Science ahoy!

I have been involved in a rather interesting discussion on Facebook (which you won't get to read, but hey-ho). It was initiated by Lenin's Tomb picking up on the latest episode in the descent of Richard Dawkins. I wandered, slightly provocatively, whether we should still refer to Dawkins as a scientist. This then got people chewing over the kind of role science and scientists should play in public life.

For me it's simple, but then maybe that's just me. The point about defrocking Dawkins is mainly political. He uses his status as a scientist to legitimise bigotry, to polish the racist turd. But also, passing off this impossibly crude graphic as an argument is an insult to reason and science (look, look, it's got arrows pointing at each other, and explosions!).

This reinforces the argument that any scientist, any specialist intellectual, should stick to what they know. Academic division of labour (like the general division of labour) has helped advance humanity greatly in the past, but we should not be blind to its current limitations. Such specialism is precisely what leads to a problem like Richard Dawkins. Unfortunately for human reason facts don't always speak for themselves. There would be no need for science if everything was as it seemed.

For example, between adenine, thyamine, guanine and cytosine, and human behaviour has to come a theory of knowledge. How do we know something imperceptible, like the gene, and what its significance is? In the case of The Selfish Gene, the theory is positive materialism. The evidence for a natural process, such as continental drift can exist for many years, waiting for a leap in theory. Facts do not always speak for themselves.

Not only will sciences be made more fruitful by closer engagement with arts (and vice versa, science seeds future artistic development) but there is something more important at stake. Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, once described physics as having “known sin” through Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From the moment when experiments revealed huge stores of energy the potential was there. There was no one better placed to warn society of the dangers of atomic power than the community of scientists. Whatever they did, they failed in this respect.

We live in an integrated, interdependent world; the radical achievement of capitalism, we intend to build upon it through socialism. If we weren't aware of it before, mass electronic media bring this fact home to us every day. There is no scope for disinterested, abstracted science. It is then quite right people expect scientists to be public figures, to explain and describe the significance of new scientific discoveries as well lead the way on matters other than their immediate scientific discipline. It is a sign that the universal, not to mention democratic, intellectual is on the way.