Your world (mine too) is better off with the conquest of the New World. The New World itself essentially underwent genocide. (y)Our gain must necessarily be viewed as less significant than their loss of, well, just about everything. And who knows what our culture might have missed out on by destroying theirs? Without knowing, the assertion that we're better off seems empty. One might say "I think we're better off" but more fully it's "I think we're better off, but there's no way to say for sure." (Quantum Mechanics again!)
You said pinning the responsibility for that on 'science' is to allow people to dodge the responsibility.
Well, if that's the case, then pinning the achievements of man on 'science' steals the credit that should be man's, no?
The downsides to alcohol has spurred significant advances in medicine and sociology. AA is, to my mind, a very important achievement, because it's an excellent example of how to structure a support framework for people with crippling problems.
That, my friend, is a circular argument. Society wouldn't have any need to address the problems of alcoholism without alcohol. Society wouldn't have the need for a support framework for those who would otherwise perish without science to save them -- because they'd be dead.
This, I think, is what I mean when I characterize your statement as "mythology." Where science has achieved good things, credit goes to science. Where science has led to disaster, or maybe just Killer Bees, those were Bad Men. I think there's some cognitive dissonance in that point of view. (And by "mythology" I simply mean a way of understanding and explaining the world around us. "The myth of progress" is a touchstone of Western thought.)
Let's turn this question around: If adaptation of technology is such a beneficial trait, why don't we see more examples in nature? There are a few examples, but technology use is pretty sparse among the genomes of this planet. I'm talking here about active employment of tools and the like -- the bird building the nest, not the maple seed that's evolved to fly like a helicopter. But then, the bird doesn't experiment with new ways to build a nest (I don't think).
Ultimately I largely agree with your assessment that science has improved our lot in life. But I still think it's a little too much to say science has always helped. More like, it's an incredibly great good, but it's not 100% good.
Then again, I guess I don't think anything is 100% good. There's always the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Farming is a good technology, right? Is its value greater than one Amazon rainforest? Is that even a judgement we can make?
I liked the anecdote, no idea if it's true, where someone asked Mao Tse Tung what was the impact of the French Revolution on Western civilization. To which he replied "it's too early to tell."
