by dalbera
Defending Science on HuffPo
[Via Bad Astronomy]
I used to write for the Huffington Post, before it became overrun with antiscience alt-med antivax garbage so thick I could smell it through my monitor.
Case in point would be a somewhat targetless essay by Dr. Larry Dossey, who seems to be trying to say that because science is portrayed as an individual effort, but is actually usually a team effort, students get confused and marginalized. Or something. His point is difficult to determine. But in any case, he’s quite wrong; the idea of science being done by groups of people collaboratively is everywhere, from astronomy to zoology.
I need not go into details, because, happily, Steve Newton from the NCSE has posted a rebuttal on HuffPo that tears Dossey to shreds. My favorite part was when Dossey says Nobel Prizes are only given to individuals, and my first thought was “Wow, I wonder if the IPCC knows about this?”… in his essay, Newton says almost exactly the same thing. Great minds, yadda yadda.
Anyway, I suggest you read Dossey’s screed, and then read Newton’s slamdunking of it. It’s a wonderful exercise in muddied and clear thinking, in that order. With people like Newton writing for HuffPo, it makes me feel a bit better that I don’t need to as much.
[More]
So, I looked at Dossey’s article and the first thing he does is quote Jeremy Rifkin. That is a name I have not heard for years. In the 80s he was essentially against almost anything to do with recombinant DNA techniques, usually for no good reason other than there are some things man should not do.
I would never take anything he said straight up. I would need a lot of back-up because I have found him to be an unreliable speaker when dealing with things I know a lot about. He was wrong in much of his rabble rousing then, so why should I trust what he says now?
The fact that he mischaracterizes science is not surprising. He has pretty much made a career of it.
And then Dorsey runs with it, somehow mixing up how people and the media present science and their research, as though that narrative is the researcher’s fault. Like there is some grand conspiracy to chase people away. Like there is only ONE science and ONE way to examine the natural world. That ALL scientists are the same, creating a misleading narrative to harm our young children!
Then he talks about how learning science is like forcing Native Americans to assimilate. Wow. WHat this all sounds like is some who works in the field of woo complaining about the fact that the scientific method undercuts the magical theory they hold.
The Scientific Method and the manner research is done today provide tools to help us understand the world around us. They have held up for hundreds of years, even when practiced by fallible humans. Nothing else has been shown to be nearly as effective in helping us understand.
Steven Newton has written a great rebuttal.
by NASA, ESA, The Hubble Key Project Team, and The High-Z Supernova Search Team
