Publications evolve. Periodically they invest in a new look, a redesign, even a dramatic one. Occasionally they will adopt a slightly modified name (for example, The Atlantic Monthly becoming simply The Atlantic). Sometimes the name will change because two periodicals merge, and you get a hyphenated result (like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, still in paper production when I first moved to the Seattle area). Rarely does a publication change its name to something completely or almost completely different. Yet, as already noted here and here, that is what we have done. I want to join our colleagues in explaining why.
I am, or was, the editor of Evolution News, or more formally Evolution News and Science Today, which began life as Evolution News and Views. There are more than a few people, inside and outside of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, who still refer to the publication as ENV. Today, beyond introducing a beautiful and highly functional redesign by Nathan Jacobson and Katherine West, we are also taking the less precedented step of bestowing the online news source with a new name, Science and Culture Today.
Back to the Future
In simplest terms, this is a “back to the future” move. The Center for Science and Culture, as envisioned by Stephen Meyer and John West, has always recognized in its name the deep entanglement of science with culture, and the name of the CSC’s daily news source now reflects that. ENV began with a limited purpose: to respond to media misinformation about intelligent design and evolution, and, as the publication further developed, to directly critique materialist theories of biological origins. The scope of our coverage, however, has expanded vastly beyond that, to a range of scientific subjects and their cultural significance — from cosmology to bioethics, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence — leaving the old name as a historical anomaly. That has now been corrected, and we hope you like the result.
How did I come to occupy my role here? Nathan asked me to write a few lines about that. As literary editor and later a senior editor at National Review, I had written my first book and had a contract for two more, which gave me the luxury of, in 2000, going freelance. I would go on to write seven books so far, including my most recent, Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome, about the thinking of evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg.
I had been writing about origins science before then, and found an institutional home at Discovery Institute. A turning point for me was a 2005 article I wrote for the Wall Street Journal about Dr. Sternberg’s persecution at the Smithsonian Institution, over a peer-reviewed biology paper he edited by Dr. Meyer, arguing for intelligent design. In 2011, when ENV editor Anika Smith undertook a new life on the East Coast, I inherited the role.
A Guide for Science Consumers
I am not a scientist but, probably like you, a science consumer. This evolving publication has functioned as a critical guide for consumers like us. CSC scientists and other science writers seek to translate natural and historical science into terms that any thoughtful layman can understand, and to examine the meaning of scientific discoveries for culture, in the sense of the way humans think about our place in the universe.
Conjoining science with culture, while it is the CSC’s calling card, is not our invention. Probably the most consequential scientist of the past century — J. Robert Oppenheimer, who gave us the age of the atomic bomb — thought passionately and creatively about both. The book I recommend about his “triumph and tragedy” is American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin.
Oppenheimer thought of science in spiritual and literary terms and was, not unlike Richard Sternberg, in many ways as much a humanist scholar as a scientist. How many scientists do you know who have learned Sanskrit in order to study the Bhagavad Gita? His biography recounts that in nearly the final chapter of his life he was “pondering man’s survival in an age of weapons of mass destruction,” giving “public lectures, most often in university settings, and usually he dwelled on broad themes related to culture and science.”
In 1961 at the University of Colorado he delivered a lecture, “Reflections on Science and Culture,” that I’ve been listening and relistening to. He does not use a text, much less a PowerPoint slide presentation, but for nearly an hour he speaks perfect sentences and paragraphs in a quiet, somewhat mystic manner — “almost rabbinical,” as a friend of his said. At one point he is startled when someone in the audience calls out, “Louder!”
“The General Common Human Problem”
In the speech, he addressed science, and, he said, “I use that word as broadly as I know, meaning the natural sciences, meaning the historical sciences,” and the changes it was engendering. Culture had once served a conservative function, linking human beings across the ages. Now, under the influence of science, culture was changing rapidly. While his overall outlook is not ours, he alludes to a variety of themes that we cover here: evolution, space and the cosmos, “moral regress,” and why modern science arose where and when it did (like Stephen Meyer, he cites the influence of the Bible). He felt that scientists needed to communicate accessibly, speaking not just to their colleagues but about “the general common human problem, to man, not of course to everybody but to anybody.”
He was very sensitive to the impact of scientific invention, of pernicious technology. In leading the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, he barred scholars from having telephones in their offices, due to the distraction. Imagine what he would say about the iPhone on my desk, or my use of Grok, on my screen at the moment, to pull up a 1963 interview he gave to The Christian Century where he discussed the ten books that influenced his “philosophy of life.” They include The Waste Land, The Divine Comedy, and Plato’s Phaedrus.
To respond to scientific discovery, and to the abuse of science, we will need to bring some of this humane, catholic sensibility to bear. Science with its prestige is indeed being abused. No event in our time illustrates that more vividly than the way, in the Covid pandemic, the science of public health was used to demonize dissenters, to keep children out of school, damaging many of them, to hollow out many city downtowns, to cast fear on everyone, to mask every human face (traditionally thought to reflect the divine visage), and more.
Hardly any more sinister words have been spoken than the command to “Follow the science!” It is a falsehood that science is an independent, value-free, objective pursuit. The falsehood is a tool in the hands of those would manipulate science to control other people. Resisting that control is another aspect of the mission of Science and Culture Today.