Love (1992)

Abstract

S tephen Jay Gould’s is one view of the issue and, in most academic disciplines, a decidedly minority view. Mainstream scholars who trouble themselves to think about disappearing species and shattered environments appear to believe that cold rationality, fearless objectivity, and a bit of technology will get the job done. If that were the whole of it, however, the job would have been done decades ago. Except as pejoratives, words such as emotional bonds, fight, and love are not typical of polite discourse in the sciences or social sciences. To the contrary, excessive emotion about the object of one’s study is in some institutions a sufficient reason to banish the miscreant to the black hole of committee duty or administration, on the grounds that good science and emotion of any sort are incompatible, a kind of Presbyterian view of science.