Science and Villainy: The Reason Everyone Hates Scientists

“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology,

in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.”

- Carl Sagan

An unfortunate fact about me, that should be apparent to any person I’ve ever worked with, is that I procrastinate, mostly by binge-watching series. So of course when I was contemplating a topic for this contribution, it was The Big bang Theory that inspired my consideration of an outsider’s opinion regarding scientists.

It’s one of those things that few of us really need to think about. Let's, however, take a moment to contemplate some recent “bad guys” in popular shows. It will be recalled that in The Avengers a scientist (Dr. Selvig) caused the impending apocalypse when he decided to experiment with alien technology (the Tesseract). Then there are the scientists who try to kill everybody in Divergent, the scientists who make the apes hate humanity in the new Planet of the Apes series, pretty much every scientist on Fringe, and of course even the American animated series Phineas and Ferb (a show for children) portrays a mad scientist trying to conquer the "entire tri-state area". There are numerous examples and it seems like we’ve gotten to a point where you just can't have a dystopian science fiction film without some evil scientists lurking behind the scenes.

Most scientists are nice, decent people. Generally, they do their jobs adequately, are concerned about their families and support efforts to create a better world. So, why then are scientists turning into bad-guy clichés? One possibility is explained by Annalee Newitz in the online magazine I09. She considers that most of the general public may feel so alienated from the scientific process that they think about science as being incomprehensible and explains how we instinctively fear the unknown. In this way science becomes akin to magic. Many of the maniacal scientists in Fringe, for example, might as well have been evil wizards. She goes on to state that this problem helps explain why we have so many mad scientists in movies, but so few mad cooks: “Even if you don't like to cook, or aren't good at it, you aren't likely to think of cooking as something that is profoundly incomprehensible and therefore responsible for almost anything”.

Recently, Brian Martin and Sharon Beder wrote in Chain Reaction that a publication by Hilary Koprowski in the magazine Science (as a response to the views of Tom Curtis when he presented his hypothesis about the origin of AIDS - first in Rolling Stone and later in Science) furthered the so-called “incomprehensibility idea” of science, speculating that it revealed a universal problem. In summary, their issue was scientists’ tendency to be quite arrogant concerning the understanding of science itself and focuses on the view that many natural scientists have a low opinion of the ability of non-scientists to make sense of the world. They therefore disregard members of the 'general public', namely those who have no degrees, institutional positions or scholarly publications, commonly considering their views as being irrelevant.

This discussion is very controversial to say the least, especially since we all know that every scientist (like many other professionals) must undergo prolonged training, involving years of course work and apprenticeship in research. Within universities and research institutes the status of a discipline depends on it being opaque to the prying eyes of outsiders, both from other disciplines and from the general public. The result of this being that arrogance is an occupational hazard for scientists.

My opinion on all of this is quite simple. “ENLIGHTENMENT,” wrote Immanuel Kant, “is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [Dare to know!]. Have courage to use your own understanding! That is the motto of enlightenment.” This passage comes from Kant’s 1784 essay “What Is Enlightenment?” and to my mind advocates the need for an age of coherence. The problem is not arrogance, but misunderstanding of the responsibility one feels as a scientist to use our knowledge in an unbiased manner, to learn from experience and to make informed decisions about matters like conservation based in fact and truth to the best of our ability. We are all on the same quest to make science less mysterious, but like everything else, how well you are respected ultimately comes down to your own quest for enlightenment.

Small publications like this attempt to bridge that gap by providing a modest glimpse of one such quest, my experiences along the way and the ongoing commitment I have to better understanding of science itself.