When does the vigorous defence of science become 'scientism'?

There's been lots of chat in my circles this week about the last Monday's Horizon presented by Paul Nurse, the Nobel prize winner and new head of the Royal Society. The programme, Science under Attack, questioned whether mild-mannered climate scientists like Phil Jones at the Climate Research Unit have been effective enough at defending their research from attacks that have increasingly emerged from unfamiliar routes like the blogosphere, Freedom of Information requests and Twitter.

I enjoyed the film and felt Nurse's concluding message was the right one - that rather than bemoaning the way the rules of the game keep changing, academic scientists have little choice but to learn those rules and play the game.

But not everyone agrees. Many, including colleagues in the science communication world, felt that it was a classic example of 'scientism', a growing tendency to demand that science should trump everything else as the only sound basis for good public debate and decision-making.

It was a point well made by my friend Professor Mike Hulme in his reaction. He rightly argues that climate change is about much more than the underlying science, and cannot be resolved without the contribution of politics, ethics, social science etc. As Hulme puts it, in the programme, Nurse "reveals an exalted view of the normative authority of science."


On one level of course, it is hardly surprising that Paul Nurse (left) should want to see the scientific way of resolving problems become the dominant one. He may have made a television programme but Nurse is not a commentator, he is one of the worlds' greatest biologists.

This is a man who, as he explained in the film, fell in love with science as an eight year old boy chasing Sputnik, and has lived his dream in laboratories, absorbed in the minutiae of science for over 30 years. For Nurse, the scientific method - testable hypothesis, observation, reason, evidence - has delivered amazing benefits for the world. We should hardly be shocked to discover he believes that debates on climate change, GM crops and HIV/AIDS will be improved by great science. But given that Nurse runs the Royal Society and not the country, his will continue to be just one world view competing with all others.

Having said that, I'm not even sure he was guilty of positing science as the answer to everything. My reading of his programme was rather different. For me, Nurse was arguing that the more people engage in debates on issues like GM crops and climate change, the more the need for scientists to have their say alongside this myriad of voices (described by some as 'scientists on tap not on top').

In sharp contrast to some scientists I know, Nurse did not call for the increasingly vocal critics of science to be silenced, censored or even ignored. Indeed he can hardly be accused of dismissing all other ways of seeing the world when his interviews with sceptics form the main part of his programme and were notable for the generous and respectful manner in which he conducted them.

This was in some ways a gentle and simple film which managed to focus on the battles over climate change without descending into the nasty, polarised style that has for too long characterised that debate. If you haven't seen it yet, you should do so.