Contemplating Science

(spoken by Nimue, scribed by James)

The science I learned at school gave me the impression that the world makes a lot of sense. I had an understanding of a mathematically elegant universe that could be understood if you could get to grips with it. It seemed that everything could be made sense of. This was wrong, and has a lot of implications.

The sense of order in school age science gives the impression of coherence and structure. This makes it easy for some people to believe there must be intelligent design. The mathematically coherent world can seem like an argument for God. Unfortunately, when you dig into it, anything that looks tidy is only tidy because humans have made it so. If there’s a neat line dividing one thing from another, it’s because someone decided to draw it there. The further you get into actual science, the less tidy it looks, and the more things we cannot properly explain.

To make any kind of sense of the universe, we need to draw those lines, invent classifications, put things in boxes. We tell ourselves the most useful stories we can, but life is always messier than our ways of thinking about it. Gender is a good case in point here. that XX and XY biology most people encounter at school, is by no means the whole story. Biological gender is far more complicated than most people realise, and that lack of knowledge fuels misinformed political decisions.

Science is never separate from politics. It is always informed by culture. The questions we ask, the research that gets funding, the papers that get published, and the results that translate into headline news are not neutral. It isn’t morally neutral, or culturally neutral. The science we learn about at school tends not to include the history of why that research was done, and that can make a big difference. It also means that many people don’t grasp what science in action looks like, and we saw that play out in responses to covid. When you think science will give you certainty, scientific caution can feed conspiracy theories.

There’s always more to learn. I think the main thing is to know that. It’s when we mistake our ignorance for certain knowlege that we tend to get into trouble.