We don't seem to grow during the good times. Unfortunately, it takes an adverse situation before we remove the pettiness of our lives and examine ourselves.
-Anonymous
The unexamined life is not worth living.
-Socrates
Chapter 1 A Passion For Science
by Lewis Wolpert (1) (2) (3) and Alison Richards Oxford University Press, 1988 Present attitudes towards science seem to indicate both ambivalence and polarization. While there is much interest and admiration for science, there is also a deep seated fear and hostility.1 Science is perceived as materialistic and dehumanizing, arrogant and dangerous. Its practitioners are a band of cold and unfeeling technicians wielding power without responsibility. Reductionism is suspect and uncomfortable, sabotaging all the mystery and wonder of life. The threats of nuclear war and the genetic manipulation of embryos loom large.
That scientific advancement may lead to good or evil ends is undeniable, but the roots of the present anti-science feeling are more tangled than this. In part they simply reflect the ideas of forbidden knowledge and retribution which are deeply embedded in western culture. More interestingly, many of the specific criticisms can be traced directly to the nineteenth century Romantic movement.2 Coleridge was clearly an early anti-reductionist and obsessed with the difference between the living whole organism and the idea of mechanical juxtaposition of parts: 'my mind feels as if it aches to behold and know something great, something one and indivisble'. We have, he argues 'purchased a few brilliant inventions at the loss of all communion with life and the spirit of nature'. It is the same theme which D. H. Lawrence takes up in the 20th century. 'The Universe is dead for us, and how is it to come alive again? "Knowledge" has killed the sun making it a ball of gas with spots; "knowledge" has killed the moon - it is a dead little earth fretted with extinct craters as with smallpox... The world of reason and science...this is the dry and sterile world the abstracted mind inhabits'. Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein is the epitome of the scientist unleashing forces he cannot control, and so powerful is the image that it has become part of of twentieth and twenty-first century popular culture, shorthand and emblem of the dangers of science.
All these images come not from scientists but from poets and writers. It was Mary Shelley who created the monster, not science. And it is not just an irony that this should be so. It suggests that at least a part of the antipathy stems from the difficulties non-scientists have in understanding science. Scientists themselves must take some of the blame for this. With notable exceptions they have tended to be reluctant to explain themselves to the public at large. But the problem may go deeper. There is some evidence that the scientific mode of thought is neither natural or comfortable. Experimental work by psychologists shows that people rely on a limited number of principles which reduce the complex task of assessing probabilities to simpler judgemental operations.3 In a very simple example, people expect that a sequence of random events such as tossing a coin is more likely to yield H-T-H-T-H-T than H-H-H-H-H-H, which is, in fact, not the case. The studies show that thinking statistically is not only difficult for many people, but an alienating activity. As Bertrand Russell pointed out,4 when it comes to assigning causes to events 'popular deduction depends on the emotional interest of the instances, not on the number'. Science demands one does deal with dry, statistical data, abandon basic beliefs, and perhaps accept that there is no simple linear cause. As the American literary critic Lionel Trilling observed,5 'This exclusion of most of us from the mode of thought which is habitually said to be the characteristic achievement of the modern age is bound to be experienced as a wound to our intellectual self-esteem.'
1. Wolpert, L. (1987). Science and Anti-science. J. Royal College of Physicians, 21 159-65.2. Willey, B. (1934) The seventeenth century background. Chatto & Windus, London.
3. Kelly, H. H. (1973) American Psychologist 28, 109.
4. Russell, B. (1927) Philosophy. Norton, New York.
5. Trilling, L. (1973) Mind in the Modern World. Viking Press, New York
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