Science versus Antiscience?; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Staff Editors; 6 Page(s)

Science has long had an uneasy relationship with other aspects of culture. Think of Galileo's 17th-century trial for heresy before the Catholic Church, which formally admitted its error just four years ago, or poet William Blake's rants against the mechanistic worldview of Isaac Newton. The schism between science and the humanities has, if anything, deepened in this century, as C. P. Snow documented in his classic 1959 essay The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.

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 denounced "antiscience" 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.