News published: 13 February 2023

Perhaps indicative of our apparently increasingly polarised world, I have recently come across a number of articles and instances where scientific knowledge is regarded as antithetical to traditional knowledge and, further still, a ‘Western-imposed ideology’ that is being applied to conservation and therefore is inappropriate and deserves to fail. But is this actually the case?

Perhaps the greatest impediment to understanding what constitutes ‘science’ and the ‘scientific method’ is the misinformed view that science is a belief system, a world view or an ideology. It is not. Science is a process of hypothesis, testing, challenging, re-testing, and challenging again until some kind of consensus is reached. What’s more, it relies on the gathering and presentation of facts and evidence, and the public sharing of those facts and evidence, so that they are open to challenge by all. It is not based on faith, nor orthodoxy. Quite the contrary. Trying to explain to a climate change-sceptic friend, whose own life is governed by his Christian faith, that climate scientists are not all in some global conspiracy – because scientific reputations are won by challenging orthodoxy not by going along with it – was pretty difficult and, to him, counter-intuitive. We need to do a much better job about explaining how science works to our children, students and politicians!

Secondly, is science a ‘Western’ construct? According to Wikipedia (and the History of Science course that I attended at university), the history of science has its roots in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia from where the disciplines of mathematics, astronomy and medicine shaped ancient Greek natural philosophy. Even if we accept that the scientific revolution and refinement of the scientific method was centred around Renaissance Europe in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, its origins were not only to be found in the writings of the ancients (East and West), they were also founded from traditional knowledge – particularly traditional medicine – which itself is based on testing, trial and error, recording what works, and passing that on to future generations either orally or in writing. This is universal, not confined to the west, and could be very dangerous indeed for the practitioners involved – think of ‘witches’ burnt at the stake for practicing traditional medicine. And is science really the preserve of the West today? According to Nature, China is the second largest publisher of scientific literature after the USA, and is on a trajectory to take the number one spot within the next few years. Japan (5^th) and South Korea (8^th) are also in the top 10 scientific publication nations.

Science, whether it is based on mathematics or Linnean classification, is a common language to all that transcends the vernacular. It represents the evolution and democratisation of human knowledge that can be shared by all, based on common language, methodologies, and peer review frameworks.

I’d therefore like to suggest that the generation and passing on of knowledge is a collective human endeavour; it doesn’t belong to a particular time, geography, race, or gender. In understanding how we can better interact with nature, everyone has something to contribute[1]. It really isn’t necessary to choose sides.

[1] An Application of Two-Eyed Seeing: Indigenous Research Methods with Participatory Action Research. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1609406918812346