littlemissattitude
Creative Thinker
Not yet.juantoo3 said:Kindest Regards, LittleMissAttitude! BTW, have you made it to Italy yet?
I guess I wasn't emphatic enough or something.Yes, that is what I was referring to. I haven't read the whole thing, but his theory of paradigm change was instrumental in three our four classes I took at university, so I got a pretty good grounding in what he had to say. Thank you for your input on the history of science. I had never thought of lab science as we know it as growing out of alchemy, but certainly that makes sense.
I think the thing that really intrigues me about "establishment" science is their willingness to pick out whole areas of inquiry and just say, "We will not study that, and if someone is so impudent as to go ahead and do so, we will excommunicate them," which in the scientific field means withholding of approval for grants, blocking publication of even well-done studies, and generally dissing the offending scientist whenever possible. An interesting, if controversial, example of this is the UFO problem. There may or may not be something there. I think UFOs are an interesting subject, but I'm not what you'd call a "true believer" concerning them. But everything I have ever read indicates that ever since the Condon Report (which was quite flawed in a number of ways, including having the conclusion arrived at before the work was even done), mainstream, official science will not even look at the problem. That doesn't exactly seem very "objective" to me, which is the standard which science is always touting.
I'm not sure about Clarke's science qualifications, although I seem to recall him having some. As for Asimov, he was a scientist - I think he held a Ph.D. in chemistry from somewhere like Columbia University (but don't quote me; it's been a long time since I read his published journals). In fact, he taught on the university level, and has probably written more nonfiction than fiction, much of it on scientific subjects.
My point about popularizers is that they open the world of science up to whoever is interested, which I think is a good thing. Sagan especially got laughed at a lot for his manner - he did have a way of pontificating sometimes
- but he was enthusiastic about his work, and about science in general, and that served to attract a lot of people to science. So did Gould's popular writings, even though they weren't always the easiest reading in the world. This, by the way, was one of the things I most enjoyed about reading him - he didn't seem to talk down to the reader. The problem the non-popularizers had with them was two-fold, I think. For one thing, they were simply jealous that they didn't receive the public adulation that those two did. The other aspect, as I said, was simply that these scientists felt that popularization let too many people into the temple, so to speak.Funny thing about biology - the chemists and physicists I know consider biology to be a "soft" science. Not enough math in it for them, or something, to go along with the lesser amount of predictability. And you make a good point about anthropology and sociology (which I consider, by the way, to be really the same subject only approached from different perspectives; I've got a long justification for that which I won't go into here) - they don't lend themselves to replicability and accurate predictions. They really don't lend themselves readily to number crunching, and are much more anecdotal in nature. This is why I am uncomfortable with the idea of the "social sciences". The study of cultures is an art and a craft much more than it is a science, and to make it into too much of a science robs it of much of its ability and effectiveness.
Everyone has an agenda. That's just a fact of life. Surely Dawkins has a quite obvious agenda, don't you think. I doubt that most religionists would like the idea of memes, at least as that term is used by Dawkins. However, I can imagine that some might turn Dawkins's frame of reference back around on him and attribute scientific thinking to rampant memes.
I've read about these discoveries. Seemingly human and seemingly dinosaur footprints apparently in association in the same strata, right? My own opinion is that these probably have been interpreted by Baugh and others in light of their young-earth bias. But then, I don't have the expertise to determine that for sure, and I haven't seen their evidence in real life, so who am I to say that my evaluation is in any way definitive. However, I believe that these geofacts have been looked at by scientists and determined to be spurious. The problem with this example is that it is mostly an example of deuling biases.
I'm actually one who has no trouble reconciling some sort of creative force in the universe with the idea of an ancient earth and geolgoical and biological evolution. Which just means that believers in both a young earth and a convetionally scientific interpretation of an ancient earth often feel free to open fire on me.
Still, there are those in the trenches who hold the same view as I do who also do not see a contradiction. I've read a good book that advocates this position, but I don't have ready access to it so I cannot give you the title and author right now. I'll see if I can dig it up and post it when I can.Well, I've said more than enough for this post. Not sure I even covered all the points I wanted to, but you all can breathe a sigh of relief. I'm done for now.
Except to tell juan - you really need to visit Yosemite. It is a beautiful place.
