It has been a long time since I wished a nonfiction book to be longer, so that my experience of reading did not have to end so soon. I found myself wishing for yet more pages in this book. It may be because The Ancient Mythology of Modern Science brings two facets of my own life (as physicist and folklorist) into clear relationship, but I think the appeal is something deeper. On the one hand, the book is a pleasure to read because of the insightful argument, the witty exposition, and the richness of the discussion. On the other hand, the unfolding argument brings disparate domains—the Greeks, anthropological theory, mythology, science, history and philosophy of science, and cognitive theory—together into provocative relationship.
The book is based on a disarmingly simple premise that is stated directly in the opening paragraph:
“Two observations converge in the idea of this study. First, books in which accredited specialists discuss science and/or specific scientific findings in terms accessible and appealing to the general public have come to occupy a prominent place in contemporary bookstores. Second, humans throughout history have been fascinated by mythology. My argument is that these two circumstances are not unrelated: or, more specifically, the thesis of this book is that popular science writing provides a primary arena for the creation of contemporary mythology.” (3)
From this vantage point, Gregory Schrempp’s focus is the genre he terms “Popular Science Writing,” not science writing per se, a point he reiterates in stating, “the main arguments of my book are not directed toward science at its core; rather, in focusing on the popularizing of science I attempt to pick up science at those points, admittedly beyond precise location, at which it starts to become—dominantly—something else, a something else that by virtue of my background in mythology I think I recognize” (5).
As noted, the terms myth and mythology are also imprecise. In common usage they are used to index a broad range of often conflicting ideas, including: “stories of supernatural beings or heroes set in ancient times and telling of cosmos- and society-shaping deeds and events”; “stories, images, or ideals when these rivet minds, energize cultures, and confer identity, design, and/or destiny on individuals or societies”; “a synthesis of poetic imagination and moral wisdom held as a society’s unique spiritual treasure”; and even “ideologies perpetrated by demagogues upon gullible masses” or “any widely and/or deeply held misconception” (15–16). Rather than limiting his analysis or resorting to oversimplifications of the complex whole, Schrempp offers a valuable analytical synthesis in his approach to myth:
“All of these qualities can be explored together under the umbrella term of anthropocentrism, for collectively they are the modalities through which anthropocentric visions take shape. Myths usually do proceed as if we humans are at the centre of the cosmos (figuratively if not literally) and as if the cosmos is specifically ‘for us’ and slanted to our interests and needs. That we are the centre (literally or figuratively) and that the cosmos is ‘for us’ are the fundamental assumptions of an anthropocentric purview." (17)
Following his lucid introduction, which provides a thorough framing of the project and orientation to relevant historical and methodological issues, Schrempp’s argument unfolds over five chapters, each of which delves into a particular arena in which popular science writers succumb to the process of re-mythologizing the world. Individual chapters tend to focus on a specific writer, but the analysis necessarily draws in the work of others whose writing embodies a similar topic or rhetorical strategy. The extensive footnotes are invaluable; they are rich with extensions of the argument, contextualizing material, and insights.
Chapter 2, “It Had to Be You: Fire without Prometheus,” explores John Barrow’s The Artful Universe, a book Schrempp describes as “designed to reveal the operation of laws (or ‘constants’) of nature within realms that many regard as quintessential sites of human freedom and spontaneity: consciousness, culture, and art” (36). As the chapter title hints, Schrempp details how Barrow’s argument is not only infused with anthropocentric bias and “continually proves less than he claims to prove” (51) but also how Barrow’s efforts, in many senses, ultimately serve to generate a “new variant” or an “updating” of “the ancient myth of the origin of cooking fire” (71).
Chapter 3, “Randomness and Life: Sobering Lessons from the Drunkard’s Walk,” concentrates on Stephen Jay Gould, and, specifically, his 1997 book Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. Schrempp characterizes Gould’s book as an analysis of the “nature of variation within four different phenomena: cancer survival rates, baseball batting averages, the organic sizes of planktonic forams, and life on Earth considered in totality” (72). Schrempp also identifies two key claims that emerge from Gould’s analysis: 1) these, and related phenomena, are best understood with attention to the full “statistical curve of distribution” or “full house” (72) and 2) application of his statistical approach to understanding the latter of these topics will result in “a radically revised notion of the human place in the cosmos,” yielding a “vision of our species as an accidental evolutionary sideshow” (73). Schrempp’s evaluation of Gould’s approach is far too nuanced to summarize here, but in one key thread of analysis he points out that internal inconsistencies in Gould’s analysis organize in such a way as to demonstrate that Gould’s own biological decentering of humans (the promised “revised notion of the human place in the cosmos”) is really based on Gould’s own anti-centric bias rather than on any statistical truth.
“Copernican Kinship: An Origin Myth for the Category,” chapter 4, addresses writing about the idea of “category” as a basic “unit” of “mental processing” (114). More specifically, Schrempp examines the commonplace in many mythologies “of a cosmos organized and held together by kinship” (114) in contrast to a purportedly scientific worldview. As a preface, Schrempp moves from surveying patterns in the use of the kinship metaphor as found in New Zealand Maori mythology to a discussion of category in the writing of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. The bulk of the chapter, however, scrutinizes claims by sociologists Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss that “category” as a mode of thinking has its origin in the “image” of human kinship, and claims by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson that category as a unit of human thought derives from the human body and the experience of embodiment (123). Schrempp notes that both of these approaches “offer as much potential for cosmological projection—that is for imposing prosaic, local images onto the cosmos—as do traditional mythological portrayals of the cosmos” (123). Again the details of his analysis and his conclusions are best understood through reading the text, but I cannot help quoting one concluding remark: “The borderline of the great Copernican divide, the point at which we learned to think of the universe scientifically rather than mythically—as a mechanism rather than as the rest of our family—is, logically and temporally, a fuzzy one” (150).
Chapter 5, “Descartes Descending or the Last Homunculus: Anthropomorphizing in Popular Science Writing,” moves into the domain of artificial intelligence and a contrast between the use of homunculi, “little men,” as an explanatory mechanism—which leads to the “homunculist fallacy” or “purporting to explain or account for intelligent behavior merely by referring to inner beings or agencies that possess the capacity that is to be explained” (152, emphasis in original)—and “a long-established theme in the theory of myth, a theme that might be summed up as the ‘anthropomorphic fallacy’” (152). Schrempp’s thesis in this chapter is that “introversive anthropomorphizing involves imperatives and constraints that both parallel and significantly differ from those involved in the outwardly directed anthropomorphizing common to mythic portrayals of the world outside us” (157).
Chapter 6, “Once More, with Feeling! The View from the Moon and the Return of the Copernican Revolution,” takes as its subject the spatial and cognitive decentering of humans found in the works of a number of writers who build on what Schrempp terms the “recent revival of Copernican musings, one prompted by the images of Earth photographed from the moon in the course of the Apollo moon missions of the 1960s and ‘70s” (192). This chapter sweeps together discussions of a number of authors who invoke Copernicus directly or who explore implications of the further decentering propagated by the work of Darwin and Freud. Discussions include the work of Steven Weinberg, John Wheeler, Stephen Wolfram, Daniel Dennet, Howard Margolis, Immanuel Kant, Tom Stoppard, Hans Blumenberg, Robert Poole, Joel Primack, and Nancy Abrahams. Special attention is reserved, however, for Carl Sagan’s work Pale Blue Dot, in which Schrempp discerns not only a deliberate decentering of human beings but also a concomitant “compensatory re-centering” (209) wherein “Sagan holds out the possibility of our making Earth into a centre by carrying out a cosmic diaspora from it” (209, emphasis in original). Schrempp notes that such a project involves a re-mythologizing of the world in a way that aligns with traditional mythological narratives and kinship (210).
The conclusion, “Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, How Scientists Save Myth,” returns to what Schrempp argues is the power of myth—“The distinguishing principle of myth (vis-à-vis science) should not be sought in an indifference to empirical reality on the part of myth. It should be sought rather in myth’s readiness to imaginatively leap beyond limited empirical observations and set sight on grand humanistic and aesthetic visions” (20, emphasis in original). It is here that Schrempp sketches out the implied “compensatory visions” offered by popular science writers wherein the “reality as envisioned by science compensates for the loss of the fantasies allegedly offered by myth—although this is often accomplished, I argue, through the construction of a new myth” (223). The forms of compensation are detailed under headings of “Truth,” “Maturity,” “A Cosmos of Wonder,” “Continuity of Religious and Humanistic Values,” and “Cosmic Kinship” (224-230). The mythologizing process continues, writes Schrempp, “because there are some things that myth still does best and for which we have still found no alternative” (232).
The Ancient Mythology of Modern Science ploughs new ground for the study of myth and folklore. I recommend it not only to anyone interested in the intersection of myth and science but also to anyone interested in better understanding who we are and how we think as human beings.
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[Review length: 1723 words • Review posted on October 31, 2012]