Science Saved the World (2000)

Humans are unique because we can imitate behavior well enough that a Darwinian process began.

Just like the gene, human behavior seeks out niches in the environment, eventually becoming the environment. Unlike the gene behavior evolves much faster, can be inherited horizontally and is far more prone to mutation.

Unfortunately we don’t have the equivalent of Mendelian genetics for behavior. We’re left with a unit but no understanding of the forces acting on it.

Before we knew these things in biology the best “research” we could do was classification. An interesting but unpredictive exercise. The social sciences are stuck here right now.

Until we have a the equivalent we’ll be stuck with articles like this. Articles that make a herculean (and valiant) effort to describe our society without a foundation in the physical sciences. Like trying to describe the behavior of a murmuration without knowing about starlings.

There was no concept of 'the scientific method' - the corner stone of scientific exploration - until a few hundred years ago. The claim made in this article is that science has been the driving force in human history for the past 50 millennia at least only adds to the debasement of the word science and as such is better left unspoken. That does not mean that exploration and ingenuity and experimentation are something of the last few centuries, far from it. Humans are intelligent animals and wont to use that intelligence to find ways to do things hitherto unthought of. That does not make these explorers 'scientists' and it does not make their exploits 'scientific' nor do they need to be called such for their discoveries to be validated.

Just like so many other 'big' words [1] the word 'science' is overused and as such has lost quite a bit of its relevance. The latest and probably one of the most damaging examples of this is the use of the term The Science (to which I almost invariably add a ™ symbol) to force and shame people into certain behaviours during the SARS2 pandemic. Other examples abound, e.g. the climate scare is a rich source especially when people start bandying round claims of The Science being settled with the implication that anyone who tries to use the scientific method to poke holes in that claim - an essential part of scientific exploration - is a heretic. There are no heretics in scientific exploration. There may be misguided souls who insist they are on to something but that is their prerogative and their burden to carry. Mostly they are proven wrong by all the available evidence pointing some other way, sometimes they end up being proven right [2].

In short, stop debasing the word science before it has lost its meaning, it is too valuable a concept for such abuse.

[2] https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/4431/why-wa...