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Pluto's Republic: Incorporating The Art of the Soluble and Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought

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This is a superb collection of essays by a Nobel Prizewinner in medicine who was also one of the best popular writers on science in recent times. Pluto's Republic contains the essays in two previous collections, The Art of the Soluble and The Hope of Progress, both currently out of print. It also contains essays on induction and intuition in scientific thought, several pieces not previously collected in book form and some new items. The contents range far and wide, including some vigorous polemics with Arthur Koestler following Medawar's review of The Act of Creation, comments on some recent books on the state of the art in cancer research and an essay on 'type A' behaviour and heart disease.

Medawar has forthright views on the use of technology to improve the world. He also considers that the traditional division of "pure" and "applied" science is unhelpful, probably deriving from the same perverse cast of mind that created the "romantic versus rational" dichotomy between imaginative and critical thinking, allied with the old Anglo-Saxon class distinction between science (for amateur "gentlemen") and technology (for grubby professional "players"). The traditional view, preserved jealously by pure scientists, is that researchers of high caliber should be allowed to follow their interests wherever they will, either in the belief that this is what the universities and the life of the mind are all about, or in the confident expectation that eventually fundamental work will pay off at the practical level. Medawar concedes

"This procedure works; that is, it works sometimes, and it may be the best we can do, but might not the converse approach be equally effective, given equal talent? That is, to start with a concrete problem, but then to allow the research to open out in the direction of greater generality...I can see no reason why this approach if it were to be attempted by persons of the same ability, should not work just as well as its more conventional counterpart. Research done in this style is always in focus, and those who carry it out, if temporarily baffled, can always retreat from the general into the particular."

It is increasingly accepted that science should have some strategic role to play in education but misconceived ideas about science have made it hard to work out what that role might be. A vacuum is waiting to be filled in the theory and practice of education, and Medawar's book should help to fill it. The "piling up the data" theory has to be put in its place (the dust-bin of history) because it promotes over specialisation, as though the person who spends the most time digging the most narrow trench will get further in the field. At the same time outsiders are discouraged from trying to find out what the scientists are up to, for how can they ever find the time to get into the trenches and master the accumulated store of information?

The alternative "hot air balloon" view of science may be more helpful and realistic. Rival theories do not depend on the sheer weight of evidence (most of the evidence can be used to support opposing theories), nor do they gain credibility by longevity alone. They need to compete for survival under critical scrutiny and tests. Five types of test can be applied: the test of evidence, the test of internal consistency, the test of consistency with other well-tested theories, the check on the problem (does the theory actually solve the problem, or just skirt around it) and the check of metaphysics (the least understood at this stage). With this view of knowledge people like Leonard Woolf could claim that he could become an expert in any field with three months of concentrated study (between running the Hogarth Press, writing Fabian tracts and socialising in Bloomsbury). More realistically we might follow the advice of Jacques Barzun in The House of Intellect

With a cautious confidence and sufficient intellectual training, it is possible to master the literature of a subject and gain a proper understanding of it: specifically, an understanding of the accepted truths, the disputed problems, the rival schools and the methods now in favor. This will not enable one to add to what is known, but it will give possession of all that the discipline has to offer the world.

There is much talk of the modern explosion of knowledge. This is mostly an explosion of publications, some of which advance our knowledge but only by a very small amount. Many do not even do as much as that. The existence of high quality science reporting in popular magazines (New Scientist etc) nullifies the despairing belief that the frontiers of science are receding ever further from view. These publications make Barzun's aim (if not Woolf's) entirely feasible for anyone who wants to keep informed of the main lines of scientific advance; to keep track of the balloons which float in the air, tugging at their mooring lines, while on board the balloons the infernal Popperian dialectic of conjecture and refutation rages, day and night.

Peter Medawar was once asked by a Customs official when he landed in USA "Do you intend to overthrow the Constitution of the United States of America?". To which he replied that he did not intend to do so, and he hoped that he would not do so by accident.

This irreverent tone is apparent in several of the essays in this collection, notably in his review of Teilhard de Chardin's "The Phenomenon of Man" and Koestler's "The Act of Creation". He had a highly skeptical attitude to pretence of all kinds, and was not hesitant to speak out.

Medawar won a Nobel Prize for medicine and he took a broad view on science and its relation to society. Everyone with an interest in science, especially biological science, will find many items of interest in this collection.

Peter Medawar was once asked by a Customs official when he landed in USA "Do you intend to overthrow the Constitution of the United States of America?". To which he replied that he did not intend to do so, and he hoped that he would not do so by accident.

This irreverent tone is apparent in several of the essays in this collection, notably in his review of Teilhard de Chardin's "The Phenomenon of Man" and Koestler's "The Act of Creation". He had a highly skeptical attitude to pretence of all kinds, and was not hesitant to speak out.

Medawar won a Nobel Prize for medicine and he took a broad view on science and its relation to society. Everyone with an interest in science, especially biological science, will find many items of interest in this collection.

I am philosophically aligned with Medawar, which means philosophically aligned with Karl Popper. Pluto's Republic is a collection of essays in Popper's mold, which is to say: scientific, realistic about how scientists do their work, and opposed to pseudoscience of all kinds. Medawar has even picked up Popper's hatred of psychoanalysis, and gives anti-Marxism in the Popperian style a healthy go.

Medawar's heart is in the right place, and he's less astringent -- less academic, perhaps -- than Popper. He has great faith in the power of science to cure the world's ills, and conversely has a deep hatred of pseudosciences that purport to solve problems without submitting their claims to rigorous examination. The scientific life, properly conceived, is the one we all should aspire to: constant self-critique and constant piecemeal explanation. Science is an endless sequence of "conjectures and refutations," to use Popper's phrase.

That's one of Medawar's repeated critiques: that a long string of philosophers has misrepresented how science works, aided and abetted by polished scientific papers. This polished picture convinces us that we can understand the world free of theory: just gather a lot of data, look at it with an uncritical mind, and voilà: out of the data's forehead springs the goddess Theory, fully formed. Whereas if you watch how science actually happens, says Medawar -- if you actually listen to chatter in the lab -- you'll hear a temporarily plausible conjecture first; this conjecture drives the experiments. Scientists then gather data and either refute or temporarily confirm their story. Onward we go, haltingly, provisionally, in a piecemeal fashion.

So induction, as it may naïvely be imagined, is a non-starter as a description of how science works. But the untruth of induction doesn't imply the uselessness of scientific method. It just means that we've misunderstood what that method is about. Science, with all its flaws, is the only legitimate candidate we know for demonstrably progressing toward a fuller knowledge of the world: guess, observe, test, repeat.

On a few occasions Medawar attacks those who see rampaging technology as a great evil in the world; here I think he falls off the rails a bit. Technology may cause great evils, says Medawar, but it is also the only solution for fixing its own mistakes. Those who've watched fertilizer runoff destroy the Gulf of Mexico may be skeptical that what we need to fix it is more technology rather than a whole new attitude toward agriculture; likewise, is there really a technological solution to the problem of nuclear weaponry? Medawar doesn't go into enough detail about exactly what he means in this context. In general, he's on the weakest terrain when he ventures outside his zone of professional competence; I found his general social commentary and economic philosophizing (e.g., why economic predictions are inherently less accurate than meteorological ones) fatuous.

Overall, I think there's a much better book waiting inside of this one. A more courageous editor would have deleted perhaps 1/3 of the essays, or would have rearranged them into new, less overlapping ones. As it is, Pluto's Republic fuses two of Medawar's earlier books without apparently deleting much from either. And it suffers from the disease (which, I'll grant you, some don't consider a disease) of many British historians: I envision the writer ambling around the lecture stage, cigarette in hand, thinking out loud to himself while his bemused students try to copy down what he says and put it in some coherent kind of order. This book is what happens when someone types up those lecture notes.

So I'd recommend against reading Pluto's Republic, when many other fine books in the same vein are available. I suspect Medawar would agree with me that you should run out and read Popper's Open Society and Its Enemies at your earliest convenience if you've not already. After that, Pluto's Republic feels like rambly footnotes.