It was a figure I kept hearing again and again: 50 percent of South African women can now expect to be raped sometime during their lives. Everywhere I went on a recent visit to the beautiful troubled city of Cape Town, people were talking about rape. An elderly neighbor of the couple I was staying with — a women in her 80s — had not long before been brutally raped in her home, then bound and gagged and imprisoned in a closet. Her son had found her several days later, and she died soon afterward in the hospital. After hearing several not dissimilar stories and endless accounts of the endemic rape in the squatter camps and black townships, I began to see that the horrific statistic might just be true.
For the past 30 years, rape has been seen as a byproduct of social conditioning and chaos. According to this line of reasoning, the situation in South Africa must be explained by a complex set of factors including the destruction of traditional tribal cultures, 50 years of apartheid and the aftermath of several centuries of colonial oppression. But a new book challenges such sociocultural accounts of rape and asserts that it is a built-in adaption that has evolved naturally because it confers a reproductive advantage on the men who do it.
“A Natural History of Rape: The Biological Basis of Sexual Coercion” sets out a strictly Darwinian view. Writing recently in the Sciences, the authors, biologist Randy Thornhill and anthropologist Craig Palmer, state their position bluntly: “We fervently believe that, just as the leopard’s spots and the giraffe’s elongated neck are the results of aeons of past Darwinian selection, so is rape.” Elsewhere they proclaim: “There is no doubt that rape has evolutionary — and hence genetic — origins.” If so, South Africa must be a hothouse for such genes.
As the latest salvo from the burgeoning “evolutionary psychology” movement, the book is a symptom of an increasingly heated border war — the fight over who controls the intellectual territory of human behavior. Traditionally, the study of what people do and why they do it has been the domain of the social sciences — cultural anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and political scientists — but increasingly, evolutionary biologists are claiming that the key to human behavior lies not in our culture and social structures but in our biological makeup. In the case of “A Natural History of Rape,” this is more than just a rhetorical battle; our whole approach to rape prevention is potentially at stake.
Ground zero for Thornhill and Palmer is the notion that rape is a strategy for helping males to procreate. Central to their argument is a rather Aristotelian distinction between what they call “ultimate” and “proximate” causes. While they acknowledge there may be social situations that enhance the likelihood of a man raping, according to them these must always be understood as just the immediate or proximate cause of his actions. Underlying all such causes, they say, is the ultimate cause, which is a biologically built-in mechanism. In other words, whatever cultural conditions prevail, the “true” explanation for rape — and in their view the only legitimate explanation — is to be found in a man’s genes.
In support of their evolutionary view, Thornhill and Palmer point out that the majority of rape victims are young women at the peak of their fertility and hence of their child-bearing potential. Why? At great length they explain that Darwinian evolution would have selected for mechanisms in males that would target these young women for rape. Since, in their view, procreation is the “ultimate” goal driving rape, it is only logical that this sexual strategy would focus on women at their reproductive zenith.
To corroborate this view the authors assert that studies have proven that it is women of child-bearing age who suffer the most psychological trauma in the aftermath of rape. Child rape victims and elderly victims supposedly suffer less because, although they have been physically violated, their reproductive potential has not been compromised. To quote: “The more a woman’s reproductive success would have contributed to the genetic success of her mate or her relatives in evolutionary history, the greater the suffering of those individuals is likely to be after she is raped.” It is married women in particular, they say, who suffer most from mental anguish after rape because a married woman risks reprisal or even rejection from her husband and his relatives.
Feminist arguments against all this will be thrashed out at length elsewhere — and rightly so — but what astonishes me as a veteran science writer and someone trained as a physicist, is what mind-bogglingly sloppy science this constitutes. To steal a quip from Anthony Lane, I’ve had bowls of spaghetti that were more tightly structured than this argument.
For a start, although the authors never say so explicitly, their text is suffused with the assumption that U.S. patterns of rape are universal. A 1992 national study they cite reported that 13 percent of American women over the age of 18 say they have been raped. The study did not include any figures for those under 18, but with this group included the total percentage may actually be higher. The same study reports that 29 percent of adult women surveyed were under the age of 11 at the time they were raped. Another study (not cited by the authors) has reported that 45 percent of rape victims were under 16. Since rape of children and teenagers is on the rise, the researchers I spoke with all expressed the view that the overall percentage of rape in America was now higher than 13 percent — perhaps as high as 20 percent, several suggested. But even at 13 percent that’s one in seven women, and this is still far higher than in many other societies, says Peggy Reeve Sanday, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania who is an expert on rape and the author of “A Woman Scorned: Acquaintance Rape” and “Fraternity Gang Rape.”
As the author of a cross-cultural study on rape in 95 different tribal societies, Sanday stresses that its incidence varies wildly from culture to culture and there are many societies in which rape is rare. Far from being the norm, she says, America is one of the most rape-prone of all contemporary cultures. If the biological imperative to rape is as powerful, and as universal, as Thornhill and Palmer insist, why does its frequency vary so much from culture to culture?
Mary Cameron, an anthropologist at Auburn University, points to another flaw in Thornhill and Palmer’s thesis: “It doesn’t begin to account for male-male rape, or incest,” neither of which confer any evolutionary advantage. If, by the authors’ own admission, almost one-third of rapes are inflicted on children under 11, it is hard to see how reproductive imperatives could possibly be responsible.
Anne Fausto-Sterling, a research biologist at Brown University, questions the very foundation of Thornhill and Palmer’s thesis: “If rape is about reproduction,” she says, “then how many rapes end in pregnancy? I’d want to see the data on that.” Such figures are notably absent from “A Natural History of Rape.” And there could well be other explanations for the fact that the majority of rape victims are young women of peak child-bearing age. After all, most rapists are themselves young men and they may simply be raping within their peer group.
Particularly woolly is the authors’ claim that women of child-bearing age suffer from more psychological trauma than children or elderly rape victims. In perhaps the book’s most eyebrow-raising chapter the authors try to convince us that this is a proven fact, but I must say I found their “evidence” entirely underwhelming. Children who have been raped can suffer a lifetime of psychological scarring (in addition to serious physical harm), and an informal poll of my female friends suggests that for many women there are few more traumatic prospects than the thought of being raped in the heightened physical vulnerability of our old age.
Trying to quantify a human being’s anguish and measure it against the suffering of another is the sort of notion that ought to make any sensible scientist run screaming from the room. It’s not just that it’s repugnant to say that a raped 7-year-old feels less pain than a raped 21-year-old, it’s also simply daft to insist that any such “objective” comparison can be made. The whole exercise is reminiscent of medieval attempts to quantify sin.
Furthermore, while the authors are right that married rape victims may indeed fear reprisal from their husbands or relatives, the very fact that the consequences of rape are so much worse in some societies than they are in others indicates that we’re talking about cultural forces here. For example, religious women in Muslim communities probably fear this more than secular women in America; it’s the difference between a fundamentalist and a liberal value system — not biology. Do the authors of “The Natural History of Rape” have any clear understanding of the distinction? Thornhill and Palmer might just as well assert that black men in the Bronx feel nervous around the NYPD because they’re hard-wired to dread authority figures.
All of which raises the question of scientific standards. To quote Fausto-Sterling: “When you make a hypothesis you really need to be able to back that up with data.” Yet data is just what is missing from this book. As with so many other neo-Darwinian accounts of human behavior now being offered by proponents of the new “evolutionary psychology” movement, Thornhill and Palmer’s analysis of rape relies not on hard evidence, as they would have us believe, but on speculative flights of fancy. Taking a leaf from Rudyard Kipling, Stephen Jay Gould has dubbed such theories “just-so-stories.” (His point being that they have not a whit more validity than Kipling’s fanciful tales of how the leopard got its spots and the tiger its stripes.)
For most of its 150-year history, evolutionary biology has relied on careful field work, but now, says Fausto-Sterling, “What you have is this new group of ‘evolutionary psychologists’ who have very different standards of proof.” Thornhill and Palmer are part of this movement, which is in effect E.O. Wilson’s old “sociobiology” under a new name. Although still in its infancy, the movement is rapidly gaining adherents, to the consternation of many scientists — most notably Gould, who has written at length on the patent inadequacies of much of this work.
The social agenda behind “A Natural History of Rape” comes into clearer focus as the authors claim that not only is evolutionary theory the only way to understand why men rape, but the only way to understand how to combat this heinous crime. Having offered their explanation for the former they end their book with a suggested program for the latter. Since, according to them, all men — by their very nature — are potential rapists, they advocate that young men be required to attend a rape education course before being granted a driver’s license. By stressing the evolutionary basis of rape, these courses would teach men where such urges come from and thus empower them to resist those urges.
Ironically, by insisting that all men are, in essence, rapists, Thornhill and Palmer are propagating a view similar to that of feminist extremists like Andrea Dworkin. The authors are aware of the parallel and it seems to unsettle them, feminists in general being a group they despise. When feminists do make this kind of claim, the public reaction is almost universally negative — Dworkin is routinely portrayed in the media as a half-crazed man-hating harpy — yet in Thornhill and Palmer’s hands the same proposition magically becomes acceptable. Respectable publications like the New York Times and the Sciences are now giving this idea a serious number of column inches.
However, according to Thornhill and Palmer, education about rape prevention must also extend to women. Since evolution has predisposed men to rape, women must understand these innate drives and the conditions that exacerbate them. In particular, they should realize that provocative clothing and flirtatious behavior can have violent biological consequences. Here, of course, “A Natural History of Rape” departs from the Dworkinian theory of who’s to blame for rape. Thornhill and Palmer strongly imply that the rapist is the one breed of criminal who, if sufficiently inflamed by miniskirts and cleavage, can’t be held entirely responsible for his crime.
Dworkin aside, Thornhill and Palmer rail against feminist views of rape throughout their book. Feminists and other social theorists, say the authors, are misguided, forever driven by ideology. Evolutionary psychologists like themselves, however, are supposedly clear of
this “sin” and are guided only by the “pure” light of reason.
With increasing vehemency, evolutionary psychologists and their champions (men such as E.O. Wilson and MIT’s Steven Pinker) have reiterated this casting of the social sciences as an impediment to a “true” understanding of human behavior. In his 1998 book “Consilience,” Wilson led the charge by declaring that in the coming decades most social science departments will be made irrelevant as their subjects of enquiry are taken over by evolutionary psychology. Thornhill and Palmer reiterate such sentiments; for them, as for Wilson, there is only one legitimate source of illumination when it comes to human behavior, and that is Darwinian theory.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that in the battle for who gets to define human nature, the proponents of evolutionary psychology take no prisoners. It seems they can’t stop at simply asserting a role for their own science in understanding human behavior — they have to annihilate the competition. And it’s not hard to guess that these attacks are the covert motivation for “A Natural History of Rape” itself.
According to Thornhill and Palmer, social science approaches to rape are not simply wrongheaded; by not being based on a “true” understanding of the problem, such strategies “may actually increase it.” We are offered no explanation of why this may be so, but again and again we are told that as long as the “social sciences view of rape” prevails the problem will never be solved. Their hearts on their sleeves, the authors write: “In addressing the question of rape, the choice between the politically constructed answers of social science and the evidentiary answers of
evolutionary biology is essentially a choice between ideology and knowledge. As scientists who would like to see rape eradicated from human life, we sincerely hope that truth will prevail.”
But what is “truth”? For Thornhill and Palmer, as for most evolutionary psychologists, it is a Platonic reality untainted by social or political force, a reality that only “pure” and “unadulterated” science can discover. But how “pure” can science ever be when it’s dealing with such complex and politically charged issues as rape? And how “scientific” can Thornhill and Palmer’s own assertions be when they’re based on interpretations of data that can’t be subjected to rigorous testing? The history of biology — when the science has been extrapolated to explain human behavior — is riddled with ideology posing as science, as Fausto-Sterling’s “Myths of Gender” and her current book, “Sexing the Body,” as well as Gould’s “The Mismeasure of Man” have shown. Ideology posing as science was also at the heart of the eugenics movement — both here in the United States, and more devastatingly in Nazi Germany. To paraphrase philosopher of science Donna Haraway, biology is politics by another name.
The ideological proof in Thornhill and Palmer’s pudding is clear from the fact that although they devote several chapters to berating social scientists’ understanding of rape, they give us no analysis whatsoever of the actual rape prevention programs and strategies arising from that understanding. With mantralike frequency they tell us that current approaches to rape prevention are wrong, but by what criteria? By what standards are they evaluating those programs?
It only stands to reason that before you dismiss a program as ineffective you should check its results to make sure that it doesn’t actually work. But despite the cloak of disinterested, objective science Thornhill and Palmer have wrapped around their work, they’re not really interested in the facts or a careful, cautious weighing of all evidence. The powerful irrational emotions underlying “A Natural History of Rape” and other similarly reductionist theories indicate how close the mania for evolutionary psychology comes to religious fundamentalism. While the Christian fundamentalist takes the Bible as his foundational text, insisting on the most literal interpretation, so these new scientific fundamentalists insist on the most doggedly literal interpretation of their chosen “text.” Here the “words” are not those of the Hebrew scriptures, but the codons of the DNA chain — which take on for them an almost divine status.
It goes without saying that Thornhill and Palmer’s book does women an immense disservice. But even more depressing to me is the disservice these authors do to science. Over the past decade the once-golden image of science has been sorely tarnished and there is a growing perception that scientists are an arrogant elite, many of whom are out of touch with ordinary people’s lives. When books like this offer up such a sloppy, illogical and downright lazy analysis of such a complex social problem they only help to fuel that perception. If this is the kind of rubbish that “science” turns out, is it any wonder people are turning away?
Fortunately, the brand of Z-grade analysis that reigns in “A Natural History of Rape” is not indicative of the majority of scientific thinking, or of evolutionary thinking, and there are many scientists who find the current abuses of evolutionary psychology as irksome as I do. Those of us who love science and believe in its potential have an obligation to expose this nonsense for what it is. If we don’t, then who will?
Just in case you were wondering, Purgatory is very much alive. As part of the Catholic Church’s jubilee celebrations, Pope John Paul II announced this year that any Christian who gives up drinking or smoking in 2000 will have his or her time in Purgatory lessened. The pontiff’s power over the souls in Purgatory was affirmed in medieval times, though very few popes have exercised this right. One who did was Boniface VIII, who in celebration of the 1300 jubilee granted complete pardon from all Purgatorial torment to anyone who died while on pilgrimage to Rome that year. Not everyone approved of such terrestrial dabbling in the hereafter; for some Christians, Boniface’s action was a dangerous and illegitimate abuse of power. John Paul II apparently has no such qualms.
As an ex-Catholic girl I was thrilled to hear that the “Middle Kingdom” was still rocking — it’s one of those things that Reformation leaders quickly struck off the register. Yet even in overwhelmingly Protestant America, Purgatory remains a significant feature of our religious landscape. According to a 1997 Yankelovich survey for Time/CNN, three-quarters of Americans (76 percent) believe they are bound for heaven: Most (61 percent) expect to go there directly, but 15 percent expect a sojourn in Purgatory. Only 4 percent see themselves headed for hell.
At the start of this century, many intellectuals believed that by the year 2000 religion would have died off. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. According to polls, 95 percent of Americans believe in God. 59 percent say that religion is very important in their lives, and another 29 percent rate it as fairly important. Only 4 percent identify themselves as agnostics or atheists. Sixty-eight percent belong to a church or synagogue and nearly half of our populace, 46 percent, describe themselves as born-again. Why, in this post-Enlightenment age — an era supposedly dominated by secular reason and science — have religious beliefs not only survived, but flourished?
Why people believe in God is the central question of Michael Shermer’s new book “How We Believe.” Director of the Skeptics Society and an ex-born-again Christian himself, Shermer has a general fascination with belief; this book might be seen as a companion to his previous “Why People Believe Weird Things,” a portmanteau study of “weird” beliefs from ESP to Holocaust denial. Though Shermer abandoned religion in his own life, he retains, he says, a deep appreciation of its role in other peoples’ lives. But despite that appreciation, like many contemporary scientists who try to explain religion, he’s leaving out evidence and missing a really critical point.
In 1998, along with MIT social scientist Frank Sulloway, Shermer set out to conduct a survey on why people believe in God. The results were both intriguing and surprising. The number one reason given (29 percent of respondents) was the apparently good design of nature or the universe. The number two reason was a feeling of God being present in everyday life (21 percent). In third place (at just 10 percent) was the answer that belief in God is comforting, consoling or relieving. The fourth place answer (another 10 percent) was that the Bible says so.
One unexpected result here is that only one in 10 people gave the consolation response. That is significant because so many secular intellectuals, particularly those opposed to religion, seem to assume that the desire for psychological comfort is the primary engine of religious faith. Over the past decade we have witnessed a boomlet in books by scientists decrying the rise of fundamentalist and New Age religious beliefs (along with other “irrationalisms” such as belief in ESP, psychic powers and past lives). At the core of these books — see Nicholas Humphrey’s “Leaps of Faith,” Carl Sagan’s “The Demon-Haunted World” and Richard Dawkins’ “Unweaving the Rainbow” — can usually be found the view that all such beliefs are childish searches for consolation in the face of death and life’s injustice. This condescending view is what I call the “child clutching at teddy in the dark” theory of religion.
The latest addition to this line is Wendy Kaminer’s “Sleeping with Extraterrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and the Perils of Piety,” a well-intentioned though curmudgeonly tirade against various forms of “irrational” belief currently sweeping our nation. Halfway through her book, Kaminer trots out the view that “people believe in deities because they would find life unbearable without them.” But as Shermer’s study reveals, consolation is not the driving force of many Americans’ faith.
On the contrary, for almost a third of his respondents, belief in God is founded on an essentially rationalist answer — these people are convinced there is a God because the universe seems so highly ordered that to them it suggests the hand of a conscious creator. Such a response would have resonated with the founders of the scientific revolution — Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Galileo — all of whom saw their scientific discoveries as evidence of a divine architect. But if such views were widespread in the 17th century, it is far from obvious why they are so alive two centuries after Kant definitively showed why the “argument from design” could not be used as evidence for God.
For Shermer, this rationalist approach to religion is of a piece with a larger picture. Humans, he says, are “pattern-seeking animals.” Hence, for him religion becomes just a special kind of pattern to be explained. There are two levels on which he says religious patterns need explaining: the personal and the social. On the first front, Shermer posits the existence of something he calls a “belief engine.” Here he follows in the footsteps of Steven Pinker, the MIT linguist and cognitive scientist whose book “How the Mind Works” proposes that our brains comprise a series of specialized computational devices or “mental modules” that perform such tasks as recognizing faces or perceiving surface textures.
Instead of a single module, Shermer proposes a more diffuse and complex structure, a general mental “belief engine” that he sees as underlying not only religious belief, but also magical thinking and even scientific thinking. One piece of evidence he cites for such a structure is the work of neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, who has found that some temporal lobe epileptics have a heightened physiological response to religious imagery.
But it is the social dimension of religious belief that most concerns Shermer, and his primary project is to present a scientific explanation for how he thinks religions arise and flourish in human societies. Here he draws on research in anthropology, genetics and particularly evolutionary psychology. Underlying Shermer’s program is a desire to find cross-cultural patterns in religious belief systems, a core that many religions share. “Seek and ye shall find” the Bible exhorts us — and, more than their proponents admit, new scientific theories of culture often operate on the same principle.
Shermer rightly notes that one of the core functions of religion is to provide a society with myths that help to bind the community together. In this postmodernist age that is a fairly uncontroversial view — though of course it is rejected by religious fundamentalists, for whom there are no myths, only Absolute Truths. What is troubling, however, is Shermer’s claim that there are universal, or near universal, religious myths.
Two such myths he identifies are that of a messiah and that of a coming apocalypse. The former he discerns not only in Christianity, but also in the late 19th century Native American Ghost Dance, in Polynesian cargo cults and in the recent Heaven’s Gate cult. But if all these cults share common themes with Christianity, that is hardly surprising for all have arisen within cultures heavily influenced by Christianity. None occur outside the Christian orbit, and hence they can’t serve as evidence for the universality of a messiah theme. That theme is definitely not found in many indigenous religions prior to their encounters with Europeans, nor is it a feature of all the so-called “great world religions.” Buddhism, for example, has no notion of a messiah; nor does it posit a coming apocalypse.
Shermer’s desire for universal religious patterns is central to his project of finding a “scientific” account of religion. Science (at least in the modern Western sense of this word), is a search for universals. Yet his hankering for such an account seems to have blinded him to the incredible diversity of the phenomena — he seems to see only those bits of religion that suit his purpose.
The most cursory look at Australian Aboriginal religions, for example, would have told him that the very idea of universal religious patterns may be an illusion. These ancient religious systems seem truly alien to Western minds on first encounter. Consider also an account I heard recently of an Eskimo shaman who healed the soul of a troubled young woman by stitching into it the soul of an arctic sea bird. What remotely Christian parallel is there for this? For all his claims to universalism, Shermer’s book remains deeply Christocentric, a quality that, because it is so unconscious, calls into question the rest of his explanatory framework.
The assumption that Western patterns are universal is an all-too-common feature of other recent attempts to explain aspects of human culture in scientific terms. In Pinker’s book, he asserts again and again that cultures around the world exhibit the same basic patterns of thought and categorization that we do. With Pinker, it is not just religion, but also language, art, music and philosophy that are filtered through blinkered Western eyes.
If with Shermer this move seems born of a genuine naiveti, in Pinker it is the hallmark of an extreme arrogance — one that heralds nothing less than a new imperialism. (I am sorry to use this jargony term, but no other phrase will do.) Under the guise of “science” what is going on here is the age-old strategy of conquerors everywhere: Our experience is the experience! What is so ironic is just how much this resembles the tactics of religious fundamentalists. Of course, they do not claim that everyone sees the world as they do, rather that everyone should.
In either case, the resulting claim is that “our” way of seeing is the right, the true and ultimately the only valid way of seeing. Hand in hand with this universalizing is a tendency to equate religions everywhere, even the very term “religion,” not just with Christianity, but with right-wing American fundamentalist Christianity. Kaminer’s book is a prime example of this elision. Although she offers the occasional disclaimer that not all religious believers are Christian fundamentalists, that is the only version of “religion” to which she gives serious attention.
None of the pictures of “religion” that Kaminer or Shermer describe in their books mesh with the intellectual Catholicism in which I was raised in my native Australia. The religious atmosphere I grew up in was one of intellectual openness: My father was a professor of philosophy, and my mother became a leader in the emerging women’s movement of the 1970s. Although my parents left the church, some of their Catholic friends remain among the most broad-minded thinkers I have ever met. American Jesuits I know would likewise be mystified by the truncated portrayals of religious belief that appear in these books. Christianity contains within it a bewildering diversity of denominations, from Pentecostals who speak in tongues and interpret dreams to Quakers who are free to question even the divinity of Jesus. There is not a universal pattern in this one religion, let alone among the vast plethora of world faiths.
Behind the tendency of secular commentators like Shermer and Pinker to make universal generalizations about religion lies their desire to come up with a scientific account of faith — a project very much in the air right now. We have already encountered such proposals from Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson in last year’s “Consilience”; from Richard Dawkins, who has famously explained religion as a virus of the mind, or what he calls a viral “meme”; and from English psychologist Susan J. Blackmore, who has elaborated on Dawkins’ ideas in her recent book “The Meme Machine.” For all these scientists, religion is simply a byproduct of cultural and/or genetic evolutionary processes that arises and flourishes in human societies because it lends a survival advantage.
On one level, an evolutionary account of religion is perfectly reasonable. By helping to bind groups of hunter-gatherers together, religious beliefs no doubt did help our ancestors to survive. No doubt such beliefs also aid in the survival of many communities today — think of the Mennonites, Hasidic Jews or Iranian Muslims. Shermer is surely right to stress that religion is a social institution that binds groups together by encouraging “altruism and reciprocal altruism” among group members and by providing a moral framework for the community. But is that all there is to religion?
All these explanations at best ignore and at worst dismiss a critical issue. Religions are indeed social institutions and moral systems, but they also make fundamental claims about the nature of reality. Christians (most of them anyway) believe that Jesus really was the son of God. They believe he really did rise from the dead and ascend to Heaven, and that they too will be resurrected. For the faithful, God and the soul are fundamental aspects of the real. Intellectually sophisticated Christians admit that in part their church derives its strength from its institutional power, but part of its power, they insist, derives from its foundation in truth — from the fact that God exists. Likewise, for Aboriginal Australians, the Dreamtime spirits really did create the world and they really do interact in it today.
Overtly or covertly, the new scientific accounts of faith deny religious beliefs any foundation in reality. Here the “true” reality is the one scientists describe, and religious beliefs become artifacts of psychocultural delusion to be explained by the “higher” powers of science. And so the historical wheel comes full circle, back again to the whole issue of science versus religion, and to which system is to be accorded the superior truth. In the 17th century, as the story of Galileo demonstrated, it was religion that had this power; today it is science.
What is at stake here is no mere quibble, as a brief example will reveal. Several years ago I attended a lecture by Oliver Sacks in which he suggested that Hildegard of Bingen’s mystical visions may have been the byproduct of migraines. The Christian claim, however, is that Hildegard was communing with God, that her writing and music came directly from the divine mind.
Now as a Jesuit friend once pointed out to me, Hildegard may well have been having migraines, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t also communing with God. The point is that religious people claim a reality beyond the purview of physical science. For them, science cannot, in principle, explain what Hildegard “saw.”
Simon Singh is not a man to shirk a challenge. In 1997 he set out to make a documentary about the solving of the world’s most famous (some would say infamous) mathematical problem, Fermat’s Last Theorem. Having bamboozled the planet’s finest mathematical minds for 350 years, Fermat’s challenge had finally been laid to rest by the retiring English mathematician Andrew Wiles. The solution, which took up more than 1,000 pages of densely packed equations, cut a swath through some of the most fiendishly difficult areas in all of math. How on earth could this be presented to a television audience? The marvel is that despite the impenetrability of the math, Singh produced an immensely human and poignant film — seen in the United States on the PBS series “Nova.” He later turned the subject into the bestselling book “Fermat’s Enigma,” which, he tells me, he wrote as an exercise — just to see if he could.
Trained as a particle physicist at Cambridge University — his research topic was the elusive “top quark” — Singh spent several years working at the European Center for Particle Physics (CERN) before swapping a life in the lab for one behind the camera at the BBC’s science department. Who could be better, then, to tackle the subject of cryptography? In his recently published “The Code Book,” Singh follows the development of secret codes from ancient Rome to the latest advances in quantum cryptography. At the end of the book he invites readers to test their own code-breaking skills with a forbidding-looking cipher challenge. The first person to crack all 10 codes will be rewarded with a prize of $15,000 from Singh’s own purse.
It strikes me that there is a continuity between your two books — solving Fermat’s Last Theorem was like cracking a huge mathematical puzzle, and that is not unlike solving a complex code.
If you look at code makers and code breakers, they’re driven by the same things that mathematicians are driven by. They’re obsessive, they love puzzles, they love conundrums. There’s a certain innocence about the code breaker, but at the end of the day, what the code breaker does has a major impact on wars, battles, lives, deaths and so on. Yet all that’s at a much higher level — the political level, the military level. The actual code breaker sitting at his or her desk is a puzzle solver, so there is that in common with mathematicians.
The other thing the two books have in common is that they’re both historical — both go back to 500 B.C., and from my point of view that’s a great context for talking about science.
It’s interesting that history is often seen as an impediment to presenting science. You get the idea from many scientists that all the really good stuff has happened in the last few years, if not last week, and that anything older is out-of-date and irrelevant. But in both books you put the science into a historical context, telling stories with great characters — like Mary, Queen of Scots, and Charles Babbage — and lots of human drama.
From a professional point of view — as a scientist — you always have to strip out the personal perspective. When you write up research papers it’s always in the passive voice: “The beaker was heated,” not “I heated the beaker, and actually that day I was feeling pretty good.” So often it’s difficult for scientists to put in emotional content — though there are some extraordinary exceptions who do. For me, coming from television — where people will switch off if they aren’t engaged — you have to put in the characters and emotional drama. So I write the way I make TV programs.
Is there one story that particularly stands out for you in the history of cryptography?
The story of the British discovery of public-key cryptography [a form of encription technology crucial to the process of putting powerful privacy tools in public hands]. The science of secrecy is a secret science, so often cryptographic work cannot be talked about publicly, sometimes for many years. This story actually only emerged while I was writing the book, this 25-year-old untold story of the greatest discovery in the history of cryptography. It turns out that some years before the Americans came up with public-key encryption, British mathematicians working secretly at the GCHQ [Government Communications Headquarters] had already discovered this, but it was all hushed up because of the military significance. This was the first time these three code makers — James Ellis, Clifford Cocks and Malcolm Williamson — could have their story told, and I feel honored to be able to tell it. The tragedy is that Ellis died just three weeks before the announcement was made, so he never lived to see the credit he deserved.
That doesn’t undermine the work of the American discoveries of public-key encryption. The work they did was quite independent. Furthermore, if they hadn’t made their breakthrough GCHQ might never have gone public, and the information age would never have been where it is now if we didn’t have this breakthrough.
Speaking of secrecy, do you think there are advances in cryptography at the moment way beyond what’s public knowledge?
The whole book is really about the ongoing battle between code makers and code breakers. At the moment most people would say that the code makers are clearly ahead. So it doesn’t really matter if people are coming up with new codes because the ones we have are already very strong. The question is whether there is someone who’s made a big breakthrough in code breaking that we don’t know about — so that the assumption that there’s this big lead isn’t actually true. You can never be sure, but I think it’s unlikely. Although the NSA [National Security Agency] is the world’s largest employer of mathematicians, there are lots of brilliant mathematicians elsewhere who haven’t found any major new algorithms.
So in fact public knowledge at this point in time may be a real reflection of the secret knowledge, so to speak?
Yes, I think that’s the case.
The subtitle of the book is “The Evolution of Secrecy from Mary, Queen of Scots, to Quantum Cryptography,” and early on you make the point that cryptography proceeds in a very Darwinian fashion with a kind of information arms race propelling developments on each side.
It is an evolutionary process, with code makers continually coming up with new developments, and then the code breakers having to respond by evolving new methods for penetrating those defenses. It is like the evolution of predator-prey relationships. It’s interesting too because there are selection pressures. Sometimes it’s only when you’re desperate enough that new breakthroughs happen. For example, when the Germans developed the Enigma code between the wars and ultimately it was the Poles — who were sandwiched between both the Germans and the Russians, and were therefore desperately worried about their national security — who made the first big breakthroughs in cracking these codes. The work was then smuggled out to the British. The Poles are often forgotten in the story, but it really was extraordinary work they did, driven by this pressure of adversity.
We seem to be living at a time when there is a general obsession with codes: not just cryptographic codes, but computer codes and genetic codes — we’ve got the Human Genome Project on the verge of sequencing the entire DNA code of human beings. You also have books like Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon.”
It’s funny, but when “Fermat’s Enigma” came out there was also “Good Will Hunting” (which was wonderful) and “Pi” (which was terrible), and there were books like “The Man Who Loved Only Numbers” [by Paul Hoffman] and “A Beautiful Mind” [by Sylvia Nasar]. There was a whole series of math films and math books that seemed to enter popular culture at the same time. And now you have a Hollywood film like “Enemy of the State” with Will Smith, and last year’s “Mercury Rising” with Bruce Willis, about the NSA. Also “Cryptonomicon” in literature. I’m sure this won’t be the only book on codes. I’m not sure what triggered this.
Just one of those things that’s in the air. It seems to me that an interest in codes is actually pretty widespread. Children love making up codes and creating secret little languages. Lots of people love the idea of being part of some select group with its own secret passwords, like the Freemasons.
As soon as you express yourself in words, and especially once you start putting words down on paper — whether it’s 10,000 years ago or children today — there’s a realization that you may need to keep these things secret, whether it’s your personal diary or a military strategy. So it’s quite natural that children do this. And it’s empowering. One of the reasons children make codes is to hide things from their parents. To children, parents are almost like Big Brother. We worry about the CIA and the NSA; children worry about their parents. We both use codes to try and protect ourselves.
Lots of people in this country have Big Brother concerns. What do you think about these fears that the government or big corporations are spying on our lives?
If people have that concern then they should just use encryption. The great thing is that encryption is extremely strong, we think there is this big lead, so it should really protect them. The fear is what might happen if governments crack down on encryption and restrict its use. That might happen in Burma or China, but I can’t see it happening in the rest of the world. All the trends are in the other direction.
For the last decade there’s been this big debate between civil libertarians and governments and law enforcement — and it’s been who’s going to win this debate. But what we’re now realizing is that there’s a third force — business, who are on the side of the civil libertarians, because they want strong encryption so they can conduct their business. In France, for example, they recently lifted almost all restrictions on encryption because they didn’t want e-mail companies going off and setting up their businesses elsewhere.
What about the argument that we need governments to be able to crack all encryption codes so they can fight crime, especially organized crime?
If governments ban encryption software it doesn’t really mean much. You can ban a shop from selling software, but you can’t ban somebody downloading it from the Internet or getting access some other way. Even if they did ban all use of such software, there are other ways of proceeding. For instance, I could use a form of steganography and hide a message in a digital image. Whatever the government is doing, people will find ways around it.
Also, the evidence that restricting encryption would help against organized crime is not enormous. If that’s important then you need to find other ways, like “tempest.” [The so-called "tempest attack" is a method whereby you park a van outside someone's house and monitor the distinct electromagnetic signals given off as they type each computer keystroke.] Or you can send special monitoring viruses into the computers of the people you are watching. There are other technologies you can use that are being developed for these purposes.
My view is that widespread use of encryption would not increase the rate of crime. In fact restricting encryption might do the opposite. If we can’t encrypt our credit card details properly, that might make it easier for criminals. At the moment I don’t see this as a great threat to society — quite the opposite. In 10 years, of course, we might have to reevaluate the whole situation.
Finally, I have to ask about your “Cipher Challenge.” You’re giving away $15,000 of your own hard-earned cash to the first person who cracks all 10 codes at the back of your book. Do you expect anyone to solve it?
I think so and I’ll be happy to give the money away. You can win $15,000 on TV from answering trivial questions, so if anyone can solve this they deserve the prize! The great thing is there’s such a diversity of people working on it. I recently spoke to a Field’s medalist who’s doing it. [The Field's Medal is the mathematics world's equivalent of the Nobel Prize.] But when I left England a few days ago, the person who was the furthest along was a 15-year-old girl.
Who are you betting on, the Field’s medalist or the schoolgirl?
[Singh smiles enigmatically, but stays mum.]
In classic biology textbooks, the story of conception resembles nothing so much as a true-romance novel, in which the bodice-ripping formula of Barbara Cartland et al. is transposed into a cellular-level melodrama starring the virile “active sperm” and the demure “passive egg.”
“In these sagas of conception,” writes science historian Londa Schiebinger, “the spermatic hero actively pursues the egg, surviving the hostile environment of the vagina and defeating his many rivals.” Like Sleeping Beauty, the egg drifts unconsciously in the fallopian tube, waiting to be awakened by the valiant, vital sperm. It is an archetypal story of female passivity enlivened by male energy — a story as old as Aristotle, and as replete with patronizing overtones.
Since the late 1970s, however, a new generation of biologists has begun to peek behind this suspect veil and, using fresh analyses, to reveal quite a different story, one summed up by the title of a seminal paper, “The Energetic Egg.” In this new account the egg, no longer a slumbering princess, becomes an active agent, directing the growth of microvilli (small finger-like projections on its surface) to capture and tether the sperm. Here the egg and sperm are partners, co-activators in the process of conception.
What is particularly noteworthy is that while the egg’s cone of microvilli was discovered in the 1890s, it was not thought worthy of serious scientific attention until 80 years later — a time when women’s roles in society were themselves being reconceived.
But before we cheer too loudly for this liberation of a core biological function from the rhetorical trappings of millennia-old sexism, it is worth stopping to reflect that the new tale itself is rife with gendered cultural overtones. As Schiebinger notes, in this new account the egg and sperm have come to resemble nothing so much as the high-powered dual-career couple of the ’80s and ’90s.
Like the contemporary corporate woman, the new “energetic egg” is valued precisely because it is now seen to be more like its male counterpart. Like the business exec with her power suit, the new egg has been “masculinized.” And just as the female exec risks accusations of aggressiveness, so too the new egg is all-too-easily seen as a “femme fatale, threatening to capture and victimize sperm.” The point is that while the new story may have stripped away the old sexist overtones, the egg and sperm remain gendered, essentially reflecting the pattern of current social arrangements between men and women.
This saga of transformation in one of our premier biological narratives raises a question that has become central to the current discussion about science: Can science ever be free of cultural influences? To put it another way: Can science ever be purely objective, an inquiry into the unsullied “truth” about the “real” world, or will it always be prey to the vagaries of subjective experience?
This is the question that resides at the heart of the so-called “science wars” that have rocked the academy for the past several years, and which show little sign of abating. On the one side are the objectivists (sometimes called realists), who believe that science is an ever-progressing ascent toward an ultimate picture of the-world-as-it-really-is. On the other hand are the subjectivists (sometimes known as relativists), who believe, to varying degrees, that science will always carry the stamp of the culture from which it springs. For this camp, prevailing views about gender, race, class and the like inexorably influence scientific theories, so that we can never (even in principle) see the world as it really is. To this camp, that very notion is a fiction that must be abandoned.
Many, though by no means all, scientists fall into the first camp — Stephen Jay Gould is an eminent exception. Likewise, many, though not all, historians, philosophers and science-studies scholars fall into the second camp.
The question of whether science can ever be culture-free is also at the heart of a number of new books. One of the best is Schiebinger’s provocatively titled “Has Feminism Changed Science?” If science is, as the objectivists claim, a culture-free activity, then the answer must be no. But as the changing narrative of the egg reveals, it is not so easy to strip away the cultural subtext from our scientific theories.
The science wars have been simmering for the past decade, but in 1996 they moved from sort of a cold war standoff phase into active engagement. The catalyst was the publication by a little-known physicist named Alan Sokal of an article in the cultural studies journal Social Text. In his now infamous piece Sokal purported to present a postmodern critique of physics in which, using lashings of trendy French philosophy and deliberately nonsensical postmodern jargon, he suggested that quantum mechanics could be seen to support the view that all knowledge is culturally relative. Immediately after the piece came out he gleefully exposed it as a hoax designed to show that cultural studies types know naught about science and ought to lay off pronouncements on the subject.
Whether one regards this as a brilliant exposi or as a petty frat-boy prank, the fallout has driven a deep wedge between the community of scientists and the community of science-studies scholars (those who study how science fits into the social, cultural and historical landscape.)
One way of looking at this divide is suggested by Canadian philosopher Michael Ruse in his new book, “Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction?” Ruse divides the two camps, roughly speaking, into the Popperians (following the Austrian philosopher of science Karl Popper), and the Kuhnians (following the American philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn). For Popper, science was a progressive activity, getting us ever nearer to a true picture of reality. Although Popper acknowledged that we could never find ultimate truth, he insisted on an objective view of science as an exploration of the world as it really is.
Kuhn, in his 1962 book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” famously declared that all science proceeds according to “paradigms” — mental constructs or theoretical frameworks which inevitably change as our society changes. For Kuhn, science is not an ascent towards any God’s-eye view, and the science of one age must be considered no better or worse than the science of any other.
Kuhn’s book sparked its own revolution, not in science but in science studies, and it became a flash point for even more revolutionary views of science, which have culminated in the radically relativist views that Sokal and the objectivists so deplore.
The two extremes in the debate may be characterized as follows: For radical objectivists, nature is the only voice, with human culture playing no role. For radical relativists, nature has no voice of its own, and all scientific knowledge is the production of humans. In reality, most people fall somewhere in between. Even Einstein, that arch-realist, recognized that we can only know nature through the prism of our theories — we can never see it naked, as it were. Glad news it is, then, to see Ruse and Schiebinger trying to find a middle ground.
Both Ruse and Schiebinger approach the question — and both books are indeed framed as questions — from the vantage point of a particular case study. For Ruse the case study is the theory of evolution, and the ways that ideas about evolution have themselves evolved over the past two centuries. For Schiebinger the case study is feminism, and the way that both female practitioners of science, and feminist theories about science, have affected (or not) various scientific disciplines — from cell biology to primatology, archeology, medicine, mathematics and physics.
Feminist science scholars, it must be noted, make up one of the key groups to have claimed science as a culture-laden activity. As such, they are seen by objectivists as a key battalion of the enemy. In the post-Sokal era, Schiebinger is aware of the need for caution, and she approaches her subject with the hyperalert acuity of a lion tamer encountering a large, wild cat. The big surprise for many objectivists will be that Schiebinger lays to rest to the notion that women in and of themselves change the nature of science simply by becoming scientists. The culture of science is not rooted in the chromosomes of its practitioners, she assures us — a conclusion all objectivists should applaud.
But if women do not necessarily do science differently, the historical record suggests that feminist perspectives have indeed made an impact on both the culture and content of science. The saga of the egg is just one example Schiebinger gives in which women’s involvement in a field has opened up new lines of inquiry that have led to significant new discoveries. Another case in point is primatology. For more than a century primatologists, who were almost exclusively male, focused almost exclusively on male primates. Once a new generation of primatologists — again beginning in the 1970s, and who by then included women — started to pay attention to the females of the species, they found that previous views were clearly distorted. Other cases can be found in genetics, archeology and medicine.
Some of the female scientists who made these discoveries were avowed feminists, but many were not. Yet, as Schiebinger shows, it is no coincidence that so many of these insights came to the fore at a time when women’s own role in society was changing, and when the very nature of “femininity” and “womanhood” was so much a subject of debate. In short, you do not have to be a feminist to be influenced by feminist cultural movements.
One example of this trend that has struck me forcefully over the past few years is the way in which the whole question of embodiment has become a hot topic in fields like artificial intelligence and cognitive science. After decades during which intelligence was seen to be a purely mental phenomenon, suddenly there is talk of it being ineluctably rooted in the physical reality of a body. Most of the current scientists and philosophers making this claim are men who would not (I am sure) identify themselves as feminists; nonetheless, feminist philosophers have been making just this claim for decades.
We are all a part of a cultural matrix, which, even if unconsciously, affects the way we think. As Schiebinger puts it “We cannot free ourselves of cultural influence; we cannot think or act outside a culture. Language shapes even as it articulates thought.”
Reluctant though he seems to be to admit this, Michael Ruse comes to a similar, if more guarded conclusion regarding evolution. Tracing the evolution of evolutionary theory through a half-dozen of its major proponents — from Charles Darwin to contemporary practitioners such as Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould and E.O. Wilson — Ruse reveals how their views of evolution were influenced both by the culture of their time and by their own upbringings.
Wilson, for example, perhaps as a legacy of his Southern Baptist childhood, is still essentially looking for some kind of fundamental truth. As he acknowledges in his own recent book, “Consilience,” at university he traded in his religion for science. Given the indelible traces of each man’s culture on his scientific theories, Ruse frankly admits, “I see the influence of culture on scientific ideas as something that is here to stay.”
That said, Ruse also wants to claim victory — and for him it is the most significant victory — for objectivism. The course of history has shown, he says, that although in the beginning evolutionary theory was almost purely a cultural construction, over the past two centuries it has been increasingly cleansed of such intrusions. While individual practitioners may still reveal the hallmarks of their culture, particularly in their use of metaphors to describe their ideas to non-scientists, in the final analysis the theory has been born out by objective, empirical validation.
In the end Ruse wants to have his cake and eat it, too: He sees evolutionary theory as essentially objective, but with an overlay of metaphorical subjectivity. Not everyone will feel satisfied with this resolution, but it is a heartening testimony to our times that this avowed champion of Sokal is at least prepared to acknowledge that the other side is not entirely wrong.
