(no subject)

[elfs]

It's religion and politics time, boys and girls.

First, in an unlovely specimen of a right-wing rant about Jack Kevorkian and Terry Schiavo, columnist Ashley Evans sneezes into the punchbowl of reason and writes:

It reminds one of the Creationism vs. evolution debate in public science classes: should it not be mentioned that evolution is still a theory, that there are serious gapes, or that most people trust in intelligent design?

I don't know about you, but I don't know about many serious "gapes" in evolutionary theory, although I have been known to gape (look with open-mouth amazement) at people who write something quite so ignorant. (I resist mightily the inclination to make porn "gaper" jokes...)

In similar news, Rep. Bill Sali (R - Idaho), while talking about how allowing a Hindu priest to conduct opening prayers for Congress should never have happened, dropped this lovely bomb: "We have not only a Hindu prayer being offered in the Senate, we have a Muslim member of the House of Representatives now, Keith Ellison from Minnesota. Those are changes -- and they are not what was envisioned by the Founding Fathers."

In more serious news, the Armed Forces is considering disciplinary action against four generals who appeared in an Evangelical group's fundraising video in uniform, implying that the group had the support of the Armed Forces. One general said he believed that the group, Christian Embassy, had become a "quasi-federal entity." Another said that Christian Embassy had been at work among the Christians in the Pentagon that he believed the group was "a sanctioned or endorsed activity."

I cannot emphasize just how devastatingly dangerous it is that we have four generals who, after having taken their oath as a soldier, then go on to proclaim that "their first loyalty is to Jesus Christ" and that "my weekly prayer sessions are more important than doing my job." Dude:

I, _____, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

When you put your loyalty elsewhere, you are a domestic enemy.

Meanwhile, Stephen Baldwin (the dumbest of the Baldwin brothers) is running a Pentagon authorized project called "Operation Straight Up," a standard old-time revival. Their Iraq project is called "Military Crusade." If you give them money, they put it into a "soldier's care package" which includes these gems:

"More than a Capenter" by Josh McDowell

This classic evangelical tract is designed to be most effective when given to people who are vulnerable due to stress or mistreatment. OSU includes this lovely blurb: "We can only hope that since the book is double printed on the reverse side in the Arabic language that it will indeed influence the nations overseas as well." Since the Pentagon is supposed to punish attempts at proselytising, I can't imagine why they're letting this through. [By the way, the misspelling of "Carpenter" in the title is verbatim from the OSU website.]

"Left Behind," the Video Game, PC Edition

In this charming video game (in the Warcraft/Starcraft style of play) you command an army of soldiers against the army of evil as you battle for the streets of New York City. The soldiers in the army of evil all wear blue berets and United Nations uniforms, and when you kill one of them your soldier forces shout out "Praise the lord!"

Comments

[tagryn]

Well, at least until a theory gets accepted as "fact," after which it gets treated as unquestionable dogma. Try to open *those* up to question, and you'll get labeled as a quack or worse, and your funding will dry up, and with it perhaps your job as well. Science does have its own ways of punishing heretics...

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Erm, no.

Not unless you're referring to the 19th century fatheads I alluded to in another comment in this thread. These days, theories, models of Nature, are only as "unquestionable" as the data they're based on.

The only ideas which get labelled, "crackpot," nowadays are ones which fly in the face of observed pheonomena. If you're gonna claim that negative gravitational charge exists, you'd better have a repeatable experiment to back it up.

There was a professor in the physics department where I did my doctorate. Asim Barut was his name. Wonderful guy. Sharp, too. But he was known around the department as, "eccentric." You see, he didn't accept quantum mechanics — one of those holdouts who believed that there must be, "hidden variables," that would make the model deterministic again. Problem was, the experiments weren't deterministic. The observed phenomena all supported Quantum Field Theory as it currently stands.

During colloquia, where the subject covered subatomic particles, condensed matter at the atomic scale, or some other field involving quantum theory, Dr. Barut would inevitably barrage the guest speaker with questions that tried to poke holes in Quantum Mechanics. The bewildered speaker would try to answer the question, but eventually ended up describing why the alternate explanation Dr. Barut raised — if he posited one — wouldn't work, how this-or-that experiment had disproven it.

You can decry a model, you can try to poke holes in it, but unless you have another model that describes the observed phenomena … all of it … better than the current model, then the current model remains.



Now, a classic example of the, "heretic who was right," is Alfred Wegener. But there are two problems with this archetypal story, details always overlooked. One: Wegener was a meteorologist, not a geologist. Would you ask a psychologist to treat a brain tumor? You see, then, why the geology community may not have taken Wegener's ideas too seriously. And Two: How could continents drift through solid rock? Wegener proposed that continents drift. But he couldn't explain how.
So, you have a rather unlikely idea: solid rock drifts through solid rock. And it's being proposed by someone outside of his field. Kinda makes sense that it would raise eyebrows. Doesn't look like a lone-unorthodox geologist battling a dogmatic system, does it?

[tagryn]

That assumes that everyone can agree on what an appropriate model and data *are*. Often, it isn't that simple.

When you get front-page science stories like the one in the current issue of Newsweek which labels global-warming questioners "contrarians" and "deniers" and implies the debate should be over, while there's still a ongoing debate among field specialists about exactly how certain and precise the predictions are...well, it sure looks like the victory of scientific dogma (and, sadly, groupthink) over how the process is ideally supposed to work.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Models, sure. Those you can argue about, at least when the phenomenon being modeled is "new", or there isn't very much experimental data to fully verify one model or another.

The data, however, aren't up for debate. You do an experiment, you observe certain behavior ("the data" being the quantitative description of said behavior). Repeat the experiment, you observe the same behavior.

As for those "front-page-stories": they're designed to sell magazines, not communicate science. My doctorate is in climate physics. During the 1998 El Niño event, I heard all manner of cockamamie, "science news," claiming that it was responsible for — well, just about everything, from NorEasters to higher waves in California. Thing is, "El Niño" occurs only in the Pacific, near the Equator (within ± 5° of latitude). The only weather pheonomenon that El Niño has a clear effect on is the Indian Monsoon, and even then, it's a weak correlation.

When there was a colloquium on the latest climate change research, those of us "in the field" all attended to get the real scientific information, not the media-generated hysteria. Sorry to disappoint you, but humans are altering the radiative heat transfer of the Earth. The question is, "Exactly how much?" and, "What will all of this extra energy do? What effect will it have?"

But, the, "global warming skeptics," don't discuss that. No, they dig up 30 year-old theories and try to poke holes in them, or just engage in ad-hominem attacks on well-known researchers in the field. (See http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn11462 for references.)

[tagryn]

* Data certainly aren't unquestionable. Bad instrumentation, inappropriate conditions for measurement, even bias on the part of the researcher can all bring into question the validity of what's being observed. I think you're mostly talking about reliability, but that's not the whole story.

* The popular news magazines are how science gets communicated to the public. The field journals (and conferences, etc.) are how the discussions and debates within disciplines get worked out, but non-specialists don't read those, and when an issue becomes part of the public debate, the popular mags play their part in shaping the frame...which affects things like funding from Congress for grants and R&D. One story in USN&WR or Time isn't going to suddenly decide an debate among scientists one way or another, but the cumulative effect can have a powerful if indirect influence on a discipline as a whole. It does matter.

* What I got from Vranes' post (that I linked to) and his follow-ups is that in the climsci field, many scientists are self-censoring and caveating their results for fear of being labeled a "skeptic." We can see at the end of your post an example of what stigmas come along with that label. Which gets back to the original point: there are dogmas in science, and questioning them (or even being perceived as doing so) does come with consequences.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Whenever non-scientists with a political agenda start spreading misinformation about a particular area of research, the science itself suffers. Very, very few of the real researchers in the field want to be associated with political crap, and so are either forced into a very defensive stance, or don't offer as strong a criticism of this-or-that bit of research, for fear of being labeled far worse than a "skeptic."

By wasting energy like that, the science suffers. For a time. Eventually, the politicos lose interest, and the scientists can start doing their jobs again without fear of attack.

The data, however, remains indifferent to all of this. You collect more observations. They either disprove the null-hypothesis, or add to an existing pattern.

Since however, "global warming" appears to be your personal bugaboo, you seem to have decided that the entirety of the scientific process is corrupt. In which case, I have nothing more I can say, since I am one of those Corrupted, and therefore, everything I say is suspect.