Robin Dunbar - The Trouble With Science

Amongascienceteachersmoststrikingexperiencesareencounterswithbright,eagerstudentswhoareutterlyunabletounderstandsomeseeminglysimplescientificidea.

Alan Cromer: UncommonSense (1993)

In 1632 the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei published his DialogueConcerningtheTwoChiefWorldSystems. In doing so he inadvertently set in motion one of the greatest revolutions in the history of the human race. His achievement was to discredit, once and for all, the long- cherished view that the earth is the centre of a universe whose sole purpose is the sustaining of human life. The world, he told us, is not always as it seems. Overnight, we humans became bit-part players in a drama whose stage dwarfed us by its magnificence, in a plot for which we were at best a minor footnote. Galileo marked the end of a long haul up from the first glimmerings of a conscious thought in the mind of some prehistoric human ancestor a quarter of a million years ago to the triumphs of fully fledged modern science.

Although we have lived in the Age of Science ever since, we have remained ambivalent about Galileos vision of the world. For the last 350 years we have continued to hanker after the cosy certainties of our intellectual infancy when we were the focus of attention, the purpose for which God had created the universe, the centre around which this enormous edifice revolved. With Galileos book, we were thrust rudely backstage . Not surprisingly, perhaps, we have viewed the ever-rising tide of science with an ambivalence tinged with a growing sense of alienation, of no longer being in control of our destinies.

The trouble with science was born of these doubts, for Galileos legacy spawned divided loyalties. On the one hand, the proponents of science, enthused by its dramatic successes, rushed headlong down the sometimes bewildering maze of corridors opened up by the scientific revolution. On the other, the reaction against the hard-edged world of science found expression in a yearning for a more emotionally sensitive relationship with nature. Many of those who nailed their colours to the Romantic movements masthead in the nineteenth century, for example, did so in order to take a deliberate stand against the destruction of traditional values that science seemed to represent.

These concerns have not gone away. They underpinned the deep antipathy to science that prompted C. P. Snows forthright essay TheTwoCultures (science versus the arts) thirty-five years ago.

The reasons for the existence of the two cultures are many, deep, and complex, some rooted in social histories, some in personal histories, and some in the inner dynamic of the different kinds of mental activity themselves Western intellectuals have never tried, wanted, or been able to understand the industrial revolution, much less accept it. Intellectuals, in particular literary intellectuals, are natural Luddites.

(Snow, p.22)

While the debate that followed the publication of Snows Rede Lecture in 1959 clearly demonstrated that many within the humanities were highly supportive of science (and, indeed, endeavoured to apply the principles of science to the study of the arts), it did little to dispel Snows point that a significant body of opinion existed within the intellectual community that was profoundly anti-science. In a curious way, this view was highlighted by Snows observation that the word intellectual was, by common convention, never used to refer to scientists.

Snow, of course, overstated his case. And it would be no fairer now to insist that all who label themselves as either intellectuals or members of the humanities advocate anti-science views. Nevertheless, there is, I believe, growing evidence to suggest that this antipathy to science has, if anything, deepened as the humanities have perceived themselves to be increasingly beleaguered by the sciences. More disturbing still is the evidence that people, particularly those of school age, are being turned off science.

One of the most alarming manifestations of this ambivalence towards science emerges from the statistics on science education. In Britain, the number of sixteen-year-olds taking chemistry in the GCSE public examinations each year has plummeted by an astounding 70 per cent in just two years from approximately 205,000 in 1989 to just over 62,000 in 1991. Most of the leakage has been into less intense general science courses (though even this is less out of choice than because students must take at least one science subject).

A similar effect can be detected at university level. Many science courses at universities are struggling to fill their places, even with students whose qualifications would be considered too poor to warrant a second thought in the humanities. I ran a quick trawl through the current entry requirements for science and humanities courses listed in one of the handbooks for prospective applicants for university places in 1994. I selected eight science degree courses (Biochemistry, Biology, Chemistry, Computing, Engineering, Genetics, Geology and Physics) and eight humanities degree courses (Fine Art, Classics, English, History, Law, Modern Languages, Philosophy and Politics) at eight major British universities (Birmingham, Bristol, Durham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool , Manchester and University College London). The average minimum qualification at GCE A-level required from school-leavers for humanities courses was 22.8 points, with a range from 20 to 26. That is very nearly equivalent to B grade passes on three subjects at A-level (where an E represents the bare minimum pass). In contrast, the average minimum qualification was 18.6 points for the science courses (with a range from 16 to 24), the equivalent of three C-grade passes at A-level. Most British universities consider C-grade passes to be the minimum acceptable for a student to cope with an Honours degree, yet some courses are accepting less than this. The lowest requirements were in chemistry, genetics and engineering, three subjects of fundamental industrial significance in the modern world.