That depends on what you mean by science. For me, science is the process of predicting and, in some cases, altering the future. In it's simplest form, it is the ability to predict that you would be able to apply more force to a blow by swinging a rock or a piece of wood than by swinging your fist, and thus carrying a club with you when you went hunting. In more complicated forms, it is the ability to predict that if you bury the appropriate pieces of a plant and conduct a few rituals like pouring on water, removing other vegetation, and adding other esoteric substances, you will at some point be able to harvest an entire crop, and thus domesticate vegetables. In still more complicated forms, it allows you to predict that if you use the wrong material in an o-ring at the wrong temperatures, your space shuttle will be unable to maintain its structural integrity and will scatter itself across the upper atmosphere.
Our ability to remember the past and use it to predict the future is our second strongest evolutionary advantage. The strongest is our ability to learn not only from our own experiences but from the experiences of all those that we can communicate with. That enables us to change our destinies on the time scale of the formation of interneural connections rather than on the time scale of mutation.
Basically, what scientists have enable us to do is bypass Darwinian evolution. For all practical purposes, we have eliminated individual competition for survival. If we did not have scientists, no discovery would ever be acted on or transmitted, and survival would have depended on the strength and experience of a single life.
ChemBuddy | 
Chem Reddit | 
Topic: where would we be without science? (Read 8343 times)