Why Science Has to Lead the Way if We are to Survive

From an early age, I have been fascinated my scientists, men and women in white lab coats working with test tubes and beakers and Bunsen burners and many colored liquids. It draws a picture in your head, doesn’t it? Well, I remember very little from my school years apart from playground antics and the science lab. I’ve been to four different schools and I can still remember the science labs in each one, I can draw you an accurate floor plan in fact. I also remember my many science teachers, chief among them my first, an Iraqi woman with wheat-field yellow colored hair, we knew her as Ms. Halaweh. In her class, I learned that science is not just fun and games, but rigor and perseverance and hard work, that labs may be inviting to the curious, but that serious matters are being decided in them through experimentation and observation. 

 

This is why science should lead our world and not dogma or belief, and neither national nor corporate interests. The great councils that meet to decide how our world shall devote and direct global resources should be populated by scientific minds that are disciplined enough to make the correct choices given the available evidence. I personally feel that scientifically minded people have been reluctant to confront wrong thinking and strong willed people who push their wrong ideas until they become policy. Scientists close to power, ex: Dr. Fauci, seem to confuse respect for the individuals spouting wrong ideas and the wrong ideas themselves. These intelligent people guided by proper science seem to respond demurely, mildly and reluctantly to politicians who have adopted and internalized certain erroneous beliefs and are setting policy based on these beliefs to the determent of us all.

 

Social media has compounded the problem over the years as people see scientific discoveries in the realm of medicine or cosmology as an attack on their faith and belief system. And here too, scientists seem fearful and reluctant to respond firmly and appropriately. Then there are those who see science as the more imperfect when compared to religion, because as they claim religion is fixed and never changing, while science facts change all the time, from decade to decade, from year to year, as new scientific discoveries cancel out previously held theories. But that is in fact the strength of science. Science is a method and mechanism for testing our fallible human perceptions through experimentation and controls and double blind trials and observation and repeatability of tests and results to ascertain that a cherished hypothesis is either true or not. Science challenges our own biases and preconceptions and is designed to show us accurate and precise results that may overturn our own cherished ideas. 

 

But, a true scientist will accept the fallibility of a life time’s work if new scientific results show his/her theories and hypotheses to be untrue, and he/she will embrace the new discoveries and work to build on those discoveries alongside other scientists. What few understand is that humility is built into the scientific disciplines, that every individual scientist only works to build yet another stepping stone on to which the next generation of researchers will tread to go further up and ahead into our understanding of the natural world. As the next generation also works similarly on building more stepping stones for the generation after them and so on and so forth. Science is a living growing discipline that is never still or fixed, but is ever changing and it is that change that many people at first feel uneasy about. As humans, we adopt beliefs because we crave certainty. Belief gives us certainty in black and white in ancient texts, however, it gives us no evidence or basis for its assertions, it rebuffs our curiosity, and many times it demands from us not to ask for evidence on pain of excommunication on grounds of blasphemous utterances. If you believe, you have to believe totally and not ask any questions or show any doubts in the revealed dogma. While science invites you to ask more questions and to test your ideas and hypotheses, in fact, this is how science grows as a body of knowledge. Science may not offer you comfort on your death bed, but a scientific mind is a satisfied mind, satisfied in the knowledge that every question asked, every tiny step forward, every theory proven or disproven, has been another rung added to the ladder that aids humanity in its climb towards greater knowledge, better quality knowledge, scientifically vetted and ascertained facts, and therefore serves to drive our civilization forward.

 

Death of one man or woman is an inevitable tragedy, but how they lived their lives determines whether it was a success or a failure, and no scientist that stays true to their discipline can be said to have lived but a successful and fruitful life that has served to benefit all of humanity, even if only in a small way. That is the glory of science as a life mission and calling and that is why we need to encourage our children to go more into the sciences than into the arts or business world. We need to encourage the spread of scientific literacy among our populations even at the very basic level if only to protect them against misinformation and magical thinking. Only a scientifically literate society can embrace the methods and discipline of science whole heartedly and thereby vote for men and women who share that passion for science and embrace facts derived through the scientific method. That is how countries rise from the pit of corruption and darkness and backwardness and magic, and rise into the light to share in the spoils of science, to embrace a future where every human being may benefit from the advances of science and the comforts it brings us all.