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Inevitable humans? Or hidden agendas?

Article Excerpt
A review of Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe by Simon Conway Morris. (Cambridge University Press, 2003, 464 pp.

"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth"--P.B. Medawar (1969, p. 28)

THE OPTIMIST SEES A GLASS AND SAYS it's half full; the pessimist says it's half empty. So goes the classic metaphor for how our expectations and beliefs can bias our judgment and perception, and cause us to see only what we want to see.

We're all familiar with examples of how Creationists can take straightforward scientific facts and twist them to fit their peculiar view of the world. Almost as soon as we detect this bias, our baloney alarms go off, and we read their arguments much more skeptically, because we have good reason to doubt that they have used the facts correctly.

But the bias is not just among Creationists. All humans have a tendency to see and emphasize what fits their preconceptions, and ignore what does not. Scientists like to think of themselves as "objective" and not prone to those biases, but as many philosophers of science have pointed out, this is not true. Scientists are all too human, and their perceptions are largely affected by the culture in which they live, as well as how they were trained. No matter how "objective" scientists try to be, they are subject to all sorts of cultural and social expectations that distort their interpretations. Unfortunately, many scientists are unaware of these prejudices or unwilling to recognize that they might be subject to them, but the effects are there just the same. We all have a tendency to seek "facts" that are part of our theoretical universe, whether we are conscious of this or not. Darwin believed that he was objective in accumulating facts in an inductive fashion, but during a moment of candor, he wrote, "How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service."

This bias is particularly apparent when scientists (and other people) begin to speculate outside the normal realm of testable hypotheses, and try to answer ultimate questions such as: "Are we alone in the universe?" or "What are the chances of there being another form of intelligent life like us?" These kinds of questions lead to non-scientific speculations about the meaning of our existence, or how humanity's status in the universe casts light on religious and philosophical questions of that nature. Science-fiction writers have long worked from the premise that some other form of alien life exists out there, looks something like us, and can communicate with us. Such optimism led to the SETI project, and to movies and novels ranging from H.G. Wells' pessimistic War of the Worlds to Steven Spielberg's more optimistic view of...

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