Epilogue: On the Planning of Science

Abstract

If there are, as is sometimes claimed, certain matters that human beings are better off for not knowing about, or things that we ought not to be trying to understand, I cannot imagine what these might be. Therefore, I do not propose to get into this line of argument beyond acknowledging that the argument does exist. I take it as axiomatic that science is a useful, intelligent, and productive sort of human behavior, and, as our collective social activities go, it has a considerably better record than most. Moreover, I doubt that it will make a great deal of difference, in the very long run, whether any or even all of us were to decide that science was, for one reason or another, a bad thing and should be voted away. It is now a permanently established part of our social structure, and it will not go away. To be sure, it has only become a dominant part of human behavior during the last 300 years or so, but it represents an explosively successful expression of the most fundamental of all human urges, which is to find out about things. We are not, of course, unique among animals for curiosity in general, but our kind of incessant, compulsive, insatiable need to reach an understanding of nature, and, above all, our instinctive drive to make some kind of sense out of it, surely sets us apart from other forms of life.