Chief Scientific Advisers: S&T Committee Report

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Wednesday 17th October 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for introducing this report. I endorse almost all its recommendations and feel slightly uneasy that I am neither a member of the Science and Technology Committee nor a natural scientist. I might have got in by virtue of being a social scientist—which, again, I am not—because I cross the border between social science and philosophy by being a moral and political philosopher. I therefore have no real competence in the matter, which is precisely why I thought I should use this occasion to think within the framework of the report and open it up a little to raise issues that it hints at but does not systematically pursue. I shall make three general points.

First, chief scientific advisers generally—I think, almost all of them—come from the natural sciences or engineering backgrounds. I can see why this is so historically, but I do not see the rationale. Public policy has profound social consequences and can easily go wrong if it makes wrong assumptions about the nature of society or the profound changes taking place in it. We should therefore widen the background of chief scientific advisers by including sociologists, psychologists and political scientists, who all have an important role. I would wish to go a step further. Public policy does not occur in a cultural vacuum; in fact, it is suffused with cultural assumptions to which scientists are not immune. A form of behaviour that we take to be uniform across the species is shaped by cultural preconditions. Unless, therefore, we begin to understand the cultural factors which are at work, we would have considerable difficulty in understanding even a non-cultural phenomenon such as global warming, let alone rising population or lots of other things.

Culture is at the centre of human existence. Unless we take account of cultural factors in policy-making, we would get our policy as wrong as if it took no account of the natural sciences. This is particularly so in a society like ours, which is increasingly multicultural. If other policy is based on the assumption that we are a Christian or secular society, taking no account either of the Jewish community, the Muslim community, the Hindu community or lots of others, we will simply fail to understand why our fellow citizens behave in the way they do, why they respond to science in the way they do and why the very idea of scientific evidence might frighten them if they take science to be inherently secular and anti-God.

Given all this, it is important that we take account not only of the social sciences but of the humanities, languages and philosophy. Profound changes are taking place at the cultural level and we need to appreciate this. I therefore suggest that there might be a space among the distinguished body of chief scientific advisers for historians, cultural anthropologists and students of humanities—even, perhaps, for students of literature.

If you think along those lines you can see where I am going: it is to locate at the very heart of the Government, at the very heart of their policy decision-making, the natural scientists, the social scientists and the humanities, and to institutionalise a dialogue between the three different perspectives that are central to understanding the kind of society in which we live. Once that dialogue takes place at the very heart of the decision-making process, it will have the capacity to trigger and stimulate similar dialogue at other levels of our society. One then begins to see why knowledge drawn from different areas should be pulled together to shape a more sensible society than we sometimes have.

The Government have already recognised the need for a chief social science adviser but their response is rather tentative. As far as I can see, their response talks in terms of it as one of several options. I do not know what other options they have in mind—I certainly do not see one—so perhaps the Minister, who I gather is not, like me, a natural scientist, will tell us what the Government have in mind. I would have thought that the idea mooted as a possible alternative—namely, joint heads of research—will not work because, in that kind of role, the social science adviser would not have the same authority and the same degree of independence.

My second point is slightly different. We have been talking about scientific advisers and the role that they can play in shaping policy. Scientific advisers are an institutionalised voice of science located in a government department. However, outside the government machinery you have national academies such as the British Academy and the Royal Society, and these bodies can provide cross-disciplinary expertise that can supplement the expertise of chief scientific advisers. The body to which I belong, the British Academy, has done this in recent years in trying to bring together the policy-makers and social scientists and, in some cases, the natural scientists. In discussing foreign policy issues such as Iraq, it brought in historians and linguists to show how that disastrous policy could have been avoided if the policy-making had taken place in a more intelligent and sensitive manner.

National academies can also play an important role in increasing public understanding and awareness of scientific evidence, as well as perhaps increasing public trust in science. An important point that was made earlier is that it is one thing for scientists to be banging away in their discussions with the Government but, if the Government are not scientifically minded, are scientifically illiterate or do not see or are unable to appreciate the point of what is going on, then that evidence, however high a role the chief scientific adviser might occupy on the governing board, the departmental board or whatever, will simply have no impact.

So while looking at the supply side, we must also look at the demand side. We must make the Government want to ensure that their decisions are right, based on scientific evidence and not discredited once they have been taken. That can happen only when we have a scientifically literate political class. That will take years to arrive but at least we can make sure that public opinion puts pressure on the Government. The national academies can increase public awareness and encourage public opinion to exert adequate pressure on the Government to listen to scientists and scientific advisers.

My last point concerns humility. Evidence is absolutely crucial in any decision-making but no decision can be based on evidence alone. Evidence is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. We require evidence, obviously, but also certain normative principles under which we charter, harness and use the evidence for this or that purpose. Evidence therefore tells us what factors are relevant, what the empirical truth is and how important these are. However, all decisions, including policy decisions, are ultimately normative; they involve moral principles and moral commitments of a certain kind, even religious convictions, and they balance various factors in judgment. Mercifully, scientists cannot provide that judgment or those moral principles. The day when scientists begin to provide these things, those scientists will be God.

In any such discussion between scientists and the Government, therefore, the Government need to recognise that scientific evidence is a necessary condition, while scientists need to recognise that scientific evidence is not a sufficient condition. Once each side begins to recognise its own strength as well as its own limitations, a sensible dialogue becomes possible.