Traveling Lands Beyond

I’ve started to read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the book that introduced the term “paradigm shift” into our lexicon. I’m only through the first few chapters at this point, but that chapter describes the destruction of old paradigms and creation of new paradigms as a recurrent process and contrasts it to what it considers a conventional view of science as a gradual accumulation.

On its surface, I find this to be a bit of a straw man. To me, it’s quite clear that historically, established scientific theory has been wrong from time to time and needs to be torn up and redone when we make new discoveries that do not fit it. I do think observed data accumulate, and since theory hangs on the scaffolding of data and becomes established by its ability to repeatedly and accurately predict relevant data, I think it unlikely that we ever need to genuinely scrap decades and decades of scientific progress. We may have abandoned theories of ether and humors and phlogiston, but because these theories are only believable insofar as they explain observed data, even if the theory turns out to be completely wrong, we still have valuable accumulated data with which to construct new ones. And, as Kuhn points out, many experiments that produced valuable data or were useful in later theoretical developments were done by scientists who wished to corroborate, refine, or challenge the existing paradigm. So data inspires theory, which inspires further and experiments, which lead to more data, and even wrong theories in this workflow can lead to progress in the end by the production of good data.

This feeling reminded me a bit of when I first learned of punctuated equilibrium as an evolutionary theory opposed to gradualism. I’m no expert on evolutionary debate, but it comes as no surprise to me that the pace of evolution may be variable and may increase rapidly in stressful environments. In stable environments natural selection’s ability to distinguish beneficial phenotypes from non-beneficial phenotypes is surely diminished; in unstable environments, where genes’ abilities to survive and reproduce are constantly held to the flame, it is surely reasonable to expect natural selection to operate more efficiently. We induce very rapid evolution on domesticated animals and plants through selective breeding, which can be thought of as an extremely stressful environment for the species in question; survival depends on organisms’ abilities to satisfy our specific needs, for large fruit, strong muscles, or cute floppy doggy ears.

Now, in both cases, I am writing from the comforts of an armchair in my apartment in the year 2012. Kuhn’s book was first published in 1962, and Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould published their landmark paper on punctuated equilibrium in 1972. It is impossible for me to really know what it was like then, what people did and did not believe and know and what did or did not seem like plausible theory. For me to call this a straw man is rather unfair. I grew up in a world where the term “paradigm” was name-dropped in a very popular book I read in fifth grade, and where punctuated equilibrium theories were covered in my ninth grade biology textbook. I am already steeped in new paradigms, and a proper appreciation of history requires you to understand that those who came before you may have looked at the same world differently than you do.

As understanding history is important to understanding the present day, in science and in other fields alike, this caveat has ramifications far beyond simply having sympathy for our predecessors. Recently I’ve read a number of books covering the Middle East (The Prize, Persepolis, Shah of Shahs, and I have started Ghost Wars). I have been struck by how many decisions the US made in the second half of the 20th century that were motivated by anti-Soviet sentiment. Here we are in the 1980s funneling money and arms to the mujahedin in Afghanistan in the name of the Cold War; these people are our enemies’ enemies but hardly our friends, and many of them bear ill will not only to Russia but to the US, to Pakistan, to Israel or anyone not a Muslim, to the West in general, and to each other (Ghost Wars makes clear how balkanized the Afghans were). It seems like a bad idea, no? But people then thought in the paradigm of the Cold War, a Manichean universe where the Third World was the battleground for the First and the Second. They weren’t thinking about things like whether some of the mujahedin might hate America as badly as they hated the Soviets, to the point where they might crash a pair of passenger planes into a pair of Manhattan skyscrapers someday.

The Cold War was a dominant paradigm for so long in American foreign relations that it is understandable that people back then, even bright military and political minds, thought within its bounds. At the same time as we might sympathize with our predecessors, we must take the lesson to be aware when paradigms shift and to recognize when we ourselves might be steeped in established paradigms that direct and constrain our thoughts and may lead us to make decisions that one day we will rue.