Williams: Science, Technology, and Human Values

Since 1986, Williams College science historian Don Beaver has taught a popular course, Science, Technology, and Human Values. The class, which attracts both science majors and non-science majors alike, weaves through a range of topics — Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigms and scientific revolutions, Wendell Berry’s eloquent protest of the computer, Al Teich’s exploration of technology and the future, John Tierney’s dismissal of recycling, and E.F. Schumacher’s “Buddhist economics.” Professor Beaver sat down with On Campus reporter Allison Benjamin to discuss the class, scientific authority, cultural perspectives on technology, and the nature of progress.

You have noted that students come in to your class with preconceived notions about science and technology. What do you mean by that?

There is a great deal of mythology around science and technology. The biggest one is that science and technology are always the wellspring of progress. Most students come in to the class believing that innovation invariably moves society forward, that virtually all new discoveries and technologies have practical applications, and that these applications will improve our lives in some measurable way.

But aren’t scientific innovation or new technologies nearly always applied? Isn’t that, in fact, one component of progress?

In this society, that is true. Virtually all technologies are applied, usually swiftly, and we absolutely define this as progress. But that is not the case in all cultures. For example, the water wheel — which converts the energy of flowing or falling water into other forms of energy — was invented in the first century BC. Until the 10th or 11th century AD, more than one thousand years after its invention, it was used almost entirely for grinding grain. Only 1,100+ years later did it become more widely used for tasks like cutting wood or forging iron. Why was the technology not more widely applied in those thousand years? Why were people content to use it for one primary purpose?

Another example comes from Amish culture. Each year, Amish communities vote on what technologies they will adopt or reject. There is no uniformity; some communities allow phones, electricity, or tractors, others choose not to use these technologies. Sometimes a community accepts a technology one year, only to reject it the following year.

Do you draw any conclusions from this?

The conclusion that I draw is that the desire to employ technology to be materially better off is not universal among humans. The notion of innovation as “progress” is simply not common to the human experience.

You and your students have researched how scientific results become accepted as fact. Tell me about that.

What we explored was a concept known as “epistemic authority” — the extent to which an idea gains legitimacy within the scientific community. Some discoveries have higher epistemic authority than others. Why is this? Are there external factors — things not related to the study itself — that would award a higher authority to any given discovery? We decided to explore whether the number of researchers involved in a study affected that study’s epistemic authority. To do this, we examined more than 2,000 articles that had been authored by Williams science faculty over multiple years. Some of these studies were collaboratively-authored, and others were single-authored. We compared the visibility and credibility of each type of article within the wider scientific community, as measured by the number of times the article was later cited in scientific journals.

What did you find?

Sure enough, we found that collaboratively-authored articles were cited more frequently over time. In other words, these collaborative efforts had higher epistemic authority than single-authored publications. It turns out science works much more like a trial by jury than it does a trial by judge. Collaboration and peer review is very, very important in science, so it makes sense that articles that themselves stem from collaboration would have an advantage over those that don’t.

That’s an interesting perspective. It almost suggests that the scientific results themselves are not “proof” enough, that scientific legitimacy is to some degree subjective.

That’s exactly right. We think of science as fact, but scientific knowledge is simply a web of constructs. The more a given phenomenon is observed, the more we have reason to believe something. But the truth is, all science is based on a logical fallacy — that of “asserting the consequent.” Scientists develop a theory about the way the world works. That theory allows them to predict what will happen in a given experiment. They then perform the experiment and observe the results. If the experiment turns out as expected, this observation is considered “proof” that their initial idea was correct. But any logician can tell you that the observation does not prove the theory. It is entirely possible that we arrived at those same results through an entirely different path than the one theorized.

During the 19th century, Dimitri Mendeleev — the chemist who created the first periodic table — theorized that the chemical properties of the elements were a periodic function of their atomic weight. Based on this, he predicted the discovery of three still unknown elements. Within a few years, these elements — scandium, gallium, and germanium — were discovered, and people took this as proof that his theory was correct. But it wasn’t; the chemical properties of the elements were actually a periodic function of their atomic number, not their atomic weight. Still, sometimes, as in the Mendeleev case, the wrong theory can be close enough to the truth to produce fertile discovery.

You note that there have been some famous failures to assess potential technologies. Tell me about those.

Perhaps the most famous failure to access the impact of technology occurred in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when computers were being developed. At that time, almost everyone, including the experts, said that we would never need more than five to ten computers in the world. There simply weren’t enough problems that were complex enough to require computers. We couldn’t imagine a day when all of us would work with such vast complexity as part of our daily lives.

That’s a famous example. But to some extent, we never fully assess technology. Even when we might understand the innovation itself, we can never predict all the ways that it will change society. I often say to my students that “with novelty comes ambiguity.” Every new technology brings unintended consequences — side effects that cannot be anticipated.

Can you provide some examples of unintended consequences?

You see unintended consequences everywhere. Take the mechanization of agriculture. Beginning in the 19th century, technological advances — the reaper, combine, and thresher — made farmers much more efficient. Suddenly, it took fewer farmers to do the same work, and more food could be created with less effort. Agricultural supply soared, and prices fell. As a result, the direct costs of food today are far lower than they have ever been in human history. But these developments also paved the way for widespread use of chemical pesticides, monocropping, loss of family farms, and the corporatization of agriculture. Today, we have fewer than a million “primary farmers,” with a relatively few giant agribusiness corporations operating at a massive scale. With that come new challenges around food quality, safety, and security. These challenges are the unintended consequences of those 19th century advances.

There are many other examples, too. When spectacles were developed, they extended the working lives of many people; this was terrific for aging people, but it also made it harder for young people to get jobs. Another example involves distilled alcohol and drugs. For many years after its invention distilled alcohol was the medieval medicinal cure-all. That role was replayed in the nineteenth century by laudanum, which was a tincture of opium. But people became addicted. The “cure” for that addiction was heroin, widely believed not to be addictive. But it was, and the cure for heroin addiction? Cocaine. We simply have no idea how new discoveries will change our society over time.

Why is it important to consider some of these issues?

Ultimately, it all comes down to values. Our values — the things we hold dear as both individuals and a society — shape, and are profoundly shaped by, scientific and technological developments. Today’s college students will be asked in their lifetime to make difficult choices around science and technology, choices that are unimaginable from our early 21st century perspective. Their response to these challenges will have tremendous ethical, policy, social, and environmental implications. If we take the time now to consider, critically, where our beliefs about science and technology come from, then our future leaders will make choices that are more informed and far more consistent with our human and societal values.