Consensus science: Voyage of the Dumbed

Recently, historian of medicine Michael Flannery, author of World of Life, remarked on the lack of informational value of “99% of biological community disagrees with ID”:

Cotton Mather (1663-1728), the New England divine, actually proposed a germ theory of medicine when 99.9% of the medical community disagreed with him. Conversely, Georg Ernst Stahl (1660-1734) proposed a "phlogiston" theory to explain combustion (burning) and rusting that nearly every scientist of the day (including Joseph Priestly [1733-1804]), hailed.


More recently, when Joseph Goldberger (1874-1929) suggested that pellagra was a nutritional deficiency disease he was dismissed because the Thompson-McFadden Commission had "proven" pellagra to be infectious. History is replete with such examples.


In fact, I would suggest that history indicates that consensus per se merely confirms periods of stability within the scientific community NOT necessarily validity of the concepts around which that consensus has formed.


Science is not entirely cumulative. Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) told us this before Kuhn. "The philosophy of nature," he wrote in 1959, "evolved by occasional leaps and bounds alternating with delusional pursuits, culs-de sac, regressions, periods of blindness, and amnesia. . . . The mad clockwork of epicycles was kept going for two thousand years; and Europe knew less geometry in the fifteenth century than in Archimedes' time." The invocation of consensus in matters of science can be a very fickle friend.

Indeed, real science involves a willingness to break with consensus.


Heck, I’d go further. As I told a group last October, any mediocrity can be a career lecture room Darwinist. It requires only the skill set demonstrated by some low level bureaucrats: Defend the system; resist evaluation.

Thinkquote of the day: Consensus vs. evidence

In the wake of frantic efforts to discredit biochemist Mike Behe's new book, The Edge of Evolution, a lawyer friend writes to say,

Asking the mainstream science community to declare that new discoveries in molecular biology and DNA render materialism inadequate to explain life is like asking someone to declare that his skills have become outmoded and obsolete, unable to solve the new problems facing us. To ask someone to declare his own obsolescence triggers some pretty strong emotions, and some powerful emotional resistance, and counter-accusations. In the words of the
poet Dylan Thomas, they "Do not go gentle into that good night" and they "rage, rage against the dying of the light." Thus, the emotional vehemence exhibited by the mainstream side is what we should expect, ...

Yes, exactly. And I have seen it in so many venues - social workers discussing welfare dependency, teachers discussing the relationship between strict standards and performance, police officers discussing the usefulness of current drug laws, dieticians discussing the usefulness of weight loss diets, media people denying a liberal bias* that is confirmed by virtually every political science study - NO ONE wants to hear findings, however impeccably produced and presented, that challenge the routine thinking with which their prospects and prestige are entangled.

Usually, they and their mistakes simply retire together.

*If it were a pervasive conservative bias, the reaction would be identical, of course.

I am currently reading Behe's book, and will comment when I have finished it.