In a famous portrait painted by his son-in-law, Thomas Henry Huxley strikes a
pose of casual menace. His white hair and mutton chop whiskers frame a dark,
direct gaze; the resting of one elbow on a stack of thick volumes points to
his position as a man of learning. And cupped in one hand is a skull.
Clearly Huxley, a doctor and anatomist who exercised great influence in
19thcentury scientific circles through a secretive dining circle known as
the X Club, was not a man to be trifled with. And he uttered a statement
that is as meaningful today as it was in the febrile intellectual atmosphere
of Victorian London: “It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as
heresies and to end as superstitions.”
At that time, no theory was more heretical than that issuing from the pen of
Charles Darwin, the reclusive naturalist who, along with Alfred Russel
Wallace, dreamt up the theory of evolution by natural selection. Such a
thesis, which argued that creatures were continually sculpted by their
environment, challenged the idea of the immutability of species, which
deigned that only God could create and alter the abundant variety of
creatures found in the world. And here we are, celebrating the bicentenary
of Darwin’s birth, with proof of evolution revealing itself in every corner
of the natural world — in the rocks, in the seas, in the cliffs, in the
deserts, in the rainforest. We, too, are creatures sculpted by natural
selection, descended from an ape, just as Darwin suspected two centuries
ago, but was too afraid to admit.
The fact that evolution has triumphed is largely down to Huxley, who was
labelled “Darwin’s bulldog” for his relentless championing in the face of
religious opposition. Darwin had the idea, but Huxley can lay claim to
promulgating the heresy.
Evolution has not yet become superstition, but the tail-end of Huxley’s quote
refers to the fact that science never stands still and that new truths are
themselves often replaced with even fresher ones. For those who take
pleasure in watching science progress — and we count ourselves among them —
heresy is perhaps the most exhilarating, and disruptive, way in which
science renews itself. That makes it a superb theme for The Times Cheltenham
Science Festival, which starts on Wednesday and contains a wealth of
thoughtprovoking and entertaining events examining the role of heresy in the
advancement of scientific thinking.
By its very definition — an idea or opinion that rubs against the established
wisdom in a field — heresy does not allow for a gradual reshaping of ideas
and mindsets. It clamours loudly for attention, a neon-clad teenager
shrieking to be heard among a throng of dowdy, middle-aged or even ancient
ideas. It’s always tempting to dismiss the young upstart (and, with
hindsight, most neon-clad teenagers are indeed best avoided), but just
occasionally one will bite back and triumph over his sniffy elders.
So, how to spot the heretical idea that will go the distance? The problem with
heresy is that it can look suspiciously similar to many other undesirable
phenomena frequently found in science. For example, how does one distinguish
between a heretical idea that might be of some value and one that’s just
plain flaky? To turn Huxley’s phrase on its head, the vast majority of
heresies don’t turn out to be great truths; indeed, most are ideas that
should have stayed within the confines of the garden sheds in which they
were created.
One such example is the idea of a perpetual motion machine, a contraption that
is powered by . . . nothing. There is something obviously wrong with it: it
breaks a fundamental law of physics, which is the conservation of energy.
You simply can’t conjure up energy from nothing. You can make it from stuff
(nuclear material, oil, coal, gas) or convert one type of energy to another
(wind, sunshine, waves), but you cannot magic up energy from the ether. And
so this particular heresy can be dismissed as fantasy.
It is also easy to mistake contrarianism for heresy. Some individuals
positively delight in taking perverse viewpoints on an issue, despite
overwhelming evidence to the contrary. We might like to place some — though
not all — climate-change deniers in this category. In cases such as these,
it is always worth examining the motives of the contrarian. The American
Enterprise Institute is a Washington think-tank that has questioned the
consensus on climate science: it has also received money from Exxon Mobil,
an oil company. In fact, several think-tanks have adopted a more questioning
attitude towards the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the
international body of scientists that is assessing how much humans are
warming the planet. Last year Exxon Mobil pulled funding from several such
organisations, including the George C. Marshall Institute and the Frontiers
of Freedom Institute. One cannot always assume that whoever pays the piper
calls the tune — we would argue that the vast majority of scientists is not
quite as crude or calculating as that — but the recent acceptance of the
climate consensus inside the oil industry has coincided with a marked
absence of scepticism in public debate.
Nonetheless, a consensus that grows stronger becomes a magnet for individual
dissenters, and so climate research is still an area to watch on the heresy
front: Sir David Bellamy has just come out as a sceptic on man-made global
warming, as has Professor Freeman Dyson, a world-renowned physicist who
works at just about the brainiest address on the planet, the Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey (his belief is that the doomsayers
have discerned a certainty in climate models unsupported by the maths). Sir
David says that he is happy to be called a heretic, but unhappy to be
smeared a denier: only hindsight will prove whether he or Professor Dyson
deserves the accolade.
If it’s difficult to spot which fanciful idea might turn out to have legs, can
we instead deduce the type of person who might make a successful heretic? In
his 2001 book The Borderlands of Science, Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic
magazine, tried to delineate the boundary between proper science that sounds
weird, and weird stuff trying to pass itself off as proper science. As part
of his analysis, he defined a “heretic personality” as “the unique pattern
of relatively permanent traits that make an individual maintain opinions on
any subject at variance with those considered authoritative”.
Shermer credits Alfred Russel Wallace (about whom he wrote a biography) with
such a personality — high in agreeableness and openness, but low in
neuroticism — and notes that, as well as evolution by natural selection,
Wallace dabbled in many other issues that ran contrary to received wisdom.
Wallace was what we might call a scattergun heretic, hitting the bull’s-eye
with his unyielding devotion to evolution, land reform and women’s rights,
but missing the scientific target by defending spiritualist mediums against
charges of fraud and refusing to believe that vaccination works (which led
to an acrimonious dispute with The Lancet).
Professor Dyson, too, gives the impression of someone born to fight for the
underdog; he professes an aversion to the scientific consensus (which might
explain his ability to carve inroads into quantum field theory). He opposes
what he calls the “holy brotherhood” of climate modellers, and it is true
that climate research offers a tempting target for anyone that way inclined.
After all, now that George W. Bush, under whose leadership climate
scepticism was not just permitted but encouraged, is gone, the greenies seem
to be getting things their own way. All the leading politicial parties in
the western hemisphere are signed up to the energy-saving agenda; in the
eyes of sceptics, deniers and would-be heretics, science has solidified into
dogma.
Of course, when most of us think of scientific heresy, we think of the Italian
with the telescope. Galileo Galilei was a heretic in the historical sense of
the word: when heresy meant an opposition to religious doctrine. After
observing the moons of Jupiter through his revolutionary improvised
telescope four centuries ago, the Pisa-born scientist rejected the
prevailing view of geocentrism (that the planets and Sun revolved around the
Earth) and professed his belief in Copernicus’s theory of heliocentrism
(that the Earth and other planets revolved around the Sun). In the early
17th century, after printing a comparison of the two theories (with
heliocentrism coming off substantially better under his penmanship), he was
summoned to a papal trial, at which he was denounced as a heresy suspect,
and placed under house arrest until his death. It would take another two
centuries for the reigning Pope to allow heliocentric books to be printed in
Rome.
While religious heresies entered orthodoxy when they converted the powerful
(the Protestant Reformation in Europe was driven mostly by princes who found
its doctrines politically convenient), scientific heresies lose their stigma
for a different reason: evidence.
Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, for example, are contemporary former heretics
— we say “former” not because they recanted their beliefs but because they
provided evidence to prove their strange hypothesis correct. In the 1970s,
the medical consensus was that stomach ulcers were caused by excess acid,
stress or a poor diet. Marshall and Warren, however, had a different idea:
they thought that the condition might be triggered by bacteria.
At first, their hypothesis met with ridicule because it flew in the face of
many years of medical insight. The origins of ulcers, it was argued, were
well understood; besides, the stomach was too acidic for bacteria to
survive. Warren’s claim to have observed bacteria was dismissed as a
delusion. “When I said they were there, no one believed it,” he said.
And so the pair gathered observation after observation, fact after fact. When
Warren identified curved bacteria in the stomach biopsies of patients with
peptic ulcers, he knew that a handful of intriguing observations would be
insufficient to carry the day. He and Marshall examined hundreds of biopsies
and established that when a duodenal or stomach ulcer was present, so, too,
was an organism called Helicobacter pylori.
This correlation, however, was not sufficient to prove causation: the ulcers
and the infections could have been the result of a third factor. Marshall
decided an unorthodox experiment was needed. He drank a flask of the
bacteria and was rewarded with an ulcer. He promptly cured himself with
antibiotics, a cure that would be effective only if the bacteria was indeed
the culprit. Before long, the Helicobacter heresy had won the day. In 2005,
Marshall and Warren received the ultimate badge of orthodox acceptance: the
Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. The men understood that
extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and, though tough on
their stomachs, they provided it in spades.
Stanley Prusiner also travelled the path from heretic to Nobel laureate
through his identification of a new class of infectious agent: prions. These
misfolded proteins — their name is a conjunction of “protein” and
“infectious” — are the cause of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD, once known
as mad cow disease) in humans, scrapie in sheep, and kuru, a brain disease
unique to a human tribe that honoured its dead by eating their brains. It
was a heretical idea because scientists believed that a substance needed
nucleic acid to be infectious — such as viruses and bacteria — and proteins
lack this.
Many thought Prusiner’s failure to detect it was sloppiness. An army of
careful, determined — and ultimately frustrated — experimenters proved that
Prusiner’s 1982 insight was right all along. Prusiner reflects on his
experience thus: “While it is reasonable for scientists to be sceptical of
new ideas that do not fit within the accepted realm of scientific knowledge,
the best science often emerges from situations where results carefully
obtained do not fit within the accepted paradigms.” To misquote Woodward and
Bernstein, you have to follow the data.
A Nobel prize signifies the death of a heresy because it symbolises its
integration into mainstream thinking. That does not necessarily mean,
however, that all the ideas emanating from a Nobel laureate’s mind are
orthodoxies-in-waiting. A Nobel prize might give us an idea of the
frontrunners in any given scientific race, but it won’t yield a dead cert.
In other words, the Nobel prize is not an intellectual mark that certifies a
scientist as a reliable source of good ideas. The path of human discovery is
strewn with tales of individuals who, after making their names with one
brilliant insight, have taken to promoting others with much less to
recommend them.
Kary Mullis provides a spectacular example. The American biochemist won the
Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1993 for his role in the development of the
polymerase chain reaction — a method of copying and amplifying DNA that has
become critical to research and genetic fingerprinting. But he has since
become an assiduous advocate of two positions that are more properly
labelled denialism than heresy: he does not accept that HIV causes Aids or
that humanity’s production of greenhouse gases is the main driver of climate
change. Mullis subscribes to astrology, and has written of an encounter with
what he considered to be an extraterrestrial being, in the form of a
talking, glowing racoon. He is a walking advertisement for a case-by-case
approach to judging ideas.
The physicist Brian Josephson, who carried out pioneering studies in
superconductivity while in his twenties, is another Nobel laureate who would
like to be thought of as a heretic waiting to be vindicated, for his
advocacy of paranormal phenomena such as telepathy. His views on the subject
are certainly unconventional — he believes that paranormal phenomena might
simply be a hard-to-grasp, hard-to-study realm of science in much the same
way that quantum physics is, but the evidence remains against him. Some
trials to assess telepathy (such as by asking a person next to a ringing
telephone to guess which one of four people is calling them) have shown a
higher success rate than would be expected by chance, but they are
frequently dogged by criticisms over methodology, replication and (lack of)
publication. Josephson’s argument is that the hunt for the neutrino is also
a hit-and-miss affair and yet physicists keep looking.
It is moot as to whether the comparison is fair: the neutrino is predicted by
the same robust theory of particle physics that has made other predictions
later verified by experiment. In science, to have been gloriously right once
offers no guarantee of a repeat performance, although it does offer the
prospect of tenacity.
In truth, science is surprisingly welcoming of bad ideas. The great sin is not
to be wrong but to cling to a hypothesis once evidence suggests it should be
abandoned. The beauty of science is its capacity for self-correction, for
assimilating heresies when they are shown to have merit, and discarding
those that have none. The scientific method, by which ideas are tested and
reassessed against observation, experiment and evidence, not authority,
could almost have been designed to support the famous dictum of John Maynard
Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind.” True heretics do not
plead for special treatment: they understand that their theories must stand
or fall purely on the strength of evidence, and are willing to submit their
work to extraordinary scrutiny.
That’s what makes them so valuable to science. They follow the facts to the
final destination, no matter how uncomfortable the voyage. Ultimately, their
insights can change the way we see the world (Galileo) and the way we see
ourselves (Darwin and Wallace). And that is why we should salute heretics as
heroes.
The Heresy strand at The Times Cheltenham Science Festival includes David
Glover debating the fine line between genius and absurdity (June 3, 7:30pm),
Matt Ridley on when to listen to heretics (June 4, 7pm) and Simon Singh
discussing the heretical ideas at the heart of science (June 6, 6pm)
