A comment for The Archdruid
I'm on my laptop tonight watching it download SW:TOR so that my wife and I can play the game with our holiday guest tonight and tomorrow.* What that means is that I'm away from my usual resources, including the HTTP-composing program that I use for my blogging and a computer with my Google login so that I can post to Blogspot blogs. Just the same, I have access to other resources, including my LiveJournal account, which I can use as an alternative ID. Hence this entry.
Tonight, I'm using this account to store my comment on tonight's Archdruid Report entry, The Suicide of Science. Follow behind the cut for what I have to say to Greer.
Greer: "Those readers who are old enough may even remember when continental drift was being denounced as the last word in pseudoscience, a bit of history that a number of science writers these days claim never happened."
I not only remember those days, I teach my students about them as part of a lecture on the nature of scientific revolutions. Continental drift was the victim of the third line of attack on heterodox ideas that you've described at your other blog the past two months. There was no accepted mechanism for it that conformed to accepted knowledge, so it was rejected for decades until new evidence from new scientific instruments was interpreted by new people to the discipline of geology to come up with one. Reinterpreted as plate tectonics, it's now the paradigm of geology, the central organizing idea in the field.
That rejection and later acceptance of continental drift forms the basis of an anecdote in An Inconvenient Truth, which I'm showing to my students next week. Al Gore uses it to introduce the quote attributed to Mark Twain, "It isn't what you don't know; it's what you know that ain't so that gets you into trouble."
Greer: "What Oswald Spengler called the Second Religiosity, the resurgence of religion in the declining years of a culture, could have taken many forms in the historical trajectory of industrial society; at this point I think it’s all too likely to contain a very large dollop of hostility toward science and complex technology."
That's already happening with creationism and it's beginning to show up on the right as hostility to climate science and social science and on the left as hostility to GMOs, although the secular left has yet to start using religion to justify its position. When Discovery News has to frame its explanation of radiometric dating in the context of a debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham of the Creation Museum, it's obvious that the side hostile to science is strong.
Some of you, such as nebris, will think I'm too nice for him. Hey, I have to get this through moderation. Besides, I'm interested in getting people to click on the links to my blog.
*Yes, we have one of our gaming buddies over for Thanksgiving. That's a story for another entry.
Tonight, I'm using this account to store my comment on tonight's Archdruid Report entry, The Suicide of Science. Follow behind the cut for what I have to say to Greer.
Greer: "Those readers who are old enough may even remember when continental drift was being denounced as the last word in pseudoscience, a bit of history that a number of science writers these days claim never happened."
I not only remember those days, I teach my students about them as part of a lecture on the nature of scientific revolutions. Continental drift was the victim of the third line of attack on heterodox ideas that you've described at your other blog the past two months. There was no accepted mechanism for it that conformed to accepted knowledge, so it was rejected for decades until new evidence from new scientific instruments was interpreted by new people to the discipline of geology to come up with one. Reinterpreted as plate tectonics, it's now the paradigm of geology, the central organizing idea in the field.
That rejection and later acceptance of continental drift forms the basis of an anecdote in An Inconvenient Truth, which I'm showing to my students next week. Al Gore uses it to introduce the quote attributed to Mark Twain, "It isn't what you don't know; it's what you know that ain't so that gets you into trouble."
Greer: "What Oswald Spengler called the Second Religiosity, the resurgence of religion in the declining years of a culture, could have taken many forms in the historical trajectory of industrial society; at this point I think it’s all too likely to contain a very large dollop of hostility toward science and complex technology."
That's already happening with creationism and it's beginning to show up on the right as hostility to climate science and social science and on the left as hostility to GMOs, although the secular left has yet to start using religion to justify its position. When Discovery News has to frame its explanation of radiometric dating in the context of a debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham of the Creation Museum, it's obvious that the side hostile to science is strong.
Some of you, such as nebris, will think I'm too nice for him. Hey, I have to get this through moderation. Besides, I'm interested in getting people to click on the links to my blog.
*Yes, we have one of our gaming buddies over for Thanksgiving. That's a story for another entry.