INSIGHTS FROM McCLINTOCK, THURMAN AND DYSON
Meet Barbara McClintock
We should be thankful for the very first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the geneticist Barbara McClintock. As a scientist in the 20th century she was a rare individual who could still observe nature in an ancient, instinctual one-on-one way.
McClintock’s biographer, Evelyn Fox Keller, wrote in A Feeling for the Organism: The Life & World of Barbara McClintock:
“Before we knew about DNA, before the molecular revolution, she saw into some of the deepest, most intricate secrets of genetic organization.
“From her earliest years as a child, McClintock couldn’t resist looking behind society’s mirrors. It was impossible for her to make herself believe the mirrored reality she was being taught to believe in. She wouldn’t accept the identity society wanted to pin on her. That was not who she was!”
As a scientist, McClintock spent her life correcting erroneous mirror-images that she believed so distorted 20th century science.
She described scientific knowledge as lots of fun.
“You can get lots of correlations, but you don’t get the truth…Things are much more marvelous than the scientific method allows us to conceive…
“Basically, everything is one. There is no way in which you can draw a line between things. What we (normally) do is make these subdivisions, but they’re not real. Our educational system is full of subdivisions that are artificial, that shouldn’t be there.
“I think maybe poets—although I don’t read poetry—have some understanding of this…
“She was interested in different ways of thinking that were totally ignored in the West—particularly methods of mind training used by Tibetan Buddhists. She applied their methods in experiments on herself. She learned to control her temperature and other bodily processes. She proved to herself humans could control many bodily functions that Western science insisted were autonomous. She said;
“You can do it. It can be taught. I couldn’t tell other people at the time because it was against the ‘scientific method.’
“We just hadn’t touched on this kind of knowledge in our medical physiology, (and it is) very, very different from the knowledge we call the ‘only way.’”
Her biographer described McClintock’s frustration when she encountered a seeming lack of logic in her colleagues. “She blamed it on tacit assumptions (models) that impose unconscious boundaries between what is thinkable and what is not. Even glaring lapses in logic become invisible.”
McClintock told Keller: “They (the scientists) didn’t know they were bound to a model. That’s why models, when they first begin to be promulgated, are so bothersome to me… They get mistaken for reality... Trying to fit everything into a set of dogma won’t work. There’s no such thing as a central dogma into which everything will fit…
“I feel that much of the work is done (in science) because one wants to impose an answer on it. They have the answer ready, and they want the material to tell them (what they want it to tell them). Anything else it tells them, they don’t really recognize as there, or they think it’s a mistake and throw it out…”
Keller said McClintock ached to tell her colleagues: “If you’d only let the material tell you…”
McClintock expressed both fear and hope for the future:
Her fear: She said “Everywhere in science the talk is of winners, patents, pressures, money, no money, the rat race, the lot; things that are so completely alien…that I no longer know whether I can be classified as a modern scientist or as an example of a beast on the way to extinction.”
Her hope: She said “I think the scientific recognition of the magnificent integration of cellular processes is leading to a major revolution that will reorganize the way we look at things, the way we do research…and I can’t wait. Because I think it’s going to be marvelous, simply marvelous. We’re going to have a completely new realization of the relationship of things to each other.”
The complete new realization of the relationship of things to each other was what both Charles Darwin and E. F. Schumacher were hoping for too.
McClintock said, “Basically everything is one…the foundation of the Science of Ecology. Can you imagine how marvelous our world would be if we had a completely new realization of things to each other?
“We could teach all the world’s children to look behind the mirrored reality they are taught to believe in. All of the subdivisions in our educational system would no longer be there. We would no longer mistake dogma and fraudulent scientific paradigms for reality.”
Reflect and Respond: Please keep a written record of your responses. Which do you think humans are living up to: McClintock’s hopes or her fears? Do you think you accepted the identity society wanted to pin on you? Have you ever looked behind “society’s mirrors?” How important is it to pass McClintock’s views to each new generation?
WHAT POSITIVE ROLE OR ROLES COULD YOU SEE TO PLAY?
Meet Robert A. F. Thurman, The Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University
We should be thankful for Robert Thurman’s advice to Western scientists.
Following are excerpts from his book Mind Science, An East–West Dialogue. The book is a report on the Proceedings of a Symposium sponsored by The Mind/Body Medical Institute of Harvard Medical School with the New England Deaconess Hospital and Tibet House in New York.
Included in the Proceedings was a presentation by Robert A. F. Thurman on Tibetan Psychology: Sophisticated Software for the Human Brain. Below are excerpts from Thurman’s presentation.
A fatally flawed, foolish and monstrous decision
I have set myself to address two main questions: First, why does modern, Western cognitive science need old-fashioned mind science from Tibet? And second, if the Indo-Tibetan tradition does have something to contribute, what is it?
In India, science and philosophy have never split, philosophy always having been thought essential to control the theoretical part of science and ultimately to be indivisible from the empirical part… The quest for knowledge of reality has always been considered the eminently practical matter. As the great eighth-century philosopher Dharrmakirti said, “All successful human action proceeds from valid knowledge of reality.” If humanity wants to succeed in any sense, it must gain valid knowledge of reality – the reality of self and the reality of the environment. We might add the corollary: All unsuccessful human action – and there seems to be quite a bit these days – proceeds from mis-knowledge, or ignorance.
In the West, scientists have predominantly thought of reality as external to the human thought world… It has seemed to scientists that the environment needed to be tamed, controlled and engineered to suit human needs. Thus physics, chemistry, biology and astronomy, armed with mathematics and geometry, have been considered the most important sciences in the West…
Underlying the choice of what aspect of reality, outer or inner, is more important to understand and control, is the complex of views about what reality is, what life within that reality is, what human life in particular is, what its purpose is and what its needs and prospects are. Without knowing the answers to these questions, if we just rush off and analyze aspects of the environment, modify what seems modifiable, and satisfy immediate needs without a long-term perspective, our procedure is not likely to succeed. In fact, it is a procedure that has already brought us to a very dubious and dangerous situation.
In essence, our powers to affect the outer reality have far outstripped our powers over ourselves. This is the key point… Most of our actions are based on penetrating and pervasive mis-knowledge of what we are doing, dressed up with hunches and guesses and degrees and certificates and mutual reassurances… Without understanding and controlling the self (this) was a fatally flawed, foolish and monstrous decision made by human beings who tragically thought that as Westerners they were the greatest, and the smartest on the planet.
The dogmatism called scientific materialism
The point of rehearsing this scenario, however, is to appreciate how the Buddha and company might have foreseen the dangerous crisis humans could get into if they did not make self-understanding a higher priority than environmental domination. Therefore, I propose the radical idea that the Indian decision not to develop outer sciences, technology, and the industrial machine might not simply be the result of a failure of intellect, but instead represent a great success of the intellect. The failure of intellect might well be ours, expressed in our decision to interfere and tamper with everything, and so unleash physical powers without having any mental power.
There is an important difference between just failing to do something and deciding not to do it. How well we understand this can very much affect the way we approach the science of another culture; whether from the paternalistic stance of our assumed superiority because we have the power to blow up the planet, or from an open-minded stance of humility… As you can see, these attitudes are very different. We must achieve humility here, if we are to benefit from the Indo-Tibetan development of inner science and inner technologies.
Western sciences were most recently reborn from the Renaissance revolt against the spiritualism under-girding the oppressive domination of the Church’s bureau of dogma and instruments of thought control. As a result, a metaphysical decision was taken and, often unwittingly, maintained, from the seventeenth century to the present, to rule mind out of the natural order and deal with all problems as physical. The fact that the decision to view reality as material was a collective decision and not an objective discovery has been forgotten. And this has led to the current dogmatism called scientific materialism.
Reflect and Respond: Please keep a written record of your responses. This could be a great topic for dialog if we can resist debate. Consider how important it might be to pass on all, or a little, or none of Thurman’s conclusion that Western cognitive science needs a dose of “old-fashioned mind science” from Tibet.
Meet Freeman J. Dyson - the prestigious 20th century physicist
Dyson was selected to receive the esteemed Templeton Prize. In his five-minute acceptance speech he mentioned that Francis Bacon Advancement of Learning written in 1605 had been the bible of the empiricism of scientific materialism. It had heralded in the coming of the scientific revolution.
After thanking the Templeton Foundation for his unexpected honor, Dyson said he simply wanted to reiterate advice given 400 years earlier by one of the founding fathers of modern science Francis Bacon. Francis Bacon’s advice, which we have ignored for 400 years, was:
“God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world. The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of our senses and understanding.”
Dyson said: “Science has filled many of Bacon’s dreams, but it still does not come close to capturing the subtlety of nature. Bacon saw clearly what science could do and what science could not do. He was saying to the philosophers and theologians of his time: ‘Look for God in the facts of nature, not in the theories of Plato and Aristotle.’
“After sketching his program for the scientific revolution that he foresaw, Bacon ends his account with a prayer:
‘Humbly we pray that this mind may be steadfast in us, and that through these our hands, and the hands of others to whom thou shalt give the same spirit, thou wilt vouchsafe to endow the human family with new mercies.’
“That is still a good prayer for all of us as we begin the twenty-first century.
“I am saying to modern scientists and theologians: don't imagine that our latest ideas about the Big Bang or the human genome have solved the mysteries of the Universe or the mysteries of life.”
Dyson described science and religion as two different windows people look through to try to understand the big Universe outside and try to understand why we are here. Each window gives a one-sided view. Neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world.
Both are worthy of respect.
“Trouble arises,” Dyson said, “when either science or religion claims universal jurisdiction, when either religious or scientific dogma claims to be infallible. Religious creationists and scientific materialists are equally dogmatic and insensitive.
“By their arrogance they bring both science and religion into disrepute.”
Dyson then sketched his program for the next phase of the scientific revolution.
“Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich.
“Scientists and business leaders who care about social justice should join forces with environmentalists and religious organizations to give political clout to ethics. Science and religion should work together to abolish the gross inequalities that prevail in the modern world.”
He related that the great question of our time will be: “How to make sure that the continuing scientific revolution brings benefits to everybody rather than widening the gap between rich and poor.”
Do you believe the continuing scientific revolution can bring benefits to everybody, rather than widening the gap between rich and poor—and providing toys for the rich?