Science! It works, bitches.

People are suspicious of science.  Presidential candidates take great care to not be too enthusiastic about it, or to flatly deny what we know is true from science.  Science doesn’t address our human side.  It is dangerous; Frankenstein mythology pervades our fiction.  Science produces the things that give us cancer, nuclear weapons, power plant disasters, genetically modified organisms, clones, designer babies, and other heartless abominations.  It creates the substances that kill us with cancer, deform our babies, and clog our arteries.  

But if we were to form a clear, objective view about the institution in the course of human history that has done more for human happiness, longevity, health, wealth, comfort, prosperity, and flourishing, there is only one answer:  science.  Nothing else we have ever engaged in has made such a positive contribution to everything that matters most to us.  Complaining about the awful things that science does to us is like complaining about the brand of caviar you’ve been given while taking an opulent, luxury cruise on the Queen Mary.  

Here’s just one bit of the evidence:  

Human mortality improvement in evolutionary context  Oskar Burger, Annette Baudisch, and James W. Vaupel

Abstract

Life expectancy is increasing in most countries and has exceeded 80 in several, as low-mortality nations continue to make progress in averting deaths. The health and economic implications of mortality reduction have been given substantial attention, but the observed malleability of human mortality has not been placed in a broad evolutionary context. We quantify the rate and amount of mortality reduction by comparing a variety of human populations to the evolved human mortality profile, here estimated as the average mortality pattern for ethnographically observed hunter-gatherers. We show that human mortality has decreased so substantially that the difference between hunter-gatherers and today’s lowest mortality populations is greater than the difference between hunter-gatherers and wild chimpanzees. The bulk of this mortality reduction has occurred since 1900 and has been experienced by only about 4 of the roughly 8,000 human generations that have ever lived. Moreover, mortality improvement in humans is on par with or greater than the reductions in mortality in other species achieved by laboratory selection experiments and endocrine pathway mutations. This observed plasticity in age-specific risk of death is at odds with conventional theories of aging.

That is, human life expectancy and mortality rates have improved more in the last four generations than they have in any period in human history.  To quote the Io9 article, “In fact, the changes are so dramatic, that a 30-year-old hunter-gatherer had the same mortality rate as a modern 72-year-old.”  We have seen greater improvements in the last 4 generations than in the previous 8,000 generations of humans.  

This evidence just concerns the length of life and some of the causes of death, but consider the multiplication effect.  Science makes concrete improvement in the quality and comfort of our lives with advances in technology, medicine, chemistry, agriculture, and a dozen other fields so that a day in your life is orders of magnitude better by every measure of quality than a day in the life of a hominid hunter-gatherer.  Then science quadruples the number of days you will have to experience those benefits too by radically extending life expectancy.  Given infant mortality rates for primitive people, disease, ignorance, scarcity, superstitions, natural disasters, and other risk factors, you most likely wouldn’t have survived infancy if you had been born 10,000 years ago.  Now you will live into your 80s or 90s (the average lifespan continues to rise).  Many of us will then die of cancer or heart disease after a life of unprecedented comfort and pleasure in human history.  But ironically, the complaint will be that science is the culprit in our deaths for producing cancer causing agents in our environments, or substances that are bad for our hearts in our food.