Science: Detached and Purely Rational?

Science is a wonderful thing.  Fascinating.  It’s made spectacular advances.

But it’s not practiced by hyper-rational demigods who’ve left human passions entirely behind.

See, for instance, the very human story told in Richard Panek, The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Mariner Books, 2011).

Nor does science exist on some transcendent plane, completely divorced from the society, fashions, and culture that surround it.

For cultural influences and intellectual fashions even in the rarefied world of pure mathematical logic, see William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization (Garden City. NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1979) ,3-117. 

Most people — and certainly most scientists — can easily understand this.

Some anti-religious polemicists, however, like to contrast their vision of victorious science, wafted by virtually disembodied reason from triumph to triumph and bringing light and health and prosperity to all humankind, with their conception of its polar opposite — childishly superstitious religion, hopelessly ignorant and fearful, fighting without any actual prospect of success against the advances of Truth, violent and oppressive and harmful.

Reality’s not actually quite like that:

“There is a popular view that scientific conferences are forums for intellectual exchange, where like-minded colleagues freely swap information, motivated only by a disinterested love of truth. . . .  For most workaday scientists the conference is fraught with danger and frustration, and is as aggressive an environment as any sales convention.  Advancement is at stake.  The long, long ladder of of academe has few promotions.  Any wrong-footedness is seized upon with glee by sharp-eyed rivals alert to the possibility that old so-and-so has peaked, and what a pity that he is no longer up to the ground-breaking work he did in 1976.  The rule is to acknowledge the seminal work of one of the handful of scientists sitting securely at the top of whatever tree it happens to be, who control the research grants, write the job references, and thus wield much power.  The ideal research paper demonstrates that an idea generated by one of these people can be applied in some new situation . . . the important thing is to get your name attached to an idea while it is still ‘hot.’  Even the conference cocktail party is a kind of desperate bazaar where the ambitious mill around trying to catch up with the latest thoughts.  Links are forged, troths given.

Richard Fortrey, Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1998), 247.