The Science of Discworld II Read Online Free PDF Page B

narrativium does crazy things, like putting machines on the Moon. Indeed, if carbon did not (yet) exist, then any narrativium-based lifeform could find some way to manufacture it, by telling itself a really gripping story about the need for carbon. So causality in this universe is irredeemably weird. Physicists like to put it all down to the fundamental constants, but it’s more likely an example of Murphy’s law.
    But that’s another story.
    The more we think about narrative in human affairs, the more we see that our world revolves around the power of story. We build our minds by telling stories. Newspapers select news according to its value as a story, not according to how intrinsically important it is. ‘England loses cricket match to Australia’ is a story (though not a very surprising one) and it goes on the front page. ‘Doctors think that they may have improved the diagnosis of liver disease by 1 per cent’ is not a story, even though most science works like that (and in years to come, depending on the state of your liver, you might think it’s a rather more important story than a cricket match).
    â€˜Scientist claims cure for cancer’ is a story, though, even if the supposed cure is nonsense. So are ‘spiritualist medium claims a cure for cancer’, and ‘Secret code predictions hidden in the Bible’, more’s the pity.
    As we write, there is a furore over a small group of people who are proposing to clone a human being. It’s a major story, but very few newspapers are reporting the most likely result of this attempt, which will be abject failure. It took 277 failures, many rather nasty, before Dolly the Sheep was cloned, and she has now been found to have serious genetic defects, poor lamb.
    Trying to clone a human may indeed be unethical, but that’s not the best reason for objecting to this misguided and foolish attempt. The best reason is that it won’t work, because nobody yet knows how to overcome numerous technical obstacles; moreover, if by some stroke of (mis)fortune it did happen to work, any child produced would have serious defects. Producing such a child, now that is unethical.
    Making ‘carbon copies’ of human beings, which is the usual basis of the newspapers’ story about the ethics, is beside the point. That’s not what cloning does, anyway. Dolly the Sheep was not genetically identical to her mother, though she came close. Even if she had been, she would still have been a different sheep, moulded by different experiences. For that matter, the same would be true even if she was genetically identical to her mother. For the same reason, cloning a dead child will not bring that child back to life. Much of the media discussion of the ethics of cloning, like much of the public understanding of science, is vaguely stirred through with science fiction. In this arena,as in so many, the power of the story outweighs any questions about the real factual basis.
    Human beings do not just tell stories, or just listen to them. They are more like Granny Weatherwax, who is aware of the power of story on Discworld, and refuses to be trapped by the story’s narrativium. Instead, she uses the power of story to mould events according to her own wishes. Roundworld priests, politicians, scientists, teachers and journalists have learned to use the power of story to get their messages across to the public, and to manipulate or persuade people to behave in particular ways. The ‘scientific method’ is a defence mechanism against that kind of manipulation. It tells you not to believe things because you want them to be true. The proper scientific response to any new discovery or theory, especially your own, is to look for ways to disprove it. That is, to try to find a different story that explains the same things.
    The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (‘wise man’). In any case it’s