Book club proposal: The Knowledge Machine, by Michael Strevens

On the basis of on one book review I read in a recent New Yorker (Review of Srevens' Knowledge Machine), I'd like to propose that CROW (and others as interested) read the book over Dec/Jan to give a broad perspective of how science really works.  An excerpt will explain better than I can:

"In “The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science” (Liveright), Michael Strevens, a philosopher at New York University, aims to identify that special something. Strevens is a philosopher of science—a scholar charged with analyzing how scientific knowledge is generated. Philosophers of science tend to irritate practicing scientists, to whom science already makes complete sense. It doesn’t make sense to Strevens. “Science is an alien thought form,” he writes; that’s why so many civilizations rose and fell before it was invented. In his view, we downplay its weirdness, perhaps because its success is so fundamental to our continued existence. He promises to serve as “the P. T. Barnum of the laboratory, unveiling the monstrosity that lies at the heart of modern science.”

Since science began, there has been disagreement about how those routes are charted. Two twentieth-century philosophers of science, Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, are widely held to have offered the best accounts of this process. Popper maintained that scientists proceed by “falsifying” scientific claims—by trying to prove theories wrong. Kuhn, on the other hand, believed that scientists work to prove theories right, exploring and extending them until further progress becomes impossible. These two accounts rest on divergent visions of the scientific temperament. For Popper, Strevens writes, “scientific inquiry is essentially a process of disproof, and scientists are the disprovers, the debunkers, the destroyers.” Kuhn’s scientists, by contrast, are faddish true believers who promulgate received wisdom until they are forced to attempt a “paradigm shift”—a painful rethinking of their basic assumptions.

Working scientists tend to prefer Popper to Kuhn. But Strevens thinks that both theorists failed to capture what makes science historically distinctive and singularly effective. To illustrate, he tells the story of Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally, two “rival endocrinologists” who shared a Nobel Prize in 1977 for discovering the molecular structure of TRH—a hormone, produced in the hypothalamus, that helps regulate the release of other hormones and so shapes many aspects of our lives. Mapping the hormone’s structure, Strevens explains, was an “epic slog” that lasted more than a decade, during which “literally tons of brain tissue, obtained from sheep or pigs, had to be mashed up and processed.” Guillemin and Schally, who were racing each other to analyze TRH—they crossed the finish line simultaneously—weren’t weirdos who loved animal brains. They gritted their teeth through the work. “Nobody before had to process millions of hypothalami,” Schally said. “The key factor is not the money, it’s the will . . . the brutal force of putting in sixty hours a week for a year to get one million fragments.”"

Maybe it's a little simplistic as a description of the foundation of scientific thought...  but it provides room for discussion.  Or so I predict.  Check out the review and see what you think.  If the ink above doesn't work for you, email me and I'm send you a soft copy.