The Use and Abuse of Science (Part One)
Topic: Decline of the West
In this column, leftie pundit Richard Cohen berates GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry over the latter’s skeptical comments about global warming. Perry, it seems, is guilty of the heinous and crying sin of “climate change denial”—which is, don’t you know, much the same thing as Holocaust denial. Cohen is confident of this because he has Science on his side. I use the initial capital deliberately, because you can hear it reverberate whenever someone like Cohen pronounces or even writes the word. But when an opinion journalist with no scientific qualifications drags Science into his dispute with a political opponent, a question occurs: How does he know?
This isn’t at all a frivolous or dismissive question. Let’s turn for a moment from climate science to another scientific theory: evolution. Adding up the time required to produce a thoroughly qualified evolutionary biologist—college, graduate school, post-doctoral work, research, teaching, writing for publication—yields a total somewhere in the vicinity of ten years. This laborious apprenticeship equips the aspiring evolutionary biologist with a large body of specialized knowledge that Richard Cohen, you and I do not possess. For that reason, the biologist's opinions about evolution carry weight—while Cohen’s, yours and mine do not.
To put it another way, non-specialists have no direct means of evaluating evolutionary theory. They possess neither the professional background nor the time to study and weigh the vast and complex body of evidence on which the theory rests. The non-specialist—the thoughtful non-specialist, anyhow—accepts the validity of evolutionary theory for secondary reasons.
First of all, he has high confidence in the scientific method itself, which has proved itself over a long period of time to be the best method of determining the facts about the physical world—near and far, visible and invisible, past and present. Our civilization’s technology—jet aircraft, nuclear power, the Internet, cell phones, vaccines, etc.—offers tangible proof that the empirical method, properly applied, produces valid conclusions about the nature of physical reality.
The thoughtful non-specialist also has confidence in the scientific profession; that is, he trusts that scientists will rigorously apply the empirical method in their work. Such confidence ought not to be blind, of course. Scientists are fallible human beings and the history of science offers many cautionary tales of intellectual fraud. In the case of evolution, however, he can accept the judgment of specialists in the field, there being no evidence of error or corruption. Evolutionary theory provides a coherent explanation of the development of life on Earth, it is well supported by a large body of evidence, and no new fact tending to falsify it seems likely to emerge. So say the scientists whose specialty it is, and there’s no reason to disbelieve them. Thus to the extent that a scientific statement can be said to be true, evolution is true.
That’s the process by which I arrived at a personal conclusion about the validity of evolution. But applying the same process to climate change, global warming, call it what you will, led me to quite a different conclusion, as I shall explain in a subsequent post.
Posted by tmg110
at 9:21 AM EDT
