When Robert May stepped down as president of the UK's Royal Society toward the end of last year, he went not with a whimper, but a roar. In the last speech of his five-year term, the Australian-born physicist and population biologist warned his audience in the gravest terms about the threat posed to science by all forms of fundamentalism: "Ahead of us lie dangerous times. There are serious problems that derive from the realities of the external world: climate change, loss of biological diversity, new and reemerging diseases, and more. Many of these threats are not immediate, yet their nonlinear character is such that we need to be acting today."
"Sadly, for many, the response is to retreat from complexity and difficulty by embracing the darkness of fundamentalist unreason. The Enlightenment's core values, which lie at the heart of the Royal Society—free, open, unprejudiced, uninhibited questioning and enquiry; individual liberty; ...
