Smoothemuse

shroomley:

What’s the opposite of intellectual arrogance?

Scientists get crap all the time for arrogantly asserting that logic is a reliable system and that we can prove or disprove things by using it. They’re seen as old and detached from reality, drawn into an emotional vacuum of formulae and theories.

…

We actually touched on this phenomena briefly today in my Personality Psychology class today. While discussing how “If everyone had children, evolution shows it would have negative effects on survival, so some population control is good; i.e. some women are infertile; contraception; the mate selection process that tends to favor only reproducing with those who are deemed “fit” by a number of criteria,” it became apparent that there were inherent moral conflicts that could potentially arise as consequence to some of this evolutionary process.

However, the fact of the matter is that morality is something generated and proliferated by culture. That is to say, the societal “rules” that can influence and govern our behavior are by no stretch of the imagination quantifiable or relevant to the ideal course of evolutionary selection. We can end up falling in love with a partner who doesn’t have “ideal” survival traits, like fitness or beauty or reproductive capacity (all things that promote survival of the individual, group, and future generations), and then staying with them for our entire lives. People are picky in this day and age, and their selections often incorporate more factors than those directly relevant to evolution.

What all this means to say is that, as it turns out, evolutionary success is usually not on our minds all the time. Our species’ capacity to generate intelligent thought processes has led to a spread-focus, and is perhaps more selfless than it needs to be (A certain amount of selflessness is beneficial to the survival of a group; you aim to help those who share aspects of your gene pool to survive, because sometimes it’s easier to help others than to help yourself. The jury’s out on why that’s the case).

What I’m getting at is this: The universe seems to be amoral. Not immoral, or lacking in “good” morals. It operates on principles that are, for the sake of distinction (and ignoring the argument that objectivity may not exist), entirely objective. That is, it favors no point of view. Its principles do not discriminate. Physics doesn’t care if you’re an innocent child or a child rapist; if you’re teetering on the edge of a cliff, gravity can and will pull you the rest of the way off. Since science aims to understand, harness, and apply the principles laid out by the universe, the work of a scientist is most effective when it is amoral. Since morality is often not fully understood by the layperson as a concept, the scientist’s lack of moral discrimination is often viewed as apathy or ambivalence, when in reality it is simply the result of their goal to be impartial.