Uncle Sam Wants You 英语短文.docx

1、Uncle Sam Wants You 英语短文Science 14 May 1999: Vol. 284 no. 5417 pp. 1131-1133 DOI: 10.1126/science.284.5417.1131 Books HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCEUncle Sam Wants YouA review by David L. Hull*1. David L. Hull*+ Author Affiliations1. The author is in the Department of Philosophy, Northwestern Uni

2、versity, Brentano Hall, 1818 Hinman Avenue, Evanston, IL 60208, USA. E-mail: d-hullnwu.eduMystery of Mysteries Is Evolution a Social Construction? Michael Ruse Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999. 320 pp. $27.50, 16.95. ISBN 0-674-46706-X. Many scientists, possibly most scientists, just do

3、 science without thinking too much about it. They run experiments, make observations, show how certain data conflict with more general views, set out theories, and so on. Periodically, however, some of usscientists includedstep back and look at what is going on in science. In doing so, students of s

4、cience use some of the same techniques that scientists use. For example, we attempt to show that science is progressive by detailing the history of science over the past couple hundred years. Or we argue that scientists have been strongly influenced by their cultures by looking at particular instanc

5、es of such cultural influence. In this respect, the study of science is reflexive. We gather data about science to show exactly how influential data are (or are not) in science. The result has been the science wars. The two extreme positions in this dispute over the nature of science are social cons

6、tructivism and positivism. The most extreme constructivists seem to hold that all of us, scientists included, are helpless victims in the maws of our societies. We all believe what our societies force us to believe. On this extreme view, the appeals that scientists make to reason, argument, and evid

7、ence are merely so much show to cover the social origins of our beliefs. The trouble is that constructivists live in precisely the same societies as the rest of us. Somehow they are able to free themselves from the ineluctable hold that society has on them, but strangely the rest of us cannot. Conve

8、rsely, positivists are portrayed as evil, insisting that scientific world views are totally devoid of any such considerationsin particular of any appeals to values. Scientists simply tell it like it is. Reason, argument, and evidence are all that matter. Most of the issues that others find so fascin

9、ating, including metaphysics, are just nonsense. That positivists spent so much time writing on issues that surely count as metaphysical, including the claim that metaphysics is nonsense, hardly warrants mentioning. As is commonly the case, both sides engaged in the science wars are constantly on th

10、e move: advancing, retreating, and covering their tracks, as best as they can, with verbal smoke screens. Combatants on both sides insist that they never held any of the views for which they are famous. Instead, they waffle extensively. Constructivists claim they always acknowledged that reason, arg

11、ument, and evidence play crucial roles in science. All that they are attempting to point out is that social factors also play important roles in science, at times overwhelming more narrowly scientific factors. More traditional philosophers object to being tarred with the same brush as the extreme po

12、sitivists. Professional and social factors play parts in science, of course, but so do reason, argument, and evidence; and in the long run, more narrowly scientific factors triumph. Hence, the only difference between the two sides is estimation of relative importance. As reasonable as these more mod

13、erate positions may seem, their advocates still must confront the problem of reflexivity. How do we decide the relative importance of scientific and cultural factors in the decisions that scientists make? If we study science scientifically, then we run the danger of circularity. If we are to study s

14、cience in some other ways, what are the outlines of these alternatives? No one has suggested any yet. It is here that Michael Ruse, in his Mystery of Mysteries, steps into the breach. When John Herschel referred to the mystery of mysteries in 1836, he had in mind the replacement of species through t

15、ime, what we have come to call biological evolution. Ruse has the evolution of science in mind, and the evolution of science is as mysterious today as the evolution of species was a century and a half ago. Ruse proposes to investigate the history of evolutionary biology from the late 18th century to

16、 the present to determine the influence of various factors in deciding the course of this scientific discipline. He selects a dozen or so evolutionary biologists to study. He begins with Erasmus Darwin as a representative of a pre-Darwinian evolutionist. For the 19th century, he quite naturally turn

17、s to Erasmus Darwins grandson, Charles, and T. H. Huxley. Then, from this century, Ruse discusses Julian Huxley, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, E. O. Wilson, Geoffrey Parker, and Jack Sepkoski. Because evolutionary theory has been one of the chief battle

18、fields in the war between constructivists and positivists, Ruse could not have picked a more appropriate topic of study. We have all heard, time and again, that the reason Darwins theory was so individualistic, competitive, elitist, sexist, and racist is that Darwins society exhibited these same cha

19、racteristics. Darwin was so callow that he simply read the characteristics of his society into nature. Ruse is uniquely prepared to write this book. He has published on the history of evolutionary theory from before Darwin to the present. He is a professional philosopher of science who deals with a

20、wide spectrum of topics, from the role of religion in science to the virtues of formalistic philosophy of science. He also has the courage of his convictionsat the 1982 Arkansas creationism trial he testified that science can be sharply distinguished from non-science, and that evolutionary biology i

21、s clearly on the scientific side of the divide while creationism is just as clearly on the unscientific side. As strange as it may sound, courage is required for writing a book such as Mystery of Mysteries. Historians of science usually deal with dead scientists. Dead scientists cannot talk back, no

22、r can they retaliate. Living scientists can. A shiver goes down my spine when I think of how the living scientists Ruse discusses are likely to respond to his book. But Ruse has always been willing to call em as he sees em. For the past dozen years, he has concluded each issue of his journal Biology

23、 & Philosophy with a set of editorial booknotes. As each issue arrives in the mail, I turn first to his “Booknotes” with equal parts of anticipation and apprehension. What will he say next, and will it be about me? For each of the evolutionary biologists that Ruse studies, he asks how do such tradit

24、ional epistemic values as predictive ability, consistency, and coherence contribute to the biologists work? He also investigates the influence of what he terms “metavalues,” those beliefs that scientists have about science itself. To take one example: in the early days of science, references to God

25、in science were perfectly acceptable, but later such references were excluded. Finally, Ruse examines whether such cultural factors as beliefs in progress, male dominance, and individualism had significant effects on the path that evolutionary biology has taken. As Ruse works his way from the 18th c

26、entury to the present, he evaluates each of his subjects, first from a present-day perspective and then according to the standards of the subjects own time. For example, from a present-day perspective, Erasmus Darwins Zoonomia (1794) hardly seems the stuff of scienceafter all, it is a poem. But in h

27、is day, his more serious contemporaries also had considerable doubt as to whether his writings counted as genuine science. Ruse agrees. The influence of epistemic values in the evolutionary writings of Erasmus Darwin was minimal. The effects of other factors were maximal. When Ruse turns to Charles

28、Darwin, the balance shifts dramatically. Darwin tried to make his theory of evolution look as scientific as possible, with varying degrees of success. One chief difference between the 18th and 19th centuries is that science was well on its way to becoming professionalized in Darwins day, and one of

29、the chief metavalues of professional science was that it had to be as free of nonepistemic values as possible. Regardless of how important a belief in progress may have actually been at the time, scientists had to act as if it did not influence their activities because such beliefs were not genuinel

30、y scientific. Darwin joined in this process of constructing science, and here the constructivist notion of “construction” has some bite. Nineteenth-century intellectuals did not simply discover science. To a large extent, they literally constructed it. Darwin, however, was not entirely successful in

31、 presenting his theory of evolution as exemplifying the best epistemic and metalevel values of his day. One of the commonest and most effective objections to Darwins theory was that it was not genuine science. Ruse concludes that evolutionary thought in the late 19th century is “more epistemically r

32、igorous than it ever was; yet at all levels it is thoroughly impregnated with culture” (p. 80). As Ruse turns to evolutionary biology in the early 20th century, the difference between the science of then and today diminishes rapidly because the science of the day was rapidly becoming the science of

33、today. The founders of the synthetic, or neo-Darwinian, theory of evolution were concerned to make evolutionary theory even more scientific than it had been, in particular more mathematical. Even so, nonepistemic factors were also operative. Several evolutionists, such as Julian Huxley, wanted to replace Christianity with a secular re