Science, Identity and People

The great pioneer of scientific education, Charles Darwin’s friend T.H. Huxley, said in a speech in Aberdeen in 1874: ‘in cultivating science as an essential ingredient in education, we are laying an admirable foundation for ethical and philosophical culture’. Scientific education is now mostly thought of as technical, or as a means to economic development. While not denying the vast improvement in human material welfare that science continues to bring about, ought we also to rediscover science’s contribution to our identity and our civic life?

It is logically impossible to create scientific knowledge of how people feel, think and act socially. Claims to have done so always misunderstand what science is and how it proceeds. Life cannot be lived ‘scientifically’. Paradoxically, this implies that the legacy of the scientific revolution has been far more dramatic than has usually been understood. However, it also makes it hard to show that modern societies and their institutions are systematically rational. Contrasts with an unenlightened past riddled by ritual, superstition, faith and credulity, may be grossly exaggerated!