The Trouble with Science

by Robin I.M. Dunbar and Robin I. M. Dunbar

Book Overview

In "The Trouble with Science," Robin Dunbar asks whether science really is unique to Western culture, even to humankind. He suggests that our "trouble with science"--our inability to grasp how it works, our suspiciousness of its successes--may lie in the fact that evolution has left our minds better able to cope with day-to-day social interaction than with the complexities of the external world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674910192
• ISBN13: 9780674910195
• Release Date: October 1996
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

It's Easy to Miss the Point

Current reviews of this book complain either that Dunbar's effort is too light, with a few interesting surprises, or that it is too focussed on elevating the perceived defects of science (reductionism) to unlikely levels of excitement and interest, and failing to observe that there is simply more to life than science. The first criticism neglects that this is, indeed, a focussed treatment, intended to show, without apology, exactly what we miss by not giving science sufficient importance in our lives, and in fact that it could be the difference between life and death itself. The second criticism completely misses Dunbar's central point that science is, in fact, one of the most basic activities of life, not to say of human life.Whether it is instrumental or essential in itself, the reality is that science, in one form or another, remains the bulwark that saves us from superstition, which in the end could just save us from extinction. That it also, in its purest reality, engages us in a truly wonderous process of discovery should not be obscured by its analytic and reductive requirements, and that is also one of Dunbar's magnificently subtle and essential points. Without belaboring what has become truely unsuccessful and often misleading popularization, such as trying to show how science somehow ultimately "proves" the reality of spirit, Dunbar manages to convey the very exciting, but just audible message, that the process of discovery in which science engages us is as much self-discovery as it is discovery of the world in which we live.