The fact that scientific activity always takes place, as everything does, within a scientist's own culture does not mean that science itself is just a cultural artifact. No! It! Doesn't! It is not a language nor a religion nor a manhood ceremony. It is not prayer or dreamtime or transcendental meditation. Science--carefully distinguished from both scientists and from the working environment--is culture-transcendent.

Is science a child of the Western intellectual tradition?

A common mistake is to take two trivial observations (1. science contains identifiable cultural characteristics; 2. science first arose in a particular culture) and go on to say that "science is itself a culture" or, worse, that "science is inseparable from its historical parent culture". These are non sequiturs. In the first case, science is a subculture rather than a culture, a fact that confers a degree of separateness and of portability. Secondly, the approach to inquiry that we call science is not necessarily, ineluctably or forever, part of any particular politico-cultural tradition. Some people say that: they're flat wrong. Science was of course discovered and developed under the aegis of one particular culture (as were wheels, writing and equestrianism, under different cultures). But to say that science is therefore merely an arm or a jackboot of that culture and its descendents, or that it is irredeemably tainted by values from that culture--or to claim, chauvinistically, that it could only be invented by that culture--is to underestimate both the idea of science and the intellectual vitality of humans. Science, as an invention or discovery, is something of which our whole species should be proud.

That science originated in a Europe inspired by Arab and Greek thought is a well-documented and boring fact. It is also an accident of history and geography. Europe merely got there first and this, while extraordinarily significant for Europe and consequently for the rest of the world, has no effect on science's ultimate value or the strength of its claims. The adjective "Western" is uninformative, meaning nothing other than locality, when "science" is its referent; there is not a particular flavour of science which is called Western. There's science done properly, and there's non-science.

Grounded in reality

It is an observable fact that science's results may be value-laden or biased; what is most interesting about science in contrast to other methods of claim-staking is that it contains self-correction mechanisms and is, by definition, always engaged in revision of its truth-statements (I nearly wrote "conclusions"). Parochial bias in science arises from errors of application in particular historical contexts rather than fundamental flaws[18]. This is the only way in which there can be anything "Western" (or "Eastern", or whatever) about the practice of science; it may be influenced by the idiosyncrasies of different environments e.g. the availability of funding in America, the urgency of the focus on agricultural science over high-energy physics in sub-Saharan Africa, and so on. But science finds truths, dissects and discards ideologies, and applies universally. There is nothing "Western" about formulating a hypothesis.

As a result, there is really no such thing as indigenous science, no Blackfoot physics, Chinese evidence-based medicine, Maori science, etc. Science is one particular type of long-term, consistent, systematic endeavour that has a fairly hard-edged definition. There are other such endeavours; indigenous knowledge is one. The ability to draw the occasional non-ridiculous analogy between, say, Tibetan mystical pronouncements and quantum physics does not prove that the Tibetans, Chinese, Blackfoot native Americans, Inuit, or Novaya Zemlyans practiced science in isolation from the Greek-to-Arab-to-Italy tradition. One swallow doesn't make a summer. Indeed, the fine print of most discussions of so-called indigenous science usually makes it clear that they are actually talking about either traditional knowledge (which they would like to be tested by science and acknowledged if correct) or about metaphysics and mysticism. In the latter, science or its disciplines is a metaphor rather than a description for the relationship between people and their world.

Nobody is seriously claiming that indigenous peoples utilize the hypothetico-inductive technique and control for all variables but one, but there is plenty of slack talk implying equivalence or identity between traditional knowledge and science. This is just sloppy thinking, eliding a metaphor into a description, stressing an analogy until it breaks down. No matter how nice and fair it might be to say that traditional knowledge is scientifically acquired, it simply isn't true that science has been widely practised in many cultures; the idea that a systematic interrogation of the world via its specific methods has a single origin (though not in a single mind). This historical fact is orthogonal to whether or not any human of whatever "culture"can be a scientist.

Kinds of minds

Today, science is done by many people from time to time and by some people all the time. There is nothing in science that prevents any member of any modern cultural group--Novaya Zemlyans and the rest--from producing scientists. All cultures, on encountering the idea, find within their ranks those with competency in science, and genius too. Uneven distributions of scientists within or between cultures arise from the ways cultures distort themselves and each other through knowledge transfer or politics rather than anything inherently "Western" about science. Whether or not a gifted individual in any society actually does science is down to their environment--this is true of mathematics, dance and origami as much as it is true of science. To claim that there is something in one culture that prevents humans within it from being scientists is wrong because it is untrue and wrong because it is racist.

Science is human universal capacity. This is a trite observation. Science is not a Human Universal like incest taboos or language, something that tells us about our nature. The Ability To Do Science is something possessed by all representatives of our species, in the same way that Ability To Use A Yo-Yo is. Science is a meme, not a faculty.

The spread of science to the rest of the world has correlated with the spread of Western culture but this is no more significant than the likewise-correlated dispersements of coal mining, paper, antibiotics, explosives, organic farming, screwdrivers, perspective in art, Velcro, photography, bicycles, telephones, skiing, chess, welding, printing, or blogging. Science, like all of these, is a Good Idea that works in many more contexts than the one in which it first happened to appear. It has travelled from that original place and prospered because it is acultural, because it is a worthwhile strategy that the human brain is able to do.

A better way

The best ideas prosper, and science is one of the best our species has had[4]. By no means all Good Ideas originate in the Western tradition (paper) but all those above were distributed globally by the agents of that tradition[20]. Science travels well not because it arrives as part of a cultural blitzkreig before which other cultures quail but because it comes with less values or belief-requirements than many seem to give it credit for. Before I became a scientist I tended to think that most scientists were like me. Wrong wrong wrong; they aren't. Science fits, or at least manages to co-habit, with an enormous range of other cultural traits (an Ikea of mental furniture). Other scientists support all kinds of causes I would ignore or discourage, subscribe to philosophies and world-views I think are transparently false or downright potty, hold opinions I consider untenable or noxious, and so on. Some of them are nothing like me at all, even some of the ones I consider to be the best scientists (even the most Compleat) that I have ever met. I've hardly moved much beyond the discipline of my original training yet I've met people of all political, ethical, cultural, racial and religious types. I have yet to find something the Compleat Scientists among them have in common, other than being scientists through and through. In a couple of cases, I can't even conceive how they manage to be so Compleat and yet hold beliefs that seem (to me!) incompatible with science. But I would be less of a scientist myself if I ignored these seemingly rogue data points or compromised the observe-record-reinvestigate process. Being a scientist is something you do; you can only reliably determine whether or not it is something you are for a single instance: your own

Science isn't a half-culture that parasitically depends upon its parent culture. It is an entirely different kind of animal. It travels well, plays well with other Good Ideas, is neighbourly to the other things we can carry around in our heads that are culture-derived, and, though young, is not a transient phenomenon. It demonstrates its compatibility all around the world every day in all manner of social and political milieu. You don't need certain cultural values to be a Compleat Scientist.

Are some cultural values incompatible with science?

Nor will your cultural values get in the way. The method of science is wholly compatible with all cultures. This is not to be confused with the results of science, which often aren't compatible. Failure to separate the method of science from the results of science is both egregious and common (an example). Science is not a way of doing something so vague as "perceiving nature", nor is it a rational mental model of the world (for some value of "rational"). It is a method that produces disinterested, unbiased insights into the workings of the world. It is an algorithm: apply it diligently and, regardless of whether the truth is palatable or not and irrespective of your subscription to any belief system, the truth will emerge. It is a strategy.

Don't tell me that there is something ineluctably Western about science because it takes things apart to understand them and that there is a different way, a better way, some kind of circle metaphor or whole-not-part metaphor that offers a new way to understand the universe! Other ways of accumulating knowledge do indeed work; indigenous beliefs have usefully informed millions of people over thousands of years, for example. This is incontestable. What is also incontestable, however, is that there is a better, surer way to expedite truth-finding. Where traditional knowledge is in agreement with science, we can applaud the traditional knowledge and, now that it has been validated(!), incorporate it into humanity's wider store. Where the two differ, there is no value in the traditional knowledge except to individuals who find themselves unable to give it up…in which case normal biological processes will eliminate them in much the same way it will eliminate a scientist who, through a failure to be both reductionistic and holistic and both open- and close-minded, fails to discard an error.

Science is not just another word for gathering knowledge: it is a particular method for doing so. Other methods exist - science is merely the most reliable for certain classes of problem. Could there be a better one? Of course; never say never (or, as science puts it, that is a falsifiable statement). Are any of the candidates currently on offer (holism, intuitive science, religion, accumulated trivia, etc.) better at providing reliable, usable knowledge? No. In that case, do they have any use at all? Sometimes. For one, they are better at providing palatable knowledge (though this exposes their problem: today's "palatable" is not tomorrow's). They also have other uses. But don't pretend they are science, or are equivalent to science, or are appropriate substitutes for science in the minds of those not raised in a Western or European or post-Enlightenment or G8 society. There may be better ways but, right now, science is by far and away the least worst way of expanding our knowledge of the way the world works.