The Faber Book of Science Read Online Free Page A

most basic level, the monitoring, protection and conservation of endangered plant and animal species is inevitably a scientific endeavour. Nor does the feminist complaint that science is dominated by male aims and attitudes justify the neglect or rejection of science by women. On the contrary, it makes urgently desirable the increased involvement of women in scientific education and research. This is the view put forward by one of the most cogent of the feminist critics, Evelyn Fox Keller, in her book Reflections on Gender and Science (1984). Herself a mathematical biophysicist, and a biographer of the Nobel prizewinning geneticist Barbara McClintock, Keller seesscientific knowledge as ideally ‘a universal goal’, rather than the expression of destructively masculine drives.
    A text that has been utilized to reinforce feminist and other disparagements of science is Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). This popularized the idea that scientists are not really as rational as they suppose, but follow cultural trends, shifting from one paradigm to another for reasons that have nothing to do with objective truth. A criticism of Kuhn’s book often voiced by scientists is that in describing how beliefs came to be held it leaves out of account the question of their truth or falsehood.
    The effect of these various devices for discrediting science has been to allow ignorance to appear not merely excusable but righteous. Teachers at British universities will know that most arts students happily forget what little science they learnt in their schooldays. Even if you are prepared for this, however, the extent of their ignorance can come as a shock. Recently, in an Oxford literature seminar, I cited John Donne’s lines, where Donne observes that no one at the time he was writing (1612) knew how blood gets from one ventricle of the heart to the other. I asked the class how, in fact, it does. There were about thirty students present, all in their last year of study, all outstandingly intelligent, and none of them knew. One young man ventured haltingly that it might be ‘by osmosis’. That the blood circulated round their bodies, they seemed unaware.
    The annual hordes competing for places on arts courses in British universities, and the trickle of science applicants, testify to the abandonment of science among the young. Though most academics are wary of saying it straight out, the general consensus seems to be that arts courses are popular because they are easier, and that most arts students would simply not be up to the intellectual demands of a science course. On this issue, Sir Peter Medawar is worth quoting, since he is well qualified to judge, and he disagrees. Commenting on the career of James Watson, the young American who became world famous in 1953 when, with Crick, Wilkins and Franklin, he discovered the molecular structure of DNA, Medawar says:
    In England a schoolboy of Watson’s precocity and style of genius would probably have been steered towards literary studies. It just so happens that during the 1950s, the first great age of molecular biology, the English schools of Oxford and particularly ofCambridge produced more than a score of graduates of quite outstanding ability – much more brilliant, inventive, articulate and dialectically skilful than most young scientists; right up in the Watson class. But Watson had one towering advantage over all of them: in addition to being extremely clever he had something important to be clever about. This is an advantage which scientists enjoy over most other people engaged in intellectual pursuits, and they enjoy it at all levels of capability. To be a first-rate scientist it is not necessary (and certainly not sufficient) to be extremely clever, anyhow in a pyrotechnic sense. One of the great social revolutions brought about by scientific research has been the democratization of learning. Anyone who combines strong common sense with an ordinary