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Hanging on to the Edges Hanging on to the Edges DANIEL NETTLE Hanging on to the Edges Hanging on to the Edges Essays on Science, Society and the Academic Life D ANIEL Essays on Science, Society I love this book. I love the essays and I love the overall form. Reading these essays feels like entering into the best kind of intellectual conversati on—it makes me want and the Academic Life to write essays in reply. It makes me want to get everyone else reading it. I almost N never feel this enthusiasti c about a book. ETTLE —Rebecca Saxe, Professor of Cogniti ve Science at MIT What does it mean to be a scien� st working today; specifi cally, a scien� st whose subject ma� er is human life? Scien� sts o� en overstate their claim to certainty, sor� ng the world into categorical dis� nc� ons that obstruct rather than clarify its complexi� es. In this book Daniel Ne� le urges the reader to unpick such DANIEL NETTLE dis� nc� ons—biological versus social sciences, mind versus body, and nature versus nurture—and look instead for the for puzzles and anomalies, the points of Hanging on to the Edges connec� on and overlap. These essays, converted from o� en humorous, some� mes autobiographical blog posts, form an extended medita� on on the possibili� es and frustra� ons of the life scien� fi c. Pragma� cally arguing from the intersec� on between social and biological sciences, Ne� le reappraises the virtues of policy ini� a� ves such as Universal Basic Income and income redistribu� on, highligh� ng the traps researchers and poli� cians are liable to encounter. This provoca� ve, intelligent and self-cri� cal volume is a testament to the possibili� es of interdisciplinary study—whose virtues Ne� le stridently defends—drawing from and having implica� ons for a wide cross-sec� on of academic inquiry. This will appeal to anybody curious about the implica� ons of social and biological sciences for increasingly topical poli� cal concerns. It comes par� cularly recommended to Sciences and Social Sciences students and to scholars seeking to extend the scope of their fi eld in collabora� on with other disciplines. As with all Open Book publica� ons, this en� re book is available to read for free on the publisher’s website. Printed and digital edi� ons, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at www.openbookpublishers.com Cover image: Photo by Alessio Lin on Unsplash, h� ps://unsplash.com/photos/E0LJBY360HI Cover design: Anna Ga� . book ebooke and OA edi� ons also available www.openbookpublishers.com OBP To access digital resources including: blog posts videos online appendices and to purchase copies of this book in: hardback paperback ebook editions Go to: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/842 Open Book Publishers is a non-profit independent initiative. We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works. HANGING ON TO THE EDGES Hanging on to the Edges Essays on Science, Society, and the Academic Life Daniel Nettle https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2018 Daniel Nettle This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Daniel Nettle, Hanging on to the Edges. Essays on Science, Society, and the Academic Life. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2018. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0155 In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https:// www.openbookpublishers.com/product/842#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Updated digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/842#resources Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-580-7 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-581-4 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-582-1 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-583-8 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-584-5 ISBN Digital (XML): 978-1-78374-608-8 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0155 Cover image: Photo by Alessio Lin on Unsplash, https://unsplash.com/photos/ E0LJBY360HI. Cover design: Anna Gatti All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) and Forest Stewardship Council® (FSC® certified). Printed in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK) Contents Introduction 1 PART ONE 7 1. How my theory explains everything: and can make you 8 happier, healthier, and wealthier 2. What we talk about when we talk about biology 25 3. The cultural and the agentic 43 4. What is cultural evolution like? 59 5. Is it explanation yet? 77 PART TWO 95 6. The mill that grinds young people old 96 7. Why inequality is bad 111 8. Let them eat cake! 129 9. The worst thing about poverty is not having enough 145 money 10. Getting your head around the Universal Basic Income 163 PART THREE 181 11. The need for discipline 182 12. Waking up and going out to work in the uncanny valley 199 13. Staying in the game 215 14. Morale is high (since I gave up hope) 231 Acknowledgements 247 Index 249 Introduction Those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision. –Bertrand Russell, New Hopes for a Changing World1 This is, in many respects, an anti-book. Books have a clear, unitary central message. The message is set out clearly in the opening chapter; seen growing up, fighting off rivals and doing all kinds of good deeds in a series of episodes in the middle; and then triumphantly restated at the end. Books come from certainty and self-confidence: the world is simpler than you thought! Anti-books, on the other hand, grow from critical self-reflection, compromise, and doubt. They cross and re-cross a complex landscape, trying to see its features from as many angles as possible, pointing out commonalities and false friends, abandoning one path and trying another. Their central message, if there is one at all, cannot be summarised in a sentence, but perhaps emerges, unsuspected, from an entanglement of detailed local engagements. It is a set of value commitments as much as a claim. In 2016 I realised, with some alarm, that I had been working for over twenty years (twenty years!) at the interface between the biological and the social sciences, trying to cross the gulf that still tends to separate those two great human endeavours. What conclusions did I have from all this effort? None clear enough, right now, for a book; but plenty for an anti-book. I had been downcast for years that where other people had grand, bold theories or sweeping claims to make their names 1 Russell, B. (1951). New Hopes for a Changing World (London: Allen & Unwin, p. 5). © 2018 Daniel Nettle, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0155.15 2 Hanging on to the Edges with, I did not. I had a lot of reading and thinking behind me; a lot of experimentation with different methods and ideas, without entirely nailing my colours to any of them; a lot of ‘both sides have useful things to contribute’ sentiments; a lot of reasonably good-humoured scepticism; and a great deal of respect for the craft. Running through all this was a diffuse sense of slight disappointment: in private moments, I could see that none of the theories espoused out there in the literature, especially those espoused by me, quite lived up to their promise. The big breakthrough had not quite come. When was I going to discover my gift? It was only latterly that I realised: disappointment, good-humoured scepticism and the ability to see something valuable on both sides are gifts, of a sort. At any rate, if they’re what you’ve got, they’re what you’ve got. I resolved to reflect on human nature in a way that did not suggest closure, overstatement or facile answers, yet still offered something useful beyond the status quo. More than that, I wanted to find a way of writing more honestly about the academic life. The published record of books and papers airbrushes out a lot of the true nature of this life. Generally, the more influential and prestigious the publication, the more severe the airbrushing is. Readers can see only the tiny subset of thoughts and experiences that makes it through the filtering and signalling processes usually involved in publication. The quotidian mass of unpublished rumination is less cocksure, more imaginative, and in some important sense, truer. The excision of all the doubt and exploration from the final product both biases the scientific record, and gives novice scholars a completely unrealistic sense of what the academic life is really like. I have here tried to find a way of writing that is more open, more like an authentic conversation, than academic papers generally allow for. Over the course of the writing of this book, the search for the authentic voice became part of the substance as well as the style.
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