junk science

Origins of Text (a Sideline): Junk Science

I have a tendency to throw the terms and issues of science around in a fairly fast and loose manner. This has been known to raise the ire of scientists and non-scientists alike. So casual readers may find themselves wondering whether I know what I'm about, or if I'm just cluttering up their display with a bunch of "Junk Science."

Reasonable. I'll say this: I've been studying science my whole life, and I like to think I have a grasp on the topic. For those of you who insist upon qualifications, I did receive a Bachelor's Degree in Chemistry with Honors from a well-respected state university in 1990, which makes me a degree less qualified than Dr. Science of public radio fame. I follow the scientific press in a limited way, and what I do follow is the hard science press, as opposed to the popular. I'm far from an expert on any particular branch of science. I wouldn't want to have a debate with Steven Jay Gould, for example. The fact is, science has become a field so specialized that even if I had the knowledge get deep into these topics of evolution and human development, chances are you wouldn't be able to understand it unless you were in the field already, in which case there wouldn't be much point. This is the broad brush approach. I can say this with absolute confidence: though some may claim otherwise, the questions of the origins of life, the origins of species, the mechanisms of evolution, and the origin of humanity are all very much open. If there's anybody out there who really knows how it all works, they are 1) privy to some information the rest of us haven't seen and 2) not talking.

On to "Junk Science". This is a term that's made a bit of a splash in the press and gets used to advantage by politicians on a semiregular basis. It doesn't mean anything. Science is a process and a discipline. There is not one single topic in science on which there are not a variety of opposing yet valid points of view. Attempts to fit science into broader philosophical frameworks have been failures. Kuhns, Popper, Russell, Berkeley: these are all interesting, but it's like Einstein's famous quote about reality and mathematics: To the extent these philosophers describe the actual practice of science, they fail to impose a consistent philosophical structure, and to the extent that they create a consistent philosphical structure, they fail to describe the practice of science. Some scientists want to come on strong with the viewpoint that science is the end-all-be-all of human thought. This is indeed junk: I say, call me when you've got a theory that justifies electromagnetics, quantum mechanics, and relativity and can explain the thermodynamic basis of evolution and whay human beings run around full of the notion that they are self-conscious and have free will. Don't you Autodynamics people get on my case either: while interesting, your theories are incomplete and still full of holes. I'm not judging science here. I love science and I also believe in it. But it is still a human discipline and so has a lot of error, inconsistency, incompleteness, and the sort of core level paradoxes that symbolic systems which model reality (like TEXT) are always mired in. What I'm pushing may at times be bad science, based on my ignorance or the intention to mislead or deceive (this is, after all, a work of fiction in progress); a lot of it is certainly old science, since I have a tendency to read at my level, and it's often impossible to do that without going back 30-40 years. Some of it may not be science at all, and I may or may not tell you which is which.

What it's not is "junk science." Junk science, if anything, is bullshit dressed up as science in order to con people. For example: when Steve Forbes tells the readers of his crummy magazine that Global Warming is Junk Science, despite the fact that it has the concensus of climatological scientists worldwide, the nod from NASA, and a stamp of approval from the American Chemical Society, and when the only people denying that it's happening are a tiny group of lone dissenters (and one thing you learn in science is that there are always a few dissenters), when the most advanced climatological models in the world are showing that the assumptions of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions are consistent with direct observations of documented geological emmission events, and when the only people pounding the pulpit with the lonely voices of dissent are people with extreme vested interests in maintaining the oil economy (that is, rich assholes): now, that's junk science. Caveat Emptor, people.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.