Science under 'serious threat' says Lord May

In his final address as Royal Society President, Lord May has warned that the core values of modern science are under serious threat from fundamentalism.

Lord May of Oxford will tell a meeting of top scientists at the Royal Society, the UK national academy of science, that the Society's core values are "under serious threat from resurgent fundamentalism, West and East."

Lord May whose address marks his last year in his five-year term as President will say: "All ideas should be open to questioning, and the merit of ideas should be assessed on the strength of the evidence that supports them and not on the credentials or affiliations of the individuals proposing them. It is not a recipe for a comfortable life, but it is demonstrably a powerful engine for understanding how the world actually works and for applying this understanding."

Lord May will stress: "Ahead of us lie dangerous times. There are serious problems that derive from the realities of the external world: climate change, loss of biological diversity, new and re-emerging diseases, and more. Many of these threats are not yet immediate, yet their nonlinear character is such that we need to be acting today. And we have no evolutionary experience of acting on behalf of a distant future; we even lack basic understanding of important aspects of our own institutions and societies. Sadly, for many, the response is to retreat from complexity and difficulty by embracing the darkness of fundamentalist unreason."

Lord May will also express his concern at lobby groups with "fundamentalist approaches" to crucial policy issues such as those relating to tackling HIV/AIDS.

"The dissemination and adoption of successful prevention strategies is being seriously hindered by arguments over the role that contraception in the form of condoms should play."

Lord May will highlight that the campaign against the use of condoms is "motivated by dogma, because it provides another example where faith and belief not only override evidence, but also lead to deliberate misrepresentation of the facts presumably in the service of a higher good. In this sense, it is a companion both in spirit and in tactical detail to the campaigns denying the reality of climate change or the seriousness of diminishing biodiversity."

(SP/KMcA)