With breathtaking ignorance and idiocy, JP has declared the death of science.
The fallacy of his argument is that he picks and chooses what he considers to be progress, while ignoring all of the other inconvenient facts. This is typical of all of his arguments.
Sure, life expectancy increase has slowed. And with limited resources, scientists and governments have to prioritize. With remote technology there's no need to send a man to Mars, since we can learn more from robots. He totally ignores the change in human lifestyle as a result of communications and travel, which has increased man's mobility and wealth many fold since the 60s.
In the medical field many things are treatable now that were hopeless in the 60s, including certain cancers, deafness, blindness, paralysis, amputations etc. Doesn't he think that LASIK surgery is revolutionary? What about cochlear implants? The Internet?
Because information has exploded, it is less concentrated in the hands a few scientists than in the past. So while you have Nobel prize winners and leaders in many fields, it becomes difficult to identify intellectual giants like Einstein and Darwin.
JP, along with his fundamentalist friends, are truly afraid that science may make religion irrelevant one day.
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JP is crazy. But we know the cliche about broken clocks. There are good arguments that we aren't undergoing a technological revolution today. In particular, the argument that there was far more technological change between say 1890 and 1950 as there has been between 1950 and 2010 is surprisingly strong. I wrote a blog entry on this recently which discusses these issues in some detail: http://religionsetspolitics.blogspot.com/2009/07/are-we-in-middle-of-technological.html
Joshua
Interesting analysis in your post. Perhaps an additional point to take into account, thought, is that there is often a time delay from a discovery or insight, until it translates down to something for the "common man". The basic understandings of nuclear physics, for example, were understood for at least several decades until the a-bomb was made, and decades more past until nuclear power plants were developed.
I think that the full potential of our understandings of cellular biology and the genome project is only just beginning to show itself, and we'll see major practical applications in the next 20-30 years.
Because information has exploded, it is less concentrated in the hands a few scientists than in the past. So while you have Nobel prize winners and leaders in many fields, it becomes difficult to identify intellectual giants like Einstein and Darwin.
Not only that, but - I think - because information and education is so readily available these days (compared to, say, in Darwin's time) you also don't need to be an intellectual giant to become a good scientist doing useful work. In the western world at least, education is available to almost everyone, and almost everyone does get to learn all the basics. So you don't have to be of any unique intelligence to enter into a scientific field. If that makes sense. :-)
Leisha, I agree and you are reinforcing my point.
There's a related issue though: There are fewer long-hanging fruit. Two hundred years ago, you could do good science by just playing around with the right chemicals or such. The easy stuff has been already done. In order to do stuff now, things are much more likely to be difficult, complicated and require collaboration between lots of people. Consider the following historical example:
In the time of Galileo, he was able to make incredible discoveries using a simple telescope by himself.
A hundred years ago, to make new discoveries already required much larger telescopes that were very precisely designed and constructed, costing tremendous amounts of money.
That's still true but now even the analysis often can't be done by a single person. Most astronomy papers now have at least four or five authors and many have more than that.
One sees similar patterns in chemistry, particle physics, math and other areas. The ratio of substantially new ideas to resources invested in the research is slowly but steadily going down.
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