Pragmatic Evolution
نویسنده
چکیده
In the early 1930s, Julian Huxley, the prominent English evolutionary biologist, embarked on a visit across many British science laboratories to understand in which way the scientific knowledge they were producing was socially relevant. His account of this journey, published in 1934 (Huxley, 1934), is a compendium of applied scientific research in engineering, medicine, agriculture and so forth. In the final chapter of the book, a conversation with Hyman Levy (a physicist and mathematician, also a person concerned about the use of science for the good of all, not just a few), Huxley remarks that back then – as is also true now – the advancement of scientific knowledge was limited by funding, including funding for applied research. In a remarkably candid admission, he wrote that one of the reasons private firms kept their research budget secret was because sometimes ‘they do not want their shareholders to know – the shareholders, you see, might think research a silly luxury, and become a nuisance at the annual meeting’ (pp. 254–5). Later in the conversation, Huxley showed some support for the then very active field of eugenics, to which Levy disagreed, as do the vast majority of evolutionary biologists today. Levy subsequently pinned down some of the core issues of applied science:
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