THE RANDLE REPORT

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY ‘SCIENCE’?

The Venerable Bede.

 In the earliest stages of its development, the word ‘science’ embodied connotations of ‘truth’ and ‘knowing’ – a sense of assimilated understanding and perhaps the application of art or a methodology based thereon.

At that distance, its subject was that which could be perceived or experienced, limited only by the immediate purpose, or angle, of the perceiver. The forerunner of the modern ‘scientist’ viewed the world directly, without specialism, preconception, preselection, ritual or exception. That he did so in a world held to be created and ruled over by a god, or gods, mattered little. It was perfectly possible to study and comprehend the ways of the weather, the pattern of the tides and the harvesting of the soil without coming into conflict with what we now think of as the church.

Indeed, most of the basic processes necessary to life were discovered and formalised before the advent of dogmatism, at a time when it would have been hard to differentiate between science and faith; when ‘faith’ could have been defined as ‘that which the adherent held to be true’. What he held to be true was from his own perception. He had no education or indoctrination. He had no weather forecasters, cook books or gardening manuals; he even had to manage without recourse to the National Curriculum.

Yet, he knew when to sow and when to reap, he knew what was edible, he knew how to combine, how to cook, how to preserve, how to husband (everything from pigs to bees), and he knew how to make ferociously strong and plentiful drink.

He, or at least someone of his acquaintance, knew what to do if he poisoned, burned or otherwise injured himself, if he was stung by his bees, or had one jug of mead too many. Cures and treatments, like other survival knowledge, were the property of all. Anyone who would hope to raise a family would have a passing, if not expert, knowledge of natural remedies.

In essence, most such remedies have remained with us – although, like weather-forecasting and animal husbandry, they have largely been given over to designated ‘authorities’. Some less generalised treatments have also persisted here and there without finding their way on to the recommended list, such as the practice in France’s Sologne region of treating headaches by strapping a dead rabbit to the patient’s head.

Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.

But all of these conclusions and practices were borne out of the individual’s observations and evaluations in direct contact with those elements upon which his survival and increase depended. He saw the life in everything around him; he came to understand its properties, its own purposes and behaviour; and he learned to respect it and adapt what he learned to his own needs, and those of his fellows.

Recognising the inherent life and will in those things with which he was forced into contact, he saw that some exchange, some payment was called for rather than mere theft of what they had to offer.

So we get the idea of propitiation, of giving something back, that would later be corrupted into worship of deities or ransoms and taxes for rulers, and would ultimately form the basis of the ritual that is now often mistaken for religion itself.

Early man’s science was his religion, and his religion was his science.

What qualifies as a science? That depends on your definition and frame of reference.

If a science is defined as an impulse or research toward the discovery of truths in relation to some aspect of knowledge, it would allow for a wide-ranging qualification. If, however, it is to be a form of writ – an authoritative proclamation that is unchanging and unchangeable, it must be rarer and more esoteric; submissable to more arbitrary tests of agreement with established norms, or simply without connection to the irritating ‘real’ world of variables.

Public perception of the practitioners of science has itself changed dramatically over the years. Right up to the early part of the twentieth century, scientists were considered eccentric – not part of any respected and worthy establishment, but slightly loopy mavericks who ventured where angels feared to tread. Far from setting prevailing opinions, they were in the business of overturning them, or at the very least, testing them to destruction.

Archimedes, The Venerable Bede, Bacon, Newton, Ashmole, Darwin and even Einstein were observers and testers, not of disciplines and theorems, but of the universe itself. Unhampered by the scientific method, or the need to seek approval or funding from monolithic conservative bodies, they followed their own lights and drew their own conclusions.

These ‘fathers of science’ looked outward for those conclusions, and they also looked across the board. No one had yet labelled them as ‘physicists, ‘chemists’ or ‘botanists’. They were permitted to gaze beyond such arbitrary barriers at the whole picture.

The sons and daughters of science look inward, going ever deeper into the data and propositions already extant. Pre-regimented into arbitrary divisions, they are content for those divisions themselves to be proscribed, not only sticking to their own fields but declaring whole areas of knowledge or speculation unworthy of investigation.

Darwin endeavoured to unravel the complexity of life forms that existed before and beyond ‘science’; Dawkins laboured to heap significance and complexity on the work of Darwin: science feeding on itself, investigating itself, trying to prove itself without going back to check the original observations.

Meteorology is a science – the study of atmospheric phenomena and climate; weather forecasting isn’t. At best, it is an interpretive art. As more data is recorded, the odds as to what will happen next might seem to get shorter, but more data also exposes more variables. Repetition of identical conditions is virtually impossible, so you can keep stuffing data into computers ad infinitum without ever doing more than model what went before.

In essence, weather forecasting, no matter how ‘scientific’ it believes itself to be, is the art of predicting the past – which bit of history will repeat itself?

Little wonder then that, despite the ever-increasing conglomeration of impressive hardware and observations, the proclamations of all the weather forecasters on all the radio and TV stations of the world are about as reliable as hanging up a piece of seaweed.

Of course, the whole flim-flam suits both parties – forecasters and forecastees.

The former can go from being earnest isobar-watchers in some backroom to media ‘personalities’, trotting out off-the-peg phrases (‘spits and spots of rain’, ‘cloud bubbling up’) from beyond the blue-screen horizon for a day job and opening fêtes at the weekend.

The latter jumps at the chance to abandon responsibility for knowing anything to a properly constituted authority. He knows the forecast is nearly always wrong, but depends upon it utterly, not so much as a useful tool, more as something to blame when the picnic goes pear-shaped.

When a bear sniffs the air, looks about him and decides to go fishing, explore the woods for honey or batten down the hatches for three or four months, ‘science’ tells us it’s just ‘instinct’.

Maybe they’re right. The bear’s survival depends on it. Lucky for him, perhaps, that his inherent intelligence and perceptions have not been buried under mountains of musty data or vested in some formalised system of cloud-mapping. 

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository