Science, Religion, and the Cartographies of Complexity

May/June 2007 · Historically Speaking 15 Science, Religion, and the Cartographies of Complexity David N. Livingstone There is no surer guide to the territory of science and religion than John Hedley Brooke. He is a superlative cartographer . For several decades he has pioneered the way into this forbidding terrain and mapped its intricate topography with both subtlety and precision. His work has shaped my own endeavors at every scale. On the most trivial level he has furnished me with yet another alliterative term for a lecture aimed at general audiences on the historical relations between science and religion . To conflictand cooperation, social competition, and ideological continuity as ways of thinking about the encounter, I have been able to add complexity as by far the best way of getting a handle on the issues involved. At a different scale, he has infected me with what I would call the Brookean allergy to "isms." Brooke's emphasis on the need to disaggregate big concepts and comfortable labels—Baconianism, Newtonianism , Anglicanism, Darwinism, Inductivism, to name but a few—has secured at least one enthusiastic disciple. For these labels conceal as much as they reveal. Like the words "science" and "religion" themselves, such terms are what WB. Gallie famously called "essentially contested concepts"; they defy specification in terms of transcendent necessary and sufficient conditions.' Brooke is also the master of delicious irony. Time and time again in his many writings, readers are brought face to face with the unexpected, with what ought not to have happened, with individuals ending up on the wrong sides in debates. In this role, Brooke emerges as an iconoclast in the best sense, demythologizing the icons of science and religion alike. The champions of secular science and religious faith need to be made more aware of the kinds of stories he tells. The enthusiastic coterie of latter-day Darwinians intent on canonizing Darwin and Huxley , for example, need to acknowledge the racism and sexism that snake their way through evolution's most sacred texts. Darwin, for example, rejoiced that the Anglo-Saxons would "almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world" and happily called on the support of his eugenicallyobsessed cousin, Francis Galton, to insist that "if the prudent avoid marriage, whilst the reckless marry, the inferior members tend to supplant the better members of society."' For their part, latter-day creationists, forever complaining about the evils of Social Darwinism, need to be reminded that creationism has been a bulwark of racial prejudice and supremacist ideology. Louis Agassiz, for example, whose name frequently crops up in works of creationist apologetic, was convinced that the different races had each been specially created and displayed a distinctive hierarchy of moral and intellectual excelA fundamentalist cartoon on the cover of B. H. Shadduck's Puddle to Paradise, 1925. lence. And anti-Darwinian, conservative Presbyterians in the American South had no trouble securing biblical legitimacy for their belief that slavery and racial hierarchy were divinely sanctioned.' Attending to complexities of this sort casts new light on episodes that loom large in the traditional iconography of science-and-religion encounters. The Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee in 1 925 is a case in point. The formulaic portrayal of this affair as redneck resistance to enlightened science has no doubt served the needs of ideologues of various hues, but mostly at the expense of ignoring the fact that the textbook in question, George William Hunter's A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems (1914), appended to its popularization of evolution declarations insisting that Caucasians were the highest human type and that eugenic practices should be installed to wipe out what he called social "parasitism and its cost to society." Given these professions, it is hardly surprising that the "Great Commoner," William Jennings Bryan, Democratic candidate for the American presidency, would find the book obnoxious . Comfortable stereotype does not serve us well here at all. It is precisely the realization that history does not fit preconceived templates that has impelled Brooke to privilege complexity and contradiction over predictability and preconception. And indeed he is entirely right to disavow the suggestion that he is the father of a "complexity thesis." For complexity is not to...