Falling for science by Bernard Beckett Longacre Press $39.99
KEY POINTS:
People are incurable romantics. Lack of hard information never prevents us from spinning a good yarn and no topic is too big.
Gradually, the human race became good at another mode of thinking. We found the power of reason and induction might not be as seductive as myths and superstitions but delivered highly satisfactory results and the compelling notions of material and intellectual progress.
Falling for Science, by Wellington writer Bernard Beckett, is a rare and welcome thing, a general book about the philosophy of science by a New Zealander.
It looks at the differences between rational science and the story-telling impulse, and how a mix of the two can be dangerously misleading, but essential to making meaning. It's a theme which has no doubt arisen from Beckett's own two distinct portfolios: as a maths and science teacher, and a novelist.
The first half of the book is a potted history of the development of Western science leaping from the ancient Greeks to the Enlightenment, a look at how inductive reasoning works and the philosophical response to it.
Beckett then moves on to modern concepts of how science advances knowledge.
The guts of his argument is in the second half of the book where he focuses on examples of what he considers to be the danger areas where science confuses its theories with leaps of faith and makes claims to absolute truth. Beckett virtually ignores the near-mysticism of modern physics, concentrating instead on evolution and genetics as areas particularly vulnerable to being taken hostage by the spinners.
He puts paid to the creationist argument but also warns against the scientific temptation to reduce us to the mechanics of genetics and cell replication.
Where he really gets stuck in is the field of evolutionary psychology and its reliance on the benefits of hindsight. And finally, he looks at the brain and whether understanding its physical processes could ever equate to understanding consciousness.
Beckett's teaching background probably accounts for the user-friendly writing style, enthusiasm to communicate and insistence on laying his intellectual cards on the table that make this an enjoyable, instructive and thought-provoking read.
The flipside is a tendency to patronise: to warn the reader about difficult passages ahead and recommend that effort is put in to understand them properly.
His demolitions of creationism and evolutionary psychology are satisfying, and the forays into areas where science and sentiment collide, such as human origins, bring a real sense of perspective. But the conclusion never really overcomes the ambiguity of the book's title, with its implications of being seduced, even conned.
The author's final assertion that we will always need story-telling to create meaning, make moral choices and to wonder at life is rather undermined by earlier statements about the limits of fictionalising and its relationship to the facts.
Ultimately it seems as if Beckett, the novelist, has fallen for fiction's lure, striving for an equality between science and story-telling that the book itself argues is false.
