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Drawing Out Leviathan: Dinosaurs and the Science Wars
" . . . are dinosaurs social constructs? Do we really know anything about dinosaurs? Might not all of our beliefs about dinosaurs merely be figments of the paleontological imagination? A few years ago such questions would have seemed preposterous, even nonsensical. Now they must have a serious answer."
At stake in the "Science Wars" that have raged in academe and in the media is nothing less than the standing of science in our culture. One side argues that science is a "social construct," that it does not discover facts about the world, but rather constructs artifacts disguised as objective truths. This view threatens the authority of science and rejects science's claims to objectivity, rationality, and disinterested inquiry. Drawing Out Leviathan examines this argument in the light of some major debates about the case of the wrong-headed dinosaur, the dinosaur "heresies" of the 1970s, and the debate over the extinction of dinosaurs.
Keith Parsons claims that these debates, though lively and sometimes rancorous, show that evidence and logic, not arbitrary "rules of the game," remained vitally important, even when the debates were at their nastiest. They show science to be a complex set of activities, pervaded by social influences, and not easily reducible to any stereotype. Parsons acknowledges that there are lessons to be learned by scientists from their would-be adversaries, and the book concludes with some recommendations for ending the Science Wars.
At stake in the "Science Wars" that have raged in academe and in the media is nothing less than the standing of science in our culture. One side argues that science is a "social construct," that it does not discover facts about the world, but rather constructs artifacts disguised as objective truths. This view threatens the authority of science and rejects science's claims to objectivity, rationality, and disinterested inquiry. Drawing Out Leviathan examines this argument in the light of some major debates about the case of the wrong-headed dinosaur, the dinosaur "heresies" of the 1970s, and the debate over the extinction of dinosaurs.
Keith Parsons claims that these debates, though lively and sometimes rancorous, show that evidence and logic, not arbitrary "rules of the game," remained vitally important, even when the debates were at their nastiest. They show science to be a complex set of activities, pervaded by social influences, and not easily reducible to any stereotype. Parsons acknowledges that there are lessons to be learned by scientists from their would-be adversaries, and the book concludes with some recommendations for ending the Science Wars.
- GenresSciencePhilosophy
240 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 9, 2013
This book is a relatively short read, around 200 pages and very accessibly written. While I don't really like all the stylistic choices that Parsons made in putting the book together [there's a lot more story-telling than arguing, and much of that story-telling requires some additional argumentation for support] he does a good job at responding to some of the major literature in the contemporary "science wars" discussion as well as the literature in Science and Technology Studies. Unlike Boghossian's Fear of Knowledge, Parsons spends the majority of his time focussing on the constructivist literature that makes up a lot of the social studies of science.
His responses to those social scientists, as a student who has studied them at a graduate level, are thoughtful and potent, though often a bit abbreviated for the purposes of fitting into a single chapter. Parsons makes a point of writing less polemically than many of the other contributors to the science wars, which is a bit of a problem since it does make the book less exciting, but it also makes the text more balanced and the argument less likely to simply turn-off those who are sympathetic to some of the post-modern thought.
I strongly recommend the book to those who are non-philosophers interested in the philosophy of science and its place in contemporary scientific practice, since I think that Parsons gives a fairly good overview of what some accessible philosophy of science looks like, and situates it well among the direct subject matter of the book [paleontology] and the disciplines of the social sciences that he critiques heavily in a few of the middle chapters. For those who are engaging in a more serious look at social studies of science, I also recommend the book as a way to challenge how committal one can be to the positions of someone like Bruno Latour or Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer.
For those who read at the pace of a graduate student and have to hammer through a ton of literature in a fast period of time, this is a good book for you. It is easy to speed-read, especially the first couple of chapters where Parsons gives his history of paleontology as well as some of the background, and it is presented in a format that is coherent and makes the positions he's advancing easy to soak up.
His responses to those social scientists, as a student who has studied them at a graduate level, are thoughtful and potent, though often a bit abbreviated for the purposes of fitting into a single chapter. Parsons makes a point of writing less polemically than many of the other contributors to the science wars, which is a bit of a problem since it does make the book less exciting, but it also makes the text more balanced and the argument less likely to simply turn-off those who are sympathetic to some of the post-modern thought.
I strongly recommend the book to those who are non-philosophers interested in the philosophy of science and its place in contemporary scientific practice, since I think that Parsons gives a fairly good overview of what some accessible philosophy of science looks like, and situates it well among the direct subject matter of the book [paleontology] and the disciplines of the social sciences that he critiques heavily in a few of the middle chapters. For those who are engaging in a more serious look at social studies of science, I also recommend the book as a way to challenge how committal one can be to the positions of someone like Bruno Latour or Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer.
For those who read at the pace of a graduate student and have to hammer through a ton of literature in a fast period of time, this is a good book for you. It is easy to speed-read, especially the first couple of chapters where Parsons gives his history of paleontology as well as some of the background, and it is presented in a format that is coherent and makes the positions he's advancing easy to soak up.
April 4, 2012
Parsons,
p151 "It is a good bet that most working scientists could name no more than one or two professional philosophers of science."
...professional... OK, I'm not sure why this qualifier is used, but for my part my professional training was never allowed to stray too far from the philosophy of science, professional or otherwise. This could be because the (late) philosophical giant, Michael Ruse was active as I was in graduate school. I actually worked in the same department with him for a spell as a Postdoc. My experience has been that most Evolutionary Biologists who trained since the 1960s are powerfully aware of the philosophical challenges to our work. The fact is that the "professionals" in philosophy have discredited themselves as mostly quacks and ad hoc skeptics. The truly great philosophers of science have been those like Ruse who worked in science as part of their philosophical contributions. The rest are just throwing mud in the water, which is easy but not very useful or productive.
This book just plain pissed me off. It is unlikely that Keith Parsons had a "qualified" scientist (e.g. paleontologist, evolutionary biologist etc.) in his dissertation examination. The book is essentially a tempest in a teapot. The trumped up "Science Wars" are at most some occasional skirmishes among the zealots that exist in any community or discipline. It's a straw man controversy; Parsons on a false bully pulpit.
p151 (again)
"I leave it to the reader to imagine what his or her chemistry professors would have done with Keats or Kant." I propose the late Stephen Jay Gould for the defense.
His other generalizations about science, and scientists are uninformed.
p157 "So the discipline of paleontology cannot be understood without knowing something about its history, ... Insofar as paleontologists wish to understand their discipline, they must learn something about its history and sociology." Yawn! It's part of every undergraduate curriculum in science disciplines that I am aware of.
p151 "It is a good bet that most working scientists could name no more than one or two professional philosophers of science."
...professional... OK, I'm not sure why this qualifier is used, but for my part my professional training was never allowed to stray too far from the philosophy of science, professional or otherwise. This could be because the (late) philosophical giant, Michael Ruse was active as I was in graduate school. I actually worked in the same department with him for a spell as a Postdoc. My experience has been that most Evolutionary Biologists who trained since the 1960s are powerfully aware of the philosophical challenges to our work. The fact is that the "professionals" in philosophy have discredited themselves as mostly quacks and ad hoc skeptics. The truly great philosophers of science have been those like Ruse who worked in science as part of their philosophical contributions. The rest are just throwing mud in the water, which is easy but not very useful or productive.
This book just plain pissed me off. It is unlikely that Keith Parsons had a "qualified" scientist (e.g. paleontologist, evolutionary biologist etc.) in his dissertation examination. The book is essentially a tempest in a teapot. The trumped up "Science Wars" are at most some occasional skirmishes among the zealots that exist in any community or discipline. It's a straw man controversy; Parsons on a false bully pulpit.
p151 (again)
"I leave it to the reader to imagine what his or her chemistry professors would have done with Keats or Kant." I propose the late Stephen Jay Gould for the defense.
His other generalizations about science, and scientists are uninformed.
p157 "So the discipline of paleontology cannot be understood without knowing something about its history, ... Insofar as paleontologists wish to understand their discipline, they must learn something about its history and sociology." Yawn! It's part of every undergraduate curriculum in science disciplines that I am aware of.
January 25, 2013
This book turned out to be a diamond in the 'science wars' literature rough. Parsons does a good job of debunking some of the more outrageous claims coming from extreme social-constructivists about scientific knowledge, while being able to adopt some of the more reasonable critiques coming from that camp about scientific rationality. The author eventually comes to the conclusion that theory-choice is not guided by a rigid algorithmic system, but is more in line with the dialogical model of science endorsed by Marcello Pera in his book "The Discourses of Science". The view is, essentially, that the scientists must figure out the best way to balance the normative aspects of theory choice, weighted against the evidence at hand. Pera insists that at base, it is a rational process that drives scientists to select theories - even if the process cannot be formalized into a strict algorithmic process. In the end, Parsons views scientific reasoning along the lines of Aristotle's phronesis (practical reasoning).
August 2, 2012
Warning! Only loosely connected with paleontology. What this book is really about is how differences in thought about science between "rationalists" and "constructionists" and how those altercations impinge on the controversies that arose in dinosaur paleontology, rather than on those controversies themselves. Parsons has done everything possible to make this book readable and he has mostly succeeded. Nonetheless, this topic is not as glamorous as you might at first think and the book occasionally descends into socio-babble as the author must explain the foggy thinking of the post-modernists and constructionists he is trying to debunk. Only for those with a serious interest in the sociology of science.
April 7, 2026
I agree that Kuhn isn’t very useful for how science is actually practiced by scientists such as Raup. For other dinosaurs, perhaps it is.
What Parsons never considers in this book is that a practicing, optimistic, enthusiastic, empirically driven scientist can also be enthusiastic about Letour's work and many constructionist arguments. Despite Parsons' assertions, they do not undermine the science we all do every day. But through understanding them, we do become more thoughtful scientists.
It's not simply accepting that there are social and power milieus to science practice and science communication. That is a surface reading of constructionists, yet its acceptance was for a very long time sorely lacking from science. Not accepting that now is foolish, but still found among certain overly confident demographics of scientists.
Parsons uses the trajectories of several case studies to diminish constructionists' arguments, but with this he entirely missed the point. Any thoughtful scientist who's been active for many years can add hundreds of similar trajectories large and small. The practice of science is riddled with social strictures of power, gender, race, and identity, as is any other human endeavour. It is pure naïveté to believe science and especially scientists are somehow free of this as science is practiced. It is pure foolishness that many of the most entrenched scientists refuse to accept these other lessons their experience can teach. Unless they are maintaining the same structures that gave them lift and keep them in place. Many do.
What the rest of us must wonder instead is, where along these trajectories are our current arguments? It is inevitable all our science is found along such trajectories. What should be observed, measured, analysed, but cannot be empirically, theoretically, socially? What foolishness is currently infecting the fields in which we work? What arguments are maintained because one powerful lab simply won't accept "defeat," however honourable such a "defeat" would surely be. Similarly, we all know workers who seem to be very much ahead of the rest conceptually, but a common way forward is not yet clear and inherent, significant risks are associated with pursuing it. For example, I suspect there is quite a lot to what Joan Roughgarden has been developing with social selection. ALSO, the sooner we can shed the temporarily useful Trivers approaches irretrievably embedded within his creepy, Epstein-loving mindset, the better. (I doubt anyone was surprised how deeply he was involved there, including trying to recruit others.) BUT few of us are currently willing to forego current orthodoxy enough, and it will be a generation before we embrace Roughgarden’s alternative and/or its descendants. Though we seldom do so, we should be able to place all our scientific pursuits along such trajectories of social construction alongside their empirical and theoretical construction.
Science is unique in that we are producing a body of knowledge that will endure. Certain facts -- the mass of the electron -- can be known with great certainty now. Others -- factors favouring speciation, for example, or mating structures -- have been actively examined for centuries, and will continue to be, and these latter are by their very nature deeply embedded in society. Pretending that all science is a dinosaur skeleton, or an electron, as Parsons does here, does us all a disservice.
It should also be remembered that this book is now 25 years old, and a number of issues have played out differently from how Parsons would have predicted. Hindsight is not its friend. It also contains a number of ridiculous statements. On p.133: "Constructivists cannot explain scientific progress, so they deny its existence." On p.123: "Freud and Marx ... perhaps deserve to be labeled “dinosaurs” ...".
What Parsons never considers in this book is that a practicing, optimistic, enthusiastic, empirically driven scientist can also be enthusiastic about Letour's work and many constructionist arguments. Despite Parsons' assertions, they do not undermine the science we all do every day. But through understanding them, we do become more thoughtful scientists.
It's not simply accepting that there are social and power milieus to science practice and science communication. That is a surface reading of constructionists, yet its acceptance was for a very long time sorely lacking from science. Not accepting that now is foolish, but still found among certain overly confident demographics of scientists.
Parsons uses the trajectories of several case studies to diminish constructionists' arguments, but with this he entirely missed the point. Any thoughtful scientist who's been active for many years can add hundreds of similar trajectories large and small. The practice of science is riddled with social strictures of power, gender, race, and identity, as is any other human endeavour. It is pure naïveté to believe science and especially scientists are somehow free of this as science is practiced. It is pure foolishness that many of the most entrenched scientists refuse to accept these other lessons their experience can teach. Unless they are maintaining the same structures that gave them lift and keep them in place. Many do.
What the rest of us must wonder instead is, where along these trajectories are our current arguments? It is inevitable all our science is found along such trajectories. What should be observed, measured, analysed, but cannot be empirically, theoretically, socially? What foolishness is currently infecting the fields in which we work? What arguments are maintained because one powerful lab simply won't accept "defeat," however honourable such a "defeat" would surely be. Similarly, we all know workers who seem to be very much ahead of the rest conceptually, but a common way forward is not yet clear and inherent, significant risks are associated with pursuing it. For example, I suspect there is quite a lot to what Joan Roughgarden has been developing with social selection. ALSO, the sooner we can shed the temporarily useful Trivers approaches irretrievably embedded within his creepy, Epstein-loving mindset, the better. (I doubt anyone was surprised how deeply he was involved there, including trying to recruit others.) BUT few of us are currently willing to forego current orthodoxy enough, and it will be a generation before we embrace Roughgarden’s alternative and/or its descendants. Though we seldom do so, we should be able to place all our scientific pursuits along such trajectories of social construction alongside their empirical and theoretical construction.
Science is unique in that we are producing a body of knowledge that will endure. Certain facts -- the mass of the electron -- can be known with great certainty now. Others -- factors favouring speciation, for example, or mating structures -- have been actively examined for centuries, and will continue to be, and these latter are by their very nature deeply embedded in society. Pretending that all science is a dinosaur skeleton, or an electron, as Parsons does here, does us all a disservice.
It should also be remembered that this book is now 25 years old, and a number of issues have played out differently from how Parsons would have predicted. Hindsight is not its friend. It also contains a number of ridiculous statements. On p.133: "Constructivists cannot explain scientific progress, so they deny its existence." On p.123: "Freud and Marx ... perhaps deserve to be labeled “dinosaurs” ...".
March 23, 2023
Explains how philosophical ramblings have far less value than the people spouting them think they do.
Basically, it's a book about how reality trumps philosophy.
It's sad that the book even has to be written, but I'm glad it was.
Basically, it's a book about how reality trumps philosophy.
It's sad that the book even has to be written, but I'm glad it was.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews