Even More Fuller
How funny – a harmonic convergence, or something. The very day that I noted the oddity of Steve Fuller’s comment on Meera Nanda’s book at Amazon, in view of his testimony at Dover – Michael Bérubé commented on exactly the same thing.
I’m working on something that I’ll explain more fully next week (when, I hope, it will be done), but in the course of my work on it I found that sociologist Steve Fuller blurbed Meera Nanda’s 2003 book, Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India by writing, “This first detailed examination of postmodernism’s politically reactionary consequences should serve as a wake-up call for all conscientious leftists.” Right, well, it so happens that I’m down with much of Nanda’s argument myself, as I explain in a bunch of things I’ve been writing lately. But wait! This Steve Fuller is that Steve Fuller, the author of Social Epistemology (and much, much more) who showed up in Dover, Pennsylvania this past October to testify that Intelligent Design is a legitimate science…
Snap. All the more interesting because Michael has told me that it was reading Meera’s articles here (at B&W) that caused him to worry about these politically reactionary consequences himself, and that’s why he’s writing about the subject now. Which is good since he’s an influential fella, on account of being such a damn brilliant writer (well, on other accounts too, but the writing is like some kind of atomic magnet). So that means B&W is useful, in its plodding little way, and it’s always good when I get to think that B&W is useful, because it keeps me going when discouragement over hackers and my inability to fix things that need fixing threatens to cause me to run away from home and become a confectioner.
So then, to add to the interest, Steve Fuller commented on Michael’s post, and Michael turned that into a new thread with comments from a lot of knowledgeable people like P Z Myers and John Emerson. There is also a comment at the Valve. And there’s a post from October at Panda’s Thumb.
I’ll just offer a few of Fuller’s…stranger remarks.
It’s not clear – at least not to me – that there is some psychologically credible line to be drawn between ‘revelation’ and ‘reason’. This distinction exists, if at all, at the public level of how you would have your ideas tested: By calculations? By experiments? By the Bible?
And
But in my circles people don’t talk much about their religious beliefs, so I just go on my reading and intermittent outbursts of others. I do wonder what might be the motivation for atheists to do science in the grand unifying sense: Why do they believe there’s sufficient order in the universe to merit the systematic efforts at inquiry?
Because they think there can be order without design, and because there’s an immense amount to find out about that if so (or, in another way, if not). That question is oddly reminiscent of Nicholas Buxton saying in that Guardian article that the only rational thing for people who think the universe is uncaused to do is jump off a cliff.
And
Actually if you’re a Darwinist ‘all the way down’, you should say that life began as some random collocation of micro-units of matter that happened to stabilize long enough to reproduce and then mutate: i.e. the self-bootstrapping theory of life. However, Darwinists don’t want to commit to this because it’s not empirically provable – which means it allows room for more feint-hearted Darwinists to believe that God kicked off the whole process.
Provable – oh dear. That’s a very basic mistake for someone in this field, especially when he does such a lot of de haut en bas condescending to everyone else on the thread.
Steve Fuller on ID and science:
Q. Do you see Intelligent Design as at least holding out the prospect for a scientific advance?
S.F. Yes.
Q. Just briefly describe some of the ways in which you see that.
S.F. Well, I mean, I think that the main thing would be a kind of unified science of design where, you know, the kinds – the design of artefacts, the design of computer programs, and the design of biological systems and social systems would be covered under one unified science.
http://www.aclupa.org/downloads/Day15AMSession.pdf
Steve’s writing style is interesting. I have been know to insert the odd parenthetical remark (though not very often) but Steve must get the gold medal.
An editor once told me it was the sign of a very disorderly mind.
After sitting through a couple of Steve Fuller’s seminars and battling through his horribly turgid book ‘Kuhn vs Popper’, I thought I had some sense of his view of the nature of science. Something like this: Paradigms/disciplines are too restrictive and potentially a source malign political influence. The social constructivists accept malign political influence on science as inevitable. They are therefore content to be merely descriptive. Instead we should be open to all hypotheses which could then be subject to Popperian falsification. (Perhaps something like Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchism? although I haven’t really bothered to try to understand that).
Anyway – Fuller then turns up at this trial arguing that ID needs time to become a new paradigm (so Kuhn was right and science needs paradigms after all?) and admitting that there is no way (currently) to falsify ID.
In fact, ID seems a great candidate for a theory immune to falsification – the type of theory that got Popper thinking about falisfication in the first place!
I can’t see any possible way to square these two apparent positions.
Fuller’s book “Kuhn vs Popper” is mostly taken up with a historical account of how Kuhn’s career was tied up in the cold war politics of the US (genetic fallacy anyone?). From this he draws the conclusion that, in their infatuation with Kuhn, left wing sociologists have been unwittingly taking on board a basically conservative philosophy. From this book and his seminars, I got the strong impression that his positions are based much more on political than philosophical or sociological considerations. After the Dover trial thing, I have to wonder whether he’s just an attention seeking iconoclast.
The other thing I got from Fuller’s seminars was a strong impression that he didn’t really know much about modern biology. In one of his seminars he actually said: “If you got rid of Darwinism tomorrow, I doubt that much in biology would change.”
As a biologist I couldn’t let that lie. I asked him if he realised that molecular biology would be unrecognisable without neo-darwinism. Molecular biologists rely on huge databases of sequences that group genes into families reflecting common descent. Their whole approach assumes conservation of sequence represents conservation of molecular function and that sequences vary by mutation and are under selective pressure.
I really couldn’t make much sense of his response. First he said that I was making the mistake of focusing on just one aspect of Darwinism when I should be treating it as a whole package. Possibly a fair point, but I don’t see what it has to do with my argument. He then made what seemed to me an irrelevant point about the use of cladistics in taxonomy not requiring Darwinism. Finally he asked why, if neo-darwinian assumptions are so critical to molecular biology, are papers on neo-darwinism not referenced more. When I said that this is because they are so fundamental there is no need, he snorted incredulously.
Why am I not surprised.
Judging by his lengthy comments at Michael’s, he relies heavily on his own putative authority, condescension, and rhetoric. Not impressive.
Dewey’s first paragraph, above, is pretty damn good. For one of the real oddities of Fuller’s position, I think, is that it doesn’t follow from the kind of jejune and opportunistic reading of Kuhn that critics of “science studies” like to lampoon; on the contrary, it follows from a Popperian critique of Kuhn. The other oddity, of course, is his support for ID. But somehow, for Steve, oddity number two follows from oddity number one.
And Ophelia, one small thing: Fuller’s endorsement of Prophets Looking Backward isn’t just an Amazon.com review. It’s on the back cover of the book, and therefore somewhat more “substantial” or “official.” (Thanks for your kind word about my writing, though. I’m working on it, as you know.)
Ah, Prophets Facing Backward, that is. Clearly not working on the writing carefully enough. Also, just printed out the draft of the book in which all my post-Sokal stuff will appear. Eyes bleary, memory failing, syntax bad.
I was really surprised to see that Fuller isn’t just defending ID because he wants to make some controversial and posturing point about power in science, but that he actually seemed to think it has some merit as science. I didn’t think it would be possible for him to go any further down in my estimations, but I was clearly wrong.
I think what really gives him away is the way he writes, he has the swaggering style of someone who doesn’t really care about the content of his arguments, which is probably why he really fails to answer the two main questions asked of him: what the hell evidence does he have for the claim that science is grounded in monotheism, and where is the evidence that ID shows any signs of actually being a science, rather than a rhetorical device for creationists? And getting the structure of DNA wrong, too amusing for words.
Essentially his only real defence of ID came in the paragraph:
“William Dembski is trying to come up with a mathematically precise definition of design that doesn’t reduce to necessity, chance or some combination of the two. His basic inspiration comes from information theory and the general failure to provide a foolproof random number generator. Again, he’s got lots of objectors, especially among philosophers of science and some statisticians. However, he’s doing what needs to be done – namely, to establish that there is some conceptually coherent domain of ‘design’ in reality. I don’t deny ID’s currently unsatisfactory epistemic situation, but it’s constantly raising its game. It’s worth keeping mind that evolution by natural selection remained on shaky ground within biology until the 1930s, when Mendelian genetics was placed firmly in the driver’s seat as the principal Neo-Darwinian causal mechanism. By then the theory had already been around for seventy years.”
Yet this simply suggests that Dembski might, at some point, if he’s lucky, come up with a coherent definition of design, for use in ID. So essentially, the strongest evidence for ID as science is that someone is currently trying to establish that it might make sense. Great. Science in action. “Constantly raising its game” it is. For fuck’s sake, if you haven’t even got around to establishing that you putative scientific domain is even coherent, what right have you to claim it is a science?
But its ok, because evolution by natural selection remained controversial until the 1930s. So this theory which had intellectual coherence and biological evidence, and was widely accepted, but where the exact mechanism of inheritance was unclear (note the way that Fuller conflates the mechanism of selection and the mechanism of inheritance), is equivalent to ID, where someone has said ‘I think some stuff is all a bit too complex for me to imagine it evolving by natural selection, so goddidit’, ‘I’m not currently in a position to indicate how goddidit, or what exactly goddid, or what things are too complex, or what “too complex” might actually mean, but trust me on this, it’s a science’.
Fuller wrote:
“the fact that contemporary ID is not well-supported by research matters much less to me than its potential for inspiring new directions in the scientific imagination”
The late great mathematician Paul Erdos was fond of saying that a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems. So Fuller would therefore not be interested in the correctness of the theorems but would be fascinated by the potential of coffee “for inspiring new directions in the scientific imagination”.
As Orwell commented, “There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them”.
When, having been rubbished by several correspondents who know more about biology, Darwinism, philosophy and logic than he knows about anything, Stephen Fuller started his reply ‘You guys are getting better’ I concluded that he IS the pompous twit that he had sounded like all along and stopped reading.
As someone said “Too big for his boots by half”
Ah, thanks for the clarification, Michael. I wondered about that myself because Meera referred to his comment as a blurb – oh, thought I haltingly, is it actually on the cover? I will look and see. -But then I forgot to do that.
Boy – too bad he didn’t take the lesson to heart and stay away from Dover then.
“Stephen Fuller started his reply ‘You guys are getting better'”
Isn’t he just a trip?!
The superiority was really dripping over everything, wasn’t it?. Maybe, though, not so surprising for one who has made it his business to judge the validity of a particular kind of knowledge by means which do not include him even claiming to possess that kind of knowledge himself.
Well exactly. I have a few words to say about that. I want to expand on this Fuller thing, because there’s really a lot there. (I have too much to do! snrxxfrglpp)