DISCUSSION 
their hands on the controls of political action. This is happening 
within the present generation and is one of the most optimistic 
things about the future of man. 
Wright: I agree, provided it is not simply pure “‘scientists”’ 
to whom you refer, but people who have had a broad scientific 
training or background. 
Medawar: Groups of this kind usually end up by agreeing 
on one thing, namely, that more education is what is wanted. 
I am unable to see how that view can be reconciled with the 
incredible diversity of opinion which has been expressed here. 
I really do not know, even if we took a census of opinion, what 
principles we would teach or what beliefs we would try to 
inculcate. This is the thing that has impressed me most about 
this meeting—the sheer diversity of our opinions, not merely 
between people like Trowell and Crick, but between people in 
the same narrow profession. I think this diversity of opinion 
is both the cause and the justification of our being obliged to do 
good in minute particulars. It is the justification of what Karl 
Popper called “‘ piecemeal social engineering’. One thing we 
might agree upon is that all heroic solutions of social problems 
are thoroughly undesirable and that we should proceed in 
society as we do in science. In science we do not leap from 
hilltop to hilltop, from triumph to triumph, or from discovery 
to discovery; we proceed by a process of exploration from which 
we sometimes learn to do better, and this is what we ought to 
do in social affairs. 
Huxley: Much advance, both in biological evolution and in 
psychosocial evolution, including advance in science, is of 
course obtained by adding minute particulars, but at intervals 
something like crystallization from a super-saturated solution 
occurs, as when science arrives at an entirely new concept, 
which then unifies an enormous amount of factual data and 
ideas, as with Newton or Darwin. Major advance occurs in a 
series of large steps, from one form of organization to another. 
In our psychosocial evolution I believe we now are in a 
position to make a new major advance, for instance in educa- 
tion. We can now educate people in the evolutionary concept 
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