Title: 
Headings: 

Content: On the contrary, the defining practices of science, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, are explicitly designed to circumvent the errors and sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable. I doubt that even the most enthusiastic defender of science is suffering under the delusion that scientists are particularly wise or noble. Those of us in science are only too painfully aware that we are as much captive to human failings as those outside science. However he is right that the methods of open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, while by no means guaranteeing avoidance of error, are fundamental characteristics of scientific practice that are worth emulating in any field. But apart from the scientism issue, Pinker does give a good description of how science has been, or should be, influential in shaping our general worldview. Thanks to science there are brute facts that we know now about the world that earlier people did not know and that have radically transformed our thinking, though some still cling to the old views. The moral worldview of any scientifically literate person—one who is not blinkered by fundamentalism—requires a radical break from religious conceptions of meaning and value. To begin with, the findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the origins of life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken. We know, but our ancestors did not, that humans belong to a single species of African primate that developed agriculture, government, and writing late in its history. We know that our species is a tiny twig of a genealogical tree that embraces all living things and that emerged from prebiotic chemicals almost four billion years ago.