Drawing Out Leviathan

For some years the 'Science Wars' have raged in academe and in the press. Unlike the usual academic tempest in a teapot, the stakes in this controversy are high. The standing of science in our culture turns on the outcome. Will science continue to occupy a position of authority or will it be demoted to just one of many competing 'voices'? Will scientific ideals of objectivity, rationality, and disinterested inquiry continue to be honoured or will they be rejected as oppressive illusions?Some have argued that science is a 'social construct', that is, that science does not discover facts about the world, but that scientific claims are culturally-constructed artefacts disguised as objective truths. For constructivists, 'nature' and 'reality' are simply what scientists agree to regard as natural or real. Further, the methods and standards of science are mere 'rules of the game' adopted to serve political and social agendas. This book critically examines this view in the light of some major debates about dinosaurs. One of the most famous dinosaurs is Apatosaurus (a.k.a. Brontosaurus). For 45 years palaeontologists placed the wrong head on this dinosaur. The first case study shows how this happened, and how the mistake was discovered and corrected.The second case involves the debate over whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded. Dinosaur 'heretic' Robert Bakker advanced this claim in the 1970s, precipitating a major controversy. The third, and loudest debate began in 1980 when Walter and Luis Alvarez proposed that a massive asteroid crashed into the earth 65 million years ago, killing all the dinosaurs. What do these debates reveal about the nature of science? Do they show that science is a social construct?This book argues that these debates, though lively and sometimes rancorous, show that evidence and logic, not arbitrary 'rules of the game' were vitally important, even when the debates were at their nastiest. What these debates show is that science is a very complex set of activities, pervaded by social influences, and not easily reducible to any stereotype. The traditional ideals of the rationality and objectivity of science continue to apply. Yet there are lessons to be learned by scientists from their would-be adversaries, and the book concludes with some recommendations for ending the Science Wars.