Hubris of the humanities

When only 40 per cent of Americans believe in evolution, how will their country negotiate the biotech century? Nicholas D. Kristof The Indian Express: Friday, December 09, 2005

The best argument against “intelligent design” has always been humanity itself. At a time when only 40 per cent of Americans believe in evolution, and only 13 per cent know what a molecule is, we’re an argument at best for “mediocre design”. But put aside the evolution debate for a moment. It’s only a symptom of something much deeper and more serious: a profound illiteracy about science and math as a whole. One-fifth of Americans still believe that the Sun goes around the Earth, instead of the other way around. And only about half know that humans did not live at the same time as dinosaurs. The problem isn’t just inadequate science (and math) teaching in the schools, however. A larger problem is the arrogance of the liberal arts, the cultural snootiness of, of well, of people like me — and probably you.

What do I mean by that? In the US and most of the Western world, it’s considered barbaric in educated circles to be unfamiliar with Plato or Monet or Dickens, but quite natural to be oblivious of quarks and chi-squares. A century ago, Einstein published his first paper on relativity — making 1905 as important a milestone for world history as 1066 or 1789 — but relativity has yet to filter into the consciousness of otherwise educated people. “The great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the Western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had,” C.P. Snow wrote in his classic essay, “The Two Cultures”.

The counterargument is that we can always hire technicians in Bangalore, while it’s Shakespeare and Goethe who teach us the values we need to harness science for humanity. There’s something to that. If President Bush were about to attack Iraq all over again, he would be better off reading Sophocles — to appreciate the dangers of hubris — than studying the science of explosives. But don’t pin too much faith on the civilising influence of a liberal education: the officers of the Third Reich were steeped in Kant and Goethe. And similar arguments were used in past centuries to assert that all a student needed was Greek, Latin, and familiarity with the Bible — or, in China, to argue that all the elites needed were the Confucian classics.

Without some fluency in science and math, we’ll simply be left behind in the same way that Ming Dynasty Chinese scholars were. Increasingly, we face public policy issues — avian flu, stem cells — that require some knowledge of scientific methods, yet the present (United States) Congress contains 218 lawyers, 12 doctors, and 3 biologists. In terms of the skills we need for the 21st century, we’re Shakespeare-quoting Philis-tines. A year ago, I wanted to ornament a column with a complex equation, so, as a math ninny myself, I looked around the Times newsroom for anyone who could verify that it was correct. Now you can’t turn around in the Times newsroom without bumping into polyglots who come and go talking of Michelangelo. But it took forever to turn up someone confident in his calculus — in the science section.

So Pogo was right. This disregard for science already hurts the US. It has bungled research on stem cells perhaps partly because Bush didn’t realise how restrictive his curb on research funds would be. And we’re risking our planet’s future because our leaders are frozen in the headlights of climate change. In this century, one of the most complex choices we will make will be what tinkering to allow with human genes, to “improve” the human species. How can our leaders decide that issue if they barely know what DNA is? Intellectuals have focused on the challenge from the right, which has led to a drop in the public acceptance of evolution in the US over the last 20 yeas, to 40 per cent from 45 per cent. Jon Miller, a professorat the Northwestern University medical school who has tracked attitudes toward evolution in 34 countries, says Turkey is the only one with less support for evolution than the US.

It’s true that antagonism to science seems peculiarly American. The European right, for example, frets about taxes and immigration, but not about evolution. But there’s an even larger challenge than anti-intellectualism. And that’s the skewed intellectualism of those who believe that a person can become sophisticated on a diet of poetry, philosophy, and history, unleavened by statistics or chromosomes. That’s the hubris of the humanities. The New York Times