As a science nerd I found this a fascinating read. Enlightening. I’ve read a lot of science over the last few years and most of these books focus on what the author knows best, on their particular field, their expertise. There are those scientists, more all of the time and science writers today, who are taking a more wholistic view of their subject, joining together all of the ‘bits’ that they are understanding in ever greater detail, and looking at what is emergent, what is a product of the whole, that isn’t revealed in our focused, atomistic, reductionist, traditional approach favored, in fact almost demanded, by those doing science. The author of this book, McFadden, isn’t one of those reductionists.

While his expertise is in molecular genetics, McFadden does not shy away from those other ‘experts’ attempting to put the pieces together to better understand the whole. He himself has done that in an earlier book that he coauthored with, physicist, Jim Al-Kalili, “Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology” and in another earlier book, “Quantum Evolution”, which is still on my to read list. In this book he looks more widely at the practice of science, how it influences our understanding of the world/universe/life, how resistant science and society have been to change and how our study of the universe and all that it contains, leads us, at least potentially, to a better, more coherent practice. He builds this around the ideas first formulated by the Franciscan Friar, William of Occam, some of whose ideas later became the standard today commonly known as ‘Occam’s Razor’.

Occam’s Razor asks us to consider the ‘simplest’ solution. When our ideas, theories, explanations, and I suppose even politics, become layered and riddled with exceptions and special rules to ‘explain’ events and practices, something is wrong. Even these, he writes, maybe helpful to some degree in their ability to ‘predict’ an outcome, but they can still impede us on our journey to understanding. He reminds us that science does not so much accurately describe reality, but it does provides us with models, constructs, which can be very helpful, because reality is a ‘slippery thing’ and our perceptions of it are necessarily limited because of the limitations of our own sense organs and the difficulty of understanding a world and universe so much larger than we are in terms of ‘space’ and time.  In physics one reads about symmetry and ‘elegance’, how a clear, simple explanation is often more inclusive, doesn’t require a ‘constellation’ of ideas to explain every variation.

McFadden begins by telling what is know of William of Occam (Occam was a small community in 13th century England at William’s birth) how his ideas ran up against the Church, specifically Pope John XXII. At the time science, as we know it today, did not exist. The universe, all of life, was believed to be a creation of God whether in the biblical 7days or in a process of ongoing creation as God chooses to add to, modify or subtract from his creation. Both purpose and fate were in the control of God, for all things, Man, the planets, everything. This was Teleology. The course of our lives and everything in them was determined by God. Nature had little to do with it. There was no need to explain beyond that. Essentially William wrote that this was ‘silly’ and went on to explain why. So, William was called in to answer charges of heresy. What follows is a select history of science in which McFadden discusses particular thinkers and theories over time that are pertinent to how Occam’s ideas came to be incorporated into the practice of science.

This isn’t a history of science. As he progresses, McFadden reveals how its practice evolved and how life and the universe itself follows its own ‘razor’ of simplicity, how all things of the universe work in such a way that is energetically efficient, a universe in which genes and subatomic particles, all fulfill a necessary role, how, over time, when that ceases to be the case, those things not only lose their use, their function, but eventually their existence. This also speaks to nature’s conservative aspect, how nothing is wasted, that everything is endlessly recycled. In the case of life, organisms and their waste are broken down in a process that serves the needs of others. Nature is ‘simple’ in this way. Darwin and Wallace’s theory of natural selection as a major force in the evolution of life on earth, is essentially an expression of Occam’s Razor as it acts in the living world. Genetics, as complex as it may seem to be to us, works through a coded system of four base pairs. Most of matter is composed of ‘up’ and ‘down’ Quarks, electrons and electron neutrinos, the other 8 particles are of negligible importance. These combine with the force carriers, the Bosons to provide all the variation and activity in this universe. All of it.

By the time you finish the book, he has introduced us to Lee Smolin’s (the physicist who first proposed ‘string’ and ‘super string’ theory), speculations about the possibility of an evolving universe, in which the defining rules themselves of the newly birthed universes, can change and the its products and viability altered. The origin of our universe in which multiple other universes, are spawned out of massive black holes, their own ‘genetics’ sometimes mutating within them, which ‘birth’ other universes. Each is unique in a way that’s comparable to animal offspring. These must meet the  survival tests to exist, the capacity to replicate, to pass on essential characteristics through heredity, the capacity for mutation, the ability to produce alternative forms and forces that bring into existence ‘other’ realities. It is a fascinating discussion of the theory of Natural Selection, merged with Quantum Mechanics and Cosmology. Occam’s Razor, some are arguing now, the drive behind the simplest most necessarily effective particles and forces of any universe, is likely the driving force behind this and any other universe and its evolving future.

At whatever scale, the ‘Razor’ operates simply and effectively. Mutations to the form, produced while ‘natural selection’ acts on them, what is necessary, what is the most effective path, being the one taken over time, genes, species, particles appearing, annihilating, obscuring as they fall into disuse or disappearing entirely over time as their necessity and efficacy decline. In physics, and mathematics, practitioners have long sought ‘elegant’, ‘simple’ solutions, rather than elaborate contrivances, with multiple exceptions to make reality ‘fit’ the theory. Scientists are often overly invested in their own work, their own ideas and may be reluctant to accept alternatives that negate or minimize their own. They aren’t any different than the rest of us in this sense. Occam did not outright exclude complexity in his ideas, only excess, the unnecessary. The ‘Razor’ works toward the elimination of what isn’t essential and, as McFadden points out as he takes the reader along, these new, simpler, theories allow science and society to shed the endless exceptions and justifications that we previously lived with.

While I haven’t written a lot here this is a trip well worth taking. In Occam’s time religion, philosophy and what stood as science, was blended. The decoupling of science and religion took centuries. There has been a lot of back and forth, surrendering and ‘taking’ of ‘ground’. Mystery and uncertainty will likely always abound. The ‘birth’ of a science less fettered by religosity, still goes on and has at times been very ‘painful’ costing the lives of many. Occam himself was driven into hiding and, fortunately, found the protection of powerful others.

Along the way McFadden discusses inductive vs. deductive thinking and the different paths they can take us down. The logic of deduction moves from a general rule to a specific conclusion which can lead one to fitting the universe, or one’s idea of it, into an accepted ‘rule’. This was the path of Aristotle, and much of the later educated western world, and left us open to the idea of forcing nature to fit our idea, or appending endless exceptions and alternative explanations, while clinging to the old. Induction, begins with the observed reality and looks for what is shared, what might ‘explain’ their mutual appearances or ‘behaviors’, action…it doesn’t insist on certainty, looking instead for what is likely or probable….Science has made its advances in this way, critiquing itself, where ‘belief’ insists on certainty. It is an interesting discussion.

Ideas shape the world as much as the world shapes them, but this wasn’t always true. For centuries, specifically in western societies, many of the powerful sought control over the world of ideas and they did this often forcefully, clinging to dogma, forcing the known world into it, no matter how ultimately ill-fitting it was. Powerful religious leaders might open or slam the door shut, forcing the world to follow its narrative with all of its contrivances while scientists themselves often bickered. It wasn’t a smooth trip. McFadden leads the way through this blinkered history. Science tends to be conservative, by design, and truth is elusive. Occam’s Razor, and good science, not only follow what works, but what gets the job done most effectively, efficiently and elegantly, and the universe itself tends to lead the way if we attempt to understand it. Science may not, and likely never will, fully explain the universe and its ways, but it provides us with the ability to better understand it and predict what can or could happen, so that we can better live our lives. Nothing in life is fixed. The last thing in how we view it, should be our ideas and willful ignorance.