Scientific bandwagon or traveling medicine show?

Abstract

H indsight is a powerful tool in the hands of the historian. Because evolutionary theory turned out to be basically correct, anyone who opposed it in the nineteenth century must have been a closed-minded bigot. Hence, anyone who opposes sociobiology today is equally obstructing scientific progress. In order to decrease the bias inherent in my investigations, I have added a third theory to the equation, an unsuccessful theory, phrenology. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Franz Josef Gall suggested that there might be some correlation between the shape of a person's skull and his mental abilities. We now know that this view is nonsense. As might be expected, phrenology degenerated into quackery. Hence, its early supporters must have been gullible fools. But at the height of the movement, phrenologists claimed among their numbers some of the greatest names of the day: John Quincy Adams, Prince Albert, Alexander Bain, Balzac, Paul Broca, Charlotte Bront~, Henry Clay, Comte, George Eliot, David Ferrier, Marx, Metternick, Edgar Allen Poe and Mark Twain, not to mention four early evolutionists: Etienne Geofroy Saint-Hilaire, Robert Chambers, Herbert Spencer, and A.R. Wallace. Both phrenology and evolutionary theory started off as genuine scientific theories. Serious scientists could be found arrayed on both sides of both issues. However, from our contemporary point of view, Gall lost and Darwin won. What did the phrenologists do wrong? What did the evolutionists do right? Could anyone at the time have been able to predict that evolutionary theory would succeed and phrenology fail? A strong tendency exists to conclude that Darwin's great achievement was to devise a theory which was basically correct and Gall's failure was to come up with a set of ideas which were crudely mistaken. What Galldid wrong was tobe wrong. Scientific theories which contain a large element of truth continue to prosper while those which are fundamentally in error either drop out of sight or degenerate into some form o f pseudoscience. Hence, the message for the sociobiologists is--be right. If the views now being urged by the sociobiologists are reasonably close to the truth, the sociobiological bandwagon will turn into a victory parade. If not, it will degenerate into a traveling medicine show. However, if the history of phrenology and evolutionary theory have anything to teach us, it is that the truth of new theories as they are originally set out is not all that important. Phrenology in the first half of the nineteenth century was no further from the truth than the theory of evolution, which became widely accepted in the second half. What really determines the success or failure of new scientific theories is how advocates of these views continue to conduct themselves. They must be conceptually flexible, socially cohesive, and terminologically rigid. The role of evidence in science is too obvious to belabor, but evidence never totally constrains the freedom of scientists in formulating their theories. As R.S. Westfall has shown, the fudge factor is just as important. Any scientist who is not a "master wriggler," to use Darwin's phrase, will see his views refuted almost immediately. Scientists can succeed only if they are willing to break a few methodological rules, sometimes every rule in the book. However, they cannot finagle at all costs. Falsifiability does matter in science but not the falsifiability of disembodied propositions. What really counts is the falsifiability of scientists. To be successful, a scientist must be able to recognize clear threats to his position and respond appropriately. But the proper response to imminent refutation is not admitting defeat; it is changing one's position while retaining one's original terminology. Successful scientists are those who master the art of judicious finagling.