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SCIENTIFIC FALLIBILITYOne by-product of the rational science debate, perhaps, has been an acceleration in the process of undermining the myth of scientific infallibility. The scientist - pictured almost as an angel, in his pristine white coat - used to be popularly seen as the savior of mankind and was a key figure in modernism. As modernism was drawing to a close, this picture was marred by the mistakes the scientists were believed to have made during the atomic age, and which emerged later in the green age. It was no longer possible to say that the scientists knew best - it had become clear that all too often they simply did not! The environmentalists, especially ecologists, then became more popular - at the expense of the laboratory scientists. In particular, even within the scientific community itself, physicists who were in the mid 20th century the aristocrats of the hard sciences have been replaced by the biochemists working on much softer subjects. The scientist has - amongst the populus as a whole - almost completely fallen from his pedestal. This may be a good thing, if it allows debate to encompass wider issues. It may be, in the short-term however, a problem - where the backlash suggests that nothing scientific any longer has any value. It also suggest that, in postmodernism which is now replacing modernism, that scientific certainty has been replaced by a rather less comfortable uncertainty. Indeed, the scientific paradigm has been almost totally abandoned by the population at large - positively opening up debate to wider issues, but negatively resulting (amongst some parts of the community) in a backlash against all things scientific; and, perhaps much worse, by all things rational. 8 May 2003 |
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