Truth in Science

Black Swan, 2003. ISBN 0-552-99704-8

This book is more up to date in its science than most school textbooks, more readable, and orders of magnitude more interesting. With a keen instinct for the human, outlandish and bizarre aspects of scientific discovery, Bryson keeps the reader entertained, whilst maintaining a dense flow of information.

As an outsider to the scientific establishment, and astute cultural critic, Bryson exposes the foibles and short-comings of scientists, and catalogues the role of ambition, intransigence and pride in their apparent search for objective knowledge. He is very up-front about our lack of knowledge in many areas.

Bryson gives a whirlwind tour of the scientific establishment's current account of the history of the universe, the earth, the biological world, of humanity, and on the way gives a brief history of science. The book's title accurately portrays its ambitious scope, but perhaps also betrays something of the author's guiding philosophy. It seems that for Bryson, the physical and biological world – the things we can see and feel – are just about all there is. On once being asked if he believed in God, Bryson's simple response was: "I'm not a spiritual person". However, he does not claim that science and belief in God are incompatible (The Guardian, 10 March 2005).

Bryson leaves us in no doubt about the ambitious nature of his book:

“This book is about how it happened – in particular, how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that somehow turned into us, and also some of what happened in between and since." (p. 20)

But despite his confidence, Bryson’s book tends to be more about the ‘what’ than the ‘how’. Bryson can tell us what scientists think happened, but there is an obvious lack of explanations for how this came about. Any mechanism, we discover, is shrouded in mystery.

For example, how did the universe originate? The best Bryson can give us is that the fact that it did originate shows us that it could originate.

“It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can.” (p. 31)

This is hardly a satisfying kind of explanation, but is again repeated for the origin of life:

"The bottom line is that life is amazing and gratifying, perhaps even miraculous, but hardly impossible – as we repeatedly attest with our own modest existences." (p. 355)

To his credit, Bryson is up front about many of the problems of naturalistic theories on the origin of life:

"Once you start talking about life, there is a great deal we don't know – not least, how it got going in the first place....

…We are no nearer to synthesizing life today than we were in 1953 – and much further away from thinking we can...

…For random events to produce even a single protein would seem a stunning improbability...

…Proteins can't exist without DNA, and DNA has no purpose without proteins. Are we to assume, then, that they arose simultaneously with the purpose of supporting each other? If so, wow...

…It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life." (pp. 349-353).

"Many of the fine details of life's beginnings remain pretty imponderable...Every scenario...involves water...but all this overlooks the fact that to turn monomers into polymers (which is to say, to begin to create proteins) involves a type of reaction known to biology as 'dehydration linkages'...It shouldn't happen, but in nature it does...if you make monomers wet they don't turn into polymers – except when creating life on earth. How and why it happens then and not otherwise is one of biology's great unanswered questions" (p. 355)

But despite these problems, one scientist has convinced him that he has the answer:

"What if...proteins didn't suddenly burst into being, but evolved?...As Richard Dawkins argues in The Blind Watchmaker, there must have been some kind of cumulative selection process that allowed amino acids to assemble in chunks. Perhaps two or three amino acids linked up for some simple purpose and then after a time bumped into some other similar small cluster and in so doing 'discovered some additional improvement" (pp. 353-354).

This raises the obvious question: what "simple purpose" could two or three amino acids have? But Bryson moves swiftly on:

"Chemical reactions of the sort associated with life are actually something of a commonplace…It may be beyond us to cook them up in a lab...but the universe does it readily enough...complexity is a natural, spontaneous, entirely reliable event" (p. 354).

As Bryson acknowledges, the kind of complexity which we can see occurring naturally around us is somewhat different to what was needed for the origin of life, but he blithely quotes Nobel laureate Christian de Duve: life is "an obligatory manifestation of nature, bound to arise wherever conditions are appropriate." (p. 354).

So to summarise Bryson's argument: we don’t know how life occurs, and we can’t do experiments to show how it occurred, but its occurrence was inevitable. Whether he himself finds this convincing, Bryson does not tell us.

Bryson introduces us to another mystery, in the form of the fossil record. If living organisms have evolved gradually over millions of years, why do they appear suddenly and fully formed in the fossil record?

"The big mystery about [trilobites] was their sudden appearance...Many thinking people in the nineteenth century saw this as proof of God's handiwork and refutation of Darwin's evolutionary ideals. If evolution proceeded slowly, they asked, then how did he account for this sudden appearance of complex, fully formed creatures? The fact is, he couldn't." (p. 393)

But, Bryson reassures us, this conundrum was not to last, because:

" one day in 1909… a palaeontologist named Charles Doolittle Walcott made an extraordinary find in the Canadian Rockies" (p. 394).

This extraordinary find was a huge number of fossils in an outcrop of the Canadian Rockies known as the Burgess Shale. Walcott had found the first evidence for the Cambrian explosion, the sudden appearance of fossils of many hundreds of species

How does the discovery of the Cambrian explosion solve the mystery of the sudden appearance of trilobites in the fossil record, and prove Darwin correct?  Bryson assures us that it does but is a little coy about explaining exactly why. Eventually, eleven pages later, Bryson lets us into the secret:

"On the face of it, the sudden appearance of lots of fully formed but varied creatures would seem to enhance the miraculousness of the Cambrian outburst, but in fact it did the opposite. It is one thing to have one well-formed creature like a trilobite burst forth in isolation – that really is a wonder – but to have many of them, all distinct but clearly related, turning up simultaneously in the fossil record in places as far apart as China and New York, clearly suggests that we are missing a big part of their history. There could be no stronger evidence that they simply had to have a forebear – some grandfather species that started the line in a much earlier past." (p. 405)

Such a remarkable piece of reasoning is all the more surprising because in other areas Bryson is unwilling to let scientists get away with bunkum. Life-size models of Australopithecines in the American Museum of Natural History in New York cause him some concern:

"The tableau is presented with such conviction that it is easy to overlook the consideration that virtually everything above the footprints is imaginary" (p. 534)

The fossil ‘Lucy’, he notes, is 20 per cent of a full skeleton, despite claims by the American Museum of Natural History that she is two-thirds complete, and by the BBC that she is complete. In addition, "It isn't actually known that she was a female. Her sex is merely presumed from her diminutive size." (p. 533). He describes the fossil record for human ancestry as "unhelpful" (p. 554). "The total world archive of hominid and early human bones" could fit "into the back of a pickup truck." (p. 529).

Unlike some scientists and psychologists, Bryson wisely has little time for genetic determinism of human behaviour. "In fact, we now know, almost nothing about you is so accommodatingly simple." (p. 499).

It is sometimes claimed that Darwinian evolution is not necessarily an undirected natural process. But after years of reading scientific papers and books, and interviewing prominent scientists, this is clearly the impression that Bryson has formed, or, as he more memorably puts it: "We are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes" (p. 424). Such a statement clearly has moral and spiritual implications and is very difficult to reconcile with a belief in God, even though, as noted above, Bryson does not claim that current scientific theories and belief in God are incompatible. It would be interesting to know how he makes sense of this.

This is a fascinating and useful book, opening up the world of science to the ordinary reader. If this makes scientists more accountable to the public, then this can only be welcomed, and could be a significant step towards the discrediting of theories whose persistence is due to bias and preconceptions in the minds of scientists. If his philosophical views had not coincided with those of scientists promoting a naturalistic view of origins, perhaps Bryson would have been more critical of evolutionary theories and given at least some space to skeptical scientists.