Science and democracy: can this marriage be saved?

• Author: Greene, Mott
• Position: Essay

The modern ideal of democracy--a constitutional polity governed by thoughtful citizens who decide on policy after public consideration of alternative courses of action and their consequences--emerged in the 18th century, riding on the coattails of a scientific worldview shared by Jefferson, Franklin, and every other signatory of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

That worldview was articulated in its classical form by John Locke and his good friend Isaac Newton, and has served historically to underwrite democracy as scientifically suited to humankind and our place in Nature. Newton's lawful Nature, ordained and guaranteed by God--where atoms gravitate to form molecules, and these lawfully assemble into the visible structure of our world--was taken up by Locke in the Second Treatise of Government in 1688. Locke argued that humans are social atoms, and he represented the "social contract" as the gravitation of these sovereign atomic individuals to form associations governed by laws that all must obey. Science and democracy are here indissolubly joined in a single world system: Individuals, like physical atoms, are free, independent, and prior to the structures they build.

This complementarity of science and democracy is not lightly abandoned, and may explain why the scientific worldview of most educated people contains nothing of relativity, quantum mechanics, or theoretical population genetics. Yet these ideas have largely superseded those of Newton and even Darwin, and have guided physics and biology for the better part of a century. I suspect the newer views appear to undercut the alliance between science and democratic politics. The characteristic vocabulary of current science--filled with words such as relative, uncertain, indeterminate, random, mutant--does not seem to bode well for an ordered polity.

I don't agree. Relativity, quantum mechanics, and population genetics are not only compatible with democratic politics, they provide a vastly more useful way of viewing the world and acting in it than the 300-year-old Newtonian and the 150-year-old Darwinian ideas they have replaced.

Let us first take up Einstein's theory of relativity, one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted pieces of science in history. The very word conjures up visions of subjective and irresolvable disputation, solipsism, uncertainty, even the rejection of a single truth in favor of multiple truths. But the theory says nothing of the sort.

What it really...