A continuation of earlier thoughts about the differences between expertise and experts, science and scientists.

the standard account of the history textbooks — with the Renaissance giving rise to the Scientific Revolution and thus preparing the way for the Enlightenment — fails to identify the primary causal relationship. Democratic governance and individual rights did not emerge from some amorphous “brew of humanistic and scientific thinking,” he [Timothy Ferris in The Science of Liberty] argues, but were “sparked” by science itself — the crucial “innovative ingredient” that “continues to foster political freedom today.” . . .

science was an integral part of the intellectual equipment of the great pioneers of political and individual liberty. John Locke was not just the most eloquent philosophical advocate of the social contract and natural rights. He was an active member of the emerging scientific culture of 17th-century Oxford, and his intimates included Isaac Newton, who likewise was a radical Whig, supporting Parliament against the overreaching of the crown. Among the American founders, the scientific preoccupations of Franklin and Jefferson are well known, but Ferris emphasizes that they were hardly alone in their interests. . .

the seemingly irresistible spread of modern principles of liberty derives in large measure from the capacity of modern industrial democracies to deliver the goods in terms of general prosperity, health and diversion. The practical side of the scientific outlook has generated endless rounds of invention and innovation (Watt and his steam engine, Morse and his telegraph, Edison and his electric lights, etc.), and the human benefits of these time- and labor-saving improvements have been extended dramatically, if haltingly, by the free market. The singular insight of Adam Smith, Ferris writes, was to recognize that wealth creation and the production of material comforts might be “increased indefinitely if individuals are free to invest and to innovate.” . . .

Science, he notes, is antiauthoritarian, self-correcting, meritocratic and collaborative. As John Dewey, one of his heroes, put it, “freedom of inquiry, toleration of diverse views, freedom of communication, the distribution of what is found out to every individual as the ultimate intellectual consumer” are all as “involved in the democratic as in the scientific method.” In a like vein, Ferris also cites the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin: “Good science comes from the collision of contradictory ideas, from conflict, from people trying to do better than their teachers did, and I think here we have a model for what a democratic society is about.”

But crucial distinctions are lost in these comparisons. The scientific community may be open to everyone, in principle, but it has steep and familiar barriers to entry, as any layperson who has tried to read the research papers at the back of journals like Nature or Science can attest. When not distorted by its own personal and political rivalries, modern science is, in the most admirable sense, an aristocracy — a selection and sorting of the best minds as they interact within institutions designed to achieve certain rarefied ends. Experiment, equality and freedom of expression are essential to this work, but it is the work of an elite community from which most people are necessarily excluded. Thankfully, participation in the everyday life of democracy does not require a Ph.D., nor are theories and ideas its basic medium.

The mistake here is in conflating the behavior of individuals in institutions with the principles and methods that they are supposed to use. The phrase "modern science is" is nonsense. Science is science. Modern science institutions and modern scientists may have all of the defects and warts noted, but science does not. This is important for us to understand since it is the measure of our institutions. They are falling short.

Science does not require credentials, it's a method, a discovery mechanism. Franklin and Jefferson were not scientists in the sense of being credentialed members of exclusive institutions. The modest discoveries that anyone can make by applying the principles are of immediate use to the discoverer and influence their world view. This is true even if others have made the discoveries in the past and the facts are well known to scholars. It is, as Smolin asserts, "a model for what a democratic society is about."