Debates over the place of science in the American democracy turned in large part on the meanings invested in the terms “science” and “democracy” by the participants. As I have discussed in the preceding chapters, Allport's and the Murphys' definitions of science contained assumptions that placed their views at odds with those of their colleagues. So, too, with their understandings of democracy: if Allport and the Murphys agreed with many of their contemporaries as to what the social, political, and economic facts of democratic life were, their interpretation of what these facts signified could diverge sharply. This was especially true in regard to whether or not the general public could be trusted with the responsibilities required of a democratic citizenry. From within the radically progressive political framework of these scientists' views, the idea of “social control” meant the regulation of economic elites by the public; for many of their peers, the idea of “social control” meant the regulation of an irrational public by administrative elites.

At issue was the question of how far the nation had progressed in its quest to become a truly democratic polity. Activists such as Allport and the Murphys belonged among those who believed that American democracy was to be defined as an aspiration yet to be reached as opposed to a goal that had already been achieved.

How to confront the complexity of the natural and the social worlds was one of the most highly charged questions that the generation of Allport and the Murphys faced during the 1930s. Many of their colleagues sought to manage this complexity by reducing the subject matter they studied to the simplest terms possible, whether by searching for clues to the nature of human life in the behavior of rats or pigeons or microscopic worms, or by restricting the form of scientific questions to those that could be answered in the language of statistical regularity. But others, Allport and the Murphys among them, argued for the intellectual, moral, and political benefits of working one's way through complexity, rather than seeking to make it disappear.

As their efforts took shape over the course of the 1930s, these three psychologists produced a diverse body of work from within social and personality psychology that challenged dimensions of scientific life that the discipline's arbiters were striving to present as matters of settled fact. When Lois Barclay Murphy labeled her own work an “exploratory study,” or Allport declared that an aspect of his research represented “a declaration of independence,” or Gardner Murphy spoke of the need to “shut our eyes and jump as far as the structure of the human mind permits,” they were each making plain that they considered the rules of the game to be open to challenge.

By pressing the scientific claims of individuality, Allport and the Murphys signaled their dissatisfaction with the current state of scientific knowledge-seeking in two ways. The study of individuality was first of all justified as an end in itself, in order to right the lop-sided view of nature that they believed scientists had produced by ignoring particulars in favor of universals. But promoting the study of that which is “individual” as a scientific priority was more than a move to supplement already dominant views, for talk of individuality simultaneously represented other challenges as well: to intellectual practices that minimized diversity, broke apart wholes, feared the taint of the subjective, and banished qualities in favor of quantities. As a symbolic rallying point for those who wished to dissent from the status quo in the sciences, a commitment to foregrounding individuality signified a resistance to perpetuating images of scientific method held dear by science's elite.

The concept of universality possesses a status in the Western intellectual tradition that the idea of particularity lacks. The practices and rhetoric of the sciences incorporate a distaste for the investigation of singularities as singularities, subscribing to the belief that such a path offers little hope of obtaining secure and certain knowledge. As philosopher Jorge Gracia remarks, unlike scholarly attention to “universals,” “discussions of the correlative notion of individuality are not abundant and, by comparison with the number and depth of treatments on universals, may even be considered scarce.”

During the 1930s, the United States underwent one of its greatest periods of economic, social, and political crisis, as vocal groups of Americans engaged in intense debate over truths that no longer appeared to be self-evident.

By the close of the 1930s, arbiters of the status quo had begun to mount worried defenses of scientific method that sought to rebut what they saw as the pernicious effect of oppositional sensibilities such as those expressed by Allport and the Murphys. Defenders of right thinking such as psychologist Arthur Bills believed that the ground that had been “won by the efforts of Galileo, Bacon, Newton and others” was imperiled by “newer psychological systems which are clamoring for scientific status with all the vigor and scorn for tradition that characterize youthful movements.” C. C. Pratt, in his 1939 text, The Logic of Modern Psychology, defended the reigning orthodoxy, stating that science was “too serious and well established a game to be entered into lightly or altered, unless it can be shown either that a proposed alteration does not upset the essential features of play, or that the new game is better than the old one.” This is why those who “played” science had “a right to insist that it be played according to rule.”

In their concern with characterizing individuality and social context during the 1930s, Allport and the Murphys shared much with the techniques and goals of naturalists. Practices and values inherent in aspects of the American natural history tradition legitimated dissent from the mechanistic and reductionist values promoted by neobehaviorists, and also offered a scientific framework that carried powerful associations to such politically charged art forms in the 1930s as documentary film and literature. In drawing on the authority of natural history, and in appropriating some of its key constructs and practices, Allport and the Murphys were able to identify conditions under which it would be possible to display and investigate aspects of scientific “reality” that their orthodox colleagues asserted were incapable of “scientific” treatment.

In the previous chapter we made an important distinction between universal and parochial features in evolution, and argued in passing that intelligence is a universal evolutionary strategy, likely to be found wherever life has taken sufficient hold. In this chapter we refine that theme by examining the evolution of intelligence on our own Earth.

You will have noticed that in the game tree of figure 14 there is a gap between top-down and bottom-up. How big is it?

It contains virtually the whole of the game tree.

There is a similar gap between what is accessible to top-down and bottom-up reductionist science. In this chapter we give this gap a name: Ant Country. The origins of the name lie in a simple mathematical system, Langton's ant, which we shortly introduce. We shall employ Langton's ant as a metaphor to open up the nature of simplicity, complexity, and the relationship between them. Langton's ant itself is an instance of ‘simplexity’, the tendency of a single, simple system of rules to generate highly complex behaviour, but it also leads to a more subtle concept, which in Collapse we called ‘complicity’.

‘It would be very singular,’ wrote Voltaire, ‘that all nature, all the planets, should obey eternal laws, and that there should be a little animal, five feet high, who, in contempt of these laws, could act as he pleased, solely according to his caprice.’ It is an eloquent statement of the problem of free will, and it is the place where our figments run slap up against reality, like the proverbial irresistible force meeting the immovable object. We have a distinct, overwhelming impression that we have a free choice concerning the actions that we take: free, that is, subject to the evident constraints of physical law. We cannot choose to float into the air, for example. Yet there is absolutely nothing in the inorganic world that possesses that kind of freedom.

To many people, science is seen as a source of certainty, a box full of answers that can be trotted out when dealing with life's many questions. Most working scientists, however, see their subject in a very different light: as a method for navigating effectively in an uncertain world. Whatever science may be, it is not just a matter of assembling ‘the facts’.

We have already offered you two versions of what happened during the evolution of life on Earth. We described the origins of life, the endless aeons when bacteria - many of them photosynthetic and emitting oxygen - were the dominant life-form, the development of eukaryote cells with nuclei, of multi-celled organisms including complex animals with brains, and the appearance of organisms that could learn.

The Ringmaster of the Zarathustran cruise-vessel Watcher-of-Moons lay back and tried to relax in a sensuous swaddle of preening-curd, only his eyes and beak projecting from the glutinous layers, giggling slightly whenever one of the nanotribbles that roamed the curd in search of tiny parasites and dirt particles encountered a sensitive patch of skin around the base of his funny-feathers.

His mind was troubled. It had been a strange voyage. Those extelligent ape-creatures with their overprivileged solo minds and their extraordinarily unoctimistic view of how the world worked were really disturbing. Always obsessed with the insides of things – no doubt a resurgence of their child-aspect in later life, the monkey curiosity that tried to find out how things worked by breaking them and seeing what they no longer did.

He expanded his neck-ruff, the Zarathustran equivalent of a sigh. The problem with preening-curd is that once you have opened a tuble you have to wallow for a full octad, and after a time preenwallow gets boring. Especially to a Ringmaster, who spends so much time making sense out of what everybody else is doing …. And this Ringmaster was subject to troubled thoughts, things he was having difficulty rationalising. He recalled that not an octuple of octoons away from him was an almost inexhaustible source of alien extelligence, refreshing even if naive. And once Hewer-of-wood had got the catalytic converter working again, Watcher-of-Moons would resume its voyage … For a moment he wondered which catalyst it was failing to convert, but he would only be able to explain that to everybody when Destroyer-of-facts had found out.