TEXT D Science has long had an
uneasy relationship with other aspects of culture. Think of Gallileo’s 17th
century trial for his rebelling belief before the Catholic Church or poet
William Blake’s harsh remarks against the mechanistic worldview of Isaac Newton.
The schism between science and the humanities has, if anything, deepened in this
century. Until recently, the scientific community was so
powerful that it could afford to ignore its critics-but no longer. As funding
for science has declined, scientists have attacked "antiscience" in several
books, notably Higher Superstition, by Paul R. Gross, a biologist at the
University of Virginia, and Norman Levitt, a mathematician at Rutgers
University; and The Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan of Cornell
University. Defenders of science have also voiced their concerns
at meetings sucas "The Flight from Science and Reason", held in New York City in
1995, and "Science in the Age of Misinformation", which assembled last June near
Buffalo. Anti-science clearly means different things to
different people. Gross and Levitt find fault primarily with sociologists,
philosophers and other academics who have questioned science’s objectivity.
Sagan is more concerned with those who believe in ghosts, creationism and other
phenomena that contradict the scientific worldview. A survey of
news stories in 1996 reveals that the anti-science tag has been attached to many
other groups as well, from authorities who advocated the elimination of the last
remaining stocks of smallpox virus to Republicans who advocated decreased
funding for basic research. Few would dispute that the term
applies to the unabomber, whose manifesto, published in 1995, scorns science and
longs for return to a pre-technological utopia. But surely that does not mean
environmentalists concerned about uncontrolled industrial growth are
anti-science, as an essay in US News & World Report last May seemed to
suggest. The environmentalists, inevitably, respond to such
critics. The true enemies of science, argues Paul Ehrlich of Stanford
University, a pioneer of environmental studies, are those who question the
evidence supporting global warming, the depletion of the zone layer and other
consequences of industrial growth. Indeed, some observers fear
that be anti-science epithet is in danger of becoming meaning less. "The term
’anti-science’ can lump together too many, quite different things," notes
Harvard University philosopher Gerald Holton in his 1993 work Science and
Anti-science. "They have in common only one thing that the tend to annoy or
threaten those who regard themselves as more enlightened." The word "schism" (Line 3, Paragraph 1) in the context probably means ______.