Dennis Overbye on Science and Democracy

Dennis Overbye at the NYTimes somewhat unintentionally answers the "what is science's rightful place?" question in his column. He emphasizes the similarity and symbiosis between science and democracy:

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.

Arguably science is the most successful human activity of all time. Which is not to say that life within it is always utopian, as several of my colleagues have pointed out in articles about pharmaceutical industry payments to medical researchers.

But nobody was ever sent to prison for espousing the wrong value for the Hubble constant. There is always room for more data to argue over.

So if you're going to get gooey about something, that's not so bad.

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.

Read the whole thing.

I argued (and have argued before) that science is also like a market for ideas and is based on similar principles. This is not to suggest that markets always function perfectly; recent history has shown that markets in scientific ideas and the free-markets often don't function as intended.

I would add to Overbye's observations that it is likewise no coincidence that active scientific cultures exist mostly in free market, democratic states. Democracy brings that aspect of openness and free debate that is necessary to keeping scientific ideas agile. Free markets bring that aspect of desire, the competitive profit motive, that gives people a reason to strive.

Many will likely disagree with me, but I don't think that healthy scientific cultures can exist without both political and economic freedom. That markets, democracies, and sciences are often imperfect is beside the point. In each case, I would respond to that observation with Churchill's quip: "Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."