Foundations of science

[davidtaus]

I had an interesting conversation with a colleague at the laboratory where I work. She is an accomplished scientist who is from mainland China but has spent much of the last decade in the UK. I asked her about returning to China to do science given the economic growth there.

She replied that there is a big problem with science in China and it is not lack of money. She said there is a real problem with lack of integrity and this undermines the scientific process; fraud and plagiarism are commonplace as scientists get paid for producing publications. She explained that many of her colleagues in China did not feel guilty about 'playing the system'.

I think integrity is a key foundation stone of good science and hence it is logical that an ethical system would need to underlie it. Perhaps this is part of the reason for the rise of science in the West?

I don't know your thoughts on this and I suspect you have covered this somewhere in your blog.

[James Hannam]

David,

Welcome to the board and thank you for joining up. Sorry you had some trouble registering.

The point you raise is very interesting and may well be highly relevant. I recall the scandal in Korea over fake cloning.

As a historian though, the subject is potentially toxic. One would need to be extremely careful before making points about a lack of integrity in non-western science. These sorts of questions can realistically only be raised by people like your colleague who are from the culture in question.

I will bear this in mind, though, because it sounds similar to the problems scientists had under Communism in Russia. A recent book by Terence Keeley called Sex, Science and Profit suggests that Governments are naturally very bad at promoting science. Since most scientists seem to be left of centre, this did not go down too well.

I hope you will stick around.

Best wishes

James

[humphreyclarke]

Hi David

Interesting question. It does seem there are major problems in Chinese science with fraud and downright forgery; a good example being the recent Melamine poisoning scandal. China evaluates research on the number of publications generated and this discourages long-term or risky work and encourages plagiarism. Faking of data and lying about academic achievements is rife. They do need to get their house in order and change the academic culture. Again it doesn’t tell you so much about the underlying values, more the meddling incompetence of the Chinese system of government.

For more I recommend the Chinese Biochemist Fang Zhouzi's blog.

fangzhouzi-xys.blogspot.com/

also:

www.scidev.net/en/editorials/china-must-address-the-roots-of-scientific-fraud.html

Historically the superiority of China was of a practical and technological level rather than theoretical. The fields that went on to make up the core of modern science - physics, astronomy, optics and mathematics – were severely lacking and China began to lag behind the West and the Islamic world from about the 11th century.

The intriguing question is, why didn’t China import learning from the west and develop it when it had the chance?. When innovations were encountered they were either put aside altogether or only adopted after the lapse of many centuries. The answer is probably that in China there is knowledge of nature but no cumulative enterprise that looks anything like modern science; the intellectual environment simply wasn’t allowed to emerge. When Joseph Needham asked the question of why this was the case his answer was that the Chinese did not have a world-view which encouraged the idea of the rationality of God that we have in the medieval European culture, coupled with the idea of God as law-giver. You do have a clear conception of natural order but it is closely bound to the ruling elite of China and the harmony of human society. This makes it hard to establish autonomous jurisdictions. The educational system was tightly controlled and its curriculum restricted to moral and literary learning (political indoctrination). It did not encourage thinkers who could threaten the status quo and Confucianism had a tendency to suppress debate. By contrast, in medieval Europe you begin to see autonomy in its universities and a curriculum which incorporates natural philosophy as a sacred duty.

Of course, you could put a different spin on it and say as Needham did that the Europeans ended up suffering from:

a schizophrenia of the soul, oscillating for ever unhappily between the heavenly host on one side and the "atoms and the void" on the other; while the Chinese, wise before their time, worked out an organic theory of the universe which included Nature and man, church and the state, and all things past, present, and to come.

If the Chinese get their act together, the question of why they didn’t originate science will become a lot less important.