Our basic objective is to examine the scientific developments through history and how they affect human life and society. To meet that objective we will first develop tools to analyze the relationship between science and the increasingly complex decisions we have to make regarding the way we apply science for human welfare.
If we have learned anything at all about the uses of science in the second half of this century, it is that it has had an unmistakable influence on contemporary trends and outcomes. Science has helped to make the world smaller, spatially, and larger, numerically. It has multiplied our choices and scaled up our risks. Based on science we have put humans into space and opened a new arena for warfare. Science has illuminated human beginnings and shaken age-old postulates about human worth and destiny. Science has unlocked material abundance and laid new burdens on irreplaceable resources. It has expanded human potential and dramatized human limits. It has advanced clarity and magnified uncertainty. It has penetrated the deepest reaches of knowledge and held a world hostage on the edge of crisis.
We have no reason to suppose that science will abate its influence upon trends and outcomes and many reasons to expect that it will continue to shape society’s choices and dilemmas. What is unprofitable is to try to outguess the rate of advancing knowledge and the forms and effects of its application through technology. But it is a very different matter to recognize and array the emergent national and global issued confronting humans on this planet and to explore with care the contributions that science could make in managing such issues.
Each of us lives with a modern paradox; how can we continue to enjoy the benefits of science and avoid the threat of its misuse or abuse to endanger life and nature? Responses to this paradox have been many, but seldom anything but emotional and impotent in making any useful changes. Among the strongest feeling brought forth by our increasing awareness of the negative side effects of technology has been the feeling of alienation – that we in society have little or no control over the impacts of science and technology on those of us who are supposed to be their beneficiaries.
We owe much to science. In fact modern life would be unthinkable without it. Not just because of the “things” it offers but because of the density of people on the planet and our inability to feed, clothe or shelter ourselves without the power over nature we gain through science. But we are also becoming aware to the “dark side of the force.” The peril of nuclear holocaust, while drastically diminished in the last few years, still threatens everyone on Earth. However the destruction of the environment, the difficulty of disposing of the enormous waste produced each day, the abuse of technology for economic manipulation are almost as equally alarming.
What are our choices? Abandon science? Ignore the dangers and continue on, full speed ahead?
Regardless of the burdens of science, society is not likely to turn it off. We have already rejected that prescription proposed by the flower children of the 1960s. We would find survival too difficult, and we would miss too much of the future promises that science and technology offer.
Full speed ahead and ignore the consequences? Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer on a network radio talk-show who might advocate just this approach. He argues that notions of disappearance of rain forests, holes in the ozone layer, and nuclear waste are frauds on the public and designed to keep enterprising people from earning a reasonable profit. There are no problems with technology, he argues, and if there were, we could apply technology to fix them.
But the validity of this attitude is also belied by unpleasant surprises like Three Mile Island, Bhopal, and Chernobyl disasters. Are these the necessary consequences of technological advance? Are they really an insignificant price to pay for the benefits of science and technology? No, there is a third alternative which can help us resolve the paradox. We can continue to enjoy the benefits of technology but we must also identify the unwanted side effects and abuses, deliberate or unexpected. These unwanted results of technology must be controlled and that control will require making tradeoff decisions. Thus we have the third alternative: advance and control.
How we do this, of course, requires considerable analysis and thought. That analysis and thought is the substance of this course. Consider our increasing national reliance on science and technology to maintain national security. By focusing on the tradeoff decisions we will, however, identify some of the most important issues which we must learn to do better with in the future. According to Jonathan Schell, “Scientific progress may yet deliver us from many evils, but there are at least two evils that it cannot deliver us from: its own finding and our own destructive bent. This is a combination that we will have to learn to deal with by some other means.
So in this site we will look at those issues of science associated with human decision-making As Jonathan Schell says in Fate of the Earth, “If, given the world’s discouraging record of political achievement, a lasting political solution seems almost beyond human powers, it may give us confidence to remember that what challenges us is simply our extraordinary success in another field of activity — the scientific. We had only to learn to live politically in the world in which we already live scientifically.”
Evolution is Not Just a Theory
Evolution is a fact in that scientists know beyond reasonable doubt that it happened. The exact mechanism of evolution — that is, exactly how it happened — is still a theory.
Evolution is both a fact and a theory. Mainstream scientists consider it a fact that evolution occurred; how it occurred is still considered a theory. Stephen J. Gould describes this difference best:
“In the American vernacular, ‘theory’ often means ‘imperfect fact’ — part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus the power of the creationist argument: evolution is ‘only’ a theory and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is worse than a fact, and scientists can’t even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric): ‘Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science — that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was.’
“Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don’t go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s in this century, but apples didn’t suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin’s proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.
“Moreover, ‘fact’ doesn’t mean ‘absolute certainty’; there ain’t no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are NOT about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us falsely for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent’. I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
“Evolutionists have been very clear about this distinction of fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory – natural selection — to explain the mechanism of evolution.” (1)
Some nit-pickers might try to argue that nothing can ever be proven 100 percent in science, therefore there is no such thing as a fact, let alone evolution standing as a fact. H.J. Muller tackles this argument:
“The honest scientist, like the philosopher, will tell you that nothing whatever can be or has been proved with fully 100% certainty, not even that you or I exist, nor anyone except himself, since he might be dreaming the whole thing. Thus there is no sharp line between speculation, hypothesis, theory, principle, and fact, but only a difference along a sliding scale, in the degree of probability of the idea. When we say a thing is a fact, then, we only mean that its probability is an extremely high one: so high that we are not bothered by doubt about it and are ready to act accordingly. Now in this use of the term fact, the only proper one, evolution is a fact. For the evidence in favor of it is as voluminous, diverse, and convincing as in the case of any other well established fact of science concerning the existence of things that cannot be directly seen, such as atoms, neutrons, or solar gravitation…
“So enormous, ramifying, and consistent has the evidence for evolution become that if anyone could now disprove it, I should have my conception of the orderliness of the universe so shaken as to lead me to doubt even my own existence. If you like, then, I will grant you that in an absolute sense evolution is not a fact, or rather, that it is no more a fact than that you are hearing or reading these words.” (2)
Endnotes:
1. Stephen J. Gould, “Evolution as Fact and Theory,” Discover, May 1981. Both quotations have been taken from Larry Moran’s FAQ, “Evolution is a Fact and a Theory,” which addresses this issue in much greater detail.
2. H. J. Muller, “One Hundred Years Without Darwin Are Enough” School Science and Mathematics 59, (1959) pp. 304-305. Reprinted in Evolution versus Creationism, J. Peter Zetterberg, ed., (ORYX Press, Phoenix AZ 1983).
