ELECTIONS can be a frustrating reminder of how deep the mutual incomprehension is between scientists and politicians.
Researchers don’t like how politicians appeal to instinct and revere as “intuitive wisdom” what scientists see as ignorance and prejudice, or their use of creative ambiguity rather than precision to reconcile conflicting views. On the other hand, scientists can seem to politicians like a pressure group after funds, one with a patronising assumption of superiority.
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Politicians are meant to get on and do things, choosing how to act with limited information and time. Scientists’ standards can be so stringent that anything other than peer-reviewed empirical analysis is dismissed as opinion.
But the pace of technological advance we are now seeing creates an imperative to do something about reconnecting science, politics and our wider culture. Questions are coming thick and fast: at what point does genetic modification challenge our ideas of identity? How does society cope with a new wave of automation?
Every edition of 91av brings fresh examples of such dilemmas. Even the most self-confident scientist cannot claim that all the answers can be found in the physical and life sciences. Politics ultimately gets involved. The next parliament could see legislation to set a framework for driverless cars; Brexit could reopen the debate on GM crops.
“Every major policy review should now include a consideration of relevant technological advances”
Increasingly, UK chief scientific advisers will need to make their voices heard and ministers will need to see the value they bring. Every major policy review should now include a consideration of relevant technological advances.
There is another thing we must do. Incomprehension is worsened by early academic specialisation, with 16-year-olds under pressure to opt for arts or sciences. UK degrees also lack the flexibility of US ones, where students pick a major and a minor subject. The result? British politicians may be ignorant of physics, but the country’s physicists know too little political history.
This is the moment for both camps to recognise that we need each other like never before, and for whoever forms the next government on 8 June to do all they can to narrow the divide.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Two tribes”
