The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World

by Charles C. Mann

More generally, the impossibility of predicting the long-term future unavoidably leaves room for hope. The chance of a successful outcome cannot logically be excluded.

Love

people are not fungible—the impact of one person living one kind of life is completely different from that of another person living another kind of life.

But the crowding that gave him, ever after, “the feel of overpopulation” had little to do with birth rates and natural resources and density of numbers and much to do with laws and institutions and government plans. “If you want to understand Delhi’s growth,” Narain said, “you should study economics and sociology, not ecology and population biology.”*5

I can spend a million dollars paving over a magnificent redwood forest and that will appear in the statistics of gross domestic product as a million dollars of economic activity. But I can also spend that money buying front-row opera seats for poor schoolchildren and that, too, will appear in the gross domestic product as a million dollars of economic activity. The two activities contribute identically to the statistics, but their environmental impact is strikingly different.

How many people? is an important question, but it is less important than What are those people doing?

The world is various but the view from the laboratory bench is ever similar. Scientists speak different tongues and live in different places and worship different gods, but at any one time the array of available problems and techniques is limited and apparent to all. In consequence, discovery is a crowded business. “The pattern of independent multiple discoveries in science is in principle the dominant pattern,” wrote the sociologist Robert K. Merton, in a passage well known to historians of science. Look hard at individual cases, Merton argued, and you will find that “all scientific discoveries are in principle multiples.” Men and women emerge from the obscurity of the laboratory waving a flag in triumph and discover somebody ahead and somebody behind, each with the same flag.

Good

The air in the scientific workshop is so clean and bracing and the results of researchers sequestering themselves inside so satisfying that they lose their bearings. They don’t want to leave the workshop. They prefer to live in its world of abstraction, separate as angels from the messiness of life. Or, worse, the findings of the workshop seem so luminous and clear, so like beacons of truth, they forget that the workshop is a special place within the world and begin to think that it is above the rest of life and should control it. And here, Husserl said, lies peril, because the people outside the workshop will come to detest and disbelieve the people within its privileged walls. Like Vogt, Borlaug was caught up in the clash between the workshop and the world.

Workshop v the world

it worked—he created varieties of wheat that were resistant to multiple types of rust and yielded two or three times more grain. But what was left out was the color of the bran, the texture of the grain, the pleasure of having several different types of flour, or, more important still, the relationship of the farmers to their land, and to each other, and the structure of power in a community or a nation.

Why would you listen to people who have no idea what you consider important? Writing in the 1930s, Husserl believed that the ensuing rejection of expertise led to an embrace of the irrational and, ultimately, to the Nazis. Surely it has played a role in the rejection of scientific claims about genetically modified organisms, nuclear power, soil depletion, and climate change.

Our record of success is not that long. In any case, past successes are no guarantee of the future. But it is terrible to suppose that we could get so many other things right and get this one wrong.

recognizing a problem doesn’t automatically imply accepting either its seriousness or any particular solution to that problem. In useful discussions, this leads to seeking to manage risks: the risk that the problem is as serious as activists think, the risk of not achieving other goals if too much time, money, and attention is devoted to solving a problem that turns out not to be very serious.