08.30.08
Horgan and the ‘end of science’
Looking Back at the End of Science
More than a decade after its original publication, does the prophecy of a controversial book still ring true? By John Horgan
Since we have invoked the ‘end of science’ in the previous post, it’s worth reading Horgan’s recent essay on the subject. Horgan is someone I have always been wary of, even if I don’t take his thesis at face value, because he stumbled on something, without quite being able to put his finger on it (as did Spengler, who was one of the progenitors of the ‘end of science’ theme). I hesitate to endorse any thesis about the far future, with an implicit prediction (ironically, in its name, Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis is similar in that regard) about short-term taken as long-term futures.
A good example can be seen by looking at science in antiquity: the great advances in science in the Axial Age waned, and soon an ‘end of science’ became a very real fact of history. The short-term future after the Axial Age. The problem can be seen with Archimedes: the future beyond the ‘end of science’ was within his grasp, the calculus, but that future slipped away–into the far future.
One often gets a similar feeling about string theory… but who knows.
The point here more directly is that Horgan is stuck in Darwinism, and thinks natural selection one of the great advances in science! It seems there is a much more pedestrian meaning to the ‘end of science’: scientists are simply unable to do good science on the subject of evolution, which came to an end with Darwin (so to speak).
The reason is that a whole new conception of what science is is required to pass beyond reductionist biology, and quite possibly that will simply not happen. The general culture is already moving regressively away from science into religion, in part because science is so incompetent at cultural questions, very much related to questions of evolution. I certainly don’t see that as the right response to science, religion, but simply take that as an omen of the ‘cultural clutching at straws’ as this peculiar ‘other end of science’ plays itself out.
In fact, although it shouldn’t be called that, the ‘end of science’, most ironically and invisibly, occurred in the Enlightenment, the great champion of science, and its first dialectical child, the Romantic movement, as the limits of science became a topic of philosophy, witness the critiques of Kant, and his very simple remedies for that situation.
In the wake of this larger enlightenment general modern culture simply played the trumpet of scientism, witness the post-Hegelian era of Feuerbach’s generation, and the onset of the positivistic age. Evolution became an orphan in that era, and we are still frozen in place in that generation’s shifting gears.
But the ‘end of science’ in this sense is coming! As the current generation of scientists stands by in incomprehension. If you that incompetent, you’re fired. bye.
Be advised!