Science and the Problem of Values

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SCIENCE AND THE PROBLEM OF VALUES* R. W. SPERRYt By evolutionary time standards, the fate of life on our planet has suddenly, and quite abruptly, come to rest on an entirely new form of security and control, based on the machinery of the human brain. The older, noncognitive controls of nature that have regulated events in our biosphere for hundreds of millions of years, the forces of nature that lifted life from the inorganic to the human level and created man, are no longer in command. Modern man has intervened and now superimposes on nature his own cognitive brand of global domination . The outstanding feature of our times is the occurrence of this radical shift in biospheric controls away from the vast interwoven matrix of pluralistic, time-tested checks and balances of nature, to the much more arbitrary, monistic, and relatively untested mental capacities and impulses of the human brain. Along with its weaknesses our newly imposed human system of global regulation also contains tremendous new powers, including the potential to effect changes within a decade that formerly required thousands and millions of years. Almost the entire fabric of the earth's surface, from the atomic to the scenic level, is rapidly becoming subject to disassembly and resynthesis along new patterns of human design. In all this human-directed supervision the potential for Utopian advancement throughout the globe seems endless. It is important that these Utopian potentialities be recognized and remembered as we turn now to consider the other side of the coin. * Lecture prepared for a centennial symposium on "Biological Controls and Human Values," at Ohio State University, May 1970, that was canceled abruptly following the Kent State riots; the lecture was presented subsequently in the 1971 Honors Program on "Earth and Myth" at the University oí Houston, under the title "Value and Belief in a Scientific World," and later in graduate seminars in the United States, Canada, and Sweden. The work has been variously supported by the F. P. Hixon Fund of the California Institute of Technology, the David Stone Foundation, and grant MH03372 from the National Institutes of Health. t Hixon Professor of Psychobiology, Division of Biology, California Institute of Technology , Pasadena, California 91109. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Autumn 1972 | 115 Disaster Trends: A Root Cause Despite the beneficial features of human domination, it becomes increasingly apparent that our biosphere is set today on a disaster course as a direct consequence of human intervention. The entire grand design of life, painstakingly evolved over millennia, suddenly is subject to instant destruction, depending only on some passing twist in human affairs. If nuclear extermination is avoided, other inbuilt, self-destruct features are evident that threaten to bring all civilization to a halt—if things continue as they are going [1, 2]. Some modern analysts are inclined to put the blame for the mounting world crises primarily on excessive population; others blame science and technology; some point to creeping materialism and the pursuit of economic gain and to the loss of faith and of moral values; communists accuse capitalism, and vice versa; some emphasize racism and intolerance; others deplore dysgenic trends in the population. Some blame the young; others, the old. Of course, there always is politics; and in the United States we still have the Indochina war. While the apparent causes are multiple, complex, and confusing at the political, economic, and social levels of analysis, a common root source of dysfunction can be seen when the situation is viewed more objectively through the broad perspectives of evolution and the life and behavioral sciences. In short, if we could summon an extraterrestrial troubleshooter to examine our earthly predicament with an outer-space perspective free of human bias, I believe he very quickly would put his finger on the human value factor in our biospheric controls as the primary underlying cause of most of our difficulties. In other words, his examination would show that the trends toward disaster in today's world stem mainly from the fact that while man has been acquiring new, almost godlike, powers of control over nature , he has continued to wield these same powers with a relatively shortsighted, most ungodlike set of values, rooted, on...

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