How does Science impact human nature and society as a whole

By Alpha G. Gray
Contributing Writer

We have learned over the time that man in his own capacity is subject to environmental changes and those changes have either positive or negative impact on him and the environment in which he lives. If a negative change occurs it causes destabilization of man's habitat and dilapidates his nature and understanding of things in the surrounding. In so doing, there is a need to relate scientific understanding to natural phenomena in our daily life. In other places around the globe, science has provided vast pieces of evidence on how the many contributions of scientific research positively affect human nature and society as a whole. Science and technology have had a major impact on society, and their impact is growing.

For example, science and technology are drastically changing our means of communication, the way we work, our housing, clothes, food, our methods of transportation, and, indeed, even the length and quality of life itself, science has generated changes in the moral values and basic philosophies of mankind. Beginning with the plow, science has changed how we live and what we believe. By making life easier, science has given the man the chance to pursue societal concerns such as ethics, aesthetics, education, and justice; to create cultures; and to improve human conditions, though it has also placed us in the unique position of being able to destroy ourselves.

Human is subject to change at any time and any place. Man's interaction with his environment determines his state of living conditions which is also base on scientific principles and natural phenomena. Every paradigm, at every time, in every place, is internally valid. By definition, it has to be, for the organism or the group to function. Everybody has to have some version of reality- “the way things are for them,” their definition of which way is up. This is perfectly valid at the time. All you can logically say about a guy who thinks he’s a poached egg is that he’s in the minority. But then, if every paradigm is valid, set in philosophical concrete, what ’s the point in going through all that confusion when change happens?

Metaphysically speaking, no one paradigm is innately any better than any other. A universe that began at 9 am on October 10, 4004 B.C. which was officially back in the seventeenth century is intrinsically no less valuable for those who live by a belief in it than our present uncertain universe, perhaps built like a yo-yo, forever destroying and remaking itself in never-ending big bangs. Each of the cosmological theories has, at different times, found totally ironclad evidence to support it. So, given that every paradigm in every place at every time has had epistemological reasons for being the only right one thus far, why does the boat get rocked time and again, why are waves made, why does change happen, when everything is fine as it is? Even if there are a few wrinkles in an otherwise fully adequate explanation of the universe, we try very hard to get around them.

Change is one of mankind’s most mysterious creations. The factors that operate to cause it came into play when the man produced his first tool. With it he changed the world forever and bound himself to the artifacts he would create in order, always, to make tomorrow better than today. But how does change operate? What triggers a new invention, a different philosophy, an altered society? The interactive network of man’s activities links the strangest, most disparate elements, bringing together the most unlikely combinations in unexpected ways to create a new world.

Is there a pattern to change at different times and separate places in our history? Can change be forecast? How does society live with perpetual innovation that, in changing the shape of its environment, also transforms its attitudes, morals, values? If the prime effect of the change is more change, is there a limit beyond which we will not be able to go without anarchy, or have we adaptive abilities, as yet only minimally activated, which will make of our future a place very different from anything we have ever experienced before?

If we look back at the cultural history of the West by doing it on the premise that you only know where you’re going if you know where you’ve been, and that those who are not prepared to learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat it, the most important thing about the process of change and forecasting change at any one time hasn’t been a matter of understanding the inner workings of the new gizmos that mankind creates to make tomorrow better than today. In many cases, it has been the awareness that change was even happening at all, the understanding that the solid base from which prediction was being made might be about as solid as quicksand. Even the most apparently immutable system or structure may be experiencing change even as you look at it.

By the change as science proves, of course, not just change in the sense of bigger and better models and new ways of doing the same things you were doing before, but a qualitative change in the structure and behavior of the society in which we live. This means new philosophies as well as new gadgets. It is not to say that the appreciation of change is easy; far from it, particularly today. As one may know that, “If you understand something today, that means it must by definition already be obsolete.” Our general relationship with the present accelerating rate of change reminds me of the postcard from the patient on holiday to his psychiatrist at home: “Having a wonderful time. Why?”

The difficulty in recognizing change even when you fall into it, and the consequent off-the-cuff variety of forecasting that prevails, is, like most things a matter of context. If you look to assess the future performance of an artifact or a human system within the envelope delineated by the factors involved, then what is the envelope, and how much of it are you aware of when you are also in the envelope?
Let us look at the envelope from a very basic point of view, that of the neurophysiology of raw perception itself. Forgive me if it’s a bit oversimple. Take me on the back of your retina I’m upside down, focused at the center but fuzzy at the edges, two-dimensional, a barrage of photons releasing rhodopsin and triggering neural impulses along the visual nerve. At the same time, the pressure wave I’m setting up right now with all this talk is causing little hairs inside the cochlea, in your inner ear, to shake around and send neural impulses into your brain. At no level am I aurally or visually more than a complicated version of the same neural impulse you’d get if you scratched yourself.

So what is it that makes all that mush me? After all, you’ve never met me before, and yet here I am, identified by you with absolute certainty as a human being, male, standing more or less upright, talking, and doing all the other things you’ve already recognized. What accomplishes that recognition job for you is your cognitive model. This is the construct, both experiential and genetic in origin, that you use to check up on all the separate bits of me and everything else you experience, mentally and physically, for identification purposes. You are using a recognition system made up of dedicated cells, each one firing in reaction to the one highly specific bit of detail it’s built to react to. Interestingly, it may be that the genetic component in that model is greater than was once thought.

Science has also shown that on the back of the human embryo, very early on in its development, is the neural plate, which contains the nerves that will eventually expand to form the spinal cord and the brain that eventually make up the nervous system. Apparently, embryonic development involves millions of those little baby neurons growing and traveling to an exact position in three-dimensional space in the final brain, in order for you to function at all when you’re born and to lay down the basic matrix of interrelating neurons which will be the neurophysiological infrastructure of your personality and of the way you think.

Above all, the judgmental systems from the old paradigms may not work in that world. Today we are, in fact, the last of the old world, living with institutions that are already creaking, facing twenty-first-century problems with nineteenth-century attitudes. Most of us find it difficult to accept what we might have to dump. We face questions like these:

If criminality is caused by XYY chromosomes, who do you blame for a crime, and why do you punish at all?

When everybody has a home computer workstation, what happens to unions, the infrastructure that runs the roads and transportation systems, the community life that “work in a central location” means, the new isolation of being alone most of the time?

If data banks carry all the knowledge we possess, to be accessed at need, what will be the purpose of memory, of “knowing” anything? And what happens if what you got from the machine yesterday (what we’ll call “what you know”) is different when you go back to the machine today?

If you have no expertise because expertise is no longer necessary, what are you left with?

If technology provides virtually free energy, with the ability to turn anything into anything else (which we can already do-it’s just too expensive to be feasible), and we no longer need the raw materials we used to because we can now make them, what happens to the materials producers in the Third World? Unlimited energy, the so-called philosopher’s stone, brings far more questions than answers. Not the least of these is a new importance it will have for the planetary heat budget, which at the moment is pretty much only the business of nature.

After all, the only need there ever was for a paradigm was based on the strictures placed on society by its contemporary tools or rather, lack of them. Now we have a tool-electronic data systems that could lift almost all of those structures from us, that could create a society that might be pluralistic in the extreme, lacking in any of the virtues we now ascribe to consensus, materialistic in every sense, highly articulate, what we would call unethical and immoral (what it would call pragmatic), self-sufficient (what we would call isolationist), libertarian (what we would call permissive), and above all, open-minded, curious, and tolerant. But in one sense it‘s what we have been heading for all along-a kind of controlled anarchy, kept in balance by the electronics. It’s the truest version yet of what John Locke meant by “the unfettered pursuit of happiness by every man.” And if the vision bothers you, remember that once we decide that the paradigm is shifting, we adapt extremely quickly.