Aylmer: A Scientist, Who Believes in 'Man's ultimate control over nature' in “The Birthmark” Blunder

Introduction

The scientific approach put the entire range of past ideas about the world, nature and human life under a magnifying glass, as it were, to see if they held up on closer analysis. In so doing, science also eventually helped create and establish the right to knowledge and free flow of information that characterises modern civilisation, despite ever-current threats to the freedom of information. Whether science itself embodies democratic values and whether its researches and other enterprises are directed democratically enough is quite another matter. Great expansion has obviously occurred in the sciences and their related activities and social institutions, and this appears to have the nature more of a geometric type progression since the advent of massive computing power. How much of this expansion really represents desirable progress and genuine enlightenment is the crucial question. (McMahan, E., Susan Day, & Robert W. Funk, 65-78)

Explanation

It is very well-known that there has been tremendous progress in the theoretical explanations, predictive abilities and manipulator techniques and instrumentation in the natural sciences in recent times. All in all, it seems knowledge of nature progresses on a broad front, especially in the basal sciences like physics, chemistry and biology. These are the most precise sciences and, since they yield many extremely accurate predictions, are regarded with good reason as producing certain knowledge, or at least the very best next thing. (McMahan, E., Susan Day, & Robert W. Funk, 65-78)

Spurts in technology can and do destabilise social organisation, not least by making obsolete entire industries and even whole economic systems, sometimes virtually 'overnight'. This invariably upsets the balance of trade, prices, exports and imports and causes drastic fluctuations on the work market with lay-offs and sudden unemployment in one place while ...