While reading the New Yorker yesterday I came across this gem of a quote from the late John Updike, which eloquently expresses one of the ideas I was reaching for in my own Darwin Day post.
The non-scientist's relation to modern science is basically craven: we look to its discoveries and technology to save us from disease, to give us a faster ride and a softer life, and at the same time we shrink from what it has to tell us of our perilous and insignificant place in the cosmos. Not that threats to our safety and significance were absent from the pre-scientific world, or that arguments against a God-bestowed human grandeur were lacking before Darwin. But our century's revelations of unthinkable largeness and unimaginable smallness, of abysmal stretches of geological time when we were nothing, of supernumerary galaxies and indeterminate subatomic behavior, of a kind of mad mathematical violence at the heart of matter have scorched us deeper than we know.
John Updike
December 30, 1985
excerpted in the New Yorker, Feb. 9, 2009
Incidentally, if you haven't already been overwhelmed with the abundance of Darwin Day offerings across the intertubes, you should peruse the riches cached at Blog for Darwin, the excellent site created by Scott Isebrand with the help of John Davison.
Life Science
Comments
He's overstating things a bit I think. There are plenty of interested, and educated enough "non-scientists" (and scientists alike) who remain level headed in the face of science's more extravagant claims.
Besides, science in the popular mind is more exciting than ever. I mean, look at the popularity of the science fiction genre and forensics in fiction writing. There's even a science channel on tv. That's not to mention wealth of gadgets and designer drugs being sold lately. (These may be somewhat dubious examples of "science" however :D)
Or maybe I'm being naive. Either way, I liked your Darwin post. Especially that you pointed out the social aspect of religion. Not that I'm religious, but it's something that rarely gets mentioned.
Posted by: Joe Leasure | February 17, 2009 8:48 PM
Thanks for the mention, Jessica, and for participating! Once I get my NY Civil Court jury duty over with (eek!), I hope to start categorizing all the submissions on BlogForDarwin by topic(s) and language. (Who would have thought that I'd get multiple submissions in Turkish and more then 10 submissions in Catalan?!)
Posted by: BlogForDarwin | February 18, 2009 3:50 PM
The idea of a "non-scientist" facing an infinite and opaque wall of science is counter-productive. It's not us vs. them.
Science happens every day. People experiment with their plumbing to find out why their bath water isn't hot. If you can walk down a hall without hitting the sides, you have the basic intuition to understand feedback loops. If you have ever successfully stopped your car, or boiled water, you know in your bones about inertia and phase lags.
The most important thing "non-scientists" need to realize is that they understand far more science than they think they do.
Anyway, thanks for the space to put my 2 cents!
Posted by: Ubbabukknamupnamummup | February 22, 2009 4:58 PM