On May 8, 2009, at 10:08 PM, raghu wrote:
On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 5:51 PM, Louis Proyect <[email protected]> wrote:
I can't stand the fact that something I wrote on my blog has
triggered such
a useless discussion so I have changed the subject heading.
I found the discussion interesting. I guess I am an idiot.
Me too. In fact I think, following an old Internet tradition I will
start incorporating this into my signature.
BTW, below is Lewontin (NYRB) on a host of issues raised: (a) what
constitutes "science" (and what is claimed to be "not science"),
especially the definitions that are offered (e.g: falsificationism),
(b) what dominant ideas/themes/attitudes/approaches were (at the time
of his writing: 1998) in the fields of science he writes about, (c)
the separation between science (knowledge) and technology (application/
manipulation), and so on.
What about human behavioral genetics, most of whose published
experiments would not pass the methodological and statistical
requirements of standard animal breeding journals, largely because
of the special difficulties involved in studying humans? Or
behavioral ecology, which consists largely of telling plausible but
unfalsifiable stories? And then there is developmental biology,
completely dominated at the present time by the manifestly false
assumption that all the information necessary to specify an organism
is contained in that organism's genes, while totally ignoring the
uncontroversial fact, supported by copious data, that the
environment in which development occurs makes an important difference.
Why do developmental biologists continue to use and take seriously
metaphors like "program" or "computation" or "code of life" or
"blueprint" when considering the relationship between genes and
organisms? Perhaps we should exclude from science everything that is
not physics, chemistry, and molecular biology. All biologists know
that DNA is not "self-replicating," but is manufactured by a complex
protein machinery in the cell, yet when they describe the results of
molecular biology to students in lectures and textbooks and to the
public in trade books, newspapers, or television, they almost always
speak of "the master molecule that is self-replicating." Well,
that's biology. At least physics doesn't suffer from ideological
predispositions. Of course Einstein did argue against quantum
uncertainty by saying that "I shall never believe that God plays
dice with the universe." For Gross and Levitt, science consists of
uncontroversial lawlike statements that describe what is "really"
true about the physical world, like Newton's laws, or the law of
combining proportions in chemistry, or Mendel's laws. It is that
simple structure that we all learned in high school. "Obtuse
ignorance" is a kind of clumsiness of thought that makes it
impossible to consider matters in their real ambiguity and complexity.
It is our experience that the collection of practices that we
include within "science" does a much better job of enabling us to
manipulate the material world than thinking beautiful thoughts or
prayer (although, of course, mental states can influence our
physical bodies). But much of what we would like to know cannot be
known, and much of what we would like to do cannot be done, even by
the best methods available. Science is a social activity carried out
by organisms with a limited central nervous system and severely
limited sense organs. It is, moreover, carried out by organisms who
have already gone through a considerable period of individual
socialization and psychic maturation before they become employed as
scientists, in a social setting that has a history that constrains
thought and action. The state of science should not be confused with
the state of the universe.
--ravi, pen-l useless idiot #1
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
