The Trouble With Science

Synopsis: The 'trouble' with science began in 1632, when Galileo demolished the belief that the earth is the centre of the universe. Yet despite the bewildering success of the scientific revolution, many continue to hanker after the cosy certainties of a man-centred universe, and young people increasingly turn away from science. Robin Dunbar's The Trouble With Science examines the sources of contemporary hostility to science, explains how real scientists go about their daily work and how the reality differs from the ideas we have about it, and clarifies why science is still a good thing. Dunbar examines some of the reasons people find science difficult, alarming, threatening, and inimical, such as fears about runaway technology and worries people have about science's destruction of "spirituality" and emotion. He gives a clear and useful history of philosophy of science, from Hume's demonstration of the problem with induction to Kuhn and Feyerabend, Popper and Lakatos, and on to the "Strong Programme," social anthropology and postmodernism. There is a chapter on ways in which science can be seen as both universal and natural: rules of thumb and cookbook science can be found in all cultures and at all times, and even in animals. But at the same time, he explains, science is also highly unnatural. He cites the Wason selection test, and the experiments on "rational choice" by Tversky and Kahneman, winners of this year's Nobel Prize in economics. Our minds have evolved to be good at rough and ready, approximate, problem-solving kinds of science, he says, but that's a different thing from the highly logical and abstract kind of thinking needed in such disciplines as physics and mathematics. But Dunbar is convinced of the value of explanation and understanding, and he makes an excellent case for them here.