How did science become so controversial?
- From: "Lance" <lachenicht@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 11 Dec 2005 03:31:52 -0800
NYT Magazine
December 11, 2005
The Way We Live Now
Madness About a Method
By JIM HOLT
Science is the distinctive achievement and crowning glory of the modern
age. So, at least, we are often told. It is also something that,
relatively speaking, the United States is pretty good at. By many
measures, this nation leads the world in scientific research, even if
our dominance has been slipping of late. Oddly, though, Americans on
the whole do not seem to care greatly for science.
Traditionalists, especially on the right, fear that science promotes
godless materialism. Its insistence on finding purely natural
explanations, they maintain, threatens to drain the world of moral
purpose and spiritual meaning. On the left, fashionable thinkers of
recent years have declared that science is an ideological prop of
global capitalism. In the guise of giving us an objective picture of
reality, they say, science encodes a hidden justification for the
dominance of one class (bourgeois), one race (white) and one sex
(male).
As for the great ruck of ordinary Americans, they are merely
uninterested in, or perhaps bored by, science. Only one in five has
bothered to take a physics course. Three out of four haven't heard that
the universe is expanding. Nearly half, according to a recent survey,
seem to believe that God created man in his present form within the
last 10,000 years. Less than 10 percent of adult Americans, it is
estimated, are in possession of basic scientific literacy.
This ignorance of science, flecked with outright hostility, is worth
pondering at a moment when three of the nation's most contentious
political issues - global warming, stem-cell research and the teaching
of intelligent design - are scientific in character. One reason that
has been cited for the dislike of science is that it is "irresistible"
- that its influence tends to overwhelm and drive out competing values
and authorities. But the Bush administration seems all too successful
in resisting it. Time after time, critics say, the administration has
manipulated and suppressed scientific findings for political reasons.
In rationalizing his opposition to the creation of new embryonic
stem-cell lines, for example, the president informed the public that
existing lines would be sufficient for medical purposes - a claim that
left researchers flabbergasted and proved to be wildly off the mark. On
the issue of climate change, American inaction on curbing greenhouse
gas emissions is defended on the grounds that there is still some
uncertainty about the magnitude and causes of global warming.
Administration allies have even maligned the motives of climate
researchers, arguing that their "alarmist" predictions are aimed at
ensuring a steady flow of scientific grant money - and conveniently
overlooking the fact that many global-warming skeptics are themselves
financed by the energy industry. (As Richard Posner has observed, the
industry with the keenest financial interest in getting climate change
right - the insurance industry - is taking global warming very
seriously, indeed.)
Are we to conclude that the Bush administration is anti-science? Not
necessarily. Its selective aversion to scientific evidence may be more
strategic than philosophical. Perhaps the administration accepts the
authority of science but has a scheme for reckoning costs and benefits
that it is not entirely candid about - a scheme in which, say, the next
quarter's corporate profits outweigh rising sea levels or third world
drought a half-century hence. When it comes to science, a cynic might
remark, there is little point in "speaking truth to power": power
already knows the truth.
In fairness, resistance to the authority of science can sometimes be
detected even within the scientific community, and in its more
progressive precincts, no less. Take the issue of race. One of the most
durable sources of evil in the world has been the idea that humans are
divided into races and that some races are naturally superior to
others. So it was morally exhilarating to discover, with the rise of
modern genetics, that racial differences are biologically trifling -
merely "skin deep," in the popular phrase. For the last three decades,
the scientific consensus has been that "race" is merely a social
construct, since genetic variation among individuals of the same race
is far greater than the variation between races. Recently, however, a
fallacy in that reasoning - a rather subtle one - has been identified
by the Cambridge University statistician A.W.F. Edwards. The concept of
race may not be biologically meaningless after all; it might even have
some practical use in deciding on medical treatments, at least until
more complete individual genomic information becomes available. Yet in
the interests of humane values, many scientists are reluctant to make
even minor adjustments to the old orthodoxy. "One of the more painful
spectacles of modern science," the developmental biologist Armand Marie
Leroi has observed, "is that of human geneticists piously disavowing
the existence of races even as they investigate the genetic
relationships between 'ethnic groups."'
For nonscientists, it may be the sheer difficulty of science - its
remoteness from any "common sense" view of the world - that makes it
seem alien and dangerous. Nothing could be more contrary to intuition
than quantum mechanics, in which everyday categories of cause and
effect break down completely; or the theory of the Big Bang, according
to which the universe somehow leapt into existence from a pointlike
singularity.
Science is also a rival to other worldviews that most people find more
congenial. In hopes of allaying the sense of rivalry, it is often said
that science and religious faith are compatible, since the former deals
with "how" questions, the latter with "why" questions. As an empirical
matter, however, that does not seem to be true. On the whole, around 9
in 10 Americans say they believe in a personal God. When scientists are
surveyed, that figure falls to 4 in 10. Among the scientific elite -
members of the National Academy of Sciences - fewer than 1 in 10 say
they believe in God, with the biologists in particular professing
agnosticism or atheism at a rate of 95 percent.
Vaclav Havel once observed, in a transport of anti-science afflatus,
that "Modern science. . .abolishes as mere fiction the innermost
foundations of our natural world: it kills God and takes his place on
the vacant throne, so henceforth it would be science that would hold
the order of being in its hand as its sole legitimate guardian and so
be the legitimate arbiter of all relevant truth." So what are the
options for someone who is determined to resist this usurping arbiter?
One of them is to insist that science can't possibly tell the whole
story: by limiting itself to "natural" explanations, it blinds itself
to the supernatural order that gives meaning to the universe. The
problem is that no one has ever shown how supernatural causes can be
accommodated by the scientific method, which relies on testability to
produce consensus.
That suggests a second option. You might concede that science is a path
to the truth but deny that it is the path. Here, though, you will find
it difficult to locate much opposition, even among scientists. No one
these days wants to be guilty of "scientism," the belief that science
is a uniquely privileged form of knowledge and that everything else is
at best poetry, at worst nonsense. Yet if science is merely one among
many paths, it is a path that is inherently expansionist, absorbing
others whenever it draws near. Is there a believer today who does not
feel slightly threatened by current research into how the wiring of our
brains might have evolved in a way that encourages faith in deities?
This leaves a still more radical option. You might deny that science is
a path to truth at all. That is not quite so crazy as it sounds. Among
philosophers of science, there is a perfectly respectable (if minority)
view called "instrumentalism." According to this view, scientific
theories do not yield a true picture of a mind-independent reality;
they are merely useful tools that enable us to predict our experience
and have a measure of control over it. History provides some support
for instrumentalism. Scientific progress, it has been observed, takes
place by funerals. Since past scientific theories have invariably
proved false - phlogiston, anyone? - we can expect the same of our
present and future theories. That does not take away from their utility
as engines for turning out cures and weapons and gadgets, or at their
most picturesque, as abstract stories to keep us in awe before the
cosmos.
The problem with this line of thought is that it makes the success of
science something of a miracle. How, asks the Oxford zoologist Richard
Dawkins, do we account for science's "spectacular ability to make
matter and energy jump through hoops on command" if not by assuming
that the world, deep down, is more or less the way science says it is?
Only a philosopher, and perhaps an oversubtle one, would advocate
acting on science without believing it is really true. But to believe
it and yet refuse to act on it - now, that takes a politician.
Jim Holt is a frequent contributor to the magazine.
.
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