Problem with science

The following post is a response to the following texts:
Taming Nature  and Monocultures of the Mind
After reading the 2 texts, I have a main takeaway. That is, nature is very complicated science, and mankind’s understanding of nature is insufficient and coupled with capitalism, resulted in homogeneity on a global scale today.

The moment we start growing crops, cultivation is happening, alienation and domination of nature is happening. We alienate as we separate from nature, by cultivating crops which we choose to consume. We dominate as we choose what stays in the ecosystem and what does not to a certain extent. Artificial selection is replaced by natural selection, and resulted in the following changes 

Today	In the past
Little species (homogeneity)	Many species (diversity)
Very vulnerable to changes in ecosystem	Less vulnerable to changes in the ecosystem
Faith in science	Faith in religion
Mostly democratic	Different types of governing systems
Dependent on nature for economic activities	Dependent on nature for survival

Nature is complex science and by cultivating we are simplifying it and reducing it to something of a much smaller value. James Scott mentioned the benefits of polyculture which people did not see in the past. “The garden was a vegetable garden, an orchard, a medicinal garden, a dump heap, a compost heap and a beeyard.” It was a sustainable orchard garden which an economist would have seen as inefficient use of resources, failure to specialise and trade… As such, polycultures, which essentially is a ‘mini rainforest’, would be a better way of life compared to monocultures as it has higher flexibility, lower vulnerability and social values. Rather than developing and conforming to western values, the indigenous locals could have been better off if they stuck to their original way of life. However they could be seen as ‘poor people’ who needs help from the rest of the ‘richer population’. Maybe we should stop enforcing values on people who are different from us, thinking that is the best for them.

On Monday, Prof Jerome mentioned how breaking away of colonization and spreading the system of democracy was in fact increasing homogeneity, because the westerners believed that democracy was the best system and should be adopted all over the world and the act of removing other systems itself is a communist one, the same goes to how traditional knowledge systems are replaced by science.

Unlike other knowledge systems are usually intertwined with religious beliefs, science is the closest thing we ever had to the truth. However, many fail to realise that science could still be very well far away from reality. This is because scientific experiments involve keeping other variable constant except the variable that is in the hypothesis. The problem with science is that it is derived from keeping all else constant but nothing is constant in reality. If you happen to miss out any one factor or thing and not conduct experiments on it, that is where unintended consequences happens. I was having dinner with another Tembusian yesterday and a friend of mine, who is a political science student, was saying ‘why do we have to science the shit out of everything?’ If science isn’t even that credible, why are we not more careful when it comes to new technological advancements such as genetic engineering?