science” to describe Mary Somerville in a positive review he was writing about her.[2] If true this would be a great story, and Mary Somerville was worthy of the honor. Her book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences was instrumental in making modern physics into a discipline and was frequently revised and republished, with nine separate editions. In 1879, the first women’s college at Oxford University was named in her honor. A main-belt asteroid (5771 Somerville) and a lunar crater in the eastern part of the moon are also named after her, and she graces all Scottish ten-pound notes printed from October 2018 onward. However, according to James Secord, professor of philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge, “Nowhere did Whewell or anyone else in her lifetime ever call Somerville a scientist, nor is it a word, so far as we know, that she ever used herself. By our current understanding of the term, Somerville can certainly be called a scientist, but for her contemporaries she belonged to a higher and more profound category entirely.”[3]
No matter whether Mary Somerville was the woman for whom the word “scientist” was made, we can think of scientists as empiricists who use their creativity to prove or disprove theories. Of course scientists are human, as they can discover gloriously complex theories while also misinterpreting and presenting data in wondrously imperfect ways that lead to fantastic new models that are wrong and subsequently disproven. That is the way scientists perform science.
Before going on a trip through the scientific world and trying to judge its impact on our lives, as well as its reputation and health, it is a good idea to take a few steps back and look at the big picture. Because when we talk about science, it is impossible to ignore the political, environmental, economic, and global surroundings. We need to know how science has gotten us here and what challenges it faces in today’s world.
Science and the Anthropocene
Since the arrival of the first Homo sapiens 40,000 years ago, a total of 108 billion humans have lived on Earth. A 15th of all these people are alive and kicking right now. Science and technology are the reason the numbers have undergone such robust growth.
Thanks to the development of weapons, protective houses, medicine, fertilizer, and so forth, humans have moved from being an occasional snack for predators to being at the top of the food chain. We have overcome constraints imposed by nature and evolution. There are no predators, other than ourselves, to limit our growth. Humans have become, in the worst sense of the word, the dictators of nature. Thanks to science, we can impose our will on nature and determine our own destinies. We are not doing a great job. Currently we are losing species 1,000 times faster than the natural rate of extinction. Humans represent just 0.01 percent of all living things by mass, yet during our time on Earth we have caused the loss of 83 percent of all wild mammals and half of all plants.[4]
Natural selection has been around for four billion years, since life on Earth began. But humans as a species are no longer governed by it. Not only are we in charge of our own evolution, but we have also changed how nature evolves. Ever since the continents broke apart, delicate ecosystems have been isolated by mountain ranges and oceans. Increased human movement has made the borders between ecosystems more porous. We have both inadvertently and purposefully introduced new species into ecosystems they could never have visited without hitching a ride on our cars, ships, and planes. In some sense, we have created a whole new global pseudo-ecosystem.[5] At the same time, thanks to modern science (CRISPR, gene drives, etc.; chapter 9) we have the ability to control the evolution of other species.
In 2000 Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate, started popularizing the concept of the Anthropocene, a new geological age, during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. The International Commission on Stratigraphy, which is in charge of approving and naming subdivisions of geological time, hasn’t yet officially approved the use of “Anthropocene” but is working on it. In an important first step, a preliminary Anthropocene working group supported the proposal and suggested the epoch start in the mid-20th century, in part because radioactive debris from the first atomic bomb is a distinct part of the geological record. Artificial radionuclides are just one of many traces we will leave as signatures in the strata of time. Traces of plastics, nitrogen-rich fertilizers, and fossils of domesticated animals and livestock species are just some of the many remnants we will leave behind in the anthropogenic layers of rock.
The International Commission on Stratigraphy will most likely vote on introducing the label for the new epoch in 2021.[6] For now, we are still officially in the Holocene era. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that we are in an age in which humankind, through science and technology, possesses unprecedented control over its surroundings and nature.
Science, Economy, and Equity
Science and its resultant technologies are also responsible for the well-being of our economies. Our financial systems rely on growth. To be successful in today’s global market, the economies of our countries are expected to grow at increasing rates. Games such as The Settlers of Catan, Civilization, Risk, Monopoly, and Minecraft, in which one has to expand one’s possessions to win the game, are microcosms of this need. There isn’t much room today to grow our agriculture or industries, and fortunately the days of colonization are over, so finding new science-based technologies is one of the few ways we can increase our economies. This places pressure on scientists to produce, which can result in corners being cut and science moving too fast for the global community to establish ethical and safe boundaries.
Scientific discoveries have not only enabled the expansion of the human population but are also the key to expanding economies in the postindustrial world. To keep the financial systems growing, such findings need to come faster and faster. At the same time, scientific discoveries will have to curtail the environmental and ecological degradation associated with growth. These expectations are unrealistic and a sign of a broken system; science cannot deliver all this. Expecting science to rescue us from the consequences of our overconsumption is just as dangerous as failing to acknowledge its great potential. In Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?, Bill McKibben argues that we have to move from a growth economy to a mature economy.[7] To illustrate his thinking, he uses a human analogy: as teens we are expected to grow and would be taken to the doctor if we didn’t; however, as mature adults we have reached stasis, and our families and doctors would be very concerned if we continued to get taller. McKibben argues, and I agree, that our economies are now mature.
At best science may be a bandage on an unsustainable, growth-based economy, but it won’t be the cure. Our economies and societies are complex ecosystems constrained by thermodynamics, and from thermodynamics we know that all this growth requires energy and generates waste (entropy). According to Philip Ball, former Nature editor, “creating a true science of sustainability is arguably the most important objective for the coming century; without it, not an awful lot else matters. There is nothing inevitable about our presence in the universe.”[8]
Throughout the 20th century, children enjoyed better lives than their parents. However, this pattern cannot continue forever; something has to give: the economic system built on growth, the environment, our energy consumption, and/or our eating habits. There is no denying that an increase in scientific knowledge will increase the quality and length of our lives, but it will also bring increasing environmental and ethical problems. It will widen the gap between the haves and have-nots, both within the United States and between nation-states. Developments in science won’t just improve transportation (cars, trains), communication (phones, internet), and consumption (fertilizers), as they did in previous generations; instead new advances have the potential to improve our bodies (CRISPR; chapter 9) and minds (optogenetics; chapter 8).
In Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Yuval Harari argues that existing inequities will be compounded by the fact that in the past, medicine’s main purpose was to heal
