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  3. Any student setting out on academic career in science is likely to become increasingly separated from humanities and society. Ev

Any student setting out on academic career in science is likely to become increasingly separated from humanities and society. Ev

admin2012-12-01  42
问题     Any student setting out on academic career in science is likely to become increasingly separated from humanities and society. Even educators who advocate that scientists should be given a rounded education seem to think of these"soft"subjects as sugar-coating for the bitter pill of technical training. But this is not good enough. Now more than ever, scientists need to know a lot more about the political, economic and cultural dimensions of the world if they are to tackle its problem, even if this means they learn a little less science.
    There is something fundamentally incoherent about Britain’s science education policy. Last December The Times Higher Education Supplement reported that 20 percent of all science graduates from Britain’s "old" universities were jobless, up from 10 percent five years ago. Yet the science minister and the other champions of the recent national science week, alias SET 95, claim that not enough students are pursuing scientific degrees.
    From this standpoint, the UN Population Conference, held in Cairo last September, was a godsend. "Overpopulation" is clearly a problem that is unlikely to disappear overnight, and so there should be plenty of work for scientists.
    The consensus of learned opinion tends to diagnose the problem of "overpopulation" in a way that reinforces the division of labor between the arts and the sciences. On the one hand, there is the long-term problem of poverty in most of Africa and much of Asia and Latin America, which stems from a history of exploitation by the developed world. This is portrayed as a problem of geopolitics, not science. On the other hand, there is the more immediate problem of Third World population growing at ecologically unsustainable rates. This is portrayed primarily as a technical problem of devising and acquainting people with the techniques of birth control, while at the same time finding more scientific ways of producing food.
    The politically correct thing to say about all this is that we need to move on both fronts at once. The arts-trained people should be tackling the long-term geopolitical issues, while the scientists deal with the more pressing life-and-death matters through their technology transfers.
    Few political planners seem to entertain the possibility that the short-term and long-term strategies may work at cross-proposes, given the kind of education that scientists receive. In particular, scientists are trained to think that any problem can be solved if only they can find the appropriate "magic bullet" — some invention that, when widely distributed, will make the problem disappear without leaving more problems in its wake.
    The magic bullet mentality is fallacious. Every new bullet eventually becomes a bargaining chip strengthening the hand of one or another party in local Third World power struggles. And each time, the scientific community is horrified that something as well-intended as contraceptives can be converted into a tool of domination. While scientists cannot be expected to become politicians or even political economists, they should have enough understanding of the ways of the world not always to be so surprised when short-term fixes turn into long-term messes.
    But the fallacious magic bullet mentality is all too pervasive. Scientific projects designed with the long term in mind are often framed as aiming for a "magic target", an underlying causal mechanism — some gene or bacillus — that, once found, can be treated, cured or eliminated at a stroke.
    Why do scientists fall so easily into the trap of thinking in terms of magic bullets shooting at magic targets? The problem here is that students are consistently taught to think about science as quite different — and perhaps even independent — from the rest of society. Among the worst offenders are the potted histories of science that are supposed to inspire students to pursue scientific careers. In elementary school, they tell of the ability of one genius — an Edison or an Einstein — to change the world simply by developing a Good Thing. By the time students reach university, a slightly more complex story is told, whereby the "giants" stand upon one another’s shoulders in fixed sequence: Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Einstein, and so on. In neither cases are students told about the individual and institutional "middlemen" who were involved in translating the original idea into a variety of applications that reached far beyond what the original scientist had in mind. A classic example is the wireless, which required the shipping interests of a Marconi, although James Clerk Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz often receive credit for its "theoretical basis".
    Bringing this sense of history into play requires that students learn about the larger social dimensions of the scientific enterprise — that science is, indeed, an "enterprise" in the full sense of the word.
The author proposes that in teaching science history, educators should not neglect contributions made by
选项 A、people who applied scientists’ ideas.
B、scientists as individuals.
C、scientists as a group.
D、giants who stand on one another’s shoulders.
答案A
解析 推理判断题。倒数第二段倒数第二句指出，“无论哪种情况下，学生们都无从得知那些将原始想法转化为各类实际应用的作为“中间人”的个体或机构，而那些实际应用远远超出了科学家的最初想法。”由此可见，作者认为教师们不应该忽略那些将观点转化为实际应用的人的贡献，故[A]为答案。[B]、[C]两项不合语境，可排除。[D]项是最受关注的群体，可直接排除。
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