Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Science is self-correcting … no make that self-repeating

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In a review of several recent science books, Dartmouth professor Alan Hirshfeld offers us a view of the Royal Society (former employer of sinner in the hands of an angry god, Michael Reiss), and similar societies, as engines of perpetual revolution (The Wall Street Journal) , opining “The Royal Society’s history of open-minded debate epitomizes science as a self-correcting process”:

The group is more effective than the individual at sussing out weak hypotheses, flawed experiments or biased observations, and one of the vital contributions of Europe’s “natural philosophers” during the Enlightenment was the creation of societies to disseminate and evaluate their ideas. Such conclaves served as intellectual hubs before the rise of modern research universities and institutes, and remain important today.

That was then. And, as mathematician David Berlinski says, now it is now.

A statement like that, applied to current science, has the flavour of the after-dinner speech you wash down with fresh, hot coffee from the tanker. The current science we skewer so often here is not the product of great minds but of lecture room mediocrities and tax-hungry lobbies. Never mind “weak hypotheses, flawed experiments or biased observations”, it’s hard to get past the tide of scandals in this atmosphere.

If “science is self-correcting” means only that heads roll in the wake of a really big one, then science doesn’t differ appreciably from politics, religion, finance, or the military.

The real difference is the inappropriate authority granted to science by the public today, given the circumstances.

Comments
When corrupt politics combines with crony science, the stench gets even greater. See: 'Payback': Democrats attack Republican candidate's children
On Nov. 4, 2010, as soon as the election results were in and they were sure their candidate had won, faculty administrators at Oregon State University gave new meaning to the term "political payback." They initiated an attack on my three children – Joshua, Bethany and Matthew – for the purpose of throwing them all out of the OSU graduate school, despite their outstanding academic and research accomplishments. . . . Thus, Democrat activist David Hamby and militant feminist and chairman of the nuclear engineering department Kathryn Higley are expelling four-year Ph.D. student Joshua Robinson from OSU at the end of the current academic quarter and turning over the prompt neutron activation analysis facility Joshua built for his thesis work and all of his work in progress to Higley's husband, Steven Reese.
Encourage readers to contact OSU to redress this corruption.DLH
March 7, 2011
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"The current science we skewer so often here is not the product of great minds but of lecture room mediocrities... ...If “science is self-correcting” means only that heads roll in the wake of a really big one, then science doesn’t differ appreciably from politics, religion, finance, or the military." Nail. Head.Upright BiPed
March 7, 2011
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Arthur's Hunt's "science" isn't self-correcting but he does repeat it quite often even though it is wrong and been shown to be wrong.Joseph
March 7, 2011
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