Posted on 02/11/2015 8:45:30 AM PST by fishtank
New Edition of Darwin Day in America Exposes the Rise of "Totalitarian Science" in the Age of Obama
Is America entering an era of "totalitarian science"? In the expanded paperback edition of Darwin Day in America (ISI Books, February 2015), political scientist John G. West describes the growing misuse of science to curtail basic freedoms, erode time-honored ethics, and circumvent democratic accountability. The paperback edition includes a brand new chapter titled "Scientism in the Age of Obama -- and Beyond."
"Our culture is witnessing the rise of what could be called totalitarian science -- science so totalistic in its outlook that its defenders claim the right to remake every sphere of human life, from public policy and education to ethics and religion," says West. "Science is a wonderful enterprise, but in the Obama era, it's being twisted in ways that are unhealthy for both science and society."
Developments discussed in the new edition of Darwin Day include:
Human Experimentation in the Name of "Science." Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) used thousands of premature infants as human guinea pigs, subjecting them to dangerous experiments with oxygen that could cause blindness and death. When the research was exposed, NIH Director Francis Collins waged a PR offensive to defend the research and stifle criticism.
(Excerpt) Read more at evolutionnews.org ...
That claim WAS made by the producers of “Cosmos”, and is quoted in the article!!!!
I not only understand science (including its limitations, especially in studying macroevolution) but have worked in it professionally for decades!!!!
Yeah, I get it: According to Left Progressives — who are trying to rescind all evidentiary human history and common sense in order to advance their own preferred splendid plans for supposed "Human Betterment" — people who do not agree with their "findings" are unreconstructibly "bad people."
But the sheer hypocrisy there is they do not acknowledge any basis for morality itself....
Notwithstanding, they do this anyway because they also believe that if they can morally tarnish anybody who disagrees with them, they are relieved from having to engage/address any dissent to their preferred "science." Which let it be clearly indicated is quite unscientific in recent times, since it seems to have been hooked up in support of a relentlessly unscientific point of view.
"We" are "haters of science" because we do not accept Darwinian evolution and anthropogenic climate change as "finished" science. Yet I — a lover of science — think there is no such thing as finished science. If "science" were ever to be "finished," then I daresay a whole lot of people would instantly become unemployed.
In similar vein, they accuse any person who disagrees with their "scientific findings" as a "hater of science."
Speaking for myself, I do not "hate" science. Rather, I love it so much that I can't stand to see it "reduced" and "co-opted" by what are substantially political operatives who have no respect for science or its glorious history. These are the very same people who think that a word like "marriage" can be endlessly redefined, ad infinitum, depending on "public opinion."
And such folks want to be IN CONTROL of public opinion....
The dreaded triple post!
>>Because Darwinian theory is primarily about interpreting history. Science is much more limited in explanatory power when it comes to history because, without a time machine, we simply cannot know all of the facts. <<
Like those interpretive sciences cosmology, geology and astronomy. They offer nothing but speculation and no science upon which we can rely.
Even worse is that demon science quantum physics — not only can you not rely on what has happened, you can’t rely on what WILL happen!
Yeah, you got me.
>>but this is very different from being able to predict outcomes of controlled experimentation.<<
Tell that to viruses, antibiotic resistance and pest resistance.
>>So the speculation of a universal common ancestor is not science.<<
Yes, because the physical universe operates differently in THAT ONE ASPECT.
Science: learn it, live it, love it. Don’t ape it/
>>This makes no sense at all unless one want to give up rationality. If we followed your line of reasoning we would have to reject all science because we reject Lamarck or Lysenko or even Al Gore.
<<
Then choosing Darwin as the Evil Lord in this sophomoric “analysis” is equally meaningless. Choose Newton or someone else.
And it is pointless to conflate AGW and TToE. I can specifically refute AGW using science, STARTING with my tagline which is a winner out of the gate.
You cannot do so with TToE.
>>“Darwin Day” is used. It is because Darwin’s birthday seems to be the equivalent of Christmas in the new religion of Scientism. <<
It is? Or the author asserts it is? You seem to enjoy begging the question.
>>You sound like a worshipper. Like the Muslims, you accuse the heretics of misnaming your God<<
Talk about ad hominem. You don’t understand TToE so you slam the man who first glimpsed it. It is you who is like the Church who attacked Copernicus for not hewing to religious dogma.
I understand science and TToE. The author grabs Darwin randomly as his deus ex machina to hang all science-related ills.
>>(various searches)<<
In every instance I could pull up, “Darwinism” is used colloquially — not as a scientific principle.
>>Why do you spout neoMarxist untruths on a conservative website?<<
Why do you use ad hominem on a conservative website? The fact you don’t understand science does not mean those who do are “neoMaxists” or whatever other epithet you generate.
I see you are here so before we redo the Crevo wars I will say have a blessed day and take care.
I have made my point and lurkers will know at least some of us here understand real science (<>AGW).
Between this and Vaxxers if I was an external observer I would rightly say we went around the bend.
God bless
“Settled Science? If so, there would only be one model and it would agree with measurements)”
Actually, if you knew anything about evolution you would know there are about as many models as there are evolutionary theorists.
And the models are being thrown out, modified refined all the time. Often because the measurement don’t agree, eg Primate Y chromosomes.
“Then choosing Darwin as the Evil Lord in this...”
What day is today?
Darwin was chosen as the Prophet by the Atheists.
“I understand science and TToE.”
That’s clearly not true.
“Yes, because the physical universe operates differently in THAT ONE ASPECT.”
No, because it is one of many examples where science simply CANNOT offer conclusive answers unless and until time travel is invented. You do realize don’t you that there is an infinitely great amount of data which is lost forever? Or perhaps science will discover a way to recover this information, but it will require the discovery of new scientific principles and the invention of new technology, because I have never heard of a single scientist who thinks we have existing technology which can use existing principles of science to traverse space-time and gather this lost historical data. And even if it were possible, the uncertainty principle still necessitates the loss of some data.
“Like those interpretive sciences cosmology, geology and astronomy.”
You first need to distinguish arguments about science from arguments about philosophy of science, which is what we are discussing. Some science is more precise than other science. Physics can allow incredibly precise trajectories for rocket ships. Medicine is less predictable because a doctor is forced to work with many unknowns. So medical doctors may not always have the exact, immediate solution to an illness, but they may still arrive at the right solution through trial and error. But trying to divine history is going to result in exponentially less precision because we are working from extremely limited information.
This is why we consider Lincoln’s assassination a historical fact rather than a scientific one. It is not an experiment to be repeated in a lab. It is an event. Would you propose we can map out every event, every action, every spoken word, every word written down through history by simply applying the scientific method to it?
There is a big difference between testable theories of gravity, space-time relativity, astrophysics, and so on, and hypothetical events which can never be verified or falsified unless time travel is invented. In astronomy we can actually see backward in time. We can see light from stars billions of years away. We can observe the past directly. We can make testable predictions.
Let us suppose for a moment that life has arisen spontaneously out of naturally occurring environments in many places in the universe. Let us further assume that life on this planet originated in some other part of the universe and was transported here by some natural means and then evolved into all the varieties of life we see today. If several completely unique life forms seeded this planet and then evolved into all of the forms we now see, in what way would it be measurably different from a singular life form seeding all of the life we see?
I do not question that all cats have a common ancestor. But I think there is no reason to believe humans share that common ancestor. You may not like that there are reasons to believe this which have greater validity than scientific inquiry, but there are. And the supposedly scientific arguments for our common ancestry are first irrelevant because they have no practical bearing on how science, medicine, and technology work today. And second, the arguments are specious. Things like we share common genetic “flaws”. We use the same exact arguments in courts of law these days to PROVE a person has violated intellectual property rights in copied computer code or plagiarized literature. It can just as easily support a common author or designer as it can support a common ancestor. It is unreasonable to assume that life was not created, but you are demanding this simply because this creation is not a repeatable event in a lab, but then neither is UCA. And unlike UCA, people have met and recorded their meeting of the Creator. And the Creator’s observations of creation have been recorded.
Your reply expresses the exact reason why scientism is a dangerous philosophy that aligns well with tyrannical forms of government that seek to use “science” as a way to invoke unquestionable authority. (Think carbon trade credits. Do you think carbon trade credits are the obvious solution to the fact of man-made global warming? Because this is a scientific fact, and anyone who disagrees deserves mockery and possibly fines or confinement.) By lumping all of the sciences together as having equal viability and authority, it appears you haven’t even listened to the argument. You are too busy mocking and self-congratulatory assertions like this one:
“Tell that to viruses, antibiotic resistance and pest resistance.”
This has absolutely NOTHING to do with the premise that all life has a universal common ancestor. That is a preposterous proposition. The problem is that you are putting an unscientific, untestable, non-falsifiable speculation of UCA on par with the testable, Bible-inspired premises that gave us principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation, pasteurization, and the germ theory of disease.
Pasteur rejected the abiogenesis of his day when he rejected spontaneous generation. His belief in the Bible and the concept of unique kinds led him to challenge the pop-science of his day (and incidentally Darwin’s day). This proves unquestionably that subscribing to UCA is NOT necessary to the advancement of science.
Thank you so much for all your insights, dearest sister in Christ!
LOL freedumb2003! Do you take me for a “Crevo warrior?”
Thanks for your kind words of blessing!
Questions: What is a “Vaxxer?” I am unfamiliar with that term. Also, what is the significance of the open caret/closed caret sign — “<>” — with respect to AGW (anthropogenic global warming)?
FWIW, AGW strikes me as being a highly unlikely story. It certainly cannot account for the Mediaeval Warming Period (~400 years in duration), or the Mini Ice Age that followed it (~400 years in duration). Not to mention that there have been no signs of global warming in the present century as the AGW model predicts. So climatologists changed the rhetoric from global warming to climate change.
But the climate is always changing. If you look at the historical record, it’s hard to see that CO2 emissions is the consistent cause of such changes. One supposes that during the Mediaeval Warming Period, there was very little by way of CO2 emissions given that the warming occurred in a pre-industrial setting. And yet Greenland was green. The record shows Greenland then supported all kinds of agricultural activities, which today it does not.
However, were it the case that CO2 emissions is the cause of climate change, then it seems to me the best remedy would be for all human beings (and other living animals) to just stop breathing. After all, we inhale oxygen, and exhale CO2. But if we were to do that, plant life would die as well. For they “inhale” CO2, and “exhale” oxygen. This is the fundamental symbiosis of living Nature.
But if one raises an objection to the “blessed” theory, one is called a “climate denier” or a “science hater.” I have already acknowledged that I do not deny that climate changes. I am merely suggesting that science may be barking up the wrong tree in saying that CO2 emissions is the primary driver of this change.
Likewise, I regard Darwin’s Theory of Evolution as another unlikely story. Bottom-line, ToE regards human nature itself as “evolving” over time. And yet if one is a student of human culture and history, going back to the beginning of the human records — which date back to something like 20,000 B.C. — what one finds most striking is how little human nature has actually changed over time. That being the case, I would argue that human nature is not “evolving,” rather it is a “given” — something relatively fixed over the passage of time, from generation to generation, first to last.
The idea of an “evolving humanity” strikes me as a very weak myth — but it is a concept that clever politicians can manipulate to the distinct disadvantage of actual human beings…. Just look at what Hitler did with it, or the eugenicist Margaret Sanger for instance.
But if human nature “evolves,” can we ask: Toward what is it evolving? Machine life???
Just some thoughts. Thanks so much for writing, freedumb2003 — it’s good to see you again!
God bless!
To address your non Crevo comments:
1) I hope you are well and happy :)
2) Vaxxer is people who won’t vaccinate their kids
3) <> is math for Not Equal To
4) My tag specifically repudiates AGW in the simplest scientific methodology terms. AGW matches exactly zero criteria for a Scientific Theory — my tag is just one example
Take care and again a blessed day to you.
Well we certainly agree about that!
So, how do you regard Darwin's theory? Is it even "scientific" by these same criteria?
The historical record is spotty so it is not surprising that such "scientists" have to fill in the blanks.
But the fact that the story itself, in this case, became orthodoxy, a blueprint into which all information MUST be fit or discarded (and the investigator bringing the discarded information besmirched) makes this particular theory the least credible of the historical sciences.
Indeed, dearest sister in Christ — oh so very true!
But if anybody wanted a precise description of “anti-science,” it seems to me that would be IT: Sounds more like some species of dogmaticism to me, relentlessly enforced.
And “dogma” and “science” are mutually-exclusive items in my book — in a way that Faith and Reason are not.
What can happen is the “scientific model” takes on a life of its own, so to speak. It “forgets” that it is only a model of something else, which it is trying to describe and causally account for. That “something else” is phenomena occurring in the world of actual, common Reality.
This is to say that scientific theories and models are abstractions from Reality. But then what all too frequently happens nowadays, science becomes victim of what A. N. Whitehead called the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness: We take the abstraction for the primary Reality, and let the “real” primary Reality — of which the abstraction is but an image — drop completely out of sight. At this point, the abstraction controls what evidence is relevant for ITS purposes. We humans thereby put ourselves into a position in which we are instantly at “once-remove” from the world of actual Nature, of which we are nonetheless parts and participants.
Darwin’s theory is a fine illustration of this phenomenon. Its abstract model of biological evolution is entirely based in two premises: (1) Biological evolution can be explained in terms of exclusively material processes. (It is relentlessly Newtonian in that regard, uncritically assuming that Newton’s physico/mechnanical laws are the ultimate laws of biology.) And (2) that natural processes “evolve” entirely according to Chance. E.g., the evolution of species is random, one might say accidental, constrained only by some sort of putative “guidance” from “Nature,” under the rubric of the “survival of the fittest.”
The strategy here is mainly to abolish any idea of divine action from science. Science cannot stand “miracles.” But then conventional science nowadays insists on instituting miracles of its own: That “Nature” viewed as a material process produces all the order that we obviously observe in the natural world — by means of accumulating accidents.
This makes absolutely no sense to me. But this view gets us forever stuck in the “God did it!” vs. “Nature did it!” argument.
On this point, I hereby declare that, in my experience, the so-called “Crevo war” is an exercise in futility. It pits people who believe that there is more to the world than the blind operations of matter, against other people who do not share that view. Put crudely, it pits “creationists” against “science.”
But this is to think exclusively in terms of Aristotle’s Third Law, the “Law of the Excluded Middle.” The Third Law proposes that, since A = A, and A ≠ B, then either A or B must be correct on any given question, but never both.
All I can say about the applicability of that logical law to the facts on the ground that we confront today, in biology and in the natural sciences generally, is that Aristotle never heard about complementarity — a tremendous insight into Nature gleaned by Niels Bohr and his colleagues in their exploration of the quantum level of Reality.
What complementarity involves is the recognition that WRT two seemingly mutually-exclusive phenomena — say, particles and waves — it is the case that both perspectives are necessary to the complete understanding of the total system in which they are each implicated. It isn’t a question of which case — “A” or “B” — is “right,” and which is “wrong.” It is the case in which both “A” and “B” are necessary to the complete understanding of the situation under consideration.
Darwinian orthodoxy does not appear (to me at least) as standing on any kind of firm logical ground. Nonetheless, it does appear to me that it has been highly effective in affecting the way a whole bunch of people think nowadays, and not just working scientists….
Must leave it there for now, dearest sister in Christ. Thank you oh so very much for your astute insights/observations! And for your kind words.
Your applying Bohr's insights was particularly illuminating. Biologists invited the mathematicians and physicists to their table. Now, if they will only listen...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.