It may come as a surprise, but those white-coated chemists beavering away in the university lab are in it for the sex. Or so claims Terence Kealey, whose new book, Sex, Science and Profits, offers a whole new way of looking at science and scientists.

The book's key claim is that science is not a public good to be funded through the public purse to ensure its survival, but the evolved product of the competitive, selfish, property- and sex-obsessed instincts that make us human. It could therefore manage very nicely, says Kealey, without any support from government.

As vice-chancellor of the private Buckingham University, Kealey may be expected to question the need for public subsidies. But in doing so, he is arguing very much against the current trend.

Since 1997, the government has boasted of its investment in science, and has put its money where its mouth is, increasing spending on the science base from 0.29% to 0.37% of GDP between 1997 and 2005. At the same time, business expenditure on research and development fell slightly from 1.18% to 1.09% of GDP.

Nick Dusic, director of the pressure group Campaign for Science and Engineering, says: "It is in the interests of the UK to invest in basic science to a higher degree than it would be for any individual or company."

Not so, argues Kealey, who says there are individuals and companies queueing up to invest in all kinds of science, both applied and basic, for their own ends.

Profit motive

First, the companies. They recognise the need for constant innovation to drive profits, keep up with the competition, and allow them to trade knowledge. He argues that they cannot afford to make a distinction between applied and pure science because markets are now so brisk that the entrepreneur who is not investing in pure science, but sitting back and waiting for others to do it first so that they can copy them, is asking for bankruptcy.

Then there are the individual philanthropists and the foundations they set up, such as the Wellcome Trust or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. While these philanthropists are making their money, their motives are primarily profit driven, he suggests. But once they stop, they go for esteem. "The biologists know that we humans evolved to seek, above all, the rewards of the social hierarchy," he writes. "What people really want is status."

And they want it for the same reasons as those white-coated chemists who work so hard to make the next breakthrough scientific discovery. To advertise their sexual fitness.

Business people advertise their potency by making money, says Kealey, philanthropists by giving money away. Scientists do it through their cleverness in the lab, and by telling everyone else about their work through publication. There is no need to worry that private funding of science withdraws the incentive to publish - publishing, claims Kealey, is the whole incentive.

But doesn't public funding at least ensure that the kind of science funded, and published, is the kind that will most benefit the public? Dusic argues that, while private funding helps to create a skilled workforce and develop new technologies, public funding ensures that research is "advancing science in ways we don't understand the full consequences of".

To counter this argument, Keaney goes back in time. In a quick historical tour beginning with the Stone Age, he claims that what has driven innovation is not theoretical musing but need, spurred on by individual property rights and the free market. Our ancestors invented farming because, having had no incentive to preserve the animals they hunted and didn't own, they had run out of their main food source. James Watt, a self-employed technician, made his crucial discoveries about steam because he was trying to mend an engine. America became the richest country in the world, and a technological power, long before it began significant public funding for science in 1940.

Indeed, Kealey argues that government subsidy can hinder research by preventing industrial backers from stepping in. He cites a 2003 report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development that looked at the economic growth rates of the world's 21 leading economies between 1971 and 1998. According to Kealey, it found that publicly funded research and development actually damaged economic growth by crowding out privately funded research and development.

While he acknowledges that a small amount of government-funded science is an important way of empowering universities against private pressures, he suggests that it can also distract them from their prime purpose, which is to teach.

Ideally, he suggests, universities should be independent centres of teaching and scholarship "fostering scholars who speak truth unto power".

Teaching and scholarship are cheap enough to survive on fees and endowments, he argues, whereas a research university demands government money, and therefore is inhibited in its criticism of government.

But isn't the fear of producing unpalatable results even greater with privately funded research?

Closed shop

No, says Kealey because science, however it is funded, is always a closed shop. In theory, journals are public, but in practice only certain scientists have any idea what they are talking about. Scientific observations only have validity if others in the same game accept them.

Scientists need to tell each other things because then they will, in turn, be told things. The scientific conference, he says, is not a forum for giving away information publicly but a trading floor.

In fact, the main advantage of public funding for science is "to ensure we have publicly funded people, answerable to democratic government, whose job it is to tell the rest of us what's really going on".

So what are the implications of Kealey's argument for the way science is taught?

First, he says, teachers need to scrap the assumption that science is a public good, due a slice of public funding. Then, they need to make it more exciting. "The official dogma of science education is that science is a collection of objective facts, disembodied and absolute," he says. "But science is actually the product of only certain cultures, and is moulded by the histories of those cultures and by the leading egos of those cultures."

This means teaching early cosmology and physics by recreating Galileo's confrontations with the Pope as plays, or early geometry by recreating the experiment in which Eratosthenes calculated the diameter of the earth 2000 years ago.

"The history, philosophy, sociology and economics of science should be an integral part of A-levels," he says, "So that no scientist emerges, blinking, into the world solely as a technocrat."