[MAIPC] thought piece on science philosophy

[Richard Gardner]

This is something that has been on my mind for a long while.  It was finally was put to words over the last several months.  As an ecologist with a background in both history and science while dealing with mental illness and diabetes (bipolar II and diabetes II) I have gained a unique perspective on science and how it is done and used, sometimes rightly, often wrongly.  It is a thought piece of writing to help us think more about what we do as scientists and in our case, as ecologists.

                                                                                                                             Richard Gardner




Our Roman/Christian Heritage: The Demon in Science

  The demon in science is our Roman/Christian heritage. It has hindered science and misled scientists, causing enormous amounts of bad data and corrupting the meaning of science.  This heritage has changed basic observation into engineering and scientists into engineers.  It has caused problem solving where no problem existed while giving answers that are superfluous and misleading to these solved non-existent problems.  It makes us impatient and result oriented where patience and understanding are required.  We attempt to understand phenomena in days or weeks instead of years, decades and possibly lifetimes.  We have changed from observers to tinkerers.  We design experiments before fully observing and understanding the system about which we are experimenting.  Then, we use this data as the basis for future experimentation.

  Our Christian heritage constantly tells us that we live in an inherently flawed world that the godly need to bring to godliness.  At the same time, it puts us at the center of creation by being the last and ultimate of God’s creations. The “heresy” of Galileo was that he took humans out the center of the universe and made them a piece of creation, not the ultimate part of it.  The shock that humanity is not the ultimate center and purpose of creation still reverberates today in science, engineering, religion, politics and economics.

  Our Roman heritage is the need to engineer the world in the same way the Romans engineered their world.  The Romans were great engineers as is obvious by their monuments, buildings, roads and other infrastructure.  There was little they did not alter as they tried to control their world and the people in it.  They were so narcissistic that they even tried to control their gods!

  Roman Christianity is mechanistic, full of formulaic prayers and rituals, i.e.  religious engineering.  This is easily seen in the written constitutions (rules) of the various monastic sects such as the Rule of St. Benedict and the prayers that attempt to engineer “salvation” and hence, God.  In the extreme, sects of Roman based Christianity hope to engineer their way into physical prosperity and eternity by extreme ritualistic/legalistic codes of behavior.

  Our philosophers talk about what we are and how we define ourselves as humans.  Seldom do they define us as a small part of the natural world.  Either they ignore the natural world in their definition of humanity, or they teach us that the natural world revolves around us, created for our benefit.  This makes us into egotists who have a hard time leaving an engineered environment for one that is unchanged from its natural condition in which we are a small, often flawed, component.

  The intersection of these psychological forces is that in Western Science we are always intent on engineering an answer to an often non-existent problem rather than understanding what we are engineering.  The issue is amply evidenced in the barrage of projects and products coming from science which attempt to make the world or at least our part of it “better”.  Whether it is medicine, ecology, food or agriculture we are intent on using “science” to change the world in some way rather than understand it.  It has taken a heavy toll on our world and everything in it.

  Reductionism is one of the worst aspects of our need to engineer the world to save it.  For some reason, we act as if our limited minds can understand systems nearly infinitely complex through a couple obvious and easily tested variables.  It is not possible to get even a minimal understanding of the complexity without several lifetimes of observation.

  In medicine, we are always at war with diseases, many of which are not diseases but lifestyle or environmental issues.  The cure for many of these diseases is obvious if we take the time to look and think.  Type II Diabetes for most of us is about lifestyle changes – getting off our fat asses and walking, pushing away from the dinner table, eating whole foods and avoiding highly processed foods.  It is not about a new miracle food or ingredient, device, routine or medication.  I am at a loss of anything that is simpler and needs less research.  The same is true for many mental illnesses.  If we take the time to understand them we may see them as a natural, healthy and necessary part of our world.   By taking this approach we would stop medicating people into incoherency.  How many cancers, lung diseases and heart diseases have causes that are lifestyle or environmental?  Stop consuming tobacco, clean up the air, stop dumping waste into our water systems, use environmentally sound organic methods of agriculture, turn off the television, get off Facebook and take a walk.  How much “science” does this require?

  Food science is a huge and easy target.  It appears to be all about “improving” nature.  I have a hard time understanding how a food that is healthy and flavorful in itself is improved by adding chemicals to it.  Aspartame, sucralose and other artificial sweeteners are a disaster for diabetics, the morbidly obese and most other people. Are margarine and butanedione better than natural oils and fats?  The whole vitamin/supplement would collapse if people realized that an apple or peach is a better supplement than the latest GNC product.  Why is it necessary for another chemical to improve how a food tastes or another additive to improve its nutrition? How does another sweetener, emulsifier or other unnatural additive add anything to a plate of fresh greens with vinegar or a dish with herbs ten minutes from a garden?

  Agriculture is another easy target.  Bioengineering is straight from the depths of our narcissism.  Pesticides are developed knowing that in a few years biology will triumph over them.  Crops are bioengineered and fail because ecology was at best a minor consideration while destroying native birds, insects, reptiles and other organisms.  We should not be looking at methods and products that give Monsanto or DuPont quarterly dividends.  Instead, we need to be pursuing methods that help increase productivity by improving the health of the local ecosystems, not destroying them.  We can put birdhouses and bat houses around fields to control unwanted insects; plant native wildflowers to bring in pollinators; plant trees in our pastures and croplands to attract hawks and owls for controlling small rodents; and encourage coyotes and gray foxes to rid our fields of larger rodents.  Imagine the almost limitless possibilities of easily intuitive agricultural practices that rebuild the ecosystems we have destroyed while sustainably producing abundant crops of healthy food.  These strategies that are based on the patient observation of where we live are much better than intrusive processes that fundamentally alter and destroy our ecosystems.

  In ecology, we constantly add new organisms to an ecosystem to “correct” problems caused by organisms added earlier.  Biocontrol has a failure rate of at least 50 percent with unknown ecological consequences for the organisms we can track.  Then, there are the organisms we released that we cannot track once they are loosed in the ecology because they disappear from our sight.  Will these invisible organisms become visible again after a latency period with disastrous consequences, as many of the present problem organisms have?  Why do we call this a success?  

  Fish and Game Commissions are wonderful at changing conditions to try to enhance a system for one organism while forgetting about the effects on other organisms in that system.  Make an area into a deer or grouse habitat to enhance their presence while not taking into account what this may do to the targeted species, let alone non-targeted species.  The damage caused by creating deer habitat is catastrophic to the native vegetation.  Ecosystem collapse is the result with the obvious consequences to all the parts of that ecosystem, including the deer.  This is wildlife conservation even though there is a severe loss of native species that used the previously unaltered habitat?  A non-native fish is introduced into a stream or a non-native “game” bird into an ecosystem just for the sake of “sport” and tradition.  (Anyone care for trout stuffed pheasant?)  Introduce plants like Russian olive that almost no native wildlife uses for the intended purpose of food and cover?  Chinese lespedeza is planted as a food for game birds, which then starve to death due to the indigestibility of the seed coat.  Sawtooth oaks were introduced for the amount of organics they produce, but support virtually no wildlife because they are not a natural part of a local plant, let alone wildlife, community.  The Pennsylvania Game Commission sees logging as an integral part of wildlife conservation.  All I see after several years is a biological desert where “best practices” means the destruction of hundreds of acres of healthy woodland every year while causing the introduction of large populations of non-native plants.  The result is that native organisms and normal balances are destroyed with the extinction of the habitats we are supposed to be protecting.

  These are only a few of the easy branches of what is commonly called “science” where our failure to apply science is obvious.  For me, the study of biocontrol in ecology is a series of disasters which have already happened, continue to happen and will happen in the future because we are blindly narcissistic about what we can do while forgetting our history.  We see almost insurmountable problems that need solving without taking the time to believe already established Science theory and thought.  Most importantly, we do not take the time to walk and observe.  A few years ago the Brown Marmorated Stinkbug was a huge problem where we live.  This fall I have killed perhaps a dozen as opposed to two years ago when I killed thousands.  Native birds and disease have taken care of the issue.  Our garden is pesticide free.  We have two freezers full of produce because we took the time to understand the ecology and work with it.  Stated simply, the most important activity for a scientist, especially a natural scientist, is to walk, observe and think.

  As scientists, we fail in the same way politicians fail, and our society fails because our collective memory of where we have been, the lessons it taught and our history are forgotten.  In my field, ecology, getting back to the basics will inform our future and prevent cascading, catastrophic mistakes that cannot be cured by well-intentioned future actions.  “Problem solving” can only come from patient, extensive observation before experimentation.  Experimentation is a secondary activity, not primary, as it is used to answer a question or questions developed from observation.  Science is not engineering.