book reviews
Society talks back
The time has come for science to accept that it must leave its cloistered cell.
Re-thinking Science: Knowledge
and the Public in
an Age of Uncertainty
by Helga Nowotny, Peter Scott
& Michael Gibbons
Polity Press: 2001. 278 pp. £50 (hbk),
£14.99 (pbk)
Jean-Jacques Salomon
The topic of science as a social institution
and its relationship with society has not been
covered in such an original fashion since the
first seminal papers by Robert Merton in the
1930s and Thomas Kuhn in the 1960s. This
book goes far beyond The New Production of
Knowledge (Sage, 1994), the earlier collec-
tion of essays by Michael Gibbons, Helga
Nowotny and others.
That book launched the debate on the
trend towards a new regime for the produc-
tion of knowledge and the practice of
research. The editors contrasted two regimes.
The first, known as mode 1, is the traditional
framework for scientific research and its
values, which will not disappear. It is deeply
entrenched in the universities, where access
to ‘mainstream’ scientific competence will
remain based on disciplinary training that is
largely insulated from the demands of society.
The second regime, mode 2, represents a
new research system, which brings together
competences and training from numerous
areas. It is multidisciplinary rather than
mono- or transdisciplinary, is carried out in
non-hierarchical organized groups, and not
primarily in institutions such as universities.
It is mainly concerned with applications and
broad societal problems (from health to envi-
ronment), and involves an enlarged circle of
participants — including the general public
through citizens’ and non-governmental
organizations — and has a widened defini-
tion of research. The key to mode-2 research
is the contextualization of science — the
development of knowledge within a particu-
lar social context — a process that undoubt-
edly started in the nineteenth century, in the
chemical and electrical industries in particu-
lar. The fact that today it involves a different
configuration of actors, institutions and
norms from the traditional mode means that
it is, in effect, a true discontinuity.
Rethinking Science revisits these themes
in the form of a single brilliant essay in social
theory. It extends the influential reflections
of American sociologist Daniel Bell on post-
modern social structures and their evolution
(see The Coming of Post-Industrial Society,
Heinemann, 1973; and The Cultural Contra-
dictions of Capitalism, Heinemann, 1976).
Present-day societies are characterized not
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Social pressures: the world of yesterday’s
scientists must yield to today’s priorities.
only by pluralism and diversity, but also by
volatility and transgressivity (in the sense
of individuals, organizations and cultures
acting beyond their traditional bound-
aries). The co-evolution of science and
society has led to increased complexity,
unpredictability and irregularity in both
spheres. Post-modern society has both a
new perception of uncertainty and new
means of dealing with risks.
The extent to which society adopts and
disseminates new products and practices —
from the virtual world of information tech-
nology to embryo manipulation — does not
only raise new issues of social and cultural
order. It also has ethical dimensions that can
catch lawyers, politicians and philosophers
unawares and undermine existing national,
cultural and institutional hierarchies. Break-
throughs and innovations require that
choices be made by society in a context of
uncertainty and risk. Nowotny et al.underline
how, in the 1970s, chaos theory provided
the wider public with a metaphor for how
relationships can be subject to ever-changing
patterns of unpredictability. I would have
thought, however, that public perception of
the social implications of uncertainty went
back even further, to quantum theory and
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which
were popularized after the Second World War.
In a mode-2 society, the conceptual and
organizational categories of the modern
world — state, market, culture, industry,
science, educational institutions — have
ceased to be recognizably distinct domains,
and old distinctions between the ‘internal’
and the ‘external’ are becoming problematic.
Such conditions allow society to talk back.
This reverse communication is so radically
transforming science, with its ‘private world’
© 2001 Macmillan Magazines Ltd
AP
PROF. PETER FOWLER/SPL
and its own practices, that even the knowl-
edge-based roots of science are being invaded
by the forces of contextualization. A very
small part remains that is still devoted to
context-free science and curiosity-driven
research. But the largest part of the enterprise
now consists of associations of private, public
and industrial laboratories, university re-
searchers and outsiders as well. This is such an
enlargement of science’s scope, and such an
enrichment of its potential in terms of appli-
cations, that most of science is no longer seen
as, nor even acts as, a discrete cultural domain.
This description raises many questions,
and will challenge the traditional scientist’s
view of his or her autonomous status and
independent practice. And why not? It also
tends to emphasize the uncoupling of the
factual knowledge gained by science from its
cognitive authority — a contentious point
that mode-1 champions will question at
length. In effect, this means that society will
not necessarily accept an innovation — say,
genetically modified food — just because
scientists show that it is safe, any more than
585
 book reviews
politicians will act because scientists show
JIM VARNEY/SPL
how climate change is a real threat to the
planet and mankind.
In the continuing battle between histori-
ans and sociologists of science, what is at
stake is the issue of the epistemological, or
knowledge-based, foundations of science. In
this regard, the authors make one of their
most radical statements: “The epistemologi-
cal core is either empty — or, alternatively
and perhaps more accurately, crowded with
other epistemologies.” The controversy may
not disappear, but the authors make their
point when they give examples — such as
Japan and the developing countries — of
where Western science, in order to function,
has to associate with and come to terms with
cultural heritages that define another kind of
epistemological approach.
Equally important will be the question of
how reliable is the knowledge produced under
mode 2, which is so radically different from
the peer system of the closely knit community
of mode 1. In Real Science: What it is and What
it Means (Cambridge University Press, 2000),
John Ziman considers that the traditional
academic ethos, in particular the commit-
ment to disinterestedness, is jeopardized, if
not alienated, by the closer links between
industry and academia. Socio-economic
power, he and others claim, threatens to be the
final authority. I would hardly disagree on this
point. Suffice to mention the uneasy relations
between the commercial genome-sequencing
company Celera and the international public
consortium for the Human Genome Project,
which are all about patents and the prospects
for new start-up companies in genetics and
involve intervention by bankers, politicians
and governments.
Yet Nowotny and her colleagues convinc-
ingly address such criticism: after all, reliable
knowledge has always been reliable only
within limits, and the shift away from weakly
contextualized to strongly contextualized
knowledge — for instance, from theoretical
physics to bioengineering — does not elimi-
nate the need for reliability. On the contrary,
it adds robustness, for research, while receiv-
ing input from society, is still being tested,
verified and validated. The authors intro-
duce a new (but old) notion: they propose
that the contextualization of knowledge is
taking place in a public arena that they call
the ‘agora’ — the public market-place of
classical Greece. To Nowotny et al., this is a
place where social knowledge and social
participation constrain scientists to recon-
struct their authority, to understand and
communicate better how science is per-
ceived and to determine how the public trust
in science — beyond market and political
pressures — can be maintained.
To these authors, the rethinking of
science is not “science re-thought”, but a
new conception — indeed, a new era — of
research practice, image and values. This
586
very exciting book, suffused with a deep
general culture and a precise knowledge of
the field, ends with 17 points to be debated
for the agora, or “how to live with mode-2
society”. It should stimulate the interest not
only of scientists or specialists in science
studies, but also of social scientists, intellec-
tuals and the lay public.
One issue the authors choose not to
develop is the influence of the scientific–
military–industrial complex in industrial-
ized countries, as if it had no impact on the
agora itself. It seems to me, however, that
the scientists involved in defence research,
who are acting both as “warriors” and as
“victims” — as the physicist Freeman Dyson
described himself — are the best illustration
of how mode 2 combines professional
behaviour, the excitement of research,
patriotic commitment, corruption, but
also scruples, ethical concerns and even
attention to public anxiety and criticism.
But this does not prevent the book from
being a splendid vision of a probable future
world, in which science and society will
increasingly overlap and be exposed to the
growing expertise and contesting forces of
the agora.
Jean-Jacques Salomon is honorary Professor of
Technology and Society at the Conservatoire
National des Arts et Métiers, 2 rue Conté,
75003 Paris, France.
The case of the
missing carpaccio
The Evolution Explosion: How
Humans Cause Rapid
Evolutionary Change
by Stephen R. Palumbi
W. W. Norton: 2001. 277 pp. $24.95
Jerry A. Coyne
Many students open The Origin of Species
expecting intellectual fireworks, but are
disappointed to find a soporific discussion
of sheep and pigeons. Yet Darwin’s tedious
opening chapter on artificial selection was a
stroke of rhetorical genius: by recounting
the familiar triumphs of animal and plant
breeders, he paved the way for his infinitely
more heretical evolutionary ideas. (This
strategy nearly misfired: one of the publ-
isher’s readers, noting that “everybody is
interested in pigeons”, recommended that
Darwin drop the messy stuff about evolution
and concentrate instead on birds.)
Although darwinism is now firmly estab-
lished in scientific and intellectual life, it is
far from entrenched in the public conscious-
ness. This is due partly to the prevalence of
creationism, but also to the notion — fami-
liar to anyone who teaches premedical
students — that evolution has nothing to
© 2001 Macmillan Magazines Ltd
■ do with everyday life. In The Evolution
Explosion, Stephen Palumbi, a biologist at
Harvard University, tries to dispel this view,
using Darwin’s own strategy of appealing to
the reader’s experience and hoping that
familiarity breeds consent.
Palumbi concentrates on cases in which
humans have produced rapid evolution in
other species by changing their environ-
ments: his examples include the evolution of
antibiotic resistance in bacteria, herbicide
resistance in plants, pesticide resistance in
insects, and changes in the growth rate of fish
caused by overfishing. Remarkably, many
people familiar with these phenomena have
failed to see that they demonstrate evolution
driven by selection. There is, for example, a
public misconception that ‘drug resistance’
involves not evolutionary change in patho-
genic bacteria, but some process whereby a
person becomes acclimated to antibiotics.
Palumbi writes enthusiastically and
clearly, and his stories are based on extensive
research documented in an appendix. His
chapter on AIDS is particularly useful,
describing in detail how HIV evolves to avoid
the double depredations of our immune sys-
tem and new generations of antiviral drugs.
Elsewhere, we learn that antibiotic resistance
in pathogenic bacteria has been caused both
by the overprescription of drugs (leading, for
example, to the resurgence of drug-resistant
tuberculosis) and by the use of antibiotics
that increase growth rates in farm animals
(producing chickens harbouring dangerous,
drug-resistant salmonellae and explaining
the absence of carpaccio di pollo in Italian
restaurants).
Sadly, our understanding of these evolu-
tionary responses seems to have contributed
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