[Pen-l] in defense of science

[Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

... Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that
people do to look for truth.

That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few
centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are
honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and
tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the
unabashedly pragmatic working principles that guide the buzzing,
testing, poking, probing, argumentative, gossiping, gadgety, joking,
dreaming and tendentious cloud of activity — the writer and biologist
Lewis Thomas once likened it to an anthill — that is slowly and
thoroughly penetrating every nook and cranny of the world.

Nobody appeared in a cloud of smoke and taught scientists these
virtues. This behavior simply evolved because it worked.

It requires no metaphysical commitment to a God or any conception of
human origin or nature to join in this game, just the hypothesis that
nature can be interrogated and that nature is the final arbiter. Jews,
Catholics, Muslims, atheists, Buddhists and Hindus have all been
working side by side building the Large Hadron Collider and its
detectors these last few years.

And indeed there is no leader, no grand plan, for this hive. It is in
many ways utopian anarchy, a virtual community that lives as much on
the Internet and in airport coffee shops as in any one place or time.
Or at least it is as utopian as any community largely dependent on
government and corporate financing can be.

Arguably science is the most successful human activity of all time.
Which is not to say that life within it is always utopian, as several
of my colleagues have pointed out in articles about pharmaceutical
industry payments to medical researchers.

But nobody was ever sent to prison for espousing the wrong value for
the Hubble constant. There is always room for more data to argue
over....

[New York TIMES, 1/27/09, Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy By
Dennis Overbye]

-- 
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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