# Is progress the exception and degeneration the rule in evolution?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-progress-the-exception-and-degeneration-the-rule-in-evolution/334147>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [December 5, 2005, 7:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-progress-the-exception-and-degeneration-the-rule-in-evolution/334147 "2005-12-05T07:57:55Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\
**Post date:** [December 7, 2005, 10:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-progress-the-exception-and-degeneration-the-rule-in-evolution/334147/21 "2005-12-07T22:02:54Z")

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> [@roger thornhill](#):
>
> I’m surprised that anyone should still hold with this notion, given the fact that a value-free scientist is neither possible or desirable. Consider Weber’s dictum that an ‘attitude of moral indifference has no connection with scientific “objectivity”’.
> 
> In an essay published in 1976, Popper makes explicit the link between scientific method and other values:
> 
> “Our motives and even our purely scientific ideals, including the ideal of a disinterested search for truth, are deeply anchored in extra-scientific and, in part, in religious evaluations. Thus the ‘objective’ or ‘value-free’ scientist is hardly the ideal scientist. Without passion we can achieve nothing – certainly not in pure science. The phrase ‘the passion for truth’ is no mere metaphor.”

But, Popper was careful to label value judgments as “extra-scientific” ones.

The human scientific enterprise itself is driven by **one** value judgment: “Knowledge is good.” That is, it is better for human beings to have accurate, tested knowledge about the universe than to remain ignorant.

But that judgment is external to the process of scientific research. The scientific method can never make a value judgment as such, can never abstract an “ought” from an “is.” Science can only try to describe the universe, as it finds it, as accurately as possible.

In that sense, science is “value free.”

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