by Naim Kabir
Naim Kabir makes his Analog debut with his short story “Ramanujan’s Goddess” in our [March/April issue, on sale now!] Here, Kabir discusses the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that dogma influences scientific research
Dogma’s a razor.
Think more Occam and Hanlon and less Gillette—it’s a philosophical razor, meant to shave off rhetorical split-ends.
I grew up with a tinny azan blaring from a speaker five times a day and mandatory memorization of the Word, so I know this power well. Dogma eliminates the unnecessary: no hesitation in charity, no fear of death, and—here’s the bit that first got me skeptical—no belief in any Word but the one.
But I’m not just dunking on religion, here. That dead horse has been beaten. That vast musical brocade’s already moth-eaten. No: it turns out that science can be just as jealous, and just as arbitrary.
Over a televised plate of hot wings Ricky Gervais once said that if you disappeared every holy book and every scientific text, a thousand years later, scientific facts would come back identically as they were.
But that’s probably not true.
Science is constrained by what we can observe, yes, and it is somewhat mutable, yes—but it grows from a seed of dogma, and only self-corrects within the cage of its own framing. Scientists know this: hell, sometimes they call a spade a spade. In school I was taught “the central dogma of molecular biology”, not to put too fine a point on it.
But it’s usually a bit more subtle than that.
Take the concept of a “force” in classical mechanics. It feels deep and primordial. Glue that keeps us pegged to the Earth. The effort that quakes your limbs when you’re lifting a weight. It’s something you can believe in. I used to think it was “real”.
But as Bertrand Russell describes in a chapter colorfully titled “The Abolition of Force”, forces disappear when you swap your point of view for a more Einsteinian one. Planets are no longer pulled by a heavy Sun, but rather follow paths of least action. Even within the context of mechanics, forces appear and disappear based on the problem at hand: generally speaking, they’re just the arrows in a freebody diagram, drawn to make the accelerations work out. In quantum electrodynamics, they don’t feature at all.
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn says that “an apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time.” The seed of every great theory is dogma!
Science is constrained by what we can observe, yes, and it is somewhat mutable, yes—but it grows from a seed of dogma, and only self-corrects within the cage of its own framing.
Someone just made something up because the shape felt right. Many shapes are possible—they’re just abstractions over sensory input, after all. Maps, not territories (too much rigor and exactitude in your maps might leave the Earth covered in tatters, if you recall).
And the dogma of a given shape is a razor: it slices away what shouldn’t be possible and focuses your questions on what should be possible. This is a very handy feature, since it gets everyone on the same page about what to ask questions about.
But dogmatic thinking can cut you when it’s used outside of its intended context. We canonized the theory of natural selection and it abcessed into Social Darwinism. We bought in so hard to the useful concepts of gametes and hormones that we’re wasting time on the useless question of which bathrooms people can use. We took insights from Skinner’s rat-box and dissolved the idea of personal responsibility.
Whenever we learn a new dogma we try and weave it into our overall story of the world: if it applies in one place it should apply everywhere. But dogma’s a razor, and should be handled with care. It’s a tool to corral the welter of your umwelt into something understandable, and should be thought of as such.
Biology, chemistry, physics, and all the little disciplines in between—they’re just tiny blades and corkscrews (and that one weird spring-powered set of scissors) in your Swiss army knife, ready to be deployed when the situation calls for it. They should be picked up and put down when necessary.
School arms you with Facts and never tells you when to put them down.
Fiction, though, forces you to. Or at least, it did for me.
The Road Not Taken taught me knowledge isn’t cumulative, but could take branching and exclusive paths. They’re Made Of Meat taught me that—wait, not-meat can dream?! Flatland flattened the third dimension, Slaughterhouse Five slaughtered linear time, and The Left Hand of Darkness left the notion of strict social roles in the ice.
Learning alternate abstractions reveals them for what they are: the same flavor of thing, a story you can follow, a cartoon whose lines are inked bold and clear, a simple slippery net over a complex Universe studded with uncountable greebles and doodads.
You’re reading this in Analog Science Fiction & Fact—but it’s all just fiction, isn’t it?
In the right time and place, some of it’s useful.
The Astounding Analog Companion 