Science and culture

I hope to have a good deal more to say about this anon, but I wanted to jot down a thought or two right now. Living through the past few years has been disturbing in many ways, but what has disturbed me the most has been the widespread rejection of scientific conclusions and expertise.

Based on some reading and thinking I've been doing of late, I realize that it's very important to put this in historical perspective. What we call science did not exist before the 17th Century. Galileo, Newton, and their successors created a novel enterprise. Yes, the ancient Greeks investigated nature and made some discoveries that have held up, but actually very few and mostly in the field of mathematics. Most of what Aristotle, Plato, and Archimedes believed either seems pretty much like gobbledygook today, or at least doesn't have much any relevance to what we call scientific understanding; or else it was total bunk. Yet people continued to believe this bunk, in many cases, for 2,000 years.

What happened during all that time is that people reasoned from religious dogma, metaphysical speculation, or in some cases political or cultural interests. But science demanded that all this be put aside and that the only meaningful truth claims were predictions that could be verified by observation of the real world. This implied certain demands. First, precise definition, measurement and counting of entities. This often required developing novel tools, such as telescopes, microscopes, and more recently high resolution cameras, electronic digital computers, and particle accelerators. It required devising methods of disproving hypotheses, and mathematics to go along with it, such as the randomized controlled trial or electromagnetic wave interference. It required an infrastructure of scientific publishing with standards of methodological quality and of inference, to build the base of scientific knowledge for future research to stand on. 

 

It required a system for training scientists in these requirements, including the requirement that they isolate their scientific investigations from their philosophical, political, or religious beliefs and from any other reason why they might favor one conclusion over another apart from the real world evidende they observed. The problem is that most people just don't work that way. Pretty much nobody did for 300,000 years of the existence of Homo sapiens, and then about 350 years ago a subset of people quite suddenly did. Without speculating for the time being about why that happened, I'll just say that it probably shouldn't be a surprise after all that much of the world has yet to go along with the program.  But they need to, because otherwise, we're totally screwed.