The Literature of Science

Literature:
a ... that kind of written composition valued on account of its

qualities of form or emotional effect.
b The body of books and writings that treat of a particular subject.

(Shorter Oxford English Dictionary)

¹One of my teachers at Oxford encountered a junior colleague deep in the science branch of the Bodleian Library and stooped to murmur in the engrossed reader’s ear. ‘Ah, dear boy, I see you are consulting the literature. Don’t. It will only confuse you.’ ‘Consulting’ and ‘the’ give the game away. He was using ‘literature’ in the special way scientists do, a version of the OED’s ‘b’ definition above. ‘The’ literature, for a scientist, is all those papers, often abstrusely and densely written, which pertain to a particular research topic. John Maynard Smith was once heard to say, ‘There are those who read the literature. I prefer to write it.’ His witticism didn’t do himself justice, for he was a generous scholar who scrupulously read and credited the work of other scientists. But his quip again serves to illustrate the two meanings of ‘literature’.

By ‘the literature of science’ in this essay, I mean something closer to the ‘a’ definition from the OED above. I am talking about science as literature, good writing on the theme of science. This usually means books rather than scientific journals. As an aside, I think that’s a pity. There’s no obvious reason why a scientific paper shouldn’t be gripping and entertaining. No reason why scientists shouldn’t enjoy the articles it is their professional duty to read. During my spell as editor of the journal Animal Behaviour I tried to encourage authors to forsake not only the self-effacing scientific passive (‘A different approach will be taken by the present author’) but also the traditional and dreary ‘Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion’ convention, in favour of telling a story. But now, to books.

I said ‘good writing about science’ and that may give the wrong impression. It doesn’t have to mean ‘fine’ writing, certainly not if that conveys – as it can – a mood of pretentiousness, or belles lettres. I shall come on to Peter Medawar, the dedicatee of this book, in the second half of this essay for he was, in my opinion, the master of scientific literature in the sense that I intend. In his words, ‘a scientist’s fingers, unlike a historian’s, must never stray toward the diapason’. Well, perhaps not quite never. The occasional purple passage is justified by the romance of science – the unimaginable scale of the expanding universe, the stately majesty of geological deep time, the complexity of a living cell, coral reef or tropical rainforest. The natural-history prose poetry of a Loren Eiseley or Lewis Thomas, the cosmic reveries of Carl Sagan, the prophetic sagacity of Jacob Bronowski? Medawar would not – certainly should not – censor them.

Science doesn’t need languaging-up to make it poetic. The poetry is in the subject matter: reality. It needs only clarity and honesty to convey it to the reader and, with a little extra effort, to deliver that authentic tingling up the spine which is sometimes thought the prerogative of art, music, poetry, ‘great’ literature in the conventional sense. That sense is the one embraced by the awarders of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It explains why the prize is almost always given to a novelist or poet or playwright, occasionally to a philosopher, so far never to a real scientist. The only arguable exception is Henri Bergson who, if he could be called a scientist at all, sets a distinctly unfortunate precedent. I wonder whether it has simply never occurred to the Nobel committee that science – the poetry of reality – is a suitable vehicle for great literature. Here’s Sir James Jeans, writing in 1930 of The Mysterious Universe:

“Standing on our microscopic fragment of a grain of sand, we attempt to discover the nature and purpose of the universe which surrounds our home in space and time. Our first impression is something akin to terror. We find the universe terrifying because of

its vast meaningless distances, terrifying because of its inconceivably long vistas of time which dwarf human history to the twinkling of an eye, terrifying because of our extreme loneliness, and because of the material insignificance of our home in space – a millionth part of a grain of sand out of all the sea-sand in the world. But above all else, we find the universe terrifying because it appears to be indifferent to life like our own; emotion, ambition and achievement, art and religion all seem equally foreign to its plan.”

Carl Sagan later said something similar in his famous Pale Blue Dot soliloquy:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character- building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

In 2013 Carolyn Porco who, together with Neil deGrasse Tyson, is the nearest approach we have to a Carl Sagan de nos jours, initiated a beautiful commemoration by inviting the world’s population to look up and smile at the camera, as her Cassini imaging team photographed us from Saturn, ‘Pale Blue Dot’ range, 898 million miles:

Look up, think about our cosmic place, think about our planet, how unusual it is, how lush and life-giving it is, think about your own existence, think about the magnitude of the accomplishment that this picture-taking session entails. We have a spacecraft at Saturn. We are truly interplanetary explorers. Think about all that, and smile.

For me, Carolyn had already earned her niche in the gallery of poetic scientists when she raced against time to have the ashes of her beloved mentor Eugene Shoemaker, narrowly denied in life his ambition to be the first geologist on the moon, included in the payload of a rocket that was about to go there, accompanied by these lines chosen by her from Shakespeare:

And when he shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night

And pay no worship to the garish sun.

Peter Atkins, one of the finest English stylists among living scientists, takes the terror of the empty void and tames it with a blithe insouciance which some might condemn as scientistic but which I find magnificent:

In the beginning there was nothing. Absolute void, not merely empty space. There was no space; nor was there time, for this was before time. The universe was without form and void.

By chance there was a fluctuation, and a set of points, emerging from nothing and taking their existence from the pattern they formed, defined a time. The chance formation of a pattern resulted in the emergence of time from coalesced opposites, its emergence from nothing. From absolute nothing, absolutely without intervention, there came into being rudimentary existence. The emergence of the dust of points and their chance organization into time was the haphazard, unmotivated action that brought them into being. Opposites, extreme simplicities, emerged from nothing.

Lawrence Krauss develops a similar theme in A Universe from Nothing, for which I wrote the afterword (see pages 353–7 below). The book from which I took the Atkins quote, The Creation, ends with a fanfare of confidence in the power of science:

When we have dealt with the values of the fundamental constants by seeing that they are unavoidably so, and have dismissed them as irrelevant, we shall have arrived at complete understanding. Fundamental science then can rest. We are almost there. Complete knowledge is just within our grasp. Comprehension is moving across the face of the Earth, like the sunrise.

The chemist Peter Atkins could fairly be called a prose poet but he never lets style take precedence over clarity. Now, here is a biologist who sees the world through the eyes of a poet, but still decidedly scientific eyes, Loren Eiseley:

Since the first human eye saw a leaf in Devonian sandstone and a puzzled finger reached to touch it, sadness has lain over the heart of man. By this tenuous thread of living protoplasm, stretching backward into time, we are linked forever to lost beaches whose sands have long since hardened into stone. The stars that caught our blind amphibian stare have shifted far or vanished in their courses, but still that naked, glistening thread winds onward. No one knows the secret of its beginning or its end. Its forms are phantoms. The thread alone is real; the thread is life.

The scientist and medical doctor Lewis Thomas writes the facts of reality and then strikes the imaginative spark that moves prose towards poetry:

We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party.

You don’t have to see viruses like that. The bare facts permit, but do not dictate, the literary image. Yet once it has been added, the reader better sees the point. Here’s Lewis Thomas (in The Lives of a Cell again) on mitochondria:

We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours.

My former Oxford colleague Sir David Smith found an apt literary allusion in making a related point. Mitochondria have become so thoroughly integrated into the host cell that their origin as invading bacteria was only recently understood.

In the cell habitat, an invading organism can progressively lose pieces of itself, slowly blending into the general background, its former existence betrayed only by some relic. Indeed, one is reminded of Alice in Wonderland’s encounter with the Cheshire Cat. As she watched it, ‘it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone’.

Peter Medawar, the Nobel Prize-winning zoologist and immunologist to whom this book is dedicated, was, I think, the greatest literary stylist among the scientists of the twentieth century and I shall use him as my exemplar for the next part of my essay. He was certainly the wittiest scientist I ever met. Indeed, if I were asked for a definition of ‘wit’ as opposed to simply telling jokes, I might define it ostensively as ‘just about anything Peter Medawar ever wrote for the general public’. Listen to this, the opening words of his 1968 Romanes Lecture in Oxford, on ‘Science and Literature’:

I hope I shall not be thought ungracious if I say at the outset that nothing on earth would have induced me to attend the kind of lecture you may think I am about to give.

That wonderful Medawarian sally prompted a literary scholar, in his critical reply, to remark, ‘This lecturer has never been thought ungracious in his life.’

Medawar could be cutting, he could ridicule, he had no patience with pretentious cant. But he never descended to vulgar abuse. His lampooning of what we might call ‘francophoneyism’ (I like to think Peter would have enjoyed the word) was merciless: his wit, that insouciant patrician mastery, the kind of thing that makes you want to rush out into the street when you read it, to show somebody – anybody. As a true stylist who used style in the service of clarity, he made short work of those self-regarding ‘intellectuals’ who raised style above content:

Style has become an object of first importance, and what a style it is! For me it has a prancing, high-stepping quality, full of self- importance; elevated indeed, but in the balletic manner, and stopping from time to time in studied attitudes, as if awaiting an outburst of applause. It has had a deplorable influence on the quality of modern thought ...

Returning to attack the same targets from another angle, Medawar wrote:

I could quote evidence of the beginnings of a whispering campaign against the virtues of clarity. A writer on structuralism in the Times Literary Supplement has suggested that thoughts which are confused and tortuous by reason of their profundity are most appropriately expressed in prose that is deliberately unclear. What a preposterously silly idea! I am reminded of an air-raid warden in wartime Oxford who, when bright moonlight seemed to be defeating the spirit of the blackout, exhorted us to wear dark glasses. He, however, was being funny on purpose.

Medawar ended this lecture on science and literature with a resounding declaration of his own:

In all territories of thought which science or philosophy can lay claim to, including those upon which literature has also a proper claim, no one who has something original or important to say will willingly run the risk of being misunderstood; people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief. The writers I am speaking of are, however, in a purely literary sense, extremely skilled.

The obscurantism in question positively pleads to be satirized, and the physicist Alan Sokal rose to the occasion. His ‘Transgressing the boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity’ is a sublime masterpiece: utter nonsense from start to finish, yet accepted for publication in a pretentious journal of literary culture, no doubt because meaningless gibberish was precisely what the journal existed to publish. More recently, Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose fooled journal editors into publishing a flurry of similar lampoons, this time satirizing what they called ‘Grievance Studies’: the politically influential genre of ‘More Victim than Thou’ self-pity. How Peter Medawar would have relished these hoaxes. Also the ‘Postmodernism Generator’, a computer program designed to churn out an indefinite number of spoof articles, indistinguishable from the senseless ‘postmodern’ real thing.

If you should feel there’s something genially anti-French in my quotations from Medawar himself, your suspicions would not be allayed by the following, from his review of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man – a candidate for the finest negative book review ever written. But his targets are not limited to French intellectuals and their fellow-travellers. The contrast he makes with a once dominant school of German thought – ‘these tuba notes from the depths of the Rhine’ (what a image, how exquisitely Medawar!) – shows him to have been an equal opportunity pretension-puncturer:

The Phenomenon of Man stands square in the tradition of Naturphilosophie, a philosophical indoor pastime of German origin which does not seem even by accident (though there is a great deal of it) to have contributed anything of permanent value to the storehouse of human thought. French is not a language that lends itself naturally to the opaque and ponderous idiom of nature- philosophy, and Teilhard has accordingly resorted to the use of that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit.

The affable good humour blunts the barbs, so that offence can hardly be taken. Once again, ‘This lecturer has never been thought ungracious in his life.’ Yet at the same time, though superficially blunted, the barbs somehow contrive to remain as sharp and penetrating as ever. Such a contrast to Samuel Johnson, in Peter’s own splendid characterization, ‘wielding, as ever, the butt end of his pistol’.

The conclusion of the Teilhard review takes on not just Teilhard himself but an entire underworld (he chose the word advisedly, as we shall see) of out-of-its-depth literary culture:

How have people come to be taken in by The Phenomenon of Man? We must not underestimate the size of the market for works of this kind, for philosophy-fiction. Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought. It is through their eyes that we must attempt to see the attractions of Teilhard.

‘Educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.’ Isn’t that delicious beyond words?

Did Peter sometimes go too far? Women friends of mine have bridled at his explanation for the title of one of his books, Pluto’s Republic:

A good many years ago a neighbour whose sex chivalry forbids me to disclose exclaimed upon learning of my interest in philosophy: ‘Don’t you just adore Pluto’s Republic?’

He certainly had a highly developed sense of mischief. When, at an unusually young age and still not well known, he was newly elected Jodrell Professor at University College, London, John Maynard Smith asked J. B. S. Haldane what this chap Medawar was like. Haldane tersely paraphrased Shakespeare: ‘He smiles and smiles, and is a villain.’ Do we conceal a guilty, vicarious mischief ourselves when we hug ourselves with delight at the following, in ‘Lucky Jim’, Medawar’s review of James Watson’s The Double Helix:

It just so happens that during the 1950s, the first great age of molecular biology, the English schools of Oxford and particularly of Cambridge produced more than a score of graduates of quite outstanding ability – much more brilliant, inventive, articulate and dialectically skilful than most young scientists; right up in the Jim Watson class. But Watson had one towering advantage over all of them: in addition to being extremely clever he had something important to be clever about.

I think a certain amount of offence was taken at that, for which Peter, gracious as ever, offered a kind of half apology. And he had the enormous advantage of being – at a level possibly unprecedented in the annals of Nobel scientists – deeply read and cultivated in literature. A real polymath – to use that overworked word in its true sense – who could hold his own against scholars in almost any field as well as his own.

His polymathy calls to mind his generous, and beautifully written, pen portrait of a genuine hero, D’Arcy Thompson:

an aristocrat of learning whose intellectual endowments are not likely ever again to be combined within one man. He was a classicist of sufficient distinction to have become President of the Classical Associations of England and Wales and of Scotland; a mathematician good enough to have had an entirely mathematical paper accepted for publication by the Royal Society; and a naturalist

who held important chairs for sixty-four years ... He was a famous conversationalist and lecturer (the two are often thought to go together, but seldom do), and the author of a work which, considered as literature, is the equal of anything of Pater’s or Logan Pearsall Smith’s in its complete mastery of the bel canto style. Add to this that he was over six feet tall, with the build and carriage of a Viking and with the pride of bearing that comes from good looks known to be possessed.

Did Peter know how much of himself was in that description? I doubt it. If I am asked to name a single scientist whom I regard as a role model, and more particularly a single author whose writing style inspired me more than any other, I would nominate that other aristocrat of learning, Peter Medawar.

Without being in the Medawar class, a scientist can deeply love literature and many do. Books have always been an important part of my life. Unlike many biologists I came to my subject not through a love of birds or natural history in the wild (that came later) but through books and a preoccupation with the deep philosophical questions of existence. My childhood devotion to Doctor Dolittle kindled my love of animals and my moral concern for their welfare. In Science in the Soul I even compared Hugh Lofting’s protagonist to my own gentle hero, Charles Darwin, the young ‘Philos’ of the Beagle. I progressed to the Eagle comic and ‘Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future’. The romance of space travel gripped me, even though the science was unnecessarily slipshod (you don’t seize the joystick and zoom off in the general direction of Venus; you have to compute orbits, schedule slingshots and harness the calculated power of gravity). Later, the novels of Arthur C. Clarke put me straight on such solecisms and led me to a love of science fiction.

My schoolfriends and I avidly discussed the moral and political implications of Brave New World and moved on to Aldous Huxley’s other novels which, though not science fiction in themselves, are manifestly written by someone deeply read in science and with an inside track on the minds and emotions of those who practise it. Scientists such as the dreamy Lord Tantamount in Point Counterpoint are among Huxley’s most sympathetic characters. His After Many a Summer is surely influenced by his scientific reading, including his brother Julian’s research on axolotls, injecting them with thyroid hormone and turning them into salamanders never before seen. We are juvenile apes; so, if we lived two hundred years, would we turn into hairy quadrumana like Huxley’s fictional Earl of Gonister?

I have learned some of my science from reading science fiction, and this leads me to wonder why it might sometimes take fiction to teach such lessons. Why do we enjoy fiction? What is the fascination of stories about non-existent people and things that never happened, and why do we turn to them for light relief after reading about things that did? Hardly a good example of light relief, but why did William Golding write Lord of the Flies as fiction, when he could have penned a prophetic treatise on human psychology with serious predictions of what would happen if a group of schoolboys should be marooned on an island with no adults? H. G. Wells did it both ways: prophetic fiction such as The Time Machine; and non- fictional speculation in his remarkable (and to modern readers deplorable in parts) Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought. But what is it that makes fiction so palatable? I think I dimly understand some kind of answer, but I am no literary scholar and it would be presumptuous of me to rush in where Henry James, E. M. Forster and Milan Kundera have trod.

The title I have chosen for the present volume – Books Do Furnish a Life – reflects the love of books that has led me, over many years, to accept invitations to write forewords, introductions or afterwords to books that I admire, to contribute to collections of essays, and to write reviews of books that I might (or, less often, might not) admire. There follows a selection of these pieces, put together in collaboration once again with Gillian Somerscales (for whose literate conscientiousness I am, as ever, immensely grateful). Any of them could have featured in our previous anthology, Science in the Soul, but it made excellent sense to keep them back for a separate volume of book-related writings – a collection that I hope reflects something of the range and quality of the literature of science.

1. This is an excerpt from the book “Books Do Furnish a Life: An Electrifying Celebration of Science Writing”