Monolithic Science

National Geographic recently published an article on how science is explaining love.

What Fisher saw fascinated her. When each subject looked at his or her loved one, the parts of the brain linked to reward and pleasure—the ventral tegmental area and the caudate nucleus—lit up. What excited Fisher most was not so much finding a location, an address, for love as tracing its specific chemical pathways. Love lights up the caudate nucleus because it is home to a dense spread of receptors for a neurotransmitter called dopamine, which Fisher came to think of as part of our own endogenous love potion. In the right proportions, dopamine creates intense energy, exhilaration, focused attention, and motivation to win rewards. It is why, when you are newly in love, you can stay up all night, watch the sun rise, run a race, ski fast down a slope ordinarily too steep for your skill. Love makes you bold, makes you bright, makes you run real risks, which you sometimes survive, and sometimes you don't.

Reading the news I am inclined to think there are legions of concerned people who are fighting to save science from being taken over by religious fanatics. My question is, "Who is fighting to keep the mad scientists out of the spiritual domain?" When I was a first grader I thought science was about growing bean plants and using prisms to break up light. And now science is explaining love?

Are scientists progressing into greater depths or cheaper embelishments? If someone you know and care about is lacking love in their life, are they suggesting the solution is as simple as injecting dopamine into their brains? Imagine Charles Darwin on a date, "The reason you love me, baby, is that natural selection has taken all of the less healthy traits out of my ancestors ...". Sheer poetry! What sagely guides to lead us up out of the subjective valentine's day mire.

"Let God be proved right and every man a liar..."

In ancient times people associated themselves and built towers, pyramids, and castles - climbing higher and higher into the heavens. How can this compare to modern science's accomplishment of explaining love? The scope has changed, but the associating hasn't. When someone disagrees the media comes rushing in to assure us, "The vast majority of scientists are certain of global warming ... of evolution ... that love can be chemically explained".

Just check the wikipedia discussion pages [1] [2] on Intelligent Design and Evolution. These days the authority of science (which is so monolithic to some it can instantly crush Michael Crichton and Creationism) has nothing to do with empiricism or Baconian induction - it's the tight association of people who cling to one another.