Before the Ball

Abstract

The Cinderella tale of biology’s history has the proverbial ‘grain of truth’ that explains its broad dissemination. Nature study was not included in the first embrace of the natural sciences maturing in the Enlightenment. Seventeenth-century Galilean scientists rejected living nature for several reasons, especially irrelevance. Nature studies had taken a pastoral course of collecting and labeling specimens, a course removed from centers of power and marked by amateurism. Natural scientists were still struggling to embrace alchemists, physicians and herbalists (scientists who paid their way) and could hardly be expected to make room for (noncontributing) nature lovers. Anatomists and, later, microscopists were welcomed in the academy, and by the eighteenth century natural scientists even humored the romantics and pretended to see merit in rustication, but most biologists were still beyond the pale, countrified and common, tainted by popular mythology, folklore, and religion.

… science finds itself in a dominant position, at the top of the heap, as we say, single-handedly preparing the future and in a position to occupy more and more territory. Powerful and isolated, it runs — or could run and make others run — grave risks. Why? Because it knows nothing about culture. As Aesop said about language, science has become by far the best and perhaps the worst of things.

Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, p. 86, 1995