Who Is anti-Science?

Using the authority of “scientific consensus” to stifle heterodox hypotheses and alternative fields of research: Science is never truly settled. Indeed, challenging seemingly incontrovertible facts and continually retesting long-accepted theories are crucial components of the scientific method.

Examples of perceived truths overturned by subsequent discoveries are ubiquitous. Here’s just one: So-called junk DNA that does not encode proteins was, until relatively recently, thought by a large majority of scientists to have no purpose, and was even used as evidence of random and purposeless evolution. But continuing investigations in the field led to the discovery that most “junk DNA” actually serves important biological functions.

Think what might have happened if scientists seeking to continue exploring this area of inquiry had been warned away because of the “scientific consensus.” What if the self-appointed guardians of existing perceived wisdom had gotten researchers to abandon their investigations for fear of losing university tenure, being scorned by colleagues, or having research funding blocked? The biological truth about non-protein-coding DNA might well have never been discerned. Yet these are the very anti-science tactics deployed today to chill scientific challenges to the theory of evolution and the questioning of “consensus” climate change conclusions.

Wesley J. Smith, The Real Anti-Science

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3 comments

  1. You can’t tell me you’re “scientific” when you say that a change of clothes, some cutting, and insistence makes a woman out of a man–especially when every cell continues to shout “XY!!!”

    Indeed, the point about how science has to keep changing in order to advance is well taken.

  2. So much of ‘science’ is based on fallacies. There is so much argumentum ad ignorantiam, so much induction from lack of evidence, and argument from self-knowing.

    Nineteenth century liberal scholars argued that if Nineveh ‘that great city’, or Ur, or the Hittites etc had ever existed then they would know of it. They didn’t know of it so such never existed.

    Likewise if certain DNA has a function then scientists would know of it. They don’t know the function, so such DNA has no function (i.e. junk).

    There is the evolutionary god-of-the-gaps: a species has a certain behaviour or characteristic. We don’t know how the species acquired it, so evolution did it.

  3. Backward and unscientific Islam only has female genital mutilation, while the scientific West freely mutilates both males and females for the sake of liberal progressivism.
    What’s not to like about broadening of the franchise?
    Nothing at all, little grasshopper. Nothing at all.

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