Hi, Archaeologist.
archaeologist writes:
look you all are just making the same excuses you would not accept from a creationist or christian.
I wasn’t making any excuses for anybody: I was giving explanations. You asked for explanations.
And, just because a certain behavior is understandable or explainable does not mean that it is acceptable or excusable.
I don’t condone the lack of ethics shown by scientists who falsify data. And, I don’t pretend that such scientists don’t exist.
The thing is that we’re not talking about what individual scientists or even individual
generations of scientists do. We’re talking about the entire enterprise, the entire process of science, spanning many generations and hundreds of years. Science has accomplished a very large amount in a very short time, despite all the charlatans and hoaxsters and liars and morons that plague our community as much as any other community.
Science bumbles along like a toddler, because it is always trying to do things that it has never done before. It doesn’t surprise anybody that there are setbacks and stumbles and snags, and that there are controversies and problems and frustrations.
But, the general principle is that conflict breeds strength. Weak arguments, poor logic and downright lies do not stand up well to empirical evidence and public experimentation, so science is able to eventually select for the best argumentation and experimentation, just like natural selection results in the fittest phenotypes surviving, and just like a free-market economy results in the best, most efficient businesses surviving.
It surprises me that you turn on the scientific process this way, because it seems like, in any other instance, you would wholeheartedly support the methodologies that you disdain when scientists do it.
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archaeologist writes:
you have no defense for this has gone on for centuries and you never clean up the entire fieldor for that matter try to clean it up because your reputations, the money, the power is too great of a temptation that keeps you all from being honest.
I should also like to point out that the money in science isn't usually all that great, and that we generally know this when we sign up, and that most of us don't really delude ourselves into thinking we're going to ever be particularly powerful. It's more common that curiosity and fascination for intellectual puzzles is the reason for a scientist to be a scientist.
Your comment here only applies well to a small segment of the scientific community, and I can't think of why it should be held against the rest of us.
Edited by Bluejay, : Verbs are occasionally important in sentences.
-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)
Darwin loves you.
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