Scientists as Citizens: Education as a weapon of intellectual self-defense

"Before I could read, my grandfather read to me from Bad Bishop Brown’s Science and History for Girls and Boys. My grandfather believed that at a minimum every socialist worker should be familiar with cosmology, evolution, and history. I never separated history, in which we are active participants, from science, the finding out how things are. My family had broken with organized religion five generations back, but my father sat me down for Bible study every Friday evening because it was an important part of the surrounding culture and important to many people, a fascinating account of how ideas develop in changing conditions, and because every atheist should know it as well as believers do." ~ Richard Levins

Introduction

In this first blog issue of Science for the People, we provide a brief historical overview on the role of radical scientific workers in the early part of the 20^th century. By placing the role of scientists in a historical context, we seek to understand how scientists within the political left have in the past engaged with ordinary people through popular education activities. Understanding this history is of crucial importance to the present day since we are facing some of the most pressing societal issues, most notably climate change and the rapid loss of biodiversity.

Popular science writers have traditionally focused their attention on communicating scientific ideas to the public in the hopes of galvanizing support for science. While these efforts should be applauded, they fall short in some important ways. They generally seek to promote changes within the established social order, either by influencing governmental agencies or individuals through self-education literature, but fail to addres how scientific knowledge is built from the ground-up so that individuals can attain the self-confidence required to change the existing social order. Contrary to the mainstream of Popular Science writers, Science for the People aims to provide ordinary people with scientific ways of thinking in order to create alternative forms of self-managed societies.

Science for the People Magazine Covers, 1974, 1970.

British Science Writers

Lancelot Hogben

Since the Victorian era, popular education played a key role in the dissemination of scientific knowledge to the public. Scientists engaged deeply with the public by displaying their most recent scientific discoveries in front of sold-out audiences. The status of the scientific worker was both as a celebrity and specialist. It was the advent of the mass printing press in the 19th century that soon expanded the dissemination of information into the public sphere. In the decades that followed, science emerged as a professional discipline with the growth of universities, government research institutions, and private industry. As there was greater emphasis on specialization within the sciences, popular science declined in the years that followed. However, a small fringe of scientific workers continued to engage with the public, albeit for different reasons. We can identify three main strands of popular science writers that dominated much of the 20th century.

From the beginning, popular science writers had primarily been concerned with the establishment of science as a professional discipline that served the purposes of government and industry. In the early years, science had not been recognized as a discipline and thus well-known scientists urged government and industry to acknowledge their work through research funding and the establishment of academic displines. But it was the links between applied science and imperialism that enabled scientists to gain government funding for research. While scientists disagreed on the best way of promoting science to the public, Britisch science writer Herbert Wells believed in the ability of science to transform society. In particular, Wells was interested in promoting a rationalist worldview that pushed forward the idea of Darwinism. In his classic work “Outline of History”, Wells offered a broad overview of Darwinian evolution and legitimized the science of biology by discounting the neo-vitalist movement, the notion that the living body could surpass its own physical laws, that had preceded much of popular science writing.

Attempts to reconcile science and religion spurred another important movement in popular science writing. Major discoveries in physics and cosmology led some prominent scientists to assess the impact of their scientific findings on religion. One such scientist was the well-known cosmologist Arthur Eddington who was the first scientist to experimentally verify Albert Einstein’s predictions. As a Quaker, Arthur Eddington challenged materialism which dominated much of physics in the 19th century. In his popular book “The Nature of the Physical World”, Eddington discussed the philosophical and religious implications of the new physics. Eddington suggested that in addition to materialism, consciousness and the mind were integral parts of our reality. This view of reconciling science and religion was generally favored by an older generation of scientists in the beginning part of the 20th century.

John S. Haldane, 1910 via Wikimedia Commons

Yet, by the 1930’s there was increasing awareness about the moral compass of a scientifically managed society. While previous generations of science writers wanted changes within the existing social structures, principally government and industry, a small group of politically Leftist scientists wanted a scientifically based society managed by ordinary people. These scientists represented a younger generation within the British political left movements. Some of these prominent scientists included the physicist John Bernal, the mathematician Hyman Levy, and the biologists John Haldane and Lancelot Hogben. While these younger scientists critiqued the previous generation of science writers for linking religious values into popular science writing, their primary aim was to make science accessible to ordinary people but also to use it as a weapon of intellectual self-defense so as to organize society based on scientific principles. Most notable defenders of these ideas were the biologists Haldane and Hogben. Besides being a well-known evolutionary biologist, Haldane had written popular science articles for the Communist Daily Workers, where he frequently wrote critical articles on the misuse of science in the case of poison gas during WWI and eugenics.

Although overshadowed by Haldane, it was the biologist Lancelot Hogben whom became one of the most prolific science writers of his generation. Hogben was a towering intellectual figure whose work spanned the scientific and political domains. As a biologist, Hogben’s work included mathematical contributions to human and medical genetics. He was actively engaged in the Nature-Nurture debate with geneticist RA Fisher. Hogben’s work challenged the eugenists, most notably Fisher, by stressing the importance of non-linear interactions between heredity and the environment. As a compartive physiologist, Hogben’s research on the endocrinology of Xenopus laevis (the African clawed toad) showed that when female frogs are injected with urine from pregnant women in their hindlegs they ovulate. This served as an indicator that the urine of the woman containing the hormone chorionic gonadotropin caused the frogs to ovulate. Hogben’s laboratory developed protocols for the standard pregnancy test, commonly referred to as the Hogben pregnancy test. In the latter part of his professional career, Hogben’s work focused on the foundations of statistical theory, in particular on statistical inference methods in human genetics.

African clawed toad pair, by TimVickers, via Wikimedia Commons

In the political sphere, Hogben belonged to the radical left-wing tradition of British scientific intellectuals. While commonly associated with Marxists, Hogben did not subscribe to the rigidity of the Communist Party. Rather, Hogben called for socialism in his early years and promoted scientific humanist later in his life. Hogben grew up as the son of fundamentalist Methodists parents in whose household books were banned and daily activities included spreading of the Gospel to save souls from going to Hell. However, it was scarlet fever at the age of 14 that forced Hogben to stay at home. This proved to be a pivotal moment in his life since books left by his cousin and books from the public library allowed him to self-educate himself in natural history and zoology. While in Tottenham County School, Hogben developed his interest in biology and showed exceptional academic abillities. Meanwhile, his friendships with working-class kids from the neighborhood shaped his left-wing political consciousness.

At the age of 17, Hogben won a prestigious scholarship to study at Cambridge University (Trinity). Hogben remembers this time, 

“As an education institution, Trinity was ideally fitted to foster my intellectual development. Perhaps because of an overdose of family prayers, I had acquired a lifelong reistance to information transmitted by the spoken word”. 

At Cambridge, Hogben became intellectually influenced by a small number of important physiologists including Walter Fletcher, A.V. Hill, and Keith Lucas.  However, it was the logician and philospher Bertrand Russell whose lectures on the philosophy of science and political activism inspired Hogben intellectually. In 1914, Hogben began to serve for the Quaker’s War Victim’s Continent during WWI as a non-combatant building homes for homeless French families and as a medical aid for the Friends Ambulance Unit. Reflecting back on this period, Hogben writes, 

“I already knew of the Quakers taking an active part in the emancipation of the slaves, that they regarded military service as contrary to the profession of a Christian and that they proclaimed no dogma to which a modernist could not subscribe.” 

However by 1916, Hogben made the political choice not to use his work for exemption from military service when conscription was introduced. Just like Russell, Hogben became a conscientious objector and served time in jail for his political actions.

While at Cambridge, Hogben met Enid Charles and they would get married by 1917. Charles was an accomplished mathematician and committed feminist. Exceptionally gifted, Charles won the “math tripos’ examinations at Cambridge, exceeding her male counterparts. Despite this accomplishment she was barred from receiving a university degree from Cambridge and spent a year in a Liverpool settlement gaining a diploma in the social sciences. While she could have acquired a well-paying civil service job, she opted for taking a low paying job as an organizer for the women’s unit of the trade union movement. After obtaining her doctorate in physiology, she shifted her interest to demography. In collaboration with R. R. Kucyznski, she would develop new statistical techniques in the study of differential fertility. In 1934, Charles garnered international attention for her book “The Twilight of Parenthood”, in which she projected that fertility rates in the UK would continue to drop thereby challenging eugenics.

As a popularizer of science, Hogben became well known for several books most notably “Mathematics for the Million”. In his 650-page classic book, Hogen traverses the reader from Euclidian geometry all the way through calculus, including differentiation and integration. The book became a bestseller and was intended to boost the self-confidence of ordinary people in their abillity to understand mathematical concepts. Hogben’s genius was to explain mathematical ideas in plain language such that the reader was able to logically follow principles against the historical background at which they emerged.

In discussing mathematical pedagogy, Hogben writes, 

“The customary way of writing a book about mathematics is to show how each step follows logically from the one before without telling you what use there will be in taking it. This book is written to show you how each step follows historically from the step before and what use it will be to you or someone else if it is taken. The first method repels many people who are intelligent and socially alive, because intelligent people are suspicious of mere logic, and people who are socially alive regard the human brain as an instrument for social activity”.

Unlike many writers of his day, Hogben’s educational strategy was to build the scientific knowledge of ordinary people from the ground up so that they wouldn’t need to take anything for granted by the elite, intellectual establishment. This strategy was so radical in its purpose that it not only served ordinary people with scientific understanding but also enabled them to use this knowledge to manage their own affairs.

Science for the People: United States 

The anti-war movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s sparked a new period in which left-wing scientists began to engage in important societal issues. Left-wing intellectuals increasingly questioned the role that universities played in society. This led to the formation of Science for the People in 1967, a national organization that started with a research strike in MIT protesting the military research presence on campus. As part of the antiwar activities, several members of Science for the People collective went to Vietnam to investigate war crimes committed against Vietnamese peasant communities, many of whom sufferred birth defects due the application of the chemical herbicide Agent Orange. Furthermore, Science for the People was actively engaged in debate surrounding the Green Revolution and genetic engineering. One prominent scientist that emerged from this era was Harvard biologist Ruth Hubbard. The events of the Vietnam War and the Women’s Liberation Movement forced her to reconsider her role as a scientist in society. As a consequence, she spent the following decades challenging the ideological roots of sociobiology and also took on the issue of gender inequality in the workplace, particularly the subservient role that women were given by their male colleagues in the university.

By the 1980’s, NWAEG (New World Agriculture and Ecology Group) emerged as the sister organization of Science for People mainly working in Nicaragua. As part of NWAEG, scientific workers went to Nicaragua to assist the Sandanista’s at the National Autonomous University in Managua. NWAEG members conducted research and taught various courses in agricultural ecology. This proved to be an important period in US history, when citizens of the oppressor country voluntarily travelled to Nicaragua to show solidarity with the victims of US terrorism.

Vision for the future: Science for People

We have provided a brief historical overview of radical scientific workers in both Britain and the United States that were actively engaged in popular educational activities. It’s important that we take note of this history in order to address some of the most pressing environmental and social issues of our time. The slogan “Educate and Organize” remains as poignent today as it was more than a century ago.

-Written Collaboratively By: Science For The People, UM Chapter

Literature Cited

Bowler, P. (2009). Science for All: The Popularization of Science in the Early Twentieth-Century Britain. University of Chicago Press.
Hogben, Anne: Hogben, Lancelot Thomas: Hogben, Adrian (1998), Lancelot Hogben: scientific humanist: and unauthorized autobiography. London: Merlin
Hogben, L. (1936). Mathematics for the Million: A Popular Self-Educator. Allen & Unwin, London.Hogben, L. (1939). Dangerous Thoughts. Allen & Unwin, London.
Levins, R. (2008). Living the 11th Thesis. Monthly Review. Volume 59, Issue 08. Retrieved from http://monthlyreview.org/2008/01/01/living-the-11th-thesis/
Mumford, D. (1997). Calculus Reform---- For The Millions. Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Volume 44, Issue 5. Retreived from http://www.ams.org/notices/199705/comm-mumford.pdf
Perutz, M. (1998). Friendly way to science. Times Higher Education. Retrieved from http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/friendly-way-to-science/162693.article
Sahotra, S. (1996). Lancelot Hogben, 1895-1975. Genetics. Volume 142: 655-660. Retrieved from http://www.genetics.org/content/142/3
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Werskey, G. (1978). The Visible College: The Collective Biography of British Scientific Socialists of the 1930’s. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York.