Science as narrative

I’ve spent a lot of time recently wondering why so many people just don’t get science. As a result, I’ve stopped thinking of science as a logically separate category of activity to other stuff we do. Science is a big multistranded narrative. Scientific laws are narratives. This is not to say that scientific narratives are equivalent to any old narrative, it’s just to say that narratives are how humans understand the world, and how we communicate our understanding: through these sequences of associations. What makes science science, and homeopathy or the Illiad not science, is simply the practice of testing the narratives against reality. Narratives that do not fit reality are discarded, or honed into a new version that works

From an evolutionary viewpoint, becoming narrative-capable represents a massive leap for a species. Individual actions need no longer be generated by the immediate local observed environment, or by habit, but can be driven by retained narratives. Collecting good narratives – that is, narratives that improve your decisions – is obviously adaptive.
A “good” narrative doesn’t have to be true – and in the Pleistocene it probably typically wasn’t – it just has to enable a better decision than you would have made without it. So we are beguiled by the story-tellers, driven to listen and collect narratives. Narratives can also create power for their power for their tellers: if I tell a believable story about why I am king, it secures my position. Therein lies our fall, we are seduced by the believable story and driven to make up stuff to control others.

Science provides a radical antidote to our weakness for seductive tales. No matter how beguiling the story, it must pass any test thrown at it to be retained. And for as long as it passes, it is Science.