Is Science really important?
The impact of science in our daily lives.
by Francisco Rodrigues, University of São Paulo.
Before we talk about whether Science is important, let us define what Science is. We can say that Science is the product of the Scientific Method. This method consists of set rules to test hypotheses by conducting experiments or studies. We observe a phenomenon, formulate a hypothesis, perform experiments and from the results obtained, we prove, or disprove, the target hypothesis. All scientific discoveries follow this rigorous procedure and are tested to the limit. If a theory fails this test, it must be reformulated or discarded. Indeed, no scientific discovery is absolute and they are correct only while we do not refute them. This is the way that science has advanced, since the end of the Middle Age.
To discuss the importance of Science, we need first identify what is most important for us, human beings. It is not hard to realize that our lives and our beloved ones are the most precious things we have. Therefore, if we had a "method" to increase our life expectancy, or even protect the ones we love, this "method" would be extremely valuable. Let us observe the following plot.
In the United Kingdom, life expectancy increased greatly since the end of the 19th century, from about 40 years to over 80 years today. Thus, at that time, "something" came along and increased our chances of survival. What could have caused such an increase? Let’s delve into history.
Louis Pasteur was born in France, in 1822. He was the son of a tanner of animal skins and had a very humble childhood. Pasteur studied in the École Normale Supérieure and become a professor of Physics and Chemistry at the universities of Strasbourg and Lille. His studies on the souring of wine revealed that the cause is microorganisms, which also sour milk and beer. From this discovery on the influence of microorganisms in wine production, Pasteur invented pasteurization, which is a process used today in the industry to kill microorganisms by heating. Due to this technique, we have pasteurized milk and juice on the markets and we do not run the risk of contracting diseases such as tuberculosis or diphtheria. This vision that there would be a microscopic world, invisible to our eyes, was a great novelty at the end of the 19th century because until then, the theory of spontaneous generation was believed, which states that living beings could "be born" from organic matter, such as worms and insects created from putrefaction. This theory was disproved with the experiments of Pasteur, who showed that organisms can only be born from other organisms.
Motivated by his work with wine and beer, Pasteur devoted himself to the study of microorganisms associated with diseases, such as anthrax, cholera, and rabies. Pasteur showed that bacteria and other germs caused putrefaction and could therefore act on people’s bodies and produce diseases. Thus, for the first time, it could be proven that microorganisms could infect people and cause different kinds of illness. Pasteur made these discoveries even after suffered a stroke that affected his speech and dexterity, so necessary in scientific experiments.
Although the association between microorganisms and diseases seems obvious today, this idea met with much resistance in the 19th century. A typical example is the case of physician Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis. In 1847, Semmelweis was intrigued by the mortality rate of mothers in Vienna. In the maternity ward, there were two divisions, one for natural childbirth, assisted by midwives, and another, run by doctors. The women who went through the doctors were nine times more likely to die of puerile fever, which generated abdominal swelling, multiple abscesses, and high fever. Semmelweis performed many experiments to decrease the mortality rate, changing the diet of pregnant women or even the position of the women during childbirth. However, he noticed a big difference in mortality when he made the doctors wash their hands before surgical procedures. Semmelweis observed that doctors who worked simultaneously in the morgue and the hospital were infected with "something" that was causing the death of the pregnant women. With this handwashing procedure, the mortality rate dropped tenfold. Nevertheless, the doctors did not believe Semmelweis, who eventually fired, after accusing the physicians of murder for not washing their hands. Thus, although the evidence pointed out that contamination was causing the deaths, doctors did not believe this hypothesis and continued to ignore the procedures, until Pasteur proved that microorganisms may trigger diseases.
The discovery of the association between diseases and microorganisms helped to decrease mortality. But that was not at all. Pasteur carried out his studies with pathogenic agents and in 1885, successfully tested the rabies vaccine, treating a 9-year-old boy who had been bitten by a dog infected with the Rabies lyssavirus. From this study, the development of vaccines began, coinciding with the growth in the curve we showed earlier. Soon, vaccines helped to increase the life expectancy of the population. While previously children died from complications generated by measles or rubella, today we have vaccines that protect us against dozens of different diseases. Thus, scientific discoveries, done by scientists working for many decades, allowed children to reach adulthood, increasing life expectancy.
In addition to vaccines, other factors were fundamental to improve our lives and increase life expectance. In 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, which is one of the most important antibiotics ever created. Felix Hoffman discovered aspirin and other anti-inflammatory drugs. In the 19th century, William Thomas Green Morton and Crawford Williamson Long used sulfuric ether as an anaesthetic, allowing surgeries to be performed painlessly. And more recently, Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, which led to the development of gene therapies.
So, in a little more than a century, science has provided a breakthrough in medicine, thanks to the use of the Scientific Method, which allows hypotheses to be tested and verified through experiments.
Therefore, considering only medicine, we see that all these discoveries explain the increase in our life expectancy, leading us to conclude how important science is to mankind. Besides medicine, other factors leveraged by science have also helped this increase in life expectancies, such as easier planting and distribution of food, improved water distribution and sewage collection systems, and preventive measures that science shows to be effective, such as proper nutrition and physical exercise. All these discoveries have increased our chance of survival, thanks to the hard work of generations of scientists who have devoted their lives to do research that improve our quality of life.
To get an idea of the presence of science in our daily lives, look at a simple smartphone. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of scientific discoveries inside. Millions of minds were employed in its development. We can read this text on a smartphone because Michael Faraday discovered the electric motor, James Clerk Maxwell formalized the laws of electromagnetism, Alessandro Volta created batteries, Claude Shannon formulated the Information Theory, and John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley created the transistor. Not to mention all the engineers who adapted the theories to the real world and the multitude of computer programmers who developed (and still develop) the applications and operating systems.
All this development in which a group of people, mostly strangers to each other, worked together, is possible because knowledge is passed from generation to generation and shared through scientific articles, books, and scientific events.
Besides increasing our life expectancy, science gives us comfort, food, and allows us to educate ourselves because knowledge today is already very democratic. All we need is a cell phone to access Wikipedia, which is the largest library in history (even larger than the Great Library of Alexandria). Science not only saves lives with drugs and treatments but also allows us to produce more food, communicate quickly and become wiser.
If science is so important, why science is under attack?
There are many reasons and I will cite only three of them. First, as incredible as it may seem, the cause lies in our intellectual capacity. Human beings are the only species that can create concepts that do not exist. As stated by Yuval Noah Harari in this book "Sapiens":
“The truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all”.
This is why conspiracy theories attacking science arise. It is very easy to create and propagate false theories. For example, some theories state that Earth is a flat surface or that vaccines will modify our DNA. However, these theories can be easily refuted with a critical view. If the Earth is flat, its shadow on the moon would be ellipses and not circles. Eratosthenes had already shown that the Earth is round and calculated its diameter around 200 B.C. (see Carl Sagan’s video explaining this amazing achievement in this link). As for vaccines, if we were able to modify DNA, then we would have already found a cure for cancer! Of course, some conspiracy theory might claim that the pharmaceutical industries already have the cure for cancer, but they prefer to make money by selling drugs. However, this reasoning is not valid either. With so many scientists working independently for a cure for cancer and with the information being shared on the internet, journals and conferences, it is very unlikely that any company can keep this cure secret. Just think critically and you will find that much of the fake news is easily refutable. However, we often believe what we are comfortable with and reinforces our beliefs. Because of this, many create pseudoscientific theories, attracting a legion of followers. As Charles Duhigg said in his book "The Power of Habit":
"There is something powerful about groups and shared experiences (…) A community creates faith".
Thus, to be accepted, pseudoscience needs to be shared. To get an idea of the power of pseudoscience, only 18% of people in the world claim to have great confidence in scientific production.
The reason for the low appreciation of science is the lack of an educational system that shows the importance of Science in our daily lives. Teaching Science through lectures, with memorization of concepts, does not allow students to create a critical view about nature and reality. Scientific subjects like Biology or Physics should be taught with experimentation and focus on everyday experience. When we talk about acceleration, we need to show how velocity changes as objects fall. When we talk about cells, it is essential to have a microscope that allows us to see the organelles and the microscopic world. Instead of talking about seeds, it is more interesting to see a bean sprout.
We only learn science if we experiment.
Furthermore, it is fundamental that we give students the chance for discovery. Instead of showing the equation that describes a falling object, students should perform the experiments and verify this theory in practice, constructing plots and deducting the physical law from the measurements. By doing this, students will develop critical thinking and accept only what is proved by scientific evidence. In addition, scientific books, such as Carl Sagan’s "The Demon-Haunted World" or Bill Bryson’s "A Brief History of Nearly Everything", should be on the list of books required by colleges, to encourage students to read them.
In short, our education system is one of those responsible for the low value given to science.
Finally, the third cause is the scientists themselves. Science specialized after the Industrial Revolution. Also, the birth of reductionism, which states that the properties of the whole can be reduced to the properties of its parts, further increased this specialization. Reductionism created highly specialized disciplines so that even scientists from the same field sometimes cannot understand the work of their colleagues. However, although very specialized, it is possible to write about scientific concepts to the lay audience. Just look at scientists like Leonard Mlodinow, Steven Pinker and Stephen Hawking. Unfortunately, scientists around the world still make little effort to make scientific discoveries accessible to the general public. As a result, lay readers are not encouraged to learn about vaccines, genetic mutations, the Theory of Relativity, or even global warming. This opens up a vacuum that is filled with pseudoscience. Thus, it is spread that vaccines can cause autism, that man never stepped on the moon, or that global warming is a fallacy invented by globalism. As Carl Sagan stated in "The World Haunted by Demons",
“Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. But so does pseudoscience. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience.”
Therefore, it is urgent to fight pseudoscience. There is more beauty in science than many realize and we, scientists, need to show them.
However, although it seems easy to blame scientists for the lack of dissemination of scientific ideas, there is an important ingredient that contributes to this behaviour. Funding agencies and governments, which mainly finance scientific research, still do not value science outreach. Researchers are charged for results, i.e. publication of scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals. Scientists are not encouraged to write for the lay public, spending their time only on investigations that generate results. Therefore, a change in the politics of the funding agencies is fundamental to increase science outreach.
For science to receive its due value, we have to face these problems and propose long-term solutions, which show that without science we will not have a better life and improve our chances of survival. Moreover, scientists might show that science can be appreciated as much as art. There is as much beauty in the Darwinian evolution that explains the creation of the human eye, as in a piece by Beethoven. To show this beauty to the general public is a big challenge of our time.
Despite all these limitations mentioned above, there is still hope. Since the Middle Ages, Science has always advanced and, regardless of ideology and attacks, it has been providing a better life for all of us. Science, through the Scientific Method, allowed humans, once peasants in the Middle Ages, to reach the moon. It also made our life expectancy double, providing more comfort and allowing us to communicate extremely fast. Of course, the lack of appreciation for science slows down the scientific and technological discoveries, but the advances will continue, for the good of humanity.
To conclude, answering the initial question: Is science so important? Yes, Science is the most valuable thing we have. One way to value Science is to learn about it and spread scientific ideas. We must keep in mind that although we are imperceptible in the universe, only science makes us special. Science has made us great enough to travel to the borders of the solar system. The image obtained by Voyager shows our great power, but also our smallness in the universe. Science allows us to be wiser and humbler. Let us learn Science!
See you next time!
If you are curious about my research, check out this link: https://sites.icmc.usp.br/francisco.
