The Focus of Science Books

I think I discovered something while searching for said books in the previous post.  The focus of popular science literature has completely shifted within my lifetime.  This shift is rather glaring with children's books.  When I was younger, at least for the media I got my hands on, the focus was very much on the subject matter.  These books showed the facts, and more importantly tried to covey the wonder of their subject matter.  Scientists were in the background, their role was the role of a servant, to understand and explore these wonders so that they can bring them to us, their audience.  It wasn't just knowledge, it was beauty they were after and that they were conveying.

The books I found today were different.  There were tons of books who's focus was Charles Darwin himself.  A plethora of books like "What Darwin Saw" seemed to have as a focus the idolization of the man himself. I don't doubt that there's plenty of knowledge conveyed in the books, but the focus has surely changed.  The same is true with non-biographical biology books, whose focus tends to be more on the triumph of the theory of Evolution than the facts or the wonder. The focus is on the scientist and what he can do, rather than on the subject matter and how it can be understood.

This is an important shift, I think. It moves us from contemplation of the world to self-congratulation regard ourselves and our accomplishments, or at least scientists and their accomplishments.  In the process, scientists are moved from a place of humility to a place of pride.  This mini-Baconian shift, as I will call it (after Francis Bacon, the most influential of the early moderns who moved the focus of science from the contemplation of creation to the act of conquering Nature by the scientist), is a bad sign for our culture, and one that will succeed only in alienating people from science.  I certainly hope the trend can be reversed.