science and humans life

science / human life

Science affects the average man and woman in two ways already. He or she benefits by its applications, driving a motor car or omnibus instead of a horse-drawn vehicle, being treated for disease by a doctor or surgeon rather than a priest or a witch and being killed with an automatic pistol or a shell in place of a dagger or battle-axe. It also affects his or her opinion. Almost everyone believes that the earth is round, and the heavens nearly empty, instead of solid, and we are beginning to believe in our animal ancestry and the possibility of vast improvements in human nature by biological methods.

            But science can do something far bigger for the human mind than the substitution of one set of belief for another, of inculcation of skepticism regarding accepted opinions it has gradually spread among humanity as a whole the point of view that prevails among research workers and has enabled a few thousand men and few dozen women to create the science on which modern civilization rests. For if we are to control our own and another’s actions as we are learning to control nature, the scientific point of view must come out of the laboratory and be applied to the events of daily life. It is foolish to thinks that the outlook which has already revolutionized industry, agriculture, war and medicine will prove useless when applied to the family, the nation or the human race.

            Unfortunately, the growing realization of this fact is opening the door to innumerable false prophets who are advertising their own pet theories in sociology as scientific. Science is continually telling us through their mouths that we are doomed unless we give up smoking adopt-or abolish-birth control, and so forth. Now it is not my object to support any scientific theory, but merely the scientific standpoint. What are the characteristics of that standpoint? In the first place, it attempts to be truthful and, therefore, impartial. And it carries impartiality a great deal further than does the legal point of view. A good judge will try to be impartial between Mr. John Smith and Mr. Chang Sing. A good scientist will be impartial between Mr. John Smith, tapeworm, and the solar system. He will leave behind him his natural revulsion of the tapeworm, which would lead him to throw it away instead of studying it as carefully as a statue or a symphony, and his awe for the solar system which led his predecessors either to worship its constituents, or at least to regard them as inscrutable servants of the Almighty, too exalted for human comprehension.

            Such an attitude leads the scientist to a curious mixture of pride and humanity. The solar system turns out to be a group of bodies rather small in comparison with many of their neighbors, and executing their movements according to simple and easily intelligible laws. But he himself is a rather aberrant member of the same order as the monkeys, while his mind is at the mercy of a number of chemical processes in his body which he can understand but little and control hardly at all .

In so far as it places all phenomena on the same emotional level, the scientific point of view may be called the god’s-eye view. But it differs profoundly from that which religions have attributed to the almighty being ethically natural. Science cannot determine what is right and wrong and should not try to. It can work out the consequences of various actions, but it cannot pass judgment on them. The bacteriologist can merely point out that pollution of the public water supply is likely to cause as many deaths as letting off a bomb in the public street. But he is no better equipped than anyone else in possession of the knowledge he had gained, for determining whether these two acts are equally wrong. The enemies of science alternately abuse its exponents for being deaf to moral considerations and for interfering in ethical problems which do not concern them. Both of these criticisms cannot be right.

            Now the tendency of the average man has always been to dwell on the emotional and ethical side of a case rather than on facts of the somewhat dull kind which interest the scientists. Let me take two examples, the problems of the Americans  hold that the negro is definitely inferior to the white man, and should as far as possible, be segregated from him. Others believe that he should enjoy the same rights. The biologist cannot decide between them. He can point out that the Negron’s skull is more ape – like that the white’s but his hairless skin less so, and forth. But he can note the results of the two divergent political views as to the negros. In the country districts of the southem states the birth-rate of the negro population exceeds the birth-rate. In the southem towns and all through the north, more negroes die than are born. Their high death-rate are due to the fact that, in an environment suitable to a white man they die of consumption and other diseases, just as the white man dies on the West Coast of Africa , the negro’s original home.