then argues that science is the handmaid of democracy:... Science teaches facts, not values, the story goes. Worse, not only does it not provide any values of its own, say its detractors, it also undermines the ones we already have, devaluing anything it can’t measure, reducing sunsets to wavelengths and romance to jiggly hormones. It destroys myths and robs the universe of its magic and mystery.
So the story goes.
But this is balderdash. 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...
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.
... It is no coincidence that these are the same qualities that make for democracy and that they arose as a collective behavior about the same time that parliamentary democracies were appearing. If there is anything democracy requires and thrives on, it is the willingness to embrace debate and respect one another and the freedom to shun received wisdom. Science and democracy have always been twins.
Soooo ... shouldn't a progressive institution, dedicated to democracy as well as to the virtues of "honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view" have a science requirement? Oughtn't all our students have experience with "interrogating" nature as well as deferring to nature as the "final arbiter," in order to understand the importance of truth in human relations - as well as the other demands these relations make on us. Overbye's scientific virtues aren't the only virtues around. Indeed, they're not always virtues - as Aristotle taught us about all virtues: every virtue is a mean between vices.
In particular, when do "doubt" and the "hunger for opposing points of view" cease to be virtues and slide into the vices of curiositas or an unwillingness to make commitments? Science may teach us the way to relate best to "the world," which requires us always to be ready to move on from wherever we now are. But might relations with particulars - particular people, particular planets - require something else, loyalty not to the utopia but the real? I'm not disagreeing with Overbye. It may be the best way to clarify the different ways we might do right by scientific endeavor and by our fellows (and ourselves) is to have shared experience of science as a point of reference, support and contrast.
