From Anomaly to Paralogy: The Post-modern Condition and its Consequences for University Science Education

In recent years natural science students' enrolment patterns have changed. Many new study-programmes have emerged with new hot names like nanotechnology, molecular biomedicine, medicinal chemistry, biotechnology, health mathematics, product and design psychology etc. These new study programmes transcend the traditional disciplinary borders of the classical scientific disciplines, so that we see how core knowledge from the old sciences like physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics etc. are mixed with each other and sometimes with humanistic disciplines and social sciences. With the new study programmes we say “[f]arewell to the old classifications, such as physics, chemistry, biology. Welcome to new ones, like GRAINN — short for genomics, robotics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience and nanotechnology [and] SHEE — the sciences of safety, health and environment plus ethics” as Jerome Ravetz has put it (2006, pp. 10–11). Hence, the contemporary tertiary natural science study-programmes face the challenge of coping with trans-disciplinarity

One could, however, argue that the new study programmes are not new at all, and that the mixing of the knowledge of the old sciences has been a task undertaken by the disciplines of engineering (the applied sciences) for more than a century. Just because somebody makes up new names for what engineers are doing, does not mean that science and technology is changing fundamentally