Posted on 04/29/2008 10:20:32 AM PDT by Hank Kerchief
Postmodernism At Work
The following two statements are parts of comments made on the Free Republic forum in response to Pamela Hewitt's "Problems of Evolution."
"Nothing in Science is ever “proven”, just provisionally accepted pending further data." (—allmendream)
All science is tentative, and nothing is ever proved! (—Coyoteman)
Normally, I would not bother with such mindless statements, but they just happen to perfectly exemplify the post-modernist nonsense that is being taught in today's colleges and universities. It is why we are living in the age of gullibility. Do not suppose this is just ignorance, however. These things are being taught with a purpose. The idea is, if you convince people nothing is ever certain, proved, or absolute, you can then put over just anything and call it science.
If "nothing in science is ever proven:"
I must assume these two have "living wills" specifying that cardioversion or defibrillation is not to be used on them since the principle of using electricity to convert a fibrillaing heart to a sinus rhythm has never been proved.
I am going to feel very sorry for these two if they ever need an operation, since the efficacy of anesthesia (once a great scientific controversy) has never been proved.
And they must really be missing out on all those television programs and phone calls transmitted by satellites launched into orbit around the earth's equator at a distance of about 22,300 miles which maintain a stationary position over the earth, by maintaining an orbital speed of approximately 6000 miles per hour, because, according to them, the physical principles such satellites are based on have never been proved.
They must only use electricity if it does not come from nuclear power plants, since the scientific principles describing a sustained chain nuclear reaction have never been proved. (Maybe they use no electricity at all, since they are sure the theory of combustion and Ohm's law have never been proved either.)
Nor must they use computers, or any other electronic devices that would not and could not work if the theories of electronics and quantum mechanics they are based on were not proved. They must avoid all Sky Scrapers because the laws of physics which are the basis of their engineering from the materials used to the structural design would fail if those physical principles were mere unproven hypotheses which, according to them, they are.
I do not know what planet these two live on, but on this planet the principle of an electric current being generated simply by moving a magnet in a coil of wire discovered by Michael Faraday, who was considered a charlatan by his contemporaries, has been proved. The unbelieved assertions by Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi that wireless communication is possible, has been proved.
What kind of demented mind can insist that nothing in science has been proved? One that assumes things without evidence, based on nothing more than the fact someone does not accept their particular faith. Here is the evidence (a concept totally foreign to such second-hand minds).
"Being a nurse doesn't QUALIFY one, in and of itself, to make an academic argument on Evolution or Genetics. ... Nothing better than an educated layman."
The fact that the "nurse" happens to be a degreed geneticist who has both worked in the field and lectured in it as well, these dimwits did not bother to discover. Evidence is not something they care about, since their cherished faith is being threatened by objective questions their little minds are incapable of answering.
They are dripping with hubris and patent snobbery, exactly like those "scientists" who were publishing papers proving heavier-than-air human flight was impossible while two laymen, who were obviously not educated well enough to learn what they were doing was "scientifically" impossible, were too busy flying to notice. According to these two jokers, the possibility of heavier-than-air human flight has never been proved. They're still waiting for, "further data."
If you believe nothing in science has been proved, it makes it easy to swallow totally made up stories such as the following:
"Evolutionary Biology has unequivocally established that all organisms evolved from a common ancestor over the last 3.5 billion years;" [From Rutgers University]
What's the difference between "unequivocally established" and "proved?" In normal English, even as spoken by scientists, there is no difference; but these story tellers can always say they never said it was "proved" we all came from a common ancestor. It's meant to deceive and gain unquestioned acceptance.
And it's pure fiction. There is no way such a thing could possibly be established. If evolution could happen once, there is nothing in reason or evidence that even suggests it could not happen more than once or even hundreds or thousands of times; but it's happening more than once would not fit their story, so just ignore that fact and present your story as, "unequivocally established," and all the gullible academics will swallow it whole.
I made the big time!
And it's been amazingly polite for the most part.
The only thing better would be the "Outstanding Freeper" or somesuch writeup that they do. You know, like the one they did for Radioastronomer before he was banned.
On second thought, nevermind...
The author states that most mutations are detrimental and the rest are mostly neutral. This is an error. By far the majority of mutations are selective neutral. Your author doesn't even understand the basics of Kamura’s neutral mutation theory and the basics of Molecular Evolution.
She also thinks that sharks maintaining the same basic body plan over millions of years is somehow a blow against the theory of evolution (Normand the millions of years, and the evidence of so many other species changing around them). Nothing in the theory of evolution through natural selection MANDATES major body changes. A shark had a great body plan and a great food procurement strategy back in the late Cretaceous, and over two thousand shark species have been described in the fossil record.
Should I point out all her other errors? She started out with fundamental errors in her first paragraph that showed her poor understanding of the subject and the history of Science.
So what is her degree? What work has she done in genetics? Her obfuscation about her credentials goes well with her obvious lack of knowledge on the subject.
“I will happily debate Ms. Hewitt.”
Why would she lower herself to debate you? Science is not establish by debate. What do you care if other people agree with you or not. If they are wrong, well then, to bad for them.
Why do you believe in Lamarckian evolution? (I’m learning your methods.) You’re the only one that has mentioned it. The moth example is a fact, one frequently used by evolutionists as an example of adaptive evolution.
Speaking of Giraffes, what kind of mutation would cause the growth of a long neck, and an especially developed heart to pump blood all the distance at the same time? If they weren’t developed at the same time, which came first? Certainly not the long neck or they couldn’t have survived. When you’ve answered these questions, tell me how you know it.
I see, to have your own opinion about something, to not bow down to some authority or the other, is now call “unbridled ego.” Well, as a matter of fact, you are absolutely right. It’s also called independent individualism, it’s also called thinking for yourself, it’s also called originality. These must all be things you despise. I guess that would make you a collectivist second-hander who has never had an original thought of his own.
You don’t need to verify it, she could send you her research papers, which I doubt you would understand. But no one really cares what you think. Believe what you like. It’s a free country so far.
Have a nice day!
Hank
Her obfuscation about her credentials goes well with her obvious lack of knowledge on the subject.
She didn’t say anything about her credentials, as a matter of fact. I did, because I know what they are. If she wishes to provide more she can. I really think she’s fed up with FR though, and doubt she’ll be back.
I’m not sure you read the first paragraph, because if you did, you would know this was not a formal paper, but a slightly cleaned up very quick response to some questions posed on a forum a year or so ago. She gave me permission to post it as an intrim article, which is what you’ve got. She would probably agree with some of your criticism.
Still think you have not answered the questions posed though. Doesn’t really matter, though.
Hank
I guess science and philosophy really don't have much to do with each other.
Wilson may be a great scientist, but there are so many logical fallacies in his argument that one wouldn't know where to begin.
But so far as what the meaning of "is" is, you're in the clear.
Funny, because you keep using philosophy in your posts. Are you saying you speak nonsense?
While the postmodern dodge is fairly standard evolutionist boilerplate, the article itself was disappointing, especially when it got to the "Hewitt conjecture". She needs to read some recent RNA research and then come back with a better theory.
The author stated her credentials (same article different web site) exactly as you did; a “medical professional” (i.e. a nurse) who had “done work in genetic research” (did she collect samples?).
I read the entire article, otherwise how would I have known about the shark idiocy; you might recall that it was at the end of the article.
If she cannot take the heat maybe she should avoid the kitchen. You put up ideas in Science to have them critiqued and criticized; although it was obvious from her “so called Theory of Evolution” opening shot that she was singing to the “cdesign proponentist” AMEN chorus and expected only laurels for her juvenile critique that got the very basics of evolution incorrect.
I have seen better educated Biology undergraduates, which is all I suspect her “credentials” in genetics extend to. Wow, so impressive. She also looks from her pic that she got any degree a long time ago; maybe she should dust off those old text books, much of what she thinks she knows of the subject is incorrect.
Most science is a broadly inductive process, meaning that the tools used to develop proof within certain other scientific fields (mathematics and logic) are only of limited use inasmuch as they are equally broadly deductive. Without delving too deeply into the relation between mathematics and logic (Russell and Whitehead did that) one might complain that deductive processes are essentially tautological; that is, one can rearrange data for the purposes of clarification but that relatively little new "knowledge" is generated. (See Wittgenstein on the topic - maybe he'll hurt your head less than he does mine).
Within certain fields this can be very highly developed. Such concepts as an "event space" within Boolean logic describe that set of data that grouped together must be examined for the relationship termed causation. Within that event space those relationships may treated with a certain mathematical rigor. The trick is defining it in the first place. Where that is applied to a huge, practical scientific problem such as the origin of life that definition is clearly impossible. Were we to know enough to define the event space we wouldn't be asking most of the questions in the first place.
The implication is that such topics are quite beyond any sort of "proof" in the customary logical sense. Where certain small pieces may be isolated enough to define that event space they can be dealt with piecemeal, which is how science breaks this sort of thing down. One can, for example, demonstrate the passage of an electrical signal through the heart by measuring it, and note inductively that muscle contraction happens on a one-to-one correlation with it, but one has not proven the causal relationship until one can explain its mechanisms in detail. That's what event space means in this context.
The real difficulty is that although the classical (and crude) scientific model - observation, hypothesis, experiment, conclusion - lends itself to a more or less deductive treatment, it isn't actually how practical science usually works. The accretion of data that is subsumed under the term "observation," for example, is (1) a necessarily inductive process, and (2) not necessarily "observed" at all, but gathered and available for observation, data, and not information, if you prefer. Within this patterns are discerned, other observations included and compared, some discarded for either valid or invalid reasons - already we are filtering the data and the decisions made to do so are more or less arbitrary and hence subject to challenge. It isn't a clean model; it never was, and we haven't even got out of "observation" yet.
All of this is only tangentially related to that academic discipline popularly termed "postmodernism," although its predecessor "poststructuralism" is perhaps more accurate. That discipline regards the entire scientific process as a "realist epistemology," having been deconstructed (more or less) by Baudrillard, et al, and treated as just another metanarrative among several. I defer here to FReeper Borges who knows more about the topic than I do. Postmodernism considers itself transcendent to such metanarratives, or at least early postmodernism did so. (It is ironic that Marxism was specifically mentioned by Baudrillard as one such metanarrative to be discarded, in the light of the behavior of more contemporary postmodernists, who embraced it.) Whether postmodernism itself constitutes such a metanarrative to be viewed by suspicion by postmodernists is at the moment a fairly hot topic in the field.
But the test of truth within most poststructuralist/postmodernist treatments is the relationship of reader to text, observer to language and not to object, which is one reason the "all viewpoints are equally accurate" accusation hits the mark. That is not in the least a scientific point of view, which postulates the independence of observer and object.
Derrida is one postmodernist who has attempted the topic, which is essentially the relationship of text to reality. It is ironic that he did most of his work never having read Wittgenstein on it, who did it better (IMHO) and came to a quite different set of conclusions. I cite line two of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which states baldly "the world is made up not of things, but of facts." That means something very different in science than it does in, say, literary criticism, where both "thing" and "fact" are endlessly negotiable. I may be old-fashioned, but I still prefer the logical positivists to the postmodernists. So sue me.
That's as I understand the topic at the moment. I'm probably completely full of crap. I need a beer.
Wilson was a great Scientist as well as having a great sense of what makes our Nation great. Science doesn't have to be put into pills or bombs in order to be of value.
Michael Faraday was once asked of what use Electricity could possibly be. He responded “of what use is a newborn baby?”. Some things have an intrinsic value in and of themselves, and Scientific knowledge is one of them.
When asked the same question by Parliament he told them ‘I have no idea what use Electricity will be put to, but no doubt some day you will tax it.’.
And after we've funded all the poets, painters, and sculptors who'd make the country worth defending, who'd have the millions left over to pay for a giant particle accelerator.
Wilson's comment reflects the arrogant 1960s "how can we afford not to spend the money" attitude that caused us so much trouble in those days.
I do notice that Wilson was an accomplished sculptor as well as a scientist.
But that also points to another fault in those 60s academics: they didn't have much understanding of what made most other people tick.
Pastore had the better part of the argument on this question.
Build the project or not -- but don't use highflown rhetoric to mock the concerns of ordinary taxpayers.
Yes, to me, a particle accelerator in the U.S. that is the best in the world REALLY does make me respect our nation and love our culture more than if we did not have a cutting edge particle accelerator in the U.S. and needed to send our Physics graduate students to Europe to study.
Science is as worthy a pursuit as painting or poetry, and having great Scientists as our countrymen makes me as proud as having great painters writers and poets. Science can also possibly be of greater use; but it needn't be directly applicable to national defense in order to be of value.
Perhaps R.R. Wilson was a bit touchy on the subject, having worked on the Manhattan project (that is the Nuclear bomb program for those of you in Rio Linda). He obviously bristled at the suggestion that all physics could be good for was making a bomb with a bigger boom.
I’m saying you can’t rule out evidence surfacing that puts a new spin on old knowledge and possibly refutes it. A lot of things people thought were scientifically correct in 1908 are not the case in 2008. I fuully expect it to be the same in 2108.
Science IS debate. You make an assertion and back it with logic and evidence. Your opponent makes a counter assertion an hopefully has logical reasoning and evidence to back their claim. Science evolves through the filter (natural selection) of logic and evidence. Hypotheses that canot survive logic and evidence perish; those that can, propagate
Your Lamarckian Maven is invited to debate her proposition. I will do it alone, or if you will allow, I will invite my rational friends.
I must assume
What follows this appears to be nothing more than a littany of strawmen. I've never know you to be a fan of that sort of thing.
I find your assertion re your scientific degree and years of practice unlikely.
I have too many years of lecturing at University not to recognise a post-grad in his early 20’s.
If you are 35+ yrs experience, what has happened to concretise your brain, that you sound 21?
After all, nothing is provable. Please prove your assertions to me, here and now!!
Please give actually references regarding what you claim you do. You know, so they can be checked
Missile technology was very much applicable to the national defense of the nation. So was getting to the moon before the Russians.
If you already agree with Wilson you're likely to find his comments wonderful. If aren't on his side to begin with, you may not be convinced.
And the "we can't afford not to spend the money" and "it's about our national greatness" arguments don't set a good standard for determining appropriations.
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