In the current embryo-freezing atmosphere serving as prelude to the possible introduction of abortion, the words “science” and “scientific” are being bandied about as if they were spells which can magically shut up opponents. Pro-life exponents are expected to genuflect reverently before the high altar of science.

The idea that science is something definitive and foolproof is as unscientific as can be. Science – a branch of knowledge – is like the universe: ever-expanding.

I am tempted to repeat what was written quite some time ago, namely that most propositions are not false but nonsensical. That any so-called “expert” should publicly say that the human being in his or her early stages is a bunch of cells, is not false but nonsensical.

The “expert” merely fails to understand the logic of our language. Embryo, child, adult are simply words with no inherent relation to reality except that which we impose on them.

Indeed, the deepest problems are in fact not problems at all, but instances of lack of clear thinking mostly owing to inaccuracies of language.

But I shall resist, and shall instead present the argument that science has made an inordinate number of errors in the past. I shall give examples, in the hope that I convince those who persist in presenting science as some infallible, static body of truths to stop being fundamentalist and to accept that science is open to error as any other branch of human thought: error of observation or calculation and error of language, which can be subjective and inaccurate despite our best efforts.

The worst error science ever made is beyond the shadow of a doubt the classification of humans into different races. Not only was it bad science, but it also allowed barbaric political acts, such as slavery, colonialism, and genocide.

Science and fundamentalism are by their very nature incompatible

In the early 20th century, anthropologists wrote about races as a biological explanation for differences in psychology and intelligence between groups of people. Races were also used to explain – biologically – why certain peoples were more successful than others.

Why, even as late as 1997, in his highly popular Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond used science to debunk the “science” behind race. So which is right? The early 20th-century science of racial superiority and inferiority, or the late 20th-century science which believes that races are figments of the imagination, instruments of political domination whereby the powerful exploit the weak?

Even Einstein made two serious blunders. “There is not the slightest indication that energy will ever be obtainable from the atom,” he said just before the atomic age was born.

Astrophysicist Mario Livio explains in his book Brilliant Blunders that in his equations describing how gravity works, Einstein included a term he called the cosmological constant, based on his belief that the universe was static.

When, later, astronomers found that the universe is expanding, Einstein removed the constant from his equations. However, in 1998 – long after Einstein had passed away – astronomers found that the only way to explain new data about the expanding universe was actually to retain the cosmological constant Einstein had erroneously removed.

Darwin’s notion of heredity was totally mistaken, and his theory is marred by his incomplete knowledge. It was only in the beginning of the 20th century that the concept of heredity devised by Mendel was understood – but that was decades after Darwin had published his theory of evolution.

Perhaps the worst offender was Lord Kelvin who ignored the advice of other scientists on how heat is transported, leading him to calculate incorrectly the ages of the Earth and the sun. The problem with Kelvin, writes Livio, was that he “was used to being right far too many times”.

A worthy contender for the title of worst offender was Linus Pauling, who won the Nobel Prize twice, just by himself. Pauling was convinced that the DNA molecule was a triple helix, whereas the correct model was the double helix proposed by Francis Crick and James Watson.

Science and fundamentalism are by their very nature incompatible. Taking science as if it were a religion, presenting it as Gospel truth, is the nec plus ultra of anti-science.

Science, like evolution, is always works-in-progress.