SCIENCE AS "GETTING IT LESS WRONG"
John Bemis, an early supporter of the Serendip project, was continually frustrated by the difficulty of getting people to understand, as he did, that life was a continual process of discovery. John's concerns triggered the following letter to him, in which Paul Grobstein suggested that science both contributed to the problem and was in a position to help with the solution, if it could be made clearer that science was actually a process not of "getting it right" but rather one of perpetually "getting it less wrong". Go to
Science Education: What's it all about? for some thoughts about getting it less wrong in a broader educational and social context.
Department of Biology
Bryn Mawr College
101 North Merion Avenue
Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania 19010-2899
B R Y N M A W R
1 March 1993
John Bemis
Concord, Massachusetts
Dear John:
I too have been frustrated, in a variety of contexts, with how
difficult it is to get people to see the importance of the "discovery
business." Your thought that it would help if everyone came to
understand that creativity is a deep, common, essential, and shared
attribute is very much along the lines of my own thinking, but I had
not previously been thinking so concretely in those terms. So let me
take a crack here at saying what we both think we know, and if the
letter turns into something you can use in your Discovery Scrapbook,
so much the better.
People in our culture, by and large, tend to presume that someone,
somewhere knows what is "right," and that each individual's task is
either to be that particular someone or to work as hard as they can to
learn from that someone what "right" is. Why this is so is an
interesting question, one we may need and want to understand better,
but let's just settle for some relevant pieces here. I knoe the
mindset long predates science as a social activity, but that science
certainly encourages it, and so it is appropriate that science should
contribute to correcting it. In fact, looking across the sciences
during the last ten or fifteen years and into the near future, I think
such a correction is exactly the message that is emerging
(significantly, not only in the sciences, but in the humanities and
social sciences as well). In an enormous variety of distinct fields of
inquiry the same general pattern is becoming clear: there is no such
thing as "right," the very concept needs to be replaced with
"progressively less wrong." The difference is far from
semantic. "Right" is measured by proximity to some fixed idea,
"progressively less wrong" by how far people have gotten from where
they started. It is the aspiration to be "right" that leads to rigid
hierarchical social organizations of all kinds, including educational
systems. Wanting to be "progressively less wrong" takes one (and
societies) in quite different directions entirely: it encourages
life-long inquiry by every individual, a respect for past wisdwom and
enthusiasm for contributing to future understanding, and an
appreciation of the enormous value of interactions between unique
individuals each of whom has unique perspectives to contribute.
Wanting to be "progressively less wrong" rather than "right" is,
however, by itself a tough pill for many people to swallow. This is
not only because of the words (we could, perhaps should, come up with
something that sounds less negative), but because the underlying ideas
themselves are alien and disturbing to many people, who have the
feeling they know how to be "right" but have no idea at all how to be
"less wrong," and for whom the whole thing sounds defeatist, to be
settling for second best. This is the place where I think science has
a very special role to play, one to which the work in my own
laboratory can contribute. Not only science, but life itself, stands
as testimonial to the reality that there is nothing at all either
defeatist or second best about becoming "progressively less wrong."
That is precisely what science is about, and is the very core of all
social and technological "progress." More importantly, being
"progressively less wrong" is the very essence of the biological
concept of evolution, whose capacity to generate enormously complex
and effective organizations has yet to show a limit, and still far
exceeds anything of which humans are capable alone.
The trick, of course, is to translate this reality into terms which
not only scientists but businessmen, politicians, indeed all
individuals, can feel and understand, and to do so in a way which
makes it clear that everyone is an active and responsible participant
in the overall process, that every individual becoming "progressively
less wrong" is an invaluable part of the global doing so. "Becoming
progressively less wrong" is, as we both know, not an arcane or
difficult skill: it requires only a capability and willingness to try
out new things, coupled with an ability to critically evaluate and
learn from one's experiments. The importance of critical evaluation is
something our culture is aware of; the key importance of creativity,
however, we seem somehow to have lost confidence in, become suspicious
of, or forgotten entirely. Clearly, if leeches and frogs have the
capability and willingness to try new things out (as our experiments
indicate they do), then all individual humans certainly have it (as is
evident, as you point out, from watching babies). More importantly,
creativity and play are not, as sometimes thought, a luxury, to be
indulged in only when real work is done, or a vaguely disreputable
hazard, to be avoided when things get serious, or something that
babies can be indulged to do but one should give up as one gets
older. They are instead capabilities which are at the very center of
the successes of all living systems, from individual organisms to
complex societies.
I share your feeling that there are two ideas that need to be better
understood, and that they are indeed closely related. One is the
essential importance of the creativity of individuals, and the other
is the nature of interactions among individuals, the social structure
within which individuals function. As your intuitions have always
suggested, the key to the latter is a better understanding of the
dynamics of complex systems, which is indeed emerging as part of a
broader scientific and intellectual revolution. The key here is the
increasing realization that highly sophisticated and effective
organizations can, and do in fact, emerge from the interactions of
large numbers of independent but closely communicating creative
elements. They don't depend on people knowing in advance what is
"right," but rather on people having confidence in the creative
potential inherent in groups of people sharing different perspectives
and ideas, in exactly the same sense that they have (or should have)
confidence in the creative potential inherent in all individuals,
themselves included. Your tidepool, and our piece of it, is, it seems
to me, very much a particular realization of this idea. It is designed
not to cause particular things to happen in particular ways, but
rather to provide the kind of permissive and supportive environment in
which unknown desirable things will happen, simply because of the
creativity and interconnectedness of individuals. Needless to say,
from my perspective, the tidepool is not only an experiment in how
things might work better, but a demonstration that in fact they do.
Best.
Paul Grobstein