I would like to share what I have read lately, from Julian Huxley, he is the forerunner of the modern evolutionary synthesis. I have been reading his essays and they are very very very good indeed. So share lng ni nko dre for you others who are into science also. I would have wanted to share this sa S&O section, pero murag mabulabog ra nya ngadto.. hehehehehehehe
excerpt from Essays of a Humanist, The Humanist Frame. By Julian Huxley, 1964
Julian Huxley - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
So we come to man’s second main higher activity—science. We must beware of the misuse of words like science and scientific, especially by those who want to cash in on the prestige of science to advance their own views or interests. Thus theology once arrogated to itself the title of Queen of the Sciences, and still claims rather plaintively to be a science—a claim which it could only justify by adopting scientific method. The most obvious modern example is that of the Marxists. Marx himself asserted that he had discovered the iron scientific laws that inevitably rule the development of society, and many people still accept Communism as a political creed because they have been told that it is “scientific”. In actual fact Marxism is no more a science than theology—largely because it is itself a kind of theology, in the sense that it consists of a body of doctrines whose truth is guaranteed by dogmatic authority instead of being constantly tested against fact, and relies on a narrow and arrogant scholastic logic instead of on the patient humility of free enquiry.
Science, like art, is a loose and general term for a broad range of human activities and their products. Though its growing core is firm and clear, it is thus inevitably fluffy at the edges, and grades imperceptibly into non-science, as art does into non-art. It is perhaps best thought of as a process—the process of discovering, establishing, and organizing knowledge. To do this effectively, it must rely on scientific method.
Looked at in the long perspective, science is seen as the continuation by new methods of the trend towards fuller and better-organized awareness which runs through the whole of animal evolution, from before the dawn of anything that could be called mind or memory, up to mammals and men. This trend was fostered by natural selection because it was biologically useful. Fuller and better-organized awareness enables its possessors to cope better and more fully with the changes and chances of their lives and their environment. In particular, it is a time-binder, enabling them to utilize past experience to guide future action.
Science has two interrelated psychosocial functions: it increases both comprehension and control. It enlarges man’s understanding of the world, both the strange world of external nature and the equally strange world of his own internal nature; and it increases his capacity to control or guide various aspects and processes of those worlds.
As a result, everything in psychosocial evolution which can properly be called advance, or progress, or improvement, is due directly or indirectly to the increase or improvement of knowledge.
Science is not merely a discovery of pre-existent facts: it is also, and more importantly, a creation of something new. It is just as creative as art, though in a different way. Scientific laws are not something existing from eternity in their own right or in the mind of God, waiting to be discovered by man: they did not exist before men of science formulated them. The same is true of scientific concepts, like atom, or electrical potential, or evolution.
Scientific laws and concepts alike are organized creations of the human mind, by means of which the disorderly raw material of natural phenomena presented to crude experience is worked into orderly and manageable forms. A scientific concept is an intellectually effective integration of experience just as a painting is an aesthetically effective one.
Thus science is not only concerned with discovering facts: it is much more concerned with establishing relations between phenomena. Scientific comprehension was increased by relating the supposedly opposed qualities of heat and cold in the common concept of a scale of temperature; by bringing a number of apparently unrelated physical activities in relation with each other through the principle of the conservation of energy; by employing the concept of metabolism to perform the same service for a number of biological activities. A good scientific theory brings together a swarm of separate phenomena and their attendant concepts in a single unified pattern of relatedness. Modern evolution theory, for instance, has spun a comprehensive web of relations between the phenomena of cytology, genetics, adaptation, paleontology, reproduction, embryology, behavior, selection, systematic, and biochemistry.
Science is also concerned with understanding the systems of relatedness to be found in nature. This means the study of organization on every level—the level of atoms, of molecules, of individual organisms, or societies, of ecological communities. That being so, science cannot be only a matter of analysis, as if often erroneously supposed. It must start from the organizations to be found on any level. After studying them descriptively, comparatively and functionally, it can then try to analyze them into lower-level elements, and finally attempt a theoretical re-synthesis. It is no good trying to start from a lower level. Nobody could have built up the triumphant principles of modern genetics merely from a knowledge of biochemistry: genetic theory had to start with phenomena on the biological level, like mitosis and Mendelian segregation, taking the facts of biological organization for granted. Only much later was it possible to analyze and understand genetic phenomena in biochemical terms, as we can now begin to do, thanks to Watson and Crick’s brilliant theory of the self-replication of certain kinds of nucleic acid molecules.
We must beware of reductionism. It is hardly ever true that something is “nothing but” something else. Because we are descended from anthropoid primates, it does not follow that we are nothing but developed apes: because we are made of matter, it does not follow that we have nothing but material properties. An organization is always more than the mere sum of its elements, and must be studied as a unitary whole as well as analyzed into its component parts.
Science is a self-correcting and self-enlarging system. It aims to unify experience. It creates patches of organized knowledge in the vast expanse of human ignorance. The patches of knowledge grow, and may fuse to form more comprehensive patterns. The trend is clearly towards an eventual single organization of conceptual thought, holding all aspects of experience in its web or relations, uniting all the separate patches of knowledge into one living and growing body of organized understanding. But meanwhile great haps of ignorance still separate some of the partial systems, some of which are still isolated islands scientifically cut off from their neighbors, while some areas of experience are still recalcitrant to the method of science and remain outside its system.
The immediate need is for the scientific study of values. Philosophers and theologians sometimes assert that this is impossible, claiming that values lie outside the range of science. The Humanist cannot accept this: after all, values are phenomena, and therefore capable of being investigated by the methods of science. They are phenomena which only appear on the psychological level, and accordingly science must first approach them on this level. It must ask appropriate questions about them: In what psychological circumstances do values come into being? Out of what raw materials are they constructed by man’s psychometabolic activity? What functions do they perform in psychosocial evolution? How do they change and evolve? And just as science had to devise special methods for dealing adequately with multicausal phenomena, especially where they are not amenable to experiment, so, as time goes on, it will have to devise special methods for dealing effectively with phenomena with a strong subjective component. But a successful beginning has already been made.
The study of values is a part of the one really major problem now before science—the problem of relating mind and mental activities to the rest of the phenomenal universe in a single scientific picture. Here too there is much hard work ahead; but here too a considerable measure of success has already been achieved, partly through the developmental study of human behavior, partly through a joint physiological and psychological attack on human mental activity.
The irresistible trend towards the creation of one comprehensive scientific picture of the world of man’s experience emerges even more clearly when we look at science historically. Since the dawn of the scientific revolution some three hundred and fifty years ago, science has steadily invaded new fields. First of all, mechanics, astronomy, physics; then chemistry and natural history; next followed geology and physiology and embryology, and then experimental and evolutionary biology; next was the turn of ethnology, then psychology, then sociology. Science then proceeds to establish a footing in new territories like economics, archaeology, and social anthropology, and established connections between various separate disciplines with the aid of bridging sciences like biochemistry, social psychology, epigenetics, and astrophysics. We are not witnessing the invasion of the field of psychosocial phenomena by science.
The only field still remaining outside the range of the scientific system is that of so-called paranormal phenomena like telepathy and extra-sensory perception (E.S.P.). If and when they are brought within its scope, some pretty radical alterations will presumably become necessary in its theoretical framework.
your comments are highly appreciated..
The Essence of Science
Originally Posted by bluedes
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