© 1986 by The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology
Reflections on the Limits of Science and Technology1
Department of Zoology, University of British Columbia Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 2A9, Canada
SYNOPSIS. Exuberance over insights gained in the infant field of genetics early this centuryled scientists to extrapolate beyond their data to heredity of behavioral traits in people. Oneof the direct consequences was the incarceration of Americans and Canadians of Japanese ancestry during World War II as enemy aliens. Drawing on this personal experience of the misapplication of science, I describe the process of scientific indoctrination and blindness to the limitations of this way of knowing. This led to my attempt to demystify science through the electronic media.
Only recently have I come to understand that two assumptions that impelled me to use television in the first place are wrong. The first was that with access to more information about science, the general public would be in a position of making better informed decisions on issues involving science and technology. The problem is that we are overwhelmed with information and most people lack the ability to distinguish meaningful "signal" (i.e., credible information) from background "noise" (i.e., garbage). We believe in phantoms created by the acceptance of anything because it exists as print or television programs.
My second assumption had been that we need a mechanism to do an in-depth "cost/benefit" analysis of new technologies before they are actually made available. But history reveals that the benefits of new technologies are immediate and obvious while the costs are usually hidden and completely unpredictable.
But in the rush to exploit new scientific insights we ignore the fact that science must lookat nature in isolated bits and pieces. Knowledge gained in fragments does not yield an understanding of the greater context from which the pieces are taken. With each new discovery, we itch to apply it, forgetting how much we have yet to learn. Our attempts to manipulate nature are often illusions of control created by our ability to overpower nature by brute strength. In the area of genetic engineering, this could be truly disastrous.