WHAT WE NEED TO KNOW TO LIVE IN A SCIENCE DEPENDENT WORLD

WHAT WE NEED TO KNOW TO LIVE IN A SCIENCE DEPENDENT WORLD

For more than thirty years I taught a course that I called Biology: A Humanities Approach.  This was not a “physics for poets” class in which I sought a literary way of teaching science. It was a liberal arts way of asking what a democratic society needs for its people to engage in discussion about the life sciences and their lives.  I felt it was important to know how cells divide, how traits are transmitted, how mutations arise, how a single cell becomes a new born baby, how we live out a life cycle of some 80 years, and how we change the environments in which we live and how those altered environments change us.  The humanities are filled with pleasures, setbacks, tragedies, and struggles and they fill our novels with the tortured lives of their heroes.  Nature does that too.  Civilization does that too.  Whatever type of life humans find themselves in, they encounter both personal crises of their own doing and societal or worldwide changes brought about by human activity.  We help create deserts, floods, climate change, and ecological change on a massive scale.  Where are the forests of yesteryear?  How did gorgeous lakes become saturated with oil slicks and void of the fish that were once abundant? How could Lake Erie have actually burned in the 1960s?  How does strip mining alter the landscape and leave waste dumps in its place?  How does bad agricultural practice lead to dust bowls?  How do colonial and economic domination of weak nations lead to destruction of their natural resources?  How does our exposure to ionizing radiation lead to gene mutations for future generations to experience?  How does our capacity for warfare lead us to make weapons of mass destruction?  How does the industrial revolution create a class of subsistence laborers?  How does it lead to urban epidemic diseases?  How does the germ theory lead to a population explosion?  How does that lead to the birth control movement?  How does that lead to a conflict of science and religion?  How does that lead to corruption of the democratic policy and who will represent the poor, the uninformed, and the neglected?  Is it in our genes to be aggressive?  To be racist? To be sexist?  To blame the victims for their personal miseries?   Do we solve our problems with bad science, using eugenics and sterilize the ones we call unfit to reproduce?  Do we use bad science to extract gas and oil from the farms and prairies and dump toxic wastes into the rocky layers just below our groundwater with no deep understanding of the long term effects of what we do? 

              If this sounds like Ecclesiastes, it is intentional.  We repeat our errors generation after generation.  Fortunately some changes for the better do emerge and replace the errors of the past.  Slavery is gone in the industrialized world.  Child labor is gone.  The deliberate subjugation of women is gone.  We do not burn heretics at the stake.  We do not kill women who are believed to be witches. We spend too much time arguing ideology and seeking power through politics.  We spend not enough time seeking to address the problems that can potentially affect our health, affect our environments, and affect our opportunities for education, work, and enjoyment of what is left of the natural world.  We live in a science saturated world and we elect science deniers and representatives ignorant of how science can identify the harms that science can cause by abuse or by neglect.