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Humanity needs love and heretics if we are to overcome the huge challenges posed by overpopulation and man-made climate change, according to distinguished zoologist and broadcaster Professor Aubrey Manning, speaking at the first of this year’s Science Week lectures at The Science Gallery in Dublin.

Popular misconceptions of science as a cold and insensitive discipline focused exclusively on hard facts fail to recognise important emotional aspects of the scientific process, says Manning.

“Science is seen as too hard, too rigid, and too full of facts. Nothing could be further from the truth. Science is not the problem. Good science can bring us back from the brink,” says Manning.

Instead of seeing science as an enemy of culture, Manning argues, we should recognise that the scientific process involves joy and despair, “the same feeling experienced by a poet who gets the last stanza of a poem into place.”

“From love comes concern and the desire to put it right. With the help of science we can have much more hope,” says Manning.

The human race, which Manning jokingly describes as “rather nice in moderation” can be helped greatly by science, but for this to happen we need to alter certain non-scientific aspects of our culture.

“You can glibly say ‘I don’t know anything about science’ and be regarded as educated, but you can’t say ‘I’ve never heard of Shakespeare’ and be regarded the same way. That’s because of culture,” says Manning.

Science and culture need to work together, just as living organisms and the inanimate earth have interacted to create the world as we know it.

And, although unwilling to spread “a message of doom and gloom” Manning believes the world is in a state of crisis: “We’re entering a sixth mass extinction phase, and we’re the cause.”

Further, climate change is delivering humanity “the first tap on the shoulder” about our current danger –”and that tap is about to become the first kick on the shins.”

“It can’t go on.”

The idea that recent changes in world temperature and CO2 levels are due to natural fluctuations rather than human interference is based on feelings of denial rather than an understanding of the facts, claims Manning, who has been involved with the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Human Ecology since 1970.

“We still think the world is going to provide for us at our current standard of living, but it can’t,” says Manning.

Perhaps the greatest threat to our existence lies in overpopulation.

“We’re walking up a down escalator, with 200,000 new people coming into the world every day. That’s a desperate figure,” says Manning.  

To tackle these problems, science and society also need to be motivated more by a culture of love and conservation rather than by the culture of economics and business that currently dominates. The ongoing global financial crisis might have a silver lining if it creates an opportunity for us to reflect on the damage untempered industrialisation has done to the planet.

But first, one great taboo will have to be overcome.

More on this (and “Manning’s Top Seven Heretics“) after the turn.

“World population control is the policy that dare not speak its name because it’s connected to important human experiences like love and having children,” says Manning, who claims that due to the strain being put on the earth’s resources by overpopulation, having children is no longer “just a personal affair.”  

But these changes are not going to take place without heretics –courageous scientists and thinkers who aren’t afraid to challenge dominant trends and paradigms.

“We particularly need some real heretics in economics who could show a feasible way of generating an economics of stock rather than an economics of throughput,” Manning told myscience.ie.

But doesn’t exponential population growth mean more useful heretics?

“[Laughs] That’s right. People have argued to me ‘Oh but look, we need more people. Think of all the Mozarts and those glorious Milton’s that are out there.’ [Laughs] That’s true. But if we looked after our offspring more closely, educated them better and gave them a really free-ranging education, then we would find the concentration of heretics rose exponentially as well, so with the same numbers, we could get more heretics [Laughs],” says Manning.

Manning provided some of examples of world-changing heretics during the lecture (and kindly shared more with myscience.ie afterwards), allowing us to present…

Aubrey Manning’s Top Five Seven Heretics  

7.  Farel Bradbury, creator of the controversial UNITAX concept according to which we would be taxed on our energy consumption rather than on our labour.

6. Peter Mitchell, the biochemist who proposed the once-controversial theory of chemiosmosis and then went on to win the 1978 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the same idea.

5. Kenneth Boulding, founder of the “evolutionary economics” movement.

4. Lynn Margulis, best known for her theory of symbiogenesis.  

3. Alfred Wegener, the scientist who discovered the phenomenon of plate tectonics.  

1 and 2. Marie Tharp, the geologist who, along with her colleague Bruce Heezen, ruffled feathers in the scientific establishment when she claimed to have discovered the Mid-Oceanic Ridge, an undersea mountain range that runs through the Earth’s oceans.    

“Yesterday’s heretics become today’s establishment. We should be looking for today’s heretics,” says Manning.

Do you have a fave heretic (scientific or othwerwise)? Let us know in the comments section.

(Note: Manning’s lecture will be available on the Science Gallery website next week.)