Settled science v. Actual science.

Apocalypse Now — More Things Scientists Would Like You to Forget 

 Michael Egnor

 

 

Scientific consensus is in the news. Scientists agree (at least in public) on all sorts of things: evolution is Darwinian, global warming is real, taking money from patrons like Jeffrey Epstein is great but mustn’t be publicized, etc. The history of science is the history of shifting consensus, and of scientists who shifted it, for better or worse. 

Of late, scientific consensus has been apocalyptic. When you read this morning that we only have a few years left before we are incinerated by our over-heated planet, it’s worth recalling the science apocalypses of recent memory. 

Science Apocalypses Past

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has done for us what scientists won’t — that is, remind us of science apocalypses past. It’s amusing: 

• “Space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast” (1974)
• “Already too late to avert famine” (1975)
• “New York City’s West Side Highway underwater by 2019” (1989)
• “Snowfalls Are Now Just a Thing of the Past” (2000)
• “Rising Seas Could Obliterate Nations by 2000” (1989)
• “Britain will be Siberian in less than 20 years” (2004)

Science apocalypses can only be understood in context. The context is that there have been a lot of them, there are a lot of them, there no doubt will be a lot of them, and they’re always wrong. And, obviously, there’s a scientific consensus that you shouldn’t pay attention to the last scientific consensus.

The Sales Pitch

The contemporary sales pitch for this stuff — that evolution is only by chance and necessity, that DDT will silence the spring, that overpopulation is reaching a Malthusian brink, that man is burning the planet to a cinder — needs to be distinguished from science, which is the work that challenges the consensus.

Scientific consensus is not science. Actually, scientific consensus has almost always been wrong. It was consensus that heavenly bodies move in epicycles, that heavy objects fall faster than light ones, that phlogiston is what burns in a furnace, that malaria is caused by bad air, and that light propagates in ether. This is not to condemn scientific consensus. Science is a business, so scientists have to agree as a corporate body to get things done. 

A Consensus at 30,000 Feet

Scientific consensus that isn’t true is consigned to oblivion, by scientific consensus. Scientific consensus that is true is engineering. Scientific consensus governs the construction of bridges and power plants and airplanes. On my commute and when I flip a light switch and when I look out the window at the clouds below I’m grateful for scientific consensus. I like engineering, especially when I’m at 30,000 feet.

Science is a search, and precludes consensus. Consensus is a means to act, whether wisely or foolishly. The scientific consensus that penicillin kills streptococcus has saved millions of lives. The scientific consensus that DDT causes cancer has cost millions of lives. 

But we must never confuse scientific consensus with science. Science is inquiry. Consensus is cloture of inquiry. What is consensus is not science. Yet consensus has its place — it makes it possible to act corporately. 

The purpose of consensus in science is to manipulate. It’s a political act. It permits scientists to act as a polity. The purpose of the scientific consensus in engineering is to manipulate nature. The purpose of scientific consensus in evolution, in global warming, and in discreet patronage is to manipulate you.

Darwinism's march toward state religion status hits a speed bump?

David Goldman on Gelernter’s Darwin Apostasy

David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

 

 

 

Yale computer scientist David Gelernter’s recent confession in the Claremont Review of Books, rejecting Darwinism, continues to pick up notices from the most interesting writers out there. The economist and philosopher David Goldman, aka Spengler, notes it in an essay, “Pseudo-science, the Bible and human freedom.” 

Goldman points out that even as the “popularity of scientific determinism has jumped,” the limits of scientific arguments for a purely material basis to reality have become ever clearer. Materialists assume that physics and biology make their case for them, yet “physics has lost its ability to make grand statements about the nature of reality,” and “biology hasn’t fared any better.”

Life’s “Great Leap”

The evidence for unguided evolution, a central pillar for any materialist ethos, doesn’t add up:

The new science of DNA proves mathematically that the odds of a random mutation leading to an improvement in the adaptability of a living organism are effectively zero, Gelernter shows. Even a small protein molecule has a chain of 150 amino acids. If we rearrange them at random we mostly obtain gibberish. In fact, “of all 150-link amino acid sequences, 1 in 10⁷⁴ will be capable of folding into a stable protein. To say that your chances are 1 in 10⁷⁴ is no different, in practice, from saying that they are zero. It’s not surprising that your chances of hitting a stable protein that performs some useful function, and might therefore play a part in evolution, are even smaller,” Gelernter explains. That is Establishment science, not the murmurings of the Creationist fringe. 
In short, the evolutionary biologists can’t explain how animal life made the great leap from protozoans to arthropods in the Cambrian Explosion, let alone how natural selection through random mutation might have shaped the human mind. Biologists do brilliant and important research, to be sure, and the profession should not be blamed for the exaggerated claims made by a few publicists like [Yuval] Harari or Harvard’s Steven Pinker.

So then, against the backdrop of materialist science’s failure, what accounts for the rise of modern determinist mythologies, led by astrology and transhumanism, that have captured the imagination of Generation X and Silicon Valley? Read Goldman’s article, but I’ll try to summarize: Behind the phenomenon is a resurgent paganism, with its shamans like Yuval Harari, “this strange little vegan who spends two hours a day in meditation,” exciting the tech elite “because he visualizes them as a new class of demigods,” and with its repellant, narcissistic moral perspective: “The New Atheism turns out to be the old idolatry packaged into a smartphone app.”

Ancient and Modern Man

The choices before modern man are not so different from the choices that faced ancient man. In fact, underneath the wrappings of contemporary life, they’re almost exactly the same. Goldman dismisses naïve “proofs” for God. The theist today makes a bold commitment just as the atheist does in his own way: “the premise of biblical religion requires a leap of faith no greater than that of the atheists. Its consequence is the birth of human freedom, by making human beings free moral agents. The consequences of the old idolatry as well as the new paganism, by contrast, are repugnant.”

The book of Psalms advises, “taste and see that the Lord is good.” That the new paganism is not good, but twisted and terrible, is also a matter to be tasted and seen. See Michael Egnor’s powerful reflections from earlier today, “Jeffrey Epstein and the Silence of the Scientists.” Can anyone who experiences our world, and follows its news, really doubt this?