Scientific progress vs. human development?

SCIENCE AND THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY?

One important ideal that inspired science was that of being true to nature, rather than to groundless opinions and superstitions, especially as regards the causes of human suffering, disasters and fallacies about divine interventions and the supernatural. 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. We can consequently examine and evaluate ideas in a climate of opinion relatively free from fear, repression, dangerous conflict or dogmatism. This itself is no small achievement and the role of science in the history of the 20th century strongly suggests that it has in general helped to sustain what Karl Popper called 'the open society', even though fruitful scientific exchanges of ideas were also fairly well integrated into the totalitarian systems of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. Where this was not so, as in Mao's China, disasters occurred (eg. the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution).

However, 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.

It is very well-known that there has been tremendous progress in the theoretical explanations, predictive abilities and manipulatory 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.

The number of scientists employed world-wide since WW2 has increased enormously. Later, even since the millennium, the explanatory power of modern physics, astronomy, bio-genetics, neurology, climatology and paleontology, geo- and social history and numerous other disciplines has made huge leaps. Medical science, as distinct from medical practice, is an area where the understanding and control of the human body has made huge strides in many respects in the last few hundred years and very much more so in the 20th century.

This being said, one must insist straight away that the huge advances made in our knowledge of the natural world should not be allowed to obscure the fact that there are very many gaps in that knowledge, many depths yet not fully sounded and also many phenomena of which the sciences have little knowledge, even if they recognise their very existence. A minority of established experts in most major sciences, not least in medical science, still support a variety of traditional prejudices or short-sighted dogmas. Some are under cogent attack even from the public. There is an inertia to scientific opinion, where caution and resistance to change are often stronger than enterprise and where invested prestige and narrowness of intellectual scope is found, particularly by those not actually doing research or who only reproduce the results of others.

Science made possible the demonstration of it's best hypotheses in repeated experiments, the range and intricacy of which - not to mention the cost - are beyond ordinary imagination. Its prestige arose from its explanatory superiority combined with the industrial technology with their advancements in material goods and useful inventions which has gradually provided a far greater control of nature and human security. Emergent European natural science studied nature, the physical environment of man, including the human body. Everyone knows how this has led to the improvement of physical conditions generally, including working conditions, health and human productivity.

At the same time, it is a platitude today to point out that scientific advances have not been without serious costs in terms of many unwanted side-effects on health, the quality of life and the environment. This applies also to a wider and more proper understanding of the human entity. From its breakthrough in the Renaissance, physical science has been supported by those who saw it as an instrument of material and social change through technological knowledge. This accounts for most of the popularity it enjoys. Francis Bacon was referring to the empirical scientific spirit when he proclaimed that "Knowledge is power". It is power indeed, probably beyond Bacon's most far-flung imaginings... both physical, economical and social power, never forgetting military power. These are both reasons for science being supported and invested in by the various leaders in society.

Fairly blind optimism about the achievements of modern science has been part and parcel of its self-publicity throughout the 20th century, with a brief period of slump after the first atomic bombs were dropped and another when scientific certainties about the peaceful use of nuclear power were shattered by Chernobyl. The essence of the complacent attitude was expressed in the post-war years in a fanfare a prominent US scientist, Dr. Gunther Stent: "...the age-old struggle against nature to vanquish poverty is nearly over. It has been a hard fight, won thanks to man's indomitable fighting spirit and the closing of ranks between the knights of science and technology." But would Dr. Stent equally have blamed on science the gap between rich and poor that has in fact only widened further everywhere... and not least in all the leading industrialised countries?

In those countries where the great improvement in production, labour-saving technology and health conditions were achieved, the inability to alter problems that arose from 'human nature' - problems arising in the wake of industrialisation - naturally led onwards to the ambition of 'a science of the human being'. In the latter part of the 1800s, academicians, philosophers and the like increasingly expressed the need for the sciences of man and began to lay various foundations for such. How much or how little the historical, social and psychological studies - the 'human sciences' - may have contributed to human progress requires continuous critical discussion.

Much that is acclaimed as progress has its shadow side too, which sometimes grows out of all proportion. One cautionary example of this - a fitting symbol of the dilemma of science, was Thomas Midgley, a man dedicated to human progress, who invented both leaded petrol and CFCs (for refrigerators and aerosols), which later became two of the most dangerous pollutants! The question is whether science does progress the human race all in all. The history of ideas and of science tell us that changes in the progress of scientific discovery occur quite unpredictably and are very 'uneven' in their effects from place to place and time to time. One can today show that this is partly dependent on where and when the scientists are being offered the highest rates of pay and opportunities generally. 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 other boom just as precipitously. These are not subjects in which scientists interest themselves much. In the main, they want to develop their ideas freely, see these applied to workable products without concerning themselves about the wider consequences set going by their work.

One of science's 'flagships' is medical research. Life expectancy has risen enormously, partly due to improved health care, partly to other improvements in life. Despite this, a number of medical theories and techniques do not to lead to a reduction of the overall incidence of certain widespread illnesses. There are many signs that advances in one sphere give rise to new symptoms in another, such as the resurgence of malaria, new forms of deadly influenza, hospital infoections etc. Drugs fail because natural resistences to them develop. Diseases once claimed to have defeated reappear in stronger strains and so forth. Strange new illnesses, unknown to history, keep on appearing and are often denied by medical science or neglected by health authorities until their incidence becomes extremely widespread (AIDS is the classic example). Chronic sufferers of many very common physical conditions, including many spinal problems, rheumatic illnesses, asthma, epilepsy, allergies and unknown but widespread syndromes etc. - are well aware how little medicine is able to help them. Alternative and traditional cures seem to be just as effective in many cases. The overall gain or loss is impossible to assess precisely, but it is undeniable that a large debit account is still running up even while medical knowledge progresses.

There is always a need for factual truth and the removal of superstition, to which scientists have contributed most exhaustively through recent centuries. One can be in no doubt that ignorance as to many facts and theories prevails in much organised religion. Fortunately, when scienctific theories are proven untenable, the 'ignorance' involved does not lead to inquisitional torture. Every educated person knows how the heretics of Christian religion, often scientifically inclined, were banned, tortured and even burned at the stake. A large number of the most important discoverers in science were themselves seen as heretics by other scientists, and many have been ostracised and ridiculed. Semmelweiss, whose work led to the development of bacteriology, despite huge resistance from colleagues to his discoveries, was but one very notable instance. Scientists do tend to ban those unfaithful to the prevailing doctrine, and the scientific community often falls short of being neutral and unbiassed towards newcomers and critics who have a real case. Despite the reliance of scientific advances on barrier-breaking genius or determined persistence of those who have chanced on unconventional discoveries, it is still the common denominator that tends to rule the field until the pressure of truth eventually becomes too great to withstand. The 'average scientist', not the visionary genius, dominates most of the time through sheer weight of numbers and persistence in upholding orthodoxy and its various advantages for its followers.

That Galileo couldn't get the bishops to look through his telescope to see that Jupiter has moons, for they knew better in advance from their reasoning based on the authority of the Bible, is a well-known example of the obscurantism against which science struggled very successfully. Today the position can again remind somewhat of that former attitude, when a priesthood was socially empowered to define the terms of truth... what could or could not be known, by what methods and hence also what the facts were or must be, as we shall see. Insupportable dogmas of a degenerate church were abolished in favour of systematic empirical knowledge, but seldom without introducing and legitimising new kinds of bias or bigotry. These included the unjustifiable domination by man of nature on all fronts with consequent increasing exploitation of animals and the environment, the continuing downgrading of qualities associated with the feminine and non-Western cultural values and the denial of all the non-visible activities of the mind (except as 'epi-phenomena) and even more so of the historically and widely reported 'inner capacities' of the soul (i.e. so-called 'psychic' or 'para-normal phenomena' which the physical senses alone appear to be too gross to perceive or influence).

Natural scientific successes often bring new and even sometimes greater problems with them. The speed of social change which can result from ever faster discoveries leading to ever new technologies is out of control and can be destructive of existing arrangements when this could have been avoided by more controlled introduction of innovations. Further, the greater the magnification of science's various instruments, the more details one sees but, at the same time, the more that is excluded from outside the scope of vision... particularly the nature of the living human being and the mind. Information technology increases available information and speeds up the further production of factual and theoretical knowledge, but this is by no means the same as improving our understanding and comprehension of the nature of very complex and extensive 'wholes' or the most fundamental insights about them.

A major prejudice that dominates the educational systems of the West and consequent its adult intellectual life is the automatic superiority of the head over the heart. It is inculcated - especially in males - so early as to be almost an inborn unconscious bias. This emphasis has contributed to misplaced rational and 'unfeeling' behaviour in many professions (eg. medicine); excessive belief in efficiency and calculable results like profitability rather than the effect on human sensibilities and relations; unnecessary over-organisation of human behaviour in workplaces and their overall lifestyles. Generally speaking, these tendencies are a bi-product of the European renaissance which becomes more and more visible in the alienated and divisive personal and social life of Westerners, as is seen when comparing these values with such as prevail in 'technologically-backward' South-East Asian societies. The methods and objectives of science epitomise this great accent on mind over feeling, thought over sensibility or 'head over heart', which has been a major aim of the sciences in their historical break not only with religion, but also with genuine spirituality.

With the demise of religious authority in society, and the exclusion from notable influence of high-minded scholarship as in former times, modern Western cultures suffer from a shortage of suitable serious fora or other outlets for radical thinking about key assumptions, objectives and values that underpin many accepted forms of scientific activity today. The views of the informed public, especially those with eco-friendly philosophies and predominantly moral leanings, are not willingly listened to when they dissent against directions taken by scientific experimentation in risky and undue interferences with the natural environment and the human make-up.

With the continuing lack of an effective world moral consensus or any power to enforce either normal justice or moral right in most cases, Western science-driven values - are causing the slow degeneration of certain long-term traditions and accompanying perceptions that have served as the 'cultural glue' that has unified or conjoined different people or peoples in a common society in the non-Europeanised world. The predominance of Western scientism runs concurrently with provincialising stagnation in intellectual overview, especially in the realm of philosophies of science and knowledge. That modern education is anchored on the scientific mentality as a belief system which excludes or side-steps many of the world's relevant cultural visions as 'invalid' will surely be to the detriment of true science in the longer run, just as destroying the rain forest will deplete the diversity of species.

A great wealth of ancient culture has gone out as the baby with the bathwater. Fortunately the younger science generation are much concerned about what can be lost to science - and to the world - through the inability to broaden the methodological and philosophical outlook. Imperialism foisted Western values on ancient cultures and often implanted an exaggerated scientific scepticism, which worked very destructively on those societies' traditions and historical continuity. Methods of passing on historical records from each generation to the next completely undreamt of by science preserved racial memories of a flood catastrophe and many other events which could not be recorded other than through tradition, but even then often with great accuracy. Despite this, and many other forms of highly convincing evidence of major earth events having taken place, the Western-dominated geological and historical sciences long failed to investigate and benefit from evidence on such matters. Now, however, it is commonplace to search for the oprigins of what was regarded a myth and legend, such as in the Bible, and many remarkable finds have thus recently been made. The very considerable testimonial evidence that there existed civilisations 'higher' in at least some respects than at present - and some possible even possessing more subtle and effective 'mind technologies' and far more sustainable and bio-degradable products than are commonly known today - is regarded as too unlikely by most historians, archeologists and paleontologists. Despite the huge blunders as regards the age of humanity that were defended rigidly until the discoveries of Leakey and, more recently, the discoveries of our human and 'racial' origins opened by genetics.

History shows how some ideas - and particularily common prejudices within a culture - can be so dear and unexamined that they become as if invisible. This would seem to have occurred widely with science and its various disciplines or sub-cultures too. It is remarkable how little scientists care to point out how relatively few human or social problems the sciences have so far elucidated or helped eliminate. Much has been written about the successes and hopes of science. Meanwhile it is left largely to non-scientists to warn about the constant recurrence of common illnesses, pending industrial disasters, unheard-of pollutions, new forms of emergent social disruption, economic disasters and maldistributions, mental illnesses and more besides. From my viewpoint, the 'holes' and blind-spots in science, and its shortcomings in effectively addressing its role in the world situation, still loom large.

There is still a clear schism running through many levels of society between two major spheres of thought that goes back to the matter-spirit dualism established in European thought and which served as a compromise between pragmatic scientific culture from other-worldly religious doctrine. Crucial historical steps in the institutionalisation of the schisms between worldly and religious interest and between empirical and divinely-revealed knowledge are represented by Galileo's distinction between primary (objective) and secondary (subjective) qualities and Descartes' analysis of two 'substances', thought substance (res extensa) and extended substance (res cogitans). The result for science has been to fall firmly on the one side of the dualism. The belief in matter and the denial of soul or spirit entraps science within the impossible one-sided 'philosophy' of materialism or physicalism. It necessarily alienates and denigrates all spirituality and all those with any kind of religious faith, whatever their experiences.

The consequences of this split today, roughly speaking, is seen in two often fundamentally different world-views and sets of value priorities. The one concentrates interest almost fully on supposedly 'primary qualities': the scientific culture that mostly supports physicalism, scepticism, material technology, monolithic organisation and consumerism. Its counterpart, regarding the quality of subjective experience as crucial (Newton's 'secondary' qualities) concentrate on human understanding, insight and leans mainly towards humanism, alternative pluralism, eco-friendly lifestyles, religious faith and spiritual behaviour. The elusive human self, soul or spirit - denied existence by scientific method and ideology, has becomes solely the province of non-scientific thought disciplines and also of a wide range of supra-scientific self-investigatory practices. This schism continues to confuse and distort the view of the human in various human sciences and allied fields like medicine, pedagogy and psychiatry.

The massive global industry embodied by all activities and chemical products connected with clinical psychology and psychiatry increased parallel to a massive increase in recorded psychic abnormalities, chronic mental illnesses and social deviance of all kinds. This fact speaks volumes about the lack of insight into human nature that underpins most Western thinking about the psyche (which is itself mostly regarded as non-existent anyhow!).

The huge increases in mental illnesses in the 20th century speaks for itself about almost all forms of established psychiatry and psychology, which have been ideologically crippled by the schism and their consequent rejection of spirituality. Much modern research shows that a clear majority of psychic sufferers are not actually cured by psychiatry, psychotherapy or psychoanalysis and that complete laymen are as effective as are professionals in helping sufferers. There is no convincing research evidence that therapy and counselling lead to better school grades, of less violence or crime or of less chronic welfare dependency, on the contrary.

An impressive survey of all reliable contemporary researches into the curative effects of these methods by Robin Dawes virtually proves this shortcoming, as far as is possible by scientific means.¹ The results of analysing hundreds of separate research reports show that the effect of psychotherapy is generally not shown to depend upon therapeutic education or professional experience. There is no clear statistical evidence that clinical psychology has any special effect and professional therapists have no special expertise in understanding, treating or predicting the behaviour of individuals. Nor do the results show that therapists learn from their work with the mental suffering anything that could not be read up in the literature. Dawes considers the problem to lie in the inability of professionals to accept 'feedback' about their own behaviour. Though Dawes holds that this does not prove that all psychotherapy is without benefit, it speaks all too eloquently of the failings of prevalent psychological theories. These facts, based on the most scientific studies available, are rationalised away or rejected out of hand by the majority of professional psychotherapists, clinical psychologists and psychologists, which is not at all surprising, considering what this could mean to their professions and a whole sector of public health. Their common interest in suppressing this data is clearly perceived in these professions.

The schism between science and religion eventually had the effect of freeing the sciences from the constraints imposed by many morals that were traditionally founded on spiritual values. Today, for example, medical scientists are considering growing headless human bodies from tampered genetic materials so as to produce organs for transplants. Cloning of humans is a distinct likelihood, considering the 'liberality' of emerging laws on cloning research and the fact that what has been developed through research will usually be applied by someone somewhere. Huxley's Brave New World seems just around the corner. The use of animal organs like the pig in human bodies brings us yet a step nearer H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau. The indulgences long granted to scientific research to pursue whatever ends it can, often regardless of the concerns of wider community, now at long last are coming under increased critical scrutiny.

Medical research has of course been under ethical restraints in some important respects, at least in law, mainly due to international conventions (from Nuremberg in 1947, Helsinki in 1964 and Tokyo in 1975). But new issues arise in medicine and genetics and the outcome has often been decided by a handful of persons on select committees, being mostly extremely liberal towards scientists' aims and arguments. This kind of elitism is surely part of the recipe for possible disaster.

Historians of science often seem almost professionally obliged to inform the public that modern physical chemistry is a great advance on the alchemy of the Middle Ages from which much of it first sprang. Alchemy was a primitive yet epoch-making sort of investigation of the properties of things, which work laid the basis of observations from which modern chemistry started. Alchemy ostensibly aimed at turning base metal into gold; not such a surprising object to pursue. The present-day scientist may laugh over such a superstition, but chemistry today is hardly different in that its overall aim is 'to turn matter into money'. The symbolic and spiritually-motivated alchemical quest for the transmutation of base metal to gold, if that was really what it was, has at all events been soundly replaced by the out-and-out profit motive in the industrial use of nature through chemistry. (I disregard all the mystical-religious and the alleged depth-psychological aspects of alchemy here).

Nobody can sensibly deny that there are great advantages for mankind in modern chemistry. However, the problems that follow are also monumentally threatening, since the full effects of new chemicals upon people and nature are seldom known for decades and nor are the best methods of producing them without pollution, using them safely in a complex society and last by definitely not least, storing or disposing of them safely in a changing physical environment and political world.

Nature is transmuted by physical processes to 'create' a vast range of synthetic materials which very often pollute or destroy much of the natural environment. This transmutation is taking place globally on an unmeasurable scale, threatening the health and even life of future generations. Many thousands of artificial compounds invented since mid-century that previously never occurred in nature have created an insecure human environment with great and unforseen consequences for pollution and public health. Documentation of this fact should be unnecessary here, since poisoning, allergies and a wide range of illnesses have increasingly been happening - often on a huge scale (eg. the Bhopal disaster) are becoming ever more widespread year by year. Chemical dangers and disasters have become so frequent that most without special news value have to go unreported.

For decades the same 'progressive blindness' drove forth a world-wide nuclear power industry. It is not the well-known shiny side of the coin but its mostly unseen dark side that is obviously our interest here. Until comparatively recent times, almost all scientists denied that there were comparable disadvantages in the discovery and manufacture of thousands of compounds not occurring naturally, not to mention mortal dangers! This is now being extended very much further in bio-chemistry, such as in hundreds of forms of genetic manipulation and in the development of transmitter-blocking agents in brain chemistry so as radically to control human emotions. Whether or not these developments represents real progress, maybe even history will fail to show.

Nation states and multinational organisations further research in the science of chemistry generally still on the basis of its profitability. This profitability is very gradually being re-conceived only where the destruction of resources and environments are being shown to lead to reduced profitability in the long run for the particular multi-national or other big investors, such as national States. Profitability is still the base-line argument from which the parameters of future science are projected. It seems to be the only way modern, materialistic man is able confidently to measure the good! This itself says very much indeed about the shortcomings of scientific progress so far! The sciences are supposed to be the supreme 'measuring instrument' - near-perfect extensions of the human sense organs etc. - at least of all natural things, and yet scientists cannot out-argue business because they cannot adequately demonstrate and prove the destructivity of many a relationship that practically anyone else can see for what it is! Many scientists even doubt many of these developments are serious threats and wash their hands of critics and campaigners.

Basic research in chemistry and biological, practised in the name of truth, acts on the doubtful assumption of future pay-off, spin-offs and drip-downs for the common human. As a whole it is actually tailored, if sometimes only in a somewhat rough-cut way, to the chief requirements of both major private interests and governmental apparati, the weapons industries and the dominant multi-national business interests. Agriculture has, in modern economies, become the victim of the chemical industry with huge and uncharted disruptions in eco-systems, the countryside, natural water or similar resources and wild life, the labour force and social culture. The spreading agro-desertification of cultivable land and the elimination of once common wildlife are the products of science-driven 'advances', which are always forcing farmers to produce more and cheaper. Though the chemical industry generates labour-saving improvements for the consumer, they are all in all probably much less beneficial than the contrary, at least from the viewpoint of safe, renewable development. The chemical industry develops and designs what power conglomerates decide, depending also on what the rich (1st and 2nd world) consumers demand, not what is needed by those who are supposed to benefit from 'trickle-down', but who somehow never quite do.

The biological sciences, with its blinkered concentration on organic and cellular research and backed by large product-oriented corporations, turned a blind eye to proponents of ecology and their warnings from the start, denigrating their ideas as 'unscientific'. It took decades before the voice of ecologists were heard, then mainly because of powerful public opinion and the seriousness of the desecrations nurtured by 'hard' bio-chemical science. The funding for ecologically-minded biologists is still a tiny fraction of what goes to organic and genetic biology... a very dangerous unbalance. See alternative research Basal research is financed mainly because it tends to "pay off", not primarily because it is right or good, not because it furthers anyone's realisation of truth. How many scientific reports today mention goodness, or even truth? The answer will be that it is not the business of science to specify these. Indeed, scientific usefulness, say in crop-control, medicine, industrial processes, tends to be estimated primarily on the basis of business and trade results and only secondarily - if at all - on genuine ethical, social or even ecological considerations.

Very similar factors condition the direction taken by most sciences, whether they have technological applications or whether they are used to support social, economic or political policies. There are almost always large economically-motivated interest groups involved somewhere in the planning and development of scientific research. A dominant line of thought across the world in these matters, alas, still is: what pays is for the common good. If research that is socially useful or just is also unprofitable, it tends to be unable to get funds.

The chief exception made to the above is if it has military 'usefulness'. The weapons industry and its many associated technologies spend relatively enormous sum on all forms of scientific research that might have military potential and consequently can employ the so-called 'elite' among scientists. It has been noted by Sherrington that the reaction of science to conscience is to 'put its finger to its lips and be silent'. Is it not self-evident that, in any wider sense, it does not really pay and it is not truly for the common good?

As said, gaping gaps between general claims about scientific knowledge and actual achievements can still be observed regularly, and even in what claim to be highly exact sciences of almost infallible theoretically soundness. A Three Mile Island or a Chernobyl are but two dramatic illustrations of known to everyone of the fallibility of reasoning of an entire range of very prominent establishment scientists and their predictions in arguing for the nuclear industry as an almost entirely safe energy source. Meanwhile, the faith they held in fission technology is now transferred to (very hot) fusion technology. Errors of similar and yet greater epistemological magnitude are, however, quite commonplace in the sciences. They happen to be little known, and the promulgators of science are clearly not keen on advertising them or referring back to them.

Though no institution keeps any record of universally-accepted hypotheses that subsequently have to be modified or even rejected outright, any student of scientific progress with a moderately-critical capacity can observe how frequent great blindnesses and blunders have occurred, especially since scientific activity mushroomed across the globe in the post-War period. This fact is obscured mainly because scientists in general - and of presenting it in a positive or even glowing light. Meanwhile, cover-ups of the frequent 'human error' and crises abound among highly-place scientific executives. Probably the worst examples of this are found in scientific establishments' bare-faced lies about the non-disposability and real dangers of the production of extremely dangerous undisposable nuclear waste, especially plutonium (now about 500,000 kilograms world-wide^.2. The Challenger disaster demonstrated definitively how, even in the world's supposed cutting edge, top level techno-science, human error led to a catastrophic consequence after advance warnings by engineers involved were simply ignored.

The history of the earth's last 12,000 years, of the nature of the earliest societies and early man, of the manner and times of the spread of populations and cultures and remains that have left inexplicable riddles are all subjects where the anxieties of narrow-minded established figures have had full play in rejecting a mass of evidence for which it cannot account within its prevailing scope. It were as if the lessons about learned ignorance of the incredibly successful Piltdown hoax was quite forgotten in paleontology, which only underwent a revolution in the dating of earliest hominoids from thousands of years to millions due to the discoveries and persistence of the Leakeys. All this says something about the situation in many branches where what has been hailed as advances are sometimes later seen as major setbacks.

This can be said of much of what nutritional science in physiology and medicine has propagated. There has hardly been a subject in which theories (of what is a sound diet) have changed about more rapidly - and in the twentieth century (unless it be perhaps the theories of micro- and astro-physicists). Many dietary ideas that have been emphasised by scientists, especially in the post-war years, have proven to be directly false, even directly dangerous. Until recently, vegetarian and vegan diets were widely warned about as if they were a slow death warrant. Though long known to those with first-hand experience, it is being shown more and more clearly by comparative statistical and other dietary studies how much healthier these are than meat, fish or poultry diets. Certain raw vegetables, seed-sprouts and fruits etc. are also slowly being recognised as the healthiest and most adequate of diets. The setbacks to health caused by wrong scientific conclusions about nutrition must still be inestimably great.

An increasing obsession in modern culture with destruction, and comparatively seldom with creation, is perhaps noteworthy for it can be seen on many fronts, of which there are some quite striking examples in science, medicine and entertainment. There ar, however, movements which attempt to raise awareness of these malpractices - if if some of the more peripheral groups are unfortunately destructive in themselves.

Scientific experimentation in the laboratory not seldom proceeds by way of 'destroying' something. The atom is split (smashed), the animal is dissected (killed) and the environments are experimentally modified (interfered with)... all in the name of 'creative thought'. Science destroys so as to analyse, or as Tennyson's poem has it, "We murder to dissect". It is a law of nature that virtually all physical destruction leaves more or less toxic waste products, which was long disregarded - or minimised as being of relatively little importance - both in the chemistry and nuclear physics and the industries these have created. Only now that toxic pollution has become a problem of planetary dimensions have scientists reluctantly been turned, largely by public outcry, to recognise more directly the consequences of this "law of destruction", so to speak.

That scientific analyses also have destructive effects far beyond the laboratory is indisputable even if we only consider how its results have been used in the development of overwhelming "weapons of mass destruction". Defence spending has been the chief funding instance in (or somewhere behind) a large amount of the advanced research work in 20th century sciences and it continues to be very considerable. Whatever benefits science may have brought humanity, one cannot but deplore the way practitioners have given it a permit to carry out some of the most 'inhuman' violence to animals, to be financed by and to produce knowledge and technology for every imaginable sort of ghoulish meddling with any processes of human life regardless of social, cultural and religious sensibilities. Public awareness of this increases in certain countries, yet is still virtually nil in other major emerging economies.

The medical industry, which includes as its extension almost all medical institutions and practitioners, is increasingly driven by profit. From the viewpoint of those major interests, illness is profitable, health is not! Medical research into disease and degeneration is far more widespread than into health and regeneration, even today. Medicine has become overly preoccupied with the prevention of impending death at all costs. Though this is understandable, it is hardly very rational. Prevention of illness is obviously related to health, but there are two general types of it: either averting or removing illness.

Any really rational overall health policy must obviously rather have the long-term and preventive view as its keystone and concentrate resources effectively there. This is constructive and creative, being oriented more towards improving life quality and averting illnesses before they arise, rather than having to patch up at far greater expense after the fact (to society, that is). However, from the viewpoint of the medical profession and all those other professions and organisations dependent upon it, a very healthy populace means in general less employment. Large cutbacks in spending are unpopular with all organisations having the inherent tendency to develop and expand, which means almost all of them.

Compared with curative medicine, the preventive field is almost entirely undeveloped. This is patently evident in cancer research in which the destruction of cancer cells has long been the Holy Grail, rather than the many constructive therapies that can prevent cancer, reinforce the patient's immune system and even effect permanent cures (written off by the puzzled doctor as 'spontaneous remissions'). Despite many billions of dollars spent, deaths by cancer have remained largely unaltered. Despite all the propaganda of medical science and its allied industries and charities, in Britain for example, life expectancy from middle age onwards has hardly changed during the entire century! The health benefits and curative powers of proper diet, including system cleansing through fasting, remain wholly unresearched. It can hardly be seriously disputed that fresh and non-polluted foodstuffs are generally better for health than artificially preserved, chemically-treated and less naturally nutritious foods. Despite blanket medical support for most 'industrial foodstuffs', a wide public has already realised the many health advantages of vegetable products grown by 'organic' or other such natural methods. Vegetarian, vegan or fruit diets have long been known by certain minority groups to cure many serious chronic and even some illnesses regarded as terminal by specialists. But science has for over a century ignored all this most blatantly. It is the cheapest kind of health care, and also absolutely the least profitable one to the interests behind medical research, modern drug development and sale, operative and other many other technologised medical techniques. Science has also been instrumental in developing the modern high-intensive, highly polluting agro-industry, towards the interests of which it is largely biassed on many issues, from the destruction of nature to the creation of more potent chemical agents with unknown side-effects and long term consequences.

Science directly affects most people's lives through the creation of modern electronic media for leisure. This has a huge potential for influencing the mind, and partly also the mental health and social values of the population. This has at the same time brought home to people the existence of every manner of terrible suffering, traumatic experience, human brutality and fearful prospect that are known or imaginable. The reverse side of the coin is well know, that the constancy of such reports in one's own living room also dulls perception of the meaning of these events and creates a sense of powerlessness. Scientific technology also plays a large part in making possible the form of entertainment that cinema, T.V., video and home computers provide, where the fascination with destructive acts is also widespread in a way that even our recent forbears would have found incomprehensibly dreadful. There seems to be no limit to the amount and value of goods destroyed, from vehicles to buildings for the sake of amusement, in the film, TV and other leisure indistries. No limits seem to exist for the extent and degree of devilishness shown in the destruction of lives, human relationships and the perversion of practically all values that have ever been held sacrosanct - both in 'artistic imagination' and, yet stranger than this, in actual fact. On the other hand, portrayal of creative acts cannot be seen to have increased or spread in the media to anything like the same obsessional degree as in the contrary case. The increasing preoccupation with destructivity at all levels of life is apparently another of the unpredicted side-effects of scientific-technological progress.

A brief mention here of a subject to be explored in some detail later: it is patently evident to any informed observer whose own interests, work and prestige are not too fully invested in one or more of the human sciences, that the requisite understanding for the harmonious development of the happy individual and peaceable society has not so far arisen in any appreciable scale from them. There have been advances, no doubt, in the general level of sensitivity to human needs and problems, compared to half a century ago. However, we may ask what the reasons are for the shortcomings of the social, psychological and anthropological sciences in understanding human nature sufficiently well to be able to propose effective programmes for stopping the decline in values, the increase in violence, crime, drug-dependency and many other forms of social disruption. A neutral report on world statistics broadcast widely in 1997 blandly stated that crimes of violence world-wide have increased by 500% in the last three decades and teen suicides have tripled. Whatever the reasons for this, one cannot surely then say that science has been very successful in contributing to solving the world's real problems?

Some part of the answer as to why the advent of psychology and other social sciences have not altered the situation very radically is most likely to arise partly from the fundamental error of thought or belief that underlies the enterprise, namely that the human being is - and can be studied straightforwardly and exclusively as - an objective entity like any natural object.

As Jürgen Habermas has written of the social sciences "they too created a scientistic consciousness as soon as they oriented themselves towards the model of the natural sciences; even the patterns of meaning inherited from the past seem to lend themselves to simultaneous combination into a cosmos of facts."³ A chief dilemma in applying scientific standards to human studies is usually how, if at all, one can meaningfully employ scientific methods devised for the study of physical nature to human beings and their works. It will be shown here how the dependency on physical science has brought with it inappropriate standards of knowledge - and thus wrong methods and techniques - for studying man and society in so far as these are not (natural) physical phenomena! The mistaken basis of strict scientific physicalism is a chief cause of the relative ineffectualness of most of the human sciences, which also exerts very widespread negative influences on society and culture.

Research in the human sciences also most often unwittingly reflects culturally-conditioned viewpoints and local or national values. The research environments are generally socially narrow and far more intellectually confomist than are people in the larger society. Academic provincialism is often highly resistant to change. Out of hundreds of research projects in psychological and sociological studies there are but a handful where the work has practically usefulness, relevance to life or is otherwise of noticeable historical or social value. This fact helps to explain why it is that the most interesting, thought-provoking, critical and constructive best-selling books about human life and society are hardly ever written by academicians or scientists. This view I base on my own sociological-epistemological researches into all social science carried out in Norway in a given period and its practical functions, where relevant, within that society.

Almost only in a few places today, in some Eastern countries, does one still find science regarded as a corollary of mankind's spiritual quest to know the self, respect creation in all its manifestations and to improve the world. Unfortunately, even there, the level of understanding of science is often abysmal and the 'spiritual' teaching is full of superstitious and speculative ideas which have little or nothing to do with personal and social improvements. Economic pragmatism rules policy planning almost everywhere nowadays and forward-looking social doctrines are regarded as idealistic, impracticable or even naive when they go against the economism in so-called 'first-world countries'.