We now know that we inhabit a tiny planet, orbiting an average star in an unremarkable galaxy, adrift in a vast impersonal cosmos. The science of Darwin showed that man was not unique among God s creatures, but, like all other living things, an accident of fate, evolved by chance through natural selection, a process that Darwin described in a letter to the botanist Joseph Hooker as one of the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature . Not content with showing that there is no god, no heaven, that man has no soul, science now takes the fight right up to religion s gates by seeing it, one of the more interesting social behaviours exhibited by human beings, as an object worthy of its attention. Religious behaviour itself is now the subject of analysis by evolutionary biologists keen to understand the survival value it seems to bestow on societies and individuals. Science was once in religion s dock, religion is now under science s microscope.
Politicians too have their reasons to fear science.
Those of the left find the ideas of evolutionary biology confronting. They find unsettling science s conclusions that there are strongly inherited components to many ugly human behaviours, such as aggression, promiscuity, xenophobia, infanticide, and male dominance, let alone traits like intelligence and happiness. They would like to ignore the inconvenient fact that we are apes with a repertoire of behaviours that have been shaped by evolutionary forces. Such science is just not helpful to those on the left who wish to improve the world through social engineering education, social welfare and the like. Politicians of the right fare little better at the hand of science, for they find that it has obliterated the core conservative belief in a proper order of things.