Science versus Scientism

There is a memorable episode at the end of Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World (1912) when Professor Challenger produces some photographs as proof of the continued existence of dinosaurs (and other prehistoric animals) in a plateau of the Amazon Basin. He is jeered by the assembled crowd, and accused of forgery. Even though the negatives are ‘open to the inspection of experts’, the experts remain sceptical. ‘No picture could convince us of anything’, remarks Dr Illingworth, the self-appointed spokesman of the London Zoological Society. Challenger then releases a pterodactyl. The reveal is amusingly theatrical (‘Even the unexpected fall of the Duke of Durham into the orchestra, which occurred at this moment, could not distract the petrified attention of the vast audience’). But there is something didactic as well as dramatic going on in this scene. It recalls the opening chapters of the book, in which Challenger is first introduced, in his absence, as the man who faked photographs from a previous expedition to South America. Challenger insists that that first set of photographs is a true record, and his desire to prove his point motivates the adventure which the novel subsequently stages. His previous experience of being disbelieved explains his precaution in securing more than photographic corroboration in his second visit. But it also explains why – we retrospectively appreciate – he courts the incredulity of his audience: that he might have cause to release his flesh-eating dinosaur (‘the wildest gargoyle that the imagination of a mad medieval builder could have conceived’), and so teach the hubristic naysayers a terrifying lesson.¹

Conan Doyle shares the same dramatic and didactic impulses as the professor he created. Both are men trained in science, and yet both are also men of soaring imagination. They demand evidence and a coherent outlook, but they are opposed to materialism: they believe that the world has fresh wonders in store, wonders they earnestly wish to explore and to share. Theirs is, in other words, a science akin to romance. It is undertaken with bold, even boyish élan: ‘Theirs was the spirit which upheld Darwin among the gauchos of the Argentine or Wallace among the head-hunters of Malaya’ (as the protagonist-narrator observes of Challenger and his fellow travelling scientist, Summerlee).² Given this frontier spirit of scientific discovery, it is suggestive that the story teases at the status of photographs as a new, revelatory, and contested source of knowledge. Conan Doyle appreciated photography as an art: during the 1880s he was a keen amateur contributor to the British Journal of Photography. But he also understood its potential uses for science: he was, for instance, an admirer of Professor Robert Koch’s photomicrographs of bacteria, which provided objective proof of the existence of that which eluded the human eye. In The Lost World, the disbelieved photographs turn out to be genuine; however, photography itself is not redeemed as a medium of definitive proof. Dr Illingworth is shown to be wrong, but it does not follow that he was wrong to query the reliability of photographic representation as such. His ringing rhetorical question – ‘Was it possible that in this age of ingenious manipulation photographs could be accepted as evidence?’³ – is not disputed, it is made irrelevant.

Only a few years after the publication of The Lost World, Conan Doyle would stake, and lose, his reputation as a man of science by himself accepting ingeniously manipulated photographs as evidence. Few readers flinched when he claimed, in The Crime of the Congo, that the slavery in the rubber plantations belonging to King Leopold of the Belgians was proved by the ‘incorruptible evidence of the Kodak’.⁴ But the reaction was rather different when he sought to substantiate his claims for the existence of the so-called Cottingley fairies on the same basis. Even the photographic company Kodak did not believe their cameras were ‘incorruptible’. Although their technicians ultimately concluded that the prints ‘showed no signs of being faked’, those same technicians were careful in...