The Undergrowth of Science: Delusion, Self-Deception and Human Frailty

The Undergrowth of Science: Delusion, Self-Deception and Human Frailty by Walter Gratzer Oxford University Press, New York, 2000. US $27.50 (328 pages) ISBN 0 1985 0707 0 Spoofing pseudo-science has a long and venerable history. Martin Gardner was probably the greatest 20th-century practitioner of the art, though by no means the first: think of Jonathan Swift’s parody of the Academy of Lagado in Gulliver’s Travels, a thinly disguised lampoon of the Royal Society, or Butler’s send-up of 19th-century English academics in Erehwon. Walter Gratzer continues in this vein, ribbing René Blondlot’s ‘N Rays’, Gurvich’s ‘mitogenic radiation’, the curious story of polywater, diverse adherents of animal magnetism and memory transfer, the sombre scientific endorsements of Uri Geller’s paranormal spoon bending, and the shortlived sensation of cold fusion. He rounds out his account with stories of more sinister quackeries, including Lysenkoist biology in Soviet Russia, the crankish case of deutsche Physik and the deadly science of Nazi racial hygiene. The book is a synthesis rather than a piece of original scholarship, but clear and personable prose makes each chapter an enjoyable read, albeit with qualifications I shall mention in a moment. The chapter on polywater explores both the trajectory of the debate and the breathless popular reception in organs like the New York Times. The idea here was that a new kind of molecular configuration of water had been found, a polymer of sorts that at one point had people fearing an apocalyptic plasticizing of the world’s oceans. Russians had pioneered the field but Americans played very serious catchup: the US Office of Saline Waters in the late 1960s, for example, devoted 10 per cent of its budget to research on the topic. As is typical in such cases, there were numerous sceptics. Richard Feynman, for example, noted that polywater violated the Second Law of Thermodynamics: there was no such thing ‘because if there were, there would also be an animal which didn’t need to eat food. It would just drink water and excrete polywater’ (p. 91). Spoofing bad science is an inherently tricky business, because there are so many ways for good science to go bad. There is deliberate fraud, of course (Charles Babbage’s ‘forging, trimming and cooking’), but there

is also bad science caused by the overenthusiastic failure to test for alternate explanations, and bad science that emerges from deeply rooted, or even criminal, prejudices. There is a smooth gradation between these various faults and foibles, which means there is probably a little bit of delusion in all great science and, perhaps, even a bit of sense in all but the most outrageous fakes. What one chooses to focus on is, therefore, interestingly revealing of what one regards as the proper sort of science. Gratzer approaches the problem with the idea that though science ‘generally works pretty well’, there are occasionally delinquents, as in any other professional group. Most of the book is devoted to ideas that turned out to be false with relatively little harm done, but the last third is devoted to T.D. Lysencko’s michurinist lamarckism, American eugenics and ‘the Nazi incursion into science’, all three of which had rather brutal consequences. Historians of science may find fault with some of these latter chapters: the Lysenckoist attack on genetics is insufficiently treated as a response to the

there is probably a little bit of delusion in all great science and, perhaps, even a bit of sense in all but the most outrageous fakes social abuse of genetics in neighbouring Nazi Germany, for example, and the Nazi ‘perversion’ of biology is treated largely as though it was purely an incursion into science from without. Gratzer tends to exoticize such abuses – he calls racial hygiene a ‘pseudo-academic discipline’, for example, and exaggerates the organic, heterodox thrust of Nazi medicine when he says that ‘conventional academic medicine was to be replaced by herbs, homeopathy, sunshine and fresh air’ (p. 226). The whole idea of ‘incursion’ suggests an alien encroachment, when the reality is that many conventional scientists were deeply involved in politicizing their respective disciplines. Nazism was biologized as much as biology was Nazified. Gratzer chooses fairly easy targets – Nazis, communists, Lysencko, Bieberbach, Duhem on the French style of science, etc. It would have been nice to hear about some of the more controversial pseudo-sciences that are alive and well today: there is nothing on trade-association science (that put out by

the Calorie Control Council or the Council for Tobacco Research, for example) or other organizations helping to camouflage modern cancer hazards or to manipulate public opinion. Gratzer is mainly concerned with ‘pathological science’ in Irving Langmuir’s sense – where deceptions are inadvertent – so trade-association science might not count as pathological in this sense (‘based on a mirage’). Historians of science tend to be suspicious of quick and ready formulas to distinguish genuine from pseudo-science, not out of any French-infected relativism, but rather from the sense that it is often hard to tell in advance where science is going to go. Fanatical adherence to a pet theory we tend to judge by how things turn out: you’re a hero if you turn out to be right and a crank if you turn out to be wrong. There are some minor mistakes: the suggestion is made that Heinrich Himmler opposed Darwin’s theory of evolution and it was not August Thienemann but Fritz Lenz who first claimed that Nazism was just ‘applied biology’. A couple of illustrations are taken from other books without attribution, and I was disappointed to see his offhand and unelaborated poke at the ‘baleful incursions’ of ‘racial, religious or feminist’ ideologies into modern science (p. 161), as if feminist science criticism were somehow on a par with, say, the inegalitarian ideology of racial hygiene. Langmuir’s rules for pathological science do not allow for any kind of systematic cultural or political bias in science; there is no sense that the exclusion of women, for example, might have skewed it one way or another. Gratzer instead lumps feminist scholarship with the relativism promulgated by ‘a fashionable school of (mainly French) philosophers’, a style of thought similar to that ‘favoured by leaders of totalitarian societies’ (p. 161). Gratzer does not say whether he thinks that scientific communities might somehow free themselves from the kinds of ‘communal derangement’ he discusses – he does not say whether these are the inevitable accompaniments of free inquiry or maladies that somehow might be healed. What he does provide, though, is some well-written insight into some of the shadier sides of science and further evidence – albeit perhaps inadvertent – that we are not likely to find clear lines of demarcation between creative genius and crackpot eccentricity. Robert N. Proctor Endeavour Vol. 25(2) 2001

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