Word: standen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Standen's book contains enough firecrackers to keep faculty-club lunches popping for weeks. Chemist Standen could expect few cheers from his fellow scientists ; even the professor of Greek might find him too glib to be taken straight. But for scientists or laymen inclined to speak of science in both holy and fearful tones, Standen's prescription might be a good little relaxer...
More important, says Standen, the physicists are really blind to the questions that should most concern men. "Is the universe to be thought of in terms of electrons and protons? Or ... in terms of Good and Evil? Merely to ask the question is to realize at least one very important limitation of physics...
...Standen, all the other sciences are guilty of the same limitation - and laymen should never forget it. The biologists, trying desperately to be "scientific," spend a good deal of time trying to define their terms. The results, says Standen, are "ludicrous." They dare not even try to define "life." They define " 'stimulus' and 'response' ... in terms of one another. No biologist can define a species. And as for a genus - all attempts come down to this: 'A genus is a grouping of species that some recognized taxonomic specialist has called a genus...
Guesswork in GobbledygooL The psychologists are worse, torn as they are between gestaltists, behaviorists, functionalists, reflexologists and other -ists. They expend their energies formalizing the obvious ("Although other sensations have various degrees of hedonic tone," says one textbook, "pain is notoriously unpleasant"). But the result of all their efforts, Standen insists, is that they cannot say anything really important about man. "It is possible to go clear through a course in psychology without ever hearing what the various virtues...
...sample thesis : "The relationship of population density to residential propinquity as a factor in marriage selection"), they are "guesswork clad in long, flowing robes of gobbledy-gook." Meanwhile, mathematics, the only exact science, has become merely the tool of all the others. Scientists deserve to be slapped, according to Standen, because they have substituted the is for the ought. "That is why we must never allow ourselves to be ruled by scientists. They must be our servants, not our masters...