Break the Science Barrier: Why Science Matters
Break the Science Barrier is a TV documentary that I presented on Channel 4 in 1996. It argues for the importance, for society, of scientific ways of thinking. In it, I interviewed David Attenborough, Alec Jeffreys, who discovered DNA fingerprinting, and Douglas Adams, who gave a wonderful impromptu eulogy for science. I also interviewed a man who was wrongly convicted of murder because none of the lawyers, on either side, knew anything about science. The program ends on a more positive note – what I later came to call Science in the Soul.
Fascinating show. It’s wonderful to see science being championed given that we now seem to be mired in a kind of new Dark Age. Modern beliefs such as the overvaluing of “lived experience” and other privileging of subjectivity e.g. if someone is offended, that is positive proof that the other party IS offensive, no need for a presumption of innocence etc., and insane ideas such as the notion that wanting to be a woman and saying you are one magically starts a process of transubstantiation whereby a man can become a woman.
How did we get here? The rot started to set in with Foucault. And the modern Left has been only to happy to embrace pure nonsense.
As a general rule, the science community as a whole is usually not capable of a "scientific way of thinking". To me, that phrase would mean something like "the application of reason to the advancement of human welfare".
The science community is clinging blindly to an outdated, simplistic and increasingly dangerous 19th century style "more is better" relationship with knowledge. This relationship was entirely rational in the long era of knowledge scarcity. The science community seems incapable of grasping that we no longer live in the old knowledge scarcity era, but in a radically different new era characterized by knowledge exploding in every direction at an ever accelerating rate. We are failing to adapt to a changing environment, and I'm sure Dr. Dawkins could tell us how that usually works out.
The "more is better" relationship with knowledge that lies at the heart of the scientific enterprise and the modern world is built upon a typically unexamined faith based assumption that human beings can successfully manage whatever powers that may emerge from scientific discovery.
That assumption was true IN THE PAST when the powers being discovered were relatively modest, and not capable of bringing down the system as a whole. That past era ended on August 6, 1945 at 8:15am over Hiroshima Japan. Instead of learning from that event, the science community is leading us ever faster in to ever deeper waters.
Nuclear weapons - no idea how to make them safe
Genetic engineering - no idea how to make it safe
Artificial intelligence - no idea how to make it safe
And the 21st century is still young, and more such vast powers which we also won't know how to make safe are surely coming. As the number and scale of such vast powers continues to grow, the room for error is being steadily erased, and the odds are increasingly against us. This is where the science community is leading us, not to utopia, but disaster.
Unless we are to assume that human beings are gods, a theory Dr. Dawkins is unlikely to endorse, there is some limit to humanity's ability to safely manage vast powers. Whatever that limit is, we are racing towards it an an ever accelerating pace. And due to the vast scale of the powers being uncovered by the science community, when we reach that limit of human ability the modern world we inhabit may be over too quickly for us to respond.
If this sounds like wild alarmist speculation, please keep in mind that we currently have thousands of massive hair trigger hydrogen bombs aimed at our heads, and they are patiently waiting in their silos for that one bad day which can bring everything we care about to a quick end. It can all be over in a hour. And we know that. But choose to ignore threat. And that is an act of insanity which is perhaps the best argument for slowing down the development of more vast powers.
I don't doubt that Dr. Dawkins is sincere in his beliefs. But like most of the scientific community, he is not really a person of reason, but an ideologist, and he has those two things confused. Today's science community is clinging to a "more is better" relationship with knowledge ideology in much the same blind faith manner that religious authority in previous centuries clung to the divinity of Jesus ideology.
What we should be learning is how to take control of the knowledge explosion. And that's the one thing the science community is not interested in learning.
Dr. Dawkins would likely counsel us to challenge any cultural authority which is not firmly grounded in reason. On this we agree. And so that's what I'm attempting to do here.