The facts of life / C.D. Darlington.

  • C. D. Darlington
Date:
1953
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The facts of life / C.D. Darlington. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    408/486 (page 394)
    So far as this is a statement of our present knowledge we may willingly accept it. It is, however, something more. Here the claim is made that the limits of knowledge can be finally set and the universal negative finally asserted. This is a meta¬ physical conclusion. It is contrary to the principles on which scientific discovery has been attempted in the past. If successful it might represent a revolutionary upheaval in natural philo¬ sophy. But, if it proves to be unsuccessful, it will be regarded by posterity as an attempt, by those who were impatient with a momentary check, to kick over the traces of scientific discipline. In biology this irritating kind of situation has been met (as we have seen) by rubbing on the sore spot a soothing lotion of purpose or design. The quantum physicist is too sophisticated for this remedy. His response is to claim finality for the statistical statement and to assert that the peripheral knowledge, the new experience, is more significant than the central body. For example, Eddington in 1928 says that a law which, by the advance of science, becomes deducible from a higher law is a truism and is possibly not subject to indeterminacy but this will not convince anyone that the universe is governed by laws of deterministic type. He thus dismisses the central and certain framework of science as irrelevant. What matters are the uncertain margins, the active margins of discovery, margins which by the process of discovery are always retreating. Hence when Eddington refers to the replacement in orthodox science of causation by causality by orthodox science he means marginal physics. Translating these views into terms of biology (and praying that biology may now be regarded as science) we should have to say that the three-to-one ratios of Mendel were orthodox science, and evidence of indeterminacy, so long as they were unexplained. On the other hand, they became truisms, irrele¬ vant to the great order of nature, when they became deducible from the chromosome theory or the observations of tetrads of spores, 394