Editorial: Scientists and Emotionalism

PERSPECTIVES IN BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE Volume VI · Number 4 · Summer 1963 EDITORIAL: SCIENTISTS AND EMOTIONALISM Among the questions about man and nature which are not easily subjected to the classical controlled experiments are some that have become so emotionally charged as to add new barriers to objective consideration and inquiry. These include the validity ofextrasensory perception, a relationship between race and intelligence, and psychoanalysis, and the ethics of euthanasia, population control, and eugenics. The relationship between smoking and disease, cancer especially, and the biologic effects ofradioactive fallout are other examples ofdifficult questions, but emotionalism has not prevented new attempts at scientific study. Frustration over our inability to get quick answers when decades of study are required has stimulated the appointment of committees, each of which must publish a concensus ofexpert opinion. Inability to do definitive experiments is not a sufficient cause for an issue to become emotionally charged, nor is ability to do definitive experimentsa guarantee ofobjectivity. Emotionalism is commonly a factor when faiths and human values are at stake. In some fields ofsocial science, the phenomena under study are too complex to yield to analysis, or the scholar is concerned with a scanty record ofpast events which cannot be made to recur by experiment. In this case, the scholar may forget that it is an aim ofscience to make its content isomorphic—as nearly as possible—with what has or is occurring in nature . Lacking a substantial hard core offacts, an individual scholar and his disciples may interpret nature in terms ofwhatever value commitments represent the preoccupation of their time. This has happened among some andiropologists confronted with a paucity of facts on the origin ofraces. Interpretation ofnature in terms ofsociological and political aims is the way to dogma ofthe sort that has flourished under fascist and communist regimes . Here again we find emotionally charged attitudes and beliefs. Students of natural science should not claim to be more holy tiian social scientists. Bitter controversies have been recorded in die history ofevery science. It is relatively easy to be objective about a reaction in a test tube, a cloud chamber, or differences in biologic responses among control and experimental groups ofmice; but confronted with questions that do not yield or questions outside one's competence, biological and physical scientists may also become emotionally partisan. Science will not educate itselfawayfrom emotional investments in faiths in the foreseeable future, but among the freedoms which we must cherish and defend is the right to dissent and debate. There do exist groups ofscientists as well as lay citizens who would make decisions by fiat on scientific issues. D.J.I. 399 ...