Science and Technology
Are Still in Their Infancy

ONE OF THE MAJOR UNDERLYING CAUSES OF THE GLOBAL ECOCRISIS is the dominant attitude within society today. It is based on a faith in the power of science and technology to give us insight and understanding that enable us to control and manipulate our environment.

Technology has revolutionized human evolution since the earliest records of our species. While providing practical dividends in the past, technology— whether pottery, painting, bow and arrow, or metalwork—did not require scientific explanation. But today, it is science that drives technological innovation, from telecommunications to biotechnology and nuclear power. And now, our insights and inventions have given our species unprecedented power to change our surroundings with unpredictable consequences. For this reason, it is essential to understand the nature of the scientific enterprise, what it reveals, and where its limits lie.

As a brand-new assistant professor in the early 1960s, I taught a course in genetics, my field of specialty, with all of the enthusiasm of an ambitious hotshot on the ladder to tenure, recognition, and bigger grants. After one of my first students had been in my lab a while, he remarked that he had assumed that geneticists knew almost everything. “Now that I’ve been doing experiments for a year,” he went on, “I realize we know almost nothing.”

He was absolutely right, of course. In spite of the vaunted “success” of modern science, it has a terrible weakness, one that is inherent in its methodology. Scientists focus on a part of the world that they then isolate, control, and measure. They gain an understanding of and power over that fragment of nature without knowing how it meshes with other components of a system. The insights we acquire are a fractured mosaic of bits and pieces instead of an integrated whole. Thus, we may invent powerful techniques to manipulate genetic material, for example, without knowing what it will do to the whole animal.

Those who have been practicing science for a while know that experiments are far more likely to yield a puzzle than a satisfying answer. So while the spectacular pictures from satellites passing by our neighboring planets may have eliminated a few theories, they generated far more questions. There is something reassuring in knowing that nature is a lot more complex than we can imagine.

But the practice of science has changed radically during the past decades. After Sputnik I was launched in 1957, the United States responded by pouring money into universities and students to catch up. It was a golden period for scientists as good research in just about any area was supported. When I graduated in 1961 as an expert on the behavior of chromosomes in fruit flies, my peers and I could choose from several job offers and grants. We were engaged in a quest for knowledge purely for the sake of knowing, and we took it for granted that good research would eventually lead to ideas that could be applied.

In the ensuing years, science has become extremely competitive because of the high stakes that come with success. Thirty years ago, a productive scientist in my field might publish one major paper a year. Now several articles are expected annually, and a publication record of a dozen or more is not unusual. But today’s articles are often repetitive or report small, incremental additions of knowledge, thereby fragmenting knowledge even further.

Since scientific ideas and techniques have created spectacular new high-tech industries, governments perceive research as vital fuel for the economic engine. Consequently, research funding agencies now look for work that promises to pay off in some practical way, and when applying for grants, scientists have to play a game by claiming or implying that the research being proposed will lead to some beneficial discovery. If you look at the titles of Canadian or U.S. research grant proposals, you would think that all of the world’s problems could be solved by scientists right here.

Of course, that’s not true at all. Even if we funded people adequately (which Canada does not), few if any of those solutions will be achieved as projected. The game of grant-seeking perpetuates a mistaken notion of how science is done. Scientists do not proceed linearly to a specific goal, going from experiment 1 to 2 to 3 to a cure for cancer, for example. If research worked that way, doing science would be routine and far less interesting. The fact is, most scientists start from an initial curiosity about some aspect of nature. They design experiments to satisfy that interest, then lurch down unexpected side streets, blunder into blind alleys, and, perhaps, through luck and perceptiveness, connect unrelated ideas to produce something useful.

But many young scientists actually believe that science advances in a straight line and that the claims made in grant proposals can be achieved. And the media tend to reinforce the notions with breathless reports of new discoveries and liberal use of the word breakthrough. People are relying on this unwarranted optimism when they believe the “experts” will take care of a problem.

But the consequences of the major hazards facing us today— atmospheric change, pollution, deforestation, overpopulation, species extinction, and so on—cannot be scientifically predicted, let alone resolved, because we have only a fragmentary understanding of nature. When scientists say “more information is needed” before a course of action can be planned for an issue like global warming, they give a mistaken impression that such knowledge can be quickly acquired and that, until it is, the problem isn’t real, so we can carry on with business as usual.

Scientists who claim their work will solve global hunger, pollution, or overpopulation do not understand the social, economic, religious, and political roots of the problems that preclude scientific solution. There is a vital role for science today in detecting and warning of changes and unpredictable hazards, but scientists have to get rid of the pernicious myth about the potential of their work to solve all our problems