It is unfortunate that "science" is usually separated from other "intellectual stuff", often by criteria that suit the individual separating them. At the moment the film animation industry is doing far more to understand our perceptions of what is real than all of the scientific efforts combined. The impressionist painters with their sometimes childlike Images taught me more about non-stereoscopic depth perception than the entire community of vision scientists. Artists knew about mixing colors long before Newton. The blinkered vision advocated by "separatists" isolates and diminishes other kinds of intellectual efforts and discourages efforts to evaluate their validity. It probably also encourages a defensive overreaction to opposition of ideas from competing disciplines, often based upon insufficient knowledge and understanding which boils down to opposition based upon ignorance and misunderstanding. An effort to constructively engage and understand the spectrum of intellectual processes available to humanity may be revealing and very instructive. A first step would be to rephrase denunciations (from both sides) of the intellectual processes that are less familiar to us. Is it impossible to reflect upon the shortcomings of our own intellectual processes and learn how to respect and leverage the intellectual  approaches offered by other, unfamiliar disciplines? Communicate instead of dismissing.

In this spirit, I challenge Ian's position on the value of science to morality. Science has failed to communicate the realities of "evolution" and the perception of science as irrefutable truth strengthens the stubbornness of society against the opinions it forms based upon science. Simple "sound bytes" become the mean's of communication rather than considered opinion. Darwin didn't use the phrase "Survival of the fittest" in the first editions of his book and a much later letter to his son revealed that he regretted ever using the phrase because of the misunderstanding it encouraged. "Evolution" was a word he used only once in the first edition of his book. Relegated to the last paragraph of his text. He preferred the expression "Descent with modification". The layperson's understanding of Darwin's ideas is based upon 19th century sound bytes.

Science still struggles to understand the complexities of evolutionary "fitness" while the "ignoracenti" (including some scientists) forge ahead with misguided notions such as eugenics, a general misguided belief that science will cure all and a failure to recognize that logical decisions based upon science can be disastrous if the underlying (mis)knowledge is not critically examined. The reality is that the process we misnamed as evolution is inevitable. New developments are inevitable and the integration of those new developments into an existing world invites functional comparisons with potential consequences for popularity and possibly long-term existence. Thus the notion of survival plays easily into the perception of evolution. Survival can have negative connotations and ignores the very real fact that the "fittest" don't merely survive, they thrive. This leads to huge numbers of "competitors" which generally seem to have eschewed fighting for individual survival and accepted living together. A new environment of many similar individuals offers opportunities for socialization and specialization for a group that then becomes "fitter" than the individuals of which it is composed. Did those early individuals logically deduce the appropriate conditions for group survival or did evolution naturally select individuals who contributed to "fitter" groups? Note also that the early manifestations of groups occurred in the unicellular organisms which eventually evolved into the societies we now recognize as human individuals. Was it intellectual design that drove these individual cells towards mutual support and even organized specializations of function which led to utter reliance on other individuals for survival? Are these perhaps early manifestations of behaviors that we now categorize as moral, derived purely from natural selection? Is it impossible to consider that, like the monosynaptic reflex, natural selection has shaped the wiring of the parts of our brains which determine how we behave socially? There is a substantial scientific literature on the role of cooperation in evolution, though it is barely recognized in popular accounts of evolution. Morality is a significant factor in the optimization of cooperation and it should therefore be no surprise that morality is a positive trait for thriving.