Candide

Little has changed, it seems, since Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science was published it in 2008. The Mail and The Express are still diligently working their way through the alphabet when it comes to foods they can label as causing and/or curing cancer. MRSA scandals are manufactured thicker and faster every year, hailing a resurgence of Crimean War-standard care.  And nutritionists continue to dine (and grow rich) on a healthy diet of our Britain’s body image insecurities.

Indeed Goldacre is the first to admit to the Bad Scientists that “You win” – there will always be a chunk of the population happy to feast on quack cures and dodgy diagnoses. On his blog he confesses to having lost thousands every year travelling up and down the country battling Bad Science. At the same time, ‘alternative’ practitioneers are raking it in thanks to the redoubtable efforts of your local Avon lady.

The fact is people will always distrust that which they cannot understand. Hence Goldacre is right to keep his aims modest – all he wants to do, through his blog, column and this book is help people understand how evidenced-based medicine works.

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When the geneticist J.S.B. Haldane challenged himself to explain what life is, his initial response was despair:

“I am not going to answer this question. In fact, I doubt if it will ever be possible to give a full answer, because we know what it feels like to be alive, just as we know what redness, or pain, or effort are. So we cannot describe them in terms of anything else.”

Haldane reasoned that it was impossible to fully define life scientifically because humanity has an intuitive knowledge of what things to call living – we can only mimic and give some validity to what we already know to be true. But does Haldane not gift our intuition far too much explanatory power?

Before we discuss what life is, we must examine the origin and veracity of this apparently ironclad intuition. Our intuition, I will argue, is the root of two misleading ideas about life: Vitalism and Essentialism. I want to see whether they can be replaced by a gene-centred view of life – life as the expression of information encoded in the genome. Then I move on to Erwin Schrödinger’s idea that life is special because it appears to defy the universe’s descent into disorder. I will attempt to bring the two ideas together by equating orderliness with information. Finally, I discuss James Lovelock’s Gaia Theory, which posits a living earth, explaining it in terms of Richard Dawkins’ Extended Phenotype. I end, however, with some cautionary words demonstrating why defining life is one of science and philosophy’s most difficult tasks.

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