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How Knowledge Grows: The Evolutionary Development of Scientific Practice
An argument that the development of scientific practice and growth of scientific knowledge are governed by Darwin’s evolutionary model of descent with modification.
Although scientific investigation is influenced by our cognitive and moral failings as well as all of the factors impinging on human life, the historical development of scientific knowledge has trended toward an increasingly accurate picture of an increasing number of phenomena. Taking a fresh look at Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , in How Knowledge Grows Chris Haufe uses evolutionary theory to explain both why scientific practice develops the way it does and how scientific knowledge expands. This evolutionary model, claims Haufe, helps to explain what is epistemically special about scientific its tendency to grow in both depth and breadth.
Kuhn showed how intellectual communities achieve consensus in part by discriminating against ideas that differ from their own and isolating themselves intellectually from other fields of inquiry and broader social concerns. These same characteristics, says Haufe, determine a biological population’s degree of susceptibility to modification by natural selection. He argues that scientific knowledge grows, even across generations of variable groups of scientists, precisely because its development is governed by Darwinian evolution. Indeed, he supports the claim that this susceptibility to modification through natural selection helps to explain the epistemic power of certain branches of modern science. In updating and expanding the evolutionary approach to scientific knowledge, Haufe provides a model for thinking about science that acknowledges the historical contingency of scientific thought while showing why we nevertheless should trust the results of scientific research when it is the product of certain kinds of scientific communities.
Although scientific investigation is influenced by our cognitive and moral failings as well as all of the factors impinging on human life, the historical development of scientific knowledge has trended toward an increasingly accurate picture of an increasing number of phenomena. Taking a fresh look at Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , in How Knowledge Grows Chris Haufe uses evolutionary theory to explain both why scientific practice develops the way it does and how scientific knowledge expands. This evolutionary model, claims Haufe, helps to explain what is epistemically special about scientific its tendency to grow in both depth and breadth.
Kuhn showed how intellectual communities achieve consensus in part by discriminating against ideas that differ from their own and isolating themselves intellectually from other fields of inquiry and broader social concerns. These same characteristics, says Haufe, determine a biological population’s degree of susceptibility to modification by natural selection. He argues that scientific knowledge grows, even across generations of variable groups of scientists, precisely because its development is governed by Darwinian evolution. Indeed, he supports the claim that this susceptibility to modification through natural selection helps to explain the epistemic power of certain branches of modern science. In updating and expanding the evolutionary approach to scientific knowledge, Haufe provides a model for thinking about science that acknowledges the historical contingency of scientific thought while showing why we nevertheless should trust the results of scientific research when it is the product of certain kinds of scientific communities.
347 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2022
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February 27, 2023
I feel a strange amount of pressure reviewing this book, since it seems like the first review I can find of an author's first book. But, I'm going for it, since it'll never happen if I perseverate on it. I read this book because it was advertised to me on social media (which is also strange), and I kept thinking about it. The idea in the blurb is that the growth of scientific knowledge is analogous to species evolving via evolution, which I found pretty profound and clever. I've also consumed a lot of media about and thought a lot about the philosophy of science, yet never directly read any. So, I went for it.
The first chunk of this book was a slog. I'm talking a lot about myself in this review, which I hope is helpful to others and not just self-absorbed. But, I think I have a pretty big appetite for dense prose. I have a PhD, I work as a scientist at a technology company, I write and read and review technical and scientific and legal documents routinely at work, I basically only read for pleasure nonfiction books and even then typically popular science books, and when I'm not reading a lot of the media I consume are scientific skepticism podcasts and Teaching Company lecture series. But, my goodness! I felt like I grasped the germ of the idea of each chapter at the jump, but then it went on and on and on. I took a lot of latin in high school and loved it and still really like etymology (yet more nerdiness!), yet I learned new latin phrases and kept looking up 'nomology' and 'epistemology' to remember exactly what they mean to parse a given sentence. The author mentioned the book was peer-reviewed, so I presume--admittedly on faith--that all of this was to satisfy other diligent philosophers of science.
Enough negativity, because I think the slog was ultimately worth it. This first part of the book gave me a great synopsis of Thomas Kuhn's famous Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book I feel like I've danced around for two decades reading blogs and listening to skeptical podcasts and reading popular science books. It also discussed the reactions to it, the overreactions to it, and Kuhn's evolving (pun intended) thoughts up until his death, the latter of which was new to me. And finally, I thought the author properly credited Kuhn and a few other philosophers driving towards this Big Idea, i.e. that scientific progress is an evolutionary process, rather than t arrogantly fronting as a unique genius with this profound eureka. And then, of course, he did the damn thing, building out the argument that scientific progress is itself a Darwinian process. Which is mindblowing and brilliant to me, and why I kept thinking about a silly ad on my phone and decided to read this book and stuck with it despite the density. But also, within all the philosophizing of science, he demonstrated how this idea threads the needle between Kuhn's observations and many detractors' pushbacks, which was pretty elegant to my eye.
And then the author blew my mind again. Spoiler alert, perhaps? The author casually mentioned at the end of this first section that the 'revolutions' Kuhn alluded to were akin to mass extinction events in the history of evolution, and I felt like the galaxy brain meme. What an insight! The author had me like putty in his hands, and then abruptly pivoted to a case study. Sure--I was along for the ride after that bombshell.
The second part of the book was about Stephen Jay Gould fighting to make paleontology a scare-quotes "real" science. This was an engrossing read, in general and because this was another thing I was tangentially familiar with. I vaguely know a lot of ivory tower-types didn't like Gould because he was a science popularizer (as Carl Sagan was slandered), I still more vaguely know a lot of biologists think he was full of crap ("everything interesting isn't new, everything new isn't interesting") but at least was a good ally against the creationists, I know quite well that plenty of atheists think his "non-overlapping magisteria" is pandering gobbledygook, etc. It was good to read a referenced and seemingly-objective account of his scientific contributions, and I found myself googling stuff to re-read the hot takes about Gould I'd seen online and didn't fully appreciate when I'd first read them. And, of course, the author also did what he set out to do and demonstrated how the process of paleontology becoming a "real" science was an evolutionary process.
And, here is where I dock a star. The author crescendoed by showing that paleontology became a "real" science when it was demonstrated that mass extinctions are hugely important to evolution, and of course paleontologists are the ones with access to and specialty in that knowledge. And it dawned on me ... "holy sh*t, this guy is using his case study proof of concept--which turns on the importance of mass extinctions--to come back and flesh out the idea of scientific revolutions as mass extinction events." I thought this was going to be the cleverest thing I'd ever read. But no. The book ended. IT JUST ENDED. No conclusion chapter, nothing. Here was my thought process as I flipped through the works cited: "Huh, he's citing sources. Well, I guess this section had a bunch of different sources. No, wait, these are also the sources from the first part. Wait. Is the book over? There was no conclusion. Why didn't he go back and flesh out the bit about scientific revolutions being mass extinctions? He did that for everything else? Also, it was sitting right there for him! And now it's the index. I can't believe this book is over. Come on!"
And, there we have it. I really thought there should have been a part three where he fleshed out the idea of scientific revolutions (think: Einstein, Copernicus, Newton, Galileo, Darwin (irony!), etc.) as mass extinction events to the level of rigor that he did in part one. I'm not a book editor nor an author, but I feel like the structure was just BEGGING for that. (Or at minimum a one-page conclusion after the case study.) I'm also not a philosopher of science, so maybe that chapter/section would be years of work to flesh out. That is probably the most likely scenario, or at least the most charitable one. If so, I hope the author gets grants to do the academic work and then a fat book advance to write it up. Perhaps he could send this review to whoever decided to advertise this book to demonstrate the future audience for "How Knowledge Grows II: Scientific Revolutions as Mass Extinctions."
TL/DR: If you saw this book somewhere and were enchanted by the analogy of scientific progress as life evolving, stick your neck out and read it. You'll be challenged and you'll learn something, and what more can you ask for out of a book?
The first chunk of this book was a slog. I'm talking a lot about myself in this review, which I hope is helpful to others and not just self-absorbed. But, I think I have a pretty big appetite for dense prose. I have a PhD, I work as a scientist at a technology company, I write and read and review technical and scientific and legal documents routinely at work, I basically only read for pleasure nonfiction books and even then typically popular science books, and when I'm not reading a lot of the media I consume are scientific skepticism podcasts and Teaching Company lecture series. But, my goodness! I felt like I grasped the germ of the idea of each chapter at the jump, but then it went on and on and on. I took a lot of latin in high school and loved it and still really like etymology (yet more nerdiness!), yet I learned new latin phrases and kept looking up 'nomology' and 'epistemology' to remember exactly what they mean to parse a given sentence. The author mentioned the book was peer-reviewed, so I presume--admittedly on faith--that all of this was to satisfy other diligent philosophers of science.
Enough negativity, because I think the slog was ultimately worth it. This first part of the book gave me a great synopsis of Thomas Kuhn's famous Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book I feel like I've danced around for two decades reading blogs and listening to skeptical podcasts and reading popular science books. It also discussed the reactions to it, the overreactions to it, and Kuhn's evolving (pun intended) thoughts up until his death, the latter of which was new to me. And finally, I thought the author properly credited Kuhn and a few other philosophers driving towards this Big Idea, i.e. that scientific progress is an evolutionary process, rather than t arrogantly fronting as a unique genius with this profound eureka. And then, of course, he did the damn thing, building out the argument that scientific progress is itself a Darwinian process. Which is mindblowing and brilliant to me, and why I kept thinking about a silly ad on my phone and decided to read this book and stuck with it despite the density. But also, within all the philosophizing of science, he demonstrated how this idea threads the needle between Kuhn's observations and many detractors' pushbacks, which was pretty elegant to my eye.
And then the author blew my mind again. Spoiler alert, perhaps? The author casually mentioned at the end of this first section that the 'revolutions' Kuhn alluded to were akin to mass extinction events in the history of evolution, and I felt like the galaxy brain meme. What an insight! The author had me like putty in his hands, and then abruptly pivoted to a case study. Sure--I was along for the ride after that bombshell.
The second part of the book was about Stephen Jay Gould fighting to make paleontology a scare-quotes "real" science. This was an engrossing read, in general and because this was another thing I was tangentially familiar with. I vaguely know a lot of ivory tower-types didn't like Gould because he was a science popularizer (as Carl Sagan was slandered), I still more vaguely know a lot of biologists think he was full of crap ("everything interesting isn't new, everything new isn't interesting") but at least was a good ally against the creationists, I know quite well that plenty of atheists think his "non-overlapping magisteria" is pandering gobbledygook, etc. It was good to read a referenced and seemingly-objective account of his scientific contributions, and I found myself googling stuff to re-read the hot takes about Gould I'd seen online and didn't fully appreciate when I'd first read them. And, of course, the author also did what he set out to do and demonstrated how the process of paleontology becoming a "real" science was an evolutionary process.
And, here is where I dock a star. The author crescendoed by showing that paleontology became a "real" science when it was demonstrated that mass extinctions are hugely important to evolution, and of course paleontologists are the ones with access to and specialty in that knowledge. And it dawned on me ... "holy sh*t, this guy is using his case study proof of concept--which turns on the importance of mass extinctions--to come back and flesh out the idea of scientific revolutions as mass extinction events." I thought this was going to be the cleverest thing I'd ever read. But no. The book ended. IT JUST ENDED. No conclusion chapter, nothing. Here was my thought process as I flipped through the works cited: "Huh, he's citing sources. Well, I guess this section had a bunch of different sources. No, wait, these are also the sources from the first part. Wait. Is the book over? There was no conclusion. Why didn't he go back and flesh out the bit about scientific revolutions being mass extinctions? He did that for everything else? Also, it was sitting right there for him! And now it's the index. I can't believe this book is over. Come on!"
And, there we have it. I really thought there should have been a part three where he fleshed out the idea of scientific revolutions (think: Einstein, Copernicus, Newton, Galileo, Darwin (irony!), etc.) as mass extinction events to the level of rigor that he did in part one. I'm not a book editor nor an author, but I feel like the structure was just BEGGING for that. (Or at minimum a one-page conclusion after the case study.) I'm also not a philosopher of science, so maybe that chapter/section would be years of work to flesh out. That is probably the most likely scenario, or at least the most charitable one. If so, I hope the author gets grants to do the academic work and then a fat book advance to write it up. Perhaps he could send this review to whoever decided to advertise this book to demonstrate the future audience for "How Knowledge Grows II: Scientific Revolutions as Mass Extinctions."
TL/DR: If you saw this book somewhere and were enchanted by the analogy of scientific progress as life evolving, stick your neck out and read it. You'll be challenged and you'll learn something, and what more can you ask for out of a book?
Displaying 1 of 1 review