The Faber Book of Science Read Online Free

does everything else. But the warlike and destructive uses to which science has been put have nothing essentially to do with science: they are the responsibility of politics. Science’s apolitical nature is worth stressing, because it helps us to defuse the charge that it is amoral. It allows us to see science’s amorality not as a defect but as a condition of its strength and purity. Politics, of course, is inseparable from morality. It battens on morality, or on moralizing, like a tapeworm on the gut. Consequently science could not free itself from politics except by being amoral.
    Approaches to life that are, in moral terms, cold, clinical and inhuman, are sometimes labelled ‘scientific’, but this is a misunderstanding , arising from the simple-minded transference of scientific method to moral attitudes. Science endorses no such transference, and no moral attitudes, cold or otherwise. In different minds, the same set of scientific propositions can prompt quite contrary moral responses. Darwin’s theory of evolution, relating humans to apes, seemed – and seems – degrading to many humans. But Bruce Frederick Cummings accepts it with gusto:
    As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through geological time via sea-jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?
    Scientists themselves may have moral or immoral reasons for pursuing their research. But these leave no mark on their findings, which are right or wrong, to whatever degree, irrespective of their discoverer’s motives. David Bodanis may be right to trace a link between Pasteur’s loathing of mass humanity and his connection of disease with bacteria. The scientific credentials of the connection are, however, neither strengthened nor weakened by Pasteur’s misanthropy.
    The last few paragraphs may prompt readers to ask why they should bother to know about science if it cannot help to resolve moralor religious questions. The best answer is that science is, simply, what is known, and the only alternative to it is ignorance. Coleridge (whatever his opinion of Sir Isaac Newton’s soul) saw this clearly:
    The first man of science was he who looked into a thing, not to learn whether it could furnish him with food, or shelter, or weapons, or tools, or ornaments, or play-withs, but who sought to know it for the gratification of knowing.
    As science has grown, so, inevitably, has the ignorance of those who do not know about it. Within the mind of anyone educated exclusively in artistic and literary disciplines, the area of darkness has spread enormously during the later twentieth century, blotting out most of modern knowledge. A new species of educated but benighted being has come into existence – a creature unprecedented in the history of learning, where education has usually aimed to eradicate ignorance. The most highly gifted members of this new species have generally been the most forthright in regretting their deprivation. ‘Exclusion from the mode of thought which is habitually said to be the characteristic achievement of the modern age’ is, lamented the distinguished American literary critic Lionel Trilling, ‘bound to be experienced as a wound to our intellectual self-esteem.’
    More recently, however, ignorance of science has acquired a degree of political correctness. The Green movement, blaming science for global pollution, has contributed to this. So has feminism, which has demonized science as the embodiment of the male will-to-power. Even supposing these attacks were justified, however, they would not constitute reasons for relinquishing science, rather the reverse. Countering the pollution that political misdirection of science has caused can only be achieved by scientific means. Even at its