Humanity 2.0: What it Means to be Human Past, Present and Future
Science and the humanities don’t often get along. Yet these days, especially when it comes to controversial work like stem cell research, they don’t have much of a choice. Funding bodies occasionally insist that scientific researchers engage with ethicists, sociologists or philosophers to consider the wider implications of what happens in their labs.
As a science journalist, I’ve seen this happen in practice, and it’s not always pretty. Once, I visited a synthetic biology lab where I encountered a teeth-gritting politeness on both sides, thinly masking the fact that the scientists in the room felt that the social scientists had invaded their space. As far as they were concerned, their “theories” were too airy-fairy to be called science at all. I’ve met other biologists and engineers who think that philosophy is little more than a circus sideshow.
I tend to take a bit of a broader view. Whether or not scientists like to admit it, early scientific thought was deeply influenced by philosophy, and today’s technologies are shaped by society as much as they do the shaping. And so I was genuinely intrigued to find out how philosopher-turned-sociology, professor Steve Fuller’s latest book, Humanity 2.0: What it Means to be Human Past, Present and Future, would tackle these kinds of issues in the context of the massive advances that have happened in the biological sciences.
It’s not just stem cell research and synthetic biology that have deep social and ethical dimensions, ripe for exploration, but also rapidly growing fields like artificial intelligence and neuroscience. Academics have only just started to build an understanding of the enormous repercussions they might have on our lives. Unfortunately Fuller hasn’t done much to push that understanding forward. He glosses over the most fascinating new research. And the result is a long, dense, inaccessible sociology paper, in which he cites himself a little too frequently.
It was only when I approached the end that I realised that the packaging might be different, but he is only grinding the same axe that he did in Dissent over Descent, which was published in June 2008 before being scathingly reviewed by AC Grayling in this magazine. Like that book, an enormous chunk of Humanity 2.0 is dedicated to his support for intelligent design, and more generally, to his plea to introduce theology to debates surrounding science.
Fuller’s writing seethes with anger. He rails against Neo-Darwinists on the one hand, and then attacks fellow intelligent-design advocates on the other for not being smart enough in making their case. But his biggest problem seems to be with the attitude that science is superior to the social sciences and philosophy. It’s demeaning that some philosophers think of themselves as “underlabourers” for science, he says.
In the end, though, it all starts to sound like the bitter complaint of someone who feels that he isn’t being taken seriously enough. Fuller isn’t just gutted that social scientists and philosophers aren’t valued as much as they should be, but that his personal theories are nowhere near the top of the ideas hierarchy.
I’m not even sure there’s much point disputing the details of his arguments (and of course there are countless arguments to be made against intelligent design) because I have a feeling that he will never change his mind. And that is perhaps one aspect in which science has the upper hand: good scientists, social or otherwise, are at least willing to change their positions when the facts suggest they might be wrong.
