Cultivating scientific spirit

Uncritical acceptance of claims in the name of science is as dangerous as superstition.

THE FOUNDING Fathers of the Indian Republic gave great importance to the cultivation of a `scientific temper' by incorporating it in the Constitution. The Constitution of the United States on the other hand contains no such provision probably because its founders took it for granted. Its authors, Thomas Jefferson in particular, were products of the European Enlightenment and were greatly influenced by Newton's Principia Mathematica, which set forth a scientific model for the universe. What they feared most was threat to freedom in the name of religion. Europe had to wage a long battle to free itself from the hold of the Church, leading eventually to the secularisation of Europe. This was institutionalised in the U.S. in the form of the First Amendment to the Constitution and became part of the Bill of Rights.

From this history, it is clear that the Founding Fathers of the American Republic were concerned mainly about the political freedom of their country and the individual freedom of its citizens. They did not see European civilisation or its institutions as alien. And the American scientific tradition is a continuation of the European, going back to the Renaissance - to Newton, Galileo and Copernicus.

Some like Jefferson looked back also to the sages of pre- Christian Greece like Plato for inspiration. In fact, Jefferson, an architect of genius, designed the campus of the University of Virginia based on Classical Greek models. In this too he was being faithful to the European tradition, for the thinkers of the European Renaissance and the Enlightenment had also looked back to Classical Greece - at least their conception of it - for inspiration.

The Indian experience was different - the decolonisation had to be both political and spiritual. The overwhelming majority of people living in India saw European institutions and culture as alien. This is still the case. At the same time, national leaders recongised the need for incorporating modern western institutions, like science and technology, if the country was to achieve progress. This is what made them incorporate the `cultivation of a scientific temper', as one of the founding principles of the new Constitution. Successive governments also took steps to establish scientific institutions that would foster such a temper and lead to technological excellence.

While technological excellence has been achieved, it cannot be said that the scientific temper among the public at large, even among the educated, has progressed to the degree desirable. This, in my opinion, is due to the fact that much of the thinking remains rooted in imitation and uncritical acceptance of the West. It lacks an independent foundation. Indian thinkers continue to borrow and copy, without developing independent methodologies that can address problems that are uniquely Indian. They simply look to the West for solutions.

Built-in corrective mechanism

Science is concerned with understanding nature and its laws. It transcends political, social or religious boundaries. As long as problems don't cross the boundary of science and intrude into social and political realms, there are enough correcting mechanisms to deal with false claims. This can be illustrated with two recent examples. First, the claim made by Ramar Pillai that he had invented a method of converting water into `herbal petrol'. Far more sensational was the claim made in 1989 by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischman of the University of Utah in the U.S. According to them it was possible to achieve `Cold Fusion' in a bottle. This is equivalent to claiming that the energy mechanism of the hydrogen bomb - the physical phenomenon responsible for the sun's energy - can be reproduced in a bottle at low temperatures.

Both claims were refuted by science, which shows that as long as the problem remains within the bounds science, the built-in corrective mechanisms can take care of such claims. (The great chemist Irving Langmuir called such cases examples of `pathological science'). But science is not merely search for truth; it is also an authority figure that has replaced religion from its fromer position in Europe. Problems arise, however, when science is invoked in the service of some political and/or social goal.

The West is not immune to such abuses. To take an example, the manned space programme - including the Space Shuttle and the Space Station - is an enormously costly venture of no scientific value. Similarly, the Star Wars anti-missile programme - now reincarnated as the NMD - has no chance of working, but has the potential to upset the world's strategic situation by leading to an arms race. Both have been sold with false promises in the name of science. The West has largely accepted these utopain claims made in the name of science.

A double-edged knife

This shows that science is a double-edged knife: it can be used to enhance knowledge and produce useful applications; it can also be misused by invoking its authority and prestige. This means that the cultivation of a scientific spirit, or `scientific temper', should include knowledge of science as well as capacity to recognise the misuse of science as authority to push political and social agendas. The latter is more common than one would wish.

In the Nineteenth century, and even in the Twentieth, racial discrimination was justified in the name of science. Modern biology has demolished the whole concept of race, but it continues to raise its head in different guises, especially in the West. For example, two American scholars, Murray and Herrstein, recently wrote a book called The Bell Curve in which they claimed that science showed American blacks to be mentally inferior to whites. They used this as `sceintific' support to argue for abandoning affirmative action programmes for blacks. This was of course their real agenda, but they justified it in the name of science to make it acceptable.

In India, the situation is further complicated by what Sri Aurobindo called ``an over-readiness to defer to European (and American) authority'', or lack of critical spirit. This allows Western powers to impose versions on events that serve their own interests. For example, soon after the Pokharan II tests, an American defence lab released a statement claiming that their seismic analysis showed that the Indian tests were much weaker than claimed. The fact of the matter is that seismic tests conducted half a world away cannot accurately measure the power of an explosion. Scientific models for the propagation of waves through the earth are highly unreliable at such great distances. This is precisely the reason why the U.S. Senate rejected the Non-Proliferation Treaty - compliance by other countries cannot be verified. And yet, this obvious misinformation by the U.S. was carried in the Indian media without any qualifications, under the belief what comes from the West must be true.

A similiar situation was in evidence in recent reports claiming that genome research at the University of Utah had demonstrated a connection between high-caste Indians and Europeans of more than five thousand years ago. This too was reported without qualifications. Basic questions were not asked: how genome research that had demolished a supposedly biologically inherited trait like race, could in the same breath identify a purely man- made construct like caste?

Further, how could a sample of a few hundred from the Vishakhapatnam district - the sample used in the study - allow one to make such far-reaching statements about Indian and European populations more than five thousand years ago? Also, Professor Richard Villems, one of the co-authors of the Utah study, soon retracted earlier claims by stating that there may be some ``apparent shift of frequencies towards those variants more common west of the Indus. Europe as such, however, has nothing to do with that.'' It was also claimed that by `Europe' the authors really meant anything west of the Indus.

Professor Villem's reticence is understandable, but even this is questionable: if `West of the Indus' can mean Europe, it can with mroe justification mean `East of the Indus', perhaps all the way to the much closer Vishakhapatnam where the sample was taken. Nonetheless, this study, which one of its authors characterised as ``weakly statistically reliable,'' was cited as scientific evidence in support of certain social and political theories. (`Weakly statistically reliable' is a euphemism for unreliable). In other words, this Utah study is no more reliable than the previous Utah study on Cold Fusion. In all this one sees an inherent belief on the part of a segment of the Indian intelligentsia that any study coming from the West must be accepted as scientifically valid. In this setup, proof of a claim does not often go beyond quoting some Western authority.

In summary, science and scientists can take care of pathologies that arise within the boundaries of science. But in the absence of a critical spirit, especially among the intelligentsia, society is open to abuse and manipulation by those who invoke science as authority. This is far more dangerous than fraud that invokes the supernatural and appeals to superstition. Where superstition thrives on the fear of the unknown, and can be cured by education, science as authority promising utopian certainty is harder to combat. This is why spread of scientific knowledge without an independent cirtical spirit is dangerously incomplete. This critical spirit is largely lacking in India today.

N. S. RAJARAM

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