (i.e., to judge your claims to be credible) is not easy. Grinnell describes nonlinearities in the path we might label "discovery," laying out some of the reasons it can be brutally difficult to build knowledge that takes us beyond the comfort of what is already well known.
Oh, you know it’s gonna be good stuff!!
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