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Author | Topic: Bad science? | ||||||||||||||||||||
Brad McFall Member (Idle past 5063 days) Posts: 3428 From: Ithaca,NY, USA Joined: |
well, I do NOT think "science" needs another Carl Sagan. I had thought so before I saw the way he behaved in public. He was sooo pro science, that his molecules mattered more than psychology. This was clearly too restrictive, to my mind. But I do not think that we need a next generation Carl Zimmer either (see the latest issue of SCIENCE where he writes on Viruses and DNA) but then again I would be "bad" scientist if I am wrong about Carl and not correct about myself. Does the ability to get a "news" article in SCIENCE make Zimmer a scientist & me in consequentia not?
I dont mind if people want to try to discuss me at all here. I will not get mad but below is what I think about it. I think Quetzal is closer when he worries about elitism. There is a crossover between specialization, socialization, and professionalism that I cross fairly quickly here, and if SCIENCE itself is being authorized by elites than there is room for worry , it seems to me. I am definitely “doing” it, whatever it is that I “do” ,’outside’ the academy, but right next to those in it such that one reading me in context would be hard pressed to notice (the) any difference. Kant, while putting the parts he realized could come together in the Conflict of the Faculties noticed the good thing that “universities” were where they were institutions that “made” doctors (phds) but he also recognized that the phd kind of work, could occur by “layman” as well, those not professionally affiliated with a given such institution, provided they cared for and were concerned with the same subjects otherwise becoming conferred. When there is some issue of about “elitism” or the difficulty of the strech between a freshman course in a scientific subject well done by a stundent and the actual work of research scientists and post-docs etc, there is a social aspect other than the simple quantity of time necessary to “know” all of the relevant things. Most higher learning however is simply a matter of time and devotion to the topic rather than some skill that separates off the very cream of the best in a given. Specialization makes this somewhat a necssisty. Clearly those who have not achieved up to the highest levels can be frustrated with pronouncements coming from the seeming “on high” but if this is merely something that is matter of time or schooling (Harvard schooled profs love to lord it over Cornell students and faculty to a rather annoying degree, but justified more often than not. I am thinking of Strogatz in math and I think Simon Levin made a smart move leaving Cornell for Princeton etc) then ,the enunciations that appear no matter if the social factor is also involved to be less discrete than “correctness” calls for, *might* be ok. Now there is the social factor, and that more than simply the level of difficulty in the amount of time, that is really the problem and this CAN cut across most of the academy, especially that which is relevant to object of EVC conversations. There is a somewhat clearly visible and intellectually labelable secularity to higher education and *this* when it comes to calling someone like me as NOT being a scientist is really kinda wrong. I am not as well rounded as your average graduate of any ivy league school but I am extremely well, more self than not, trained in reading biology. This was a conscious choice I made and contine to differentiate my life with but I am doing it OUTSIDE the standard, traditional and actual means currently made as economical as possible by univeristites and colleges more than other institutions. I consider my self to be a scientist. I am constantly thinking through the history of biology and tyring to develop ways to test ideas both of my own conception and falsify those of others that might appear at first blush to be of a different color than the rule of law I think I see as causally necessary etc. So unless the issue of what makes a scientist is to say that theory is not science, that empirical bench work but not paper and ink is science, then OK I might not be a scientist ,(I had always since a teenager labeled my self as a “natural historian”)but I shall give an example to show how much MORE I must do just to maintain the same relation to history that one in the academy must and can do with less psychological burden thus in my view deflating any gain it would ever make to allow scientists to be “elite” as Sharf wanted to say later. http://www.asa3.org/asa/PSCF/1993/PSCF3-93Hedman.html At this web site the author wrote, quote: This drawing out of the issue of contingency is definitely an advance over the work of Dauben that is cited in the references. But the writing goes way beyond the science that the work attempts to discuss. Cantor is against the positivism that Kant’s work lead to NOT to what is ostensibly exposed by Cantor’s thoughts on reality. So in order to get a definite stance on contingency this author had cashed in Cantor’s thoughts BEYOND the original organic nature that Kant exposed and Cantor sought to provide math for, for his own historicization of science itself. What this author did not try to do was to see what, if anything, the first world hypothesis, might mean, in today’s science. If, in other words, it actually provides a theoretical position other than contingent leanings, that can change the work of scientists for a better yesterday, specifically in correspondence with Mittag-Leffler who said that Cantor was 100 years ahead of his time, when it came to order types. Bertrand Russell refused to follow this direction of Cantor deciding to think about what counts as proof in math harder than others after Cantor instead. Godel however opened this back up but in ways that are still not being taught in the most difficult courses even if, (I am not in these classes to actually know), they might be dismissed as not socially / secularly needed, even if they are. The author did not realize that biology itself might be a science composed of Aleph-tw0 point sets whereas traditional chemistry and physics is only Aleph -One (according to Cantor (not me)) thus he did not find out that for instance Faraday’s question as to if an electric fish could be both a conductor and an insulator might be answered from a science of Cantor conception, in that TIME. He did not look hard at the relation of chemistry to electricity nor the notions of macrothermodyanmics as different than phenomenological thermodynamics so he could re-read Gould’s contingency in biological change on his own interpretative basis. These are all things that can and do do but you will not find them anywhere in the academy that I know of. As soon as they are I will have a job but because this projection of my own doing is wider than secualarism and is not out of filiation with creationism I can not find this work IN the university setting, nor among the people I meet in Ithaca. That is why I am doing this all on-line. But I will not all of a sudden become a “scientist” as soon as this kind of thinking finds a chair somewhere to which grad students are writing theses for. If I am going to become a scientists this way, I would have already been one. That is the only way this makes sense. The other fate is that I am just ”crazy’ to think that what I do will EVER find a legit output. I personally don’t need to worry about this as I already know it does. It works for me, all politics aside. This ability to read science this way IS however contrary to what counts as elite commentary ON SCIENCE so it can easily be mistaken taken that what I am talking about is not “science” but then what I am doing would already be past, and that it barely is. Edited by Brad McFall, : error of content Edited by Brad McFall, : commas, etc Edited by Brad McFall, : wrong infinte number denotation
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Brad McFall Member (Idle past 5063 days) Posts: 3428 From: Ithaca,NY, USA Joined: |
Carl's "science" exemplared. I objected to the hand bag, but it made it in.
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Brad McFall Member (Idle past 5063 days) Posts: 3428 From: Ithaca,NY, USA Joined: |
Well,
It is odd indeed that despite there being a readable difference of temporal relocations in the ambiguity of the niche occupant vs recess environmentally that any ambiguity in the FORM of a fossil vs the time it takes to form possibly influencing living form-making (given the caveat that was linked to your post above)that "scientists" continue to miss the overlaping as it circles around theoretically. It is rather precarious to carry out the reasoning as to a final cause of quick fossil formation back to the design AFTER the mechanical activity being reflected in the occupants of niches ordered by fossil data (inside and outside the actual shapes and places of said fossil"s") but I had expected that John Davison would have cognized the possiblity and I fully anticipated that I would discuss this in his thread that has now surpassed the limit without much progess in the debate being made (here on EvC). He for instance insists that the environment itself must be extripated when discussing ontogeny geographically and this makes the application of a practical logic to the organs in any organon of fossil records harder to apply in his case for instance. This makes the existence of scientists of this figure even farther removed than I would consider pragmatically. It is not however MORE likely taphonomy can have a larger share of the efficient cause in biological change (which you seem to have thought) than would be manifest in the relation of chromosome rearrangment and the kinds of mutational categories that pink sasquatch presented. As long as one continues to restrict these judgements to individuals without respect to their environment (and that such as what is the environment of fossil formations) we can not say that scientists have reached their full potential. Edited by Brad McFall, : spelling
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Brad McFall Member (Idle past 5063 days) Posts: 3428 From: Ithaca,NY, USA Joined: |
quote: The "pre-concieved" notion here seemed to me to have been "dynamics." I do not think there is any question that Agassiz used BOTH sides of Kant's "on the other hand" (in the "Critique of Judgment") reference to Lineaus when moving from a consideration of Glacial motions to fossil fish formations. Yes, I think it is a "bad habit" if taxonomists must not be considered good "scientists" if they have not mastered the triple integral solute of Newton. Gould however created his name for evolutionary theory without a need to expand the flexible wrist of taxonomy using the standard scientific elements of dynamics. Fossilzation does not seem to me just an example here. The author asks if scientists should not consider the difference between their prejudice for long times vs the observation of short ones (as ICR did much on for the current generation). As far as I can see no retraction is necessary except that taxonomists SHOULD be better trained in mathematics so that convolutionary system that Gould created is not continued in the history of biology without using some more stringent logical and mathematical processing of the same data. Unfortuantely molecular biology where this move has occurred in science tends to make up more words rather than trying to reduce some of the taxanomic redundancies as occurrs regularly in straight forward "stamp" collecting lineage taxonmy itself. If better mathematics and physics were dynamically involved then "time" would not be open to any philosophical consideration as it currently retains but instead specific models of it would be used in coverstation (compare :Bohm hidden variables vs older Quantum mechanics, for instance ). Before one simulates dyanmically it is important to have some notion of the kinematics. It would be very interesting if the kinematics of different geological horizons constrained the dynamics across the horizon. In this case Gould simple expendient of physical analogy between terminal strata justapositions and acceleration vs retardation of evolutionary rates when "scaled" into geological time would not simply be a wash in the very valley that was likely misrecognized as not glacial when it was. I hope that my first post in this thread came across as what Kant called praeter propter in his "Introduction to Logic" page 45 below:
Edited by Brad McFall, : clarification of first post contributed in this thread.
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