Free The Best Australian Science Writing 2014 by Ashley Hay Page B

he make due allowance for our profound ignorance in regard to the mutual relations of the many beings which live around us.’ A good theory is fertile and identifies uncertainty; it can remain true at the same time as it generates new and exciting research into areas of weakness. ‘The theory of evolution is not just getting older, it is getting better,’ declared the palaeontologist Steven Stanley in 1981. And the theory of climate change is also getting older and better – and more forbidding. It has accurately predicted many observed manifestations of global warming – from sea-level rises to increased temperatures to acidification of theoceans – although sometimes these changes have come about a little more quickly than had been estimated. Caution – of which Darwin at Down is the exemplar – is another hallmark of good science.
    The theory of evolution opened up a new worldview, chiefly of the past but also with implications for the future. Family history – across deep time – became natural history. Natural selection was radical in its vision of a totally contingent natural world, one ruled by chance and improbability rather than by a steady and progressive purpose or a predetermined set of stages. People who resisted or rejected the theory of evolution argued about origins, creation, history and natural history. But they also felt the future was at stake – the prospect of a godless world and their personal destinies in heaven. At the end of Origin , Darwin argued eloquently that there is ‘grandeur in this view of life’, that ‘from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved’. And he also finished the book with words of confident hope about the earthly future of humanity: ‘Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length’, he wrote, because humanity under the influence of natural selection ‘will tend to progress towards perfection’. Here the scientist begins to look for a way of selling his idea to Victorian industrial society, and allows the chaos at the heart of his theory to be conceived as ‘progress’. Thus Darwin succumbed to the progressive culture that his own theory undermined.
    Today, climate scientists are like Darwin: the implications of their science frighten them, and the politics of their society can intimidate them. The theory of anthropogenic climate change met with swift scientific acceptance but has been followed by a sustained and strengthening public counterattack. The backlash has been deep and powerful because this new idea does not have the reassuring ethic of progress on its side; instead it requires acritical reassessment of the implications of the Industrial Revolution. And the balance of the problem it poses lies more in the future than in the past. It does not promise ‘a secure future of great length’; it threatens it. It demands political action, which the theory of evolution did not. And for that action to have significant effect, it must be global. Competition will need to be moderated by co-evolution. Further refinement of Darwin’s theory awaits humanity’s decisions this century about its own evolutionary fate.
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    You are sitting at the dinner table with old friends you haven’t seen for a while. The atmosphere is warm, friendly and celebratory. Then, suddenly, climate change slips into the conversation. The mention of global warming immediately precipitates a light frost. There is some wariness and a sounding-out of positions. Then one old friend leans forward, slightly conspiratorially but also with the conviction that he is delivering some welcome information, and tells you that a friend of his uncle’s is an absolute whiz with computers and has crunched the numbers of the climate scientists and found that they have made a basic error that changes everything. What do you