SCIENCE AS A FIELD OF HUMAN ACTIVITY

SCIENCE AS A FIELD OF HUMAN ACTIVITY?

??????????? Science is a human activity, with all of the human elements that characterize the other human activities.? It covers different ground and asks (and answers) different questions than art, literature, law, philosophy, politics/government, history, or religion.? But it is clear that science influences these other fields.? And science has fundamentally challenged, and fundamentally changed, what it means to be human.? Science solved many human problems that have plagued humanity for the entire length of its history, and at the same time generated new challenges that our human ancestors never encountered.?

What is Science?

??????????? As odd as it seems for a field that occupies such a central position in human affairs, no one has developed a canonical definition of science.? This situation might be like former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s comment about obscenity: “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.”? For scientists a working definition might be “the examination and explanation of phenomena in the natural world.”? Science examines the natural world and develops ideas about the fundamental principles operating in nature, and develops ideas of the history of the universe that produced our current reality. This emphasis on the natural world, of course, excludes the supernatural realm covered by religion or by the paranormal.?

??????????? Science often interacts with the other (equally challenging and valuable) fields of human endeavor: humanities, politics/government, economics, law, ethics/morals, art/aesthetics, and religion.? Those fields mainly value and explore interactions between humans and each other.? Some also explore the relationship between people and the world around them.? Religion explores the relationship between people and their God or gods.? The scientific method, the way that science explores the natural world has produced such a long string of dramatic practical successes that sometimes other fields view science as arrogant.? This success sometimes leads to the temptation to apply science to inappropriate areas.? Science cannot do what the arts, humanities, and other fields that cover aesthetics do; science cannot determine beauty or value.? For the most part, science has no business delving in subjects in the social sciences either.? It cannot make value judgments about morals or ethics, religion, or political thought.? Science is neither moral or immoral; it is amoral.? But the technology generated by the scientific pursuit certainly can be applied in a moral or immoral way.? And the decision about the morality of a particular application of science must be argued outside the realm of science.? (For example, the question “was it moral to drop an atom bomb on Hiroshima or Nagasaki?” cannot be a scientific argument.? Science produced these bombs capable of enormous destructive power, but President Truman’s decision to use them in war was a political and ethical decision.)? Science cannot solve the ethical dilemmas that it creates.? ???

??????????? This generation of ethical dilemmas by Science is so common that it has generated its own field of bioethics.? Science influences and interacts with other fields as as well.? Sometimes science and another field coexist uncomfortably or outright conflict.? Scientific advances have certainly presented a challenge to many of the other fields.

The Diversity of the Scientific Pursuit

??????????? The previous discussion referred to science as if it was a single field.? Of course, it is not.? Basic science differs from applied science or engineering.? Biology, geology, chemistry, astronomy, and physics examine different components of the physical world and differ in their approaches to discovery.? Physical anthropology (which includes the study of human evolution and hominid fossils) is often grouped into science, while academics usually group cultural anthropology with the social sciences.? Geography includes physical geography which can be grouped into the sciences, and psychology straddles the border between science and the social sciences.? Science uses mathematics and its related field formal logic, but these fields also may be applied or theoretical.? The difference between all of these fields is vast - chemistry and atomic physics study the smallest objects in the universe, and astronomy studies the largest.? They interact and blend and to a large extent the borders between these scientific disciplines are artificial.? Biologists absolutely need knowledge of chemistry to pursue their studies, and there is not much difference between a molecular biologist and a biochemist.? Atomic physicists study atoms, the realm of chemists.? But the training, approaches, and cultures of a chemist and a physicist are different.?

The different disciplines differ in the culture and approaches.? ?Experimental physicists think differently than theoretical physicists.? Molecular biologists think differently than organismal biologists.? Physiologists, who study the processes of the human body, differ in their approach from anatomists who study its structure.

??????????? Biology has been said to be very different from the physical sciences.? Physics and chemistry are often more quantitative, where biology traditionally has been thought to be qualitative.? Biology can be called the science of exceptions, since for most any generalization that you might make about organisms, there will be one species out there in the vast diversity of life that violates that generalization.? Astronomy and geology (and biology to a lesser extent) have a time element; they develop hypotheses about the history of the universe and of the earth, and then test those hypotheses.?

??????????? The basic sciences often generate principles used by the applied sciences in a way that the original researchers never expected.? The biologists who in the late 1960's were studying the reasons why certain strains of bacteria could not be infected by bacterial viruses did not know that they would discover restriction enzymes or that these enzymes would become the “molecular scissors” that launched the multi-billion dollar commercial field of biotechnology.??

??????????? Carl Sagan put it this way:

“Maxwell wasn’t thinking of radio, radar, and television when he scratched out the fundamental equations of electromagnetism; Newton wasn’t dreaming of space flight or communication satellites when he first understood the motion of the Moon; Roentgen wasn’t contemplating medical diagnosis when he investigated a penetrating radiation so mysterious that he called it “X-rays”; Curie wasn’t thinking of cancer therapy when she painstakingly extracted minute amounts of radium from tons of pitchblende; Fleming wasn’t planning on saving the lives of millions with antibiotics when he noticed a circle free of bacteria around a growth of mold; Watson and Crick weren’t imagining the cure of genetic diseases when they puzzled over X-ray diffractometry of DNA; Rowland and Molina weren’t planning to implicate CFCs in ozone depletion when they began studying the role of halogens in stratospheric photochemistry.”

??????????? Basic research often goes in a direction that the primary researchers would never have predicted.?

??????????? So basic and applied research differs, and the research methods of biology, chemistry, physics, and astronomy differ.? Still, the sciences have enough in common with each other to make some generalizations about how “science” works.? It’s these general principles that the learning community explored.

?