Nice piece in the Science Times section of Tuesday’s NY Times — the one section of the paper we look forward to each week for itself alone, more even than the Book Review on Sunday. If you don’t have the time or inclination to read Nature, or Science, or Scientific American this is a weekly morsel that will help you keep up with science in its popular manifestations. Besides an article debunking fears of a crack baby epidemic, and another countering myths of exploding teen sexuality, Dennis Overbye offers a very nice reflection on Obama’s inauguration and the promise of putting science back “in its rightful place.” He dwells too much on the Chinese contradiction between science and democracy for my liking — when there are more familiar, and useful examples closer to home; say Texas. Nonetheless, he offers a useful counter to the widespread claim that science is value free, that it only concerns itself with “things.”

…this is balderdash. Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.

That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that guide the buzzing, testing, poking, probing, argumentative, gossiping, gadgety, joking, dreaming and tendentious cloud of activity — the writer and biologist Lewis Thomas once likened it to an anthill — that is slowly and thoroughly penetrating every nook and cranny of the world.

Nobody appeared in a cloud of smoke and taught scientists these virtues. This behavior simply evolved because it worked.

… It is no coincidence that these are the same qualities that make for democracy and that they arose as a collective behavior about the same time that parliamentary democracies were appearing. If there is anything democracy requires and thrives on, it is the willingness to embrace debate and respect one another and the freedom to shun received wisdom. Science and democracy have always been twins.

Dennis Overbye: Science Times