Please educate us!!! I know nothingk.
The problem with that analogy is that science isnât just another âcultureâ â it stands above and beyond all cultures. While I have little sympathy for an amateur archeologist who illegally stole artifacts, I have even less sympathy for the wishy-washy idea that science and superstition are analogous ways to view the world.
I can only conclude that you have never studied the history of science.
Of course I donât believe that science and supernaturalism are equivalent. However, at any time a lot of science is actually contaminated with supernaturalism. Scientists have in the past shied away from facing facts for religious reasons. The idea that there is a completely pure âscienceâ that stands above all cultures is in fact an aspiration, not a reality.
I assume you have read Kuhn, because just about everybody has. One way of understanding the way that theories continue to be clung to when it is clear that they are bursting at the seams is through the understanding of culture. Take String Theory. It may or may not be correct, and currently no experiment exists to distinguish between it and the Standard Model. Yet people have built careers on it, and if String Theory is exploded they and their students will be unemployable in the physics community. They have a vested interest in defending challenges to their theory exactly as Catholic priests do to defending their beliefs.
Archaeology is particularly prone to adopting ideas about the past which are really seeing things through the cultural bias of the practitioners.
Terms like âwishy-washyâ show, to me, that you see things in black and white. But human activities are all about shades of grey. There is a continuum between ISIS breaking off artefacts at Palymyra and selling them (then blowing up the remains to conceal the theft), and Napoleonâs academicians stealing Egyptian remains and largely decontextualising them. But if you asked those academicians, they would come up with âscientificâ arguments to justify what they were doing.
Postmodernists who seriously claim that physicists have a âvested interestâ in defending challenges to string theory are an awful lot like right-wingers who claim that climate scientists are making up global warming and silencing critics in a similar conspiracy. They donât get how science works. It isnât about defending dogma like priests as you suggest. Being an iconoclast who overturns accepted theory is the traditional way to fame and success in science. âThanksâ in part to Kuhn, the scientist whose work shows even a very modest disagreement with the status-quo in their field will tend to exaggerate the novelty of their work and even claim that it represents a revolution as opposed to a modest contribution to the edifice of science.
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I think thereâs a chance you may be underestimating the level of controversy re the divide between String Theory and everything else. String theory has yet to produce a single testable claim, yet people are still clinging to it. At this point it seems almost like a religion, but unfortunately I (specifically me) donât know of anything that produces testable claims as a challenge to string theory that hasnât yet been disproven.
In anycase I do still agree with you that science, at itâs best is based on shooting holes in other peopleâs ideas, and the ones that are bulletproof are the one we provisionally accept as a good approximation to be torn down by further evidence later.
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The physicist Howard Georgi calls mathematical models without experimental data (or even the possibility to design experiments with the current techniques) âwonderful scientific mythsâ.
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Youâre very good at using terminology to misrepresent anybody who disagrees with you, arenât you? âPostmodernistsâ? Itâs practising experimental physicists who complain about the untestability of String Theory, and graduate students who complain that attempts to bolster it form an awful lot of theoretical physics jobs.
I freely confess that I side with that âpostmodernistâ Newton and his comment âhypotheses non fingoâ - by which he meant that he did not speculate on things not capable of experimental demonstration. (Of course he was far from right about this especially in his Biblical chronology, but his sentiments were sound.)
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Where did I say that others shouldnât care? Iâm not saying ancestral connection/significance is bunk, just that it doesnât matter to me personally. And to be clear, the thing that doesnât matter to me is whether or not stuff was left by MY ancestors. It is just as important to me (or not) to preserve archeolgical finds and sites, no matter whose ancestors left the stuff there. Thatâs all Iâm saying. Iâll absolutely accept this whose ancestors they were is important to others, but I wonât pretend to understand why in any meaningful way.
And that my threshold for what is interesting-to-me is a bit higher than for some. Corn-cobs? Perhaps not.
Okay, fair enough, I guess.
The actual process is more complex than that. It is a mixture of what you can prove and what you can devise. Sometimes the proof has to catch up to the theorizing. Sometimes, in the midst of experimentation, new ideas arise which need mental exploration before further physical interpretation. Itâs âgray,â as you wrote in another post, not black and white. Itâs a creative process. Creative processes, by their nature, move around from formless to form and back again, sometimes bearing fruit.
Calling someone who wrote that string theorists âhave a vested interest in defending challenges to their theory exactly as Catholic priests do to defending their beliefsâ a postmodernist, is simply accurate.
The point isnât that that there isnât any disagreement in string theory. Iâm a biologist and even I know about it. But how do I know? I know because critics of string theory like Lee Smolin and Peter Woit are quite famous and get constantly interviewed by the media, write best-selling books, and so on. But you know? I canât name an actual string theorist even though they are in the majority. Far from being oppressed, it seems the way of getting your name out there is to rebel against the status quo. But the problem is that to the outside of the scientific community it looks like there is a crisis rather than just iconoclasts being iconoclasts.
In my own field, it is similar. Ford Doolittle and others have gotten famous by asserting that there is no Tree of Life. What they mean by that is that technically, if you accept that any transfer of genes between species has occurred in nature, technically there is a network rather than a binary tree. Okay, fine they are technically correct by that definition, even though it isnât that revolutionary. But they have gotten on the cover of popular magazines like âNew Scientistâ for it. The problem is that some in the general public think there is a crisis in evolutionary biology because of it.
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I donât follow that. I was just making the point that if you have a professorship based on research in one or other variant of String Theory, and you have postgraduate students, you want to believe that all this time you have been progressing theoretical physics and not just creating a very elegant model which, like Braheâs attempt at improving on Ptolemaus, is suddenly going to run out of steam. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church, in the same way, would have a bit of a problem if God emerged from a cloud, fired off a few lightning bolts, and informed that world that actually she preferred to be called Pallas Athena.
It would be postmodernism if I wrote that String Theory was equivalent to Catholic theology, which is something I donât assert for a moment. I think that the problem is that you seem to start from the position that scientific research is in a fundamentally different category from, say, philosophy or theology, while I view it as an emergent (and still emerging) discipline which has arisen from earlier modes of human investigation of the world and is still influenced by them.
Stephen Hawking?
I donât want to derail, but I was under the impression there werenât any provable examples of horizontal gene transfer between complex mammals. Is that not true? (And I am not referring to gene transfers by way of bacteria, because that infers more of a bridged network than peer network).
Also, I am not a biologist and I donât play one on TV.
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A gold nugget is not an artifact. Or perhaps you can define âartifactâ for me?
Youâre in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, itâs crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on itâs back. The tortoise lays on itâs back, itâs belly baking in the hot sun, beating itâs legs trying to turn itself over, but it canât, not without your help. But youâre not helping. Why is that?
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Because a tortoise bit me that one time back in 'Nam when I was trying to give him a chunk of my MRE. Now I canât stand the sight of em.
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I was under the impression there weren't any provable examples of horizontal gene transfer between complex mammals. Is that not true? (And I am not referring to gene transfers by way of bacteria, because that infers more of a bridged network than peer network).
I donât know of any between-mammal examples (although theyâre hard to prove as all mammals are rather similar genetically), but Iâm not sure it makes sense to exclude bacteria as not being âpeersâ. Personally, my problem with the âno tree of lifeâ position isnât the type of horizontal transfers involved but that the network seems to be more or less tree-like in most parts rather than the ball of spaghetti often depicted in âno treeâ papers (which implies that horizontal transfer has swamped out any signal allowing understanding of evolutionary relationships between organisms.)
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Wait, whatâs a tortoise?
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Thatâs some mighty fine carving!
