得背诵的考研阅读真题八

　　Science has long had an uneasy relationship with other aspects of culture. Think of Gallileos 17th-century trial for his rebelling belief before the Catholic Church or poet William Blakes harsh remarks against the mechanistic worldview of Isaac Newton. The schism between science and the humanities has, if anything, deepened in this century.

　　Until recently, the scientific community was so powerful that it could afford to ignore its critics -- but no longer. As funding for science has declined, scientists have attacked anti-science in several books, notably Higher Superstition, by Paul R. Gross, a biologist at the University of Virginia, and Norman Levitt, a mathematician at Rutgers University; and The Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan of Cornell University.

　　Defenders of science have also voiced their concerns at meetings such as The Flight from Science and Reason, held in New York City in 1995, and Science in the Age of information, which assembled last June near Buffalo.

　　Anti-science clearly means different things to different people. Gross and Levitt find fault primarily with sociologists, philosophers and other academics who have questioned sciences objectivity. Sagan is more concerned with those who believe in ghosts, creationism and other phenomena that contradict the scientific worldview.

　　A survey of news stories in 1996 reveals that the anti-science tag has been attached to many other groups as well, from authorities who advocated the elimination of the last remaining stocks of smallpox virus to Republicans who advocated decreased funding for basic research.

　　Few would dispute that the term applies to the Unabomber, whose manifesto, published in 1995, scorns science and longs for return to a pre-technological utopia. But surely that does not mean environmentalists concerned about uncontrolled industrial growth are anti-science, as an essay in US News World Report last May seemed to suggest.

　　The environmentalists, inevitably, respond to such critics. The true enemies of science, argues Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, a pioneer of environmental studies, are those who question the evidence supporting global warming, the depletion of the ozone layer and other consequences of industrial growth.

　　Indeed, some observers fear that the anti-science epithet is in danger of becoming meaningless. The term anti-science can lump together too many, quite different things, notes Harvard University philosopher Gerald Holton in his 1993 work Science and Anti-Science. They have in common only one thing that they tend to annoy or threaten those who regard themselves as more enlightened.