THE SIXTH DEVELOPMENTALIST MYTH OF AGRICULTURE (FROM LEWONTIN AND LEVINS, “BIOLOGY UNDER THE INFLUENCE”) AND COMMENTS ON ITS RESOLUTION

In their chapter “Seven developmental myths about agriculture”, Levins and Lewontin talk specifically about specialists and generalists and assumptions that seem to drive ever increasing specialization, in their 6^th myth.  I here quote that myth and then add some comments that I think could be relevant to modern food systems (and other subjects too).

“Specialists are modern, generalists backward. The rational kernel in this view is that there is too much to know within every discipline for anyone to know everything. The history of European thought has been an increasing subdivision of knowledge from the days of the philosopher-scholar-theologian, through  general “scientists,” to the present multiplication of specialties within previously coherent fields of study.  For example, genetics, a part of biology, now includes molecular genetics, cytogenetics, population genetics, quantitative genetics (for plant and animal breeding), as well as further breakdowns by kinds of organisms studied.  Developing countries speak with pride of the numbers of specialists who graduate from their schools.  Uncritical admirers of specialization propose that groups of specialists working as teams can solve problems related to the subdivision of knowledge within a field. However, specialization prevents the researchers from seeing the whole picture, both because of the narrowness of their training and because the ideology of expertise makes it a matter of pride to consider only precise quantitative information as real science while the rest is “philosophy” (a bad word among positivistic scientists) or “not my department.” The training of specialists rather than the education of scientists encourages the combination of micro-creativity and docility that permits scientists to work on the most monstrous projects of destruction without attention to their consequences.  The great failings in the application of science to human well-being have come about not because of the failure to examine the system in its complexity.  The strategy of the Green Revolution is solving many and difficult technical problems of plant breeding, but the geneticists did not anticipate problems of pest ecology, land tenure, or political economy, and as a result increases in production are sometimes associated with increases in misery.  The Aswan Dam was an engineering success in that it retained the water it was intended to retain.  But by stopping the seasonal flooding that provided renewed soil fertility, the dam made farmers dependent on imported chemical fertilizers; the reduced flow of water into the Mediterranean Sea increased salinity and adversely affected fisheries; the outflow of the Nile was reduced to the point that it could no longer offset the erosion of the coastline; the irrigation ditches became the habitat for snails that transmit liver flukes.

            It is a common experience that in large programs of development the ministries of health and agriculture do not talk to each other; thus it come as a surprise when the expansion of cotton production increases malaria.  Cotton is very heavily sprayed.  The natural enemies of the mosquitoes are killed, allowing the mosquitoes that transmit malaria to thrive in habitats created for them by the clearing of forest.  The immigration of a labor force not previously adapted to malaria allows the parasites ideal susceptible hosts.  There is a vast oral tradition of such cautionary tales.  The point is that most of these “unexpected” outcomes are predictable, at least in principle.  There is no longer any excuse for planners not to ask the obvious questions about a program, such as: what will it do to the position of women?  New technologies are usually handed over to men, and traditional women’s occupations are displaced.  For instance, the use of herbicides displaces women from weeding.  How will vegetational changes alter the biology of potential disease vectors? Will the new productive activity be compatible with the water needs of the people? Will the production of export crops make the food supply more vulnerable?

            The outcome of short-sighted specialization is that each department takes as its starting point the products of the department next door.  Crops are bread for their performance in monoculture because the machinery was designed for operations in pure stands of a single crop.  The engineers design machinery for monoculture because the agronomists inform them that it can replicate what farmers do.  The farmers plant monocultures because their varieties and machinery are suitable to monoculture.  Each party is making rational decisions given the constraints imposed by the others, giving the whole trajectory of technological development the appearance of inevitability and necessity, while nobody looks out for the process as a whole.”

Resolving the 6^th: The move towards interdisciplinarity, promoted as a goal in US universities for the past 10 years, is an implicit acknowledgement that what L and L say here is correct, yet the university’s response is lame. Embarrassingly, the group of scholars with whom I affiliate seems to mimic the lame approach of the university.  In planning a project it is normal, and thought to be wise, to seek out experts from across a broad intellectual spectrum. While it is difficult to criticize such an approach, it is in the end an intellectually lazy approach. Interdisciplinarity is, in and of itself, an intellectual challenge that is only dodged by assembling a team of experts. Indeed, historically we see the emergence of great creativity when disciplines are merged and then deepened, rather than deepened and then merged. When biochemistry emerged as an independent science it was not because of a university program that encouraged chemists and biologists to talk to one another.  It emerged out of independent scholars asking questions at the interface of those two classical disciplines. The department of Women’s Studies is clearly an amalgam of sociology, literature, psychology, and many other mainly social science disciplines, and emerged from independent scholars asking questions, unified by an interest in issues specifically attached to gender, at the boarders of their traditional disciplines. Similar narratives can be easily constructed for Biophysics, African American studies, American Culture, Complex Systems, and many others.

            In contrast, the continual splitting of intellectual disciplines is the other dynamic component of intellectual phylogenies. We now have two biology departments (Cell and Molecular and Developmental Biology (MCDB) and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB)), but that split was of a department that had originally been a merger of two others (Zoology and Botany).  I have been here long enough to watch both the merger and split, and I would not be at all surprised to see further splits and mergers as both knowledge increases and as petty intellectual territoriality evolves (splits frequently happen because faculty are sometimes like kids in a sandbox).

            Since all intellectual activity is located in metaphor and simile, in thinking about the problem of interdisciplinarity, we need an appropriate metaphor. A lake has depth and superficial extent, pretty good potential metaphors.  There are those who have extremely broad knowledge (Jack of all Trades,, etc. . . ), covering the entire surface of the lake, and there are those who have very deep knowledge, extending to the depths of the lake, but only within a narrow section.  For those (like me) who appreciate a graphic, figure 1 is useful for further discussion.

Figure 1. A metaphorical lake basin containing all “truth” about a subject (the shaded area) and the various pieces of “knowledge” we have of that truth (hatched area).

Both generalist and specialist knowledge is legitimate, to be sure, but, like all knowledge it is incomplete. What is special about the incompleteness is its fixed nature. If the specialist understands his and her limits, and, true to the specialist ideology, is forbidden to transcend those limits, it is almost inevitable that interdisciplinary teams will fail to cover much of the “truth space” with “knowledge.” The interdisciplinarian, although less broad than the generalist and less deep than the specialist, combines disciplines so as to sometimes take note of critical overlaps in the knowledge space. And, evidently, the team of interdisciplinarians, with such overlaps continually exposed and, hopefully, acknowledged and pursued will eventually cover the truth space with knowledge, perhaps quicker and with greater efficiency.

           

NOMOTHETIC EPISTEMOLOGY: SCAFFOLDING FOR UNDERSTANDING OR CONSTRAINT ON CREATIVITY?

NOMOTHETIC EPISTEMOLOGY: SCAFFOLDING FOR UNDERSTANDING OR CONSTRAINT ON CREATIVITY?

John Vandermeer

            In Wallerstein’s masterful “The Growth of Knowledge” he contrasts the “intent” of the various social sciences as on a scale ranging from nomothetic to ideographic. Depending on their history, particular social sciences locate their epistemological positions near to or far from Newton. The Newtonian revolution has been characterized, both adoringly and critically, as casting reality as a machine, thus providing a strong metaphor, known today as “mechanism,” that is thought to provide an understanding of that reality. Kant was the first to distinguish ways of knowing as falling into a dichotomous epistemology that later Kantians referred to as nomothetic versus ideographic, the natural sciences generally falling into the first category the social sciences into the second. Wallerstein takes issue with such a simple classification and notes that the continual tension between these two epistemologies has not been completely resolved in many of the social sciences. 

            Economics, for example, at the micro level seeks to establish a general theory on which all economic data can be rationalized, a nomothetic position, while at the macro level seeks to study the detail of particulars, real economic activities operating at some time and in some space, effectively an ideographic position. Sociology seeks general principles, theories that predict social phenomena much as the inverse square law predicts elliptical orbits, while anthropology elaborates the details of particular cultural formations. It is somewhat ironic that at their most basic level, sociology and anthropology seek to understand the same reality (human societies), yet their epistemologies have evolved along dramatically distinct pathways.

            A remarkably unusual field is history, idiosyncratically finding itself lodged neither in natural nor social sciences in most epistemological schema, but rather, somewhat incongruously categorized as a subject of the humanities. Nomothetic themes are certainly observable (e.g., Marx’s class struggle, Foucault’s discourse), but most practitioners are dramatically ideographic, struggling with the complicated socio/economic/politico/cultural structures that they use to construct their narratives.  And it is taken as a kind of badge of honor that those narratives are situated in the particularities of time and space and absolutely not to be squeezed into some nomothetic construct.

            There is little debate on this issue in the natural sciences, the assumption being that all are nomothetic. Research programs are normatively thought to be contained in some theoretical framework, and usually are so situated even when not explicitly stated as such.  Yet all would have to admit when viewing their field historically that it had its ideographic moments (precise positioning of the stars in early astronomy, collection of fossils in early evolutionary biology, random combinations of chemicals in alchemy, the precursor of chemistry).  The process of induction so readily acceptable at certain stages of the methodology of the natural sciences can be ideographic in practice if not ultimate intent. The process of developing theory and deducing predictions therefrom is, contrarily, clearly nomothetic.

            Ecology, as a natural science, is automatically assumed to have a nomothetic epistemology. Yet, most ecologists (at least those with direct connection to field work) acknowledge the complexity and contingency of the subject, frequently lamenting the fact that all ecological theories are spectacularly over simplified. Yet the underlying assumption is that there certainly must exist (in the same way the physicist assumes there certainly must exist) a machine that operates in precisely the same way as observed reality. That is, there is a “mechanism” that provides understanding of the reality, or at least that is the normal assumption. But does this nomothetic assumption accurately characterize what ecologists have been doing since their discipline was named by Haeckel in the late nineteenth century? And, more importantly, is the unquestioned assumption that ecological epistemology should be nomothetic a useful assumption? Can there be, should there be, an ideographic ecology? Would the current community of scholars self-identifying themselves as ecologists accept an ideographic epistemology as legitimate?  Or is their almost religious commitment to the Newtonian “machine” (their famous “mechanism”) a 100% effective firewall?

            I take my own prejudices as an example.  I believe (and the religious connotation is probably quite appropriate) that ecological communities are collections of coupled oscillators forced by periodic environmental conditions (Vandermeer, 2006; also see, especially, King and Shaffer, 1999), a hard-line nomothetic position (with about as much empirical support as string theory).  Yet my field work on the coffee agroecosystem emphasizes the contingent, the nonlinear, the stochastic, the particular, the temporary, the chaotic, in short, the ideographic storytelling which harkens to pre-Darwinian naturalists (e.g., Vandermeer et al., 2010; Perfecto and Vandermeer, 2014). Do I force everything I see into the coupled oscillator framework, thus creating a constraint on possible ways of envisioning what I see, or even preventing me to see what is before my eyes?  Or, do I utilize the coupled oscillator framework as a scaffolding to provide insight into my observations and interpretations of their deeper meanings?