Science Goes Nuts.

Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, by Alan D. Sokal and Jean Bricmont (Picador, 300 pp., $23)

Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction?, by Michael Ruse (Harvard, 320 pp., $27.50)

Like "culture wars," "science wars" is an expression first heard in the academy. They are both food-fights that began among the professoriate, fights that, for all their frequent inanity, have consequences, because ideas have consequences. We have here two recent entries into the science wars.

A few years ago, scientists took notice of a new kind of anti-science. It comes not from the usual precincts-medical quackery, New Age rapture, astrological pseudoscience, literalist creationism-but from the intelligentsia, and in many flavors. It is often associated with the remains of the New Left. It flourishes in humanities and social sciences, but also in "studies" programs where the curriculum is an ideological boot-camp.

Theoretical physicist Sokal is well known for an epic hoax he perpetrated on the practitioners of anti-science. In 1996, a trendy journal of cultural studies, Social Text, published an article by him, ostensibly on politics and quantum gravity, but in fact-unremarked by the editors- intended as a farrago of political cant and scientific nonsense. Sokal was testing a hypothesis: that the editorial "collective" at Social Text, although they pontificate on science, in reality a) know little about it, b) don't care about how ignorant they are, and c) adore politically correct sentiments. The hypothesis was sustained. Sokal revealed the hoax and all hell broke loose. The postmodernists quoted in the article were stars of French high culture, whose teachings had colonized American and British universities.

Sokal and physicist Jean Bricmont wanted to expand on a point made by the original hoax: that although postmodernist luminaries refer heavily to mathematics and physics, what they say is gibberish. Toward this end, they wrote Impostures Intellectuelles, with long passages from Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Paul Virilio. In such vehicles as Le Monde, the book evoked abuse, including the charge that Sokal (a Francophile) and Bricmont (a Francophone) are Francophobes. Now rewritten in English, the book, Fashionable Nonsense is a gambol, widely reviewed. And the distribution of opinion is spectacularly bimodal.

A particularly sneering review appeared in the London Review of Books, by John Sturrock, a prince of cultural studies. He likens the Sokal and Bricmont effort to a "catchpenny campaign in defense of our mental virginity." His argument can be crystallized in a phrase familiar from less elevated quarters: They just don't get it.

But Sokal and Bricmont do get it. The exposition here is marred only by their anxiety to remain men of the Left, which leads to such banalities as "the harshest form of 'free market' capitalism seems to have become the implacable reality for the foreseeable future." Otherwise the authors' goal is limited and achieved. They are scientists who know philosophy, and are well read in cultural studies. Their sampling of science-palaver is comprehensive. Fashionable Nonsense is a rewarding and ap- palling read.

Professor Ruse, respected for contributions to philosophy and the history of science (especially evolution), comes on a Jimmy Carter mission of peace to the belligerents. He maintains that the hostilities all focus on an improperly phrased question. That question is: Which values drive scientific knowledge? Are they epistemic values (objectivity, reproducibility, predictive strength, empirical fruitfulness)? Or cultural values (religion, belief in progress, egalitarianism, militarism)? "Scientists" involved in the culture wars say epistemic; "sociologists" say cultural. Ruse detects a false dilemma.

It can be shown, he argues, that epistemic values inform all science that survives; and that fact grows clearer as a science matures. But he says it can also be shown that cultural values are present even in mature science, that the cultural values of important scientists can be seen in the work they choose to do.

Ruse fills out his argument with capsule biographies of ten contributors to evolutionary science, starting with Erasmus Darwin in the 18th century and ending with two currently working evolutionists, Geoffrey Parker and Jack Sepkoski. The "mystery of mysteries" referred to in the title is the origin of organic matter. In between we read about Charles Darwin, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Richard Dawkins, S. J. Gould, Richard Lewontin, and E. O. Wilson.

Although Ruse shows, in elegant vignettes, that the role of "epistemic values" in science has increased over the past two centuries, he has a harder time with "cultural values." To identify, as he does, belief in progress as a cultural value is already a stretch; to suggest as he does that such a belief actually affects the content of contemporary evolutionary biology is simply unjustified. To attribute to E. O. Wilson affection for religion and "militarism," as Ruse does because Wilson grew up in the South, is grasping at straws. That Lewontin is a Jew does not significantly illuminate his views of Nazism, the brilliance of his research in population genetics, or his implacable Marxism. Where Lewontin's politics become evident in his writing about science, it is irrelevant, or bad science.

In short, Ruse fails as a peacemaker. But bella detesta matribus-mothers hate war-and we must at the least listen respectfully to people who cry out in behalf of peace. That's why it's fine to be able to report that in Mystery of Mysteries we have a fine presentation of the Highlights of Evolutionary Thought, which casts light on Fashionable Nonsense and vice- versa.

Mr. Gross is university professor of life sciences, emeritus, of the University of Virginia, and co-author with Norman Levitt of Higher Superstition (Johns Hopkins).