歷年考研英語(yǔ)閱讀理解1998年03

[00:05.80]1998 Passage3 [00:08.62]Science has long had an uneasy relationship [00:11.94]with other aspects of culture. [00:14.56]Think of Gallileo's 17th-century trial for his rebelling belief [00:19.00]before the Catholic Church or poet William Blake's [00:22.52]harsh remarks against the mechanistic worldview [00:25.35]of Isaac Newton. [00:27.46]The schism between science and the humanities has, [00:31.06]if anything, deepened in this century. [00:34.69]Until recently, the scientific community was so powerful [00:38.63]that it could afford to ignore its critics [00:41.66]--but no longer. [00:43.38]As funding for science has declined, [00:45.90]scientists have attacked "antiscience" in several books, [00:50.34]notably Higher Superstition, by Paul R.Gross, [00:54.88]a biologist at the University of Virginia, [00:58.10]and Norman Levitt, [00:59.21]a mathematician at Rutgers University; [01:02.23]and The Demon-Haunted World, [01:04.65]by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. [01:08.08]Defenders of science have also voiced their concerns [01:11.71]at meetings such as "The Flight from Science and Reason," [01:15.86]held in New York City in 1995, [01:19.08]and "Science in the Age of (Mis)information," [01:22.91]which assembled last June near Buffalo. [01:26.54]Antiscience clearly means different things to different people. [01:31.27]Gross and Levitt find fault primarily with sociologists, [01:35.71]philosophers and other academics [01:38.23]who have questioned science's objectivity. [01:41.15]Sagan is more concerned with those who believe in ghosts, [01:44.77]creationism and other phenomena [01:47.30]that contradict the scientific worldview. [01:50.92]A survey of news stories in 1996 reveals [01:54.93]that the antiscience tag has been attached to [01:57.55]many other groups as well, [01:59.77]from authorities who advocated the elimination [02:02.18]of the last remaining stocks [02:04.20]of smallpox virus to Republicans [02:06.69]who advocated decreased funding for basic research. [02:11.13]Few would dispute that the term applies to the Unabomber, [02:15.25]whose manifesto, published in 1995, scorns science [02:20.20]and longs for return to a pretechnological utopia. [02:24.22]But surely that does not mean environmentalists concerned [02:27.85]about uncontrolled industrial growth are antiscience, [02:31.79]as an essay in US News & World Report last May [02:35.23]seemed to suggest. [02:37.74]The environmentalists, inevitably, respond to such critics. [02:42.29]The true enemies of science, [02:43.99]argues Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, [02:47.22]a pioneer of environmental studies, are those [02:50.45]who question the evidence supporting global warming, [02:53.88]the depletion of the ozone layer [02:55.89]and other consequences of industrial growth. [02:59.94]Indeed, some observers fear that the antiscience epithet [03:04.47]is in danger of becoming meaningless. [03:07.50]"The term 'antiscience' can lump together too many, [03:10.93]quite different things," [03:13.05]notes Harvard University philosopher Gerald Holton [03:16.28]in his 1993 work Science and Anti-Science. [03:20.51]"They have in common only one thing [03:22.63]that they tend to annoy or threaten those [03:25.00]who regard themselves as more enlightened."

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