The Sun Has Started To Revolve Around The Earth Again
Look out!
The sun has started to revolve around the Earth again.
“A gaggle of energetic and amusing, mostly anonymous, neuroscience bloggers — including Neurocritic, Neuroskeptic, Neurobonkers and Mind Hacks — now regularly point out the lapses and folly contained in mainstream neuroscientific discourse. This group, for example, slammed a recent Newsweek article in which a neurosurgeon claimed to have discovered that ‘heaven is real’after his cortex ‘shut down.’ Such journalism, these critics contend, is ‘shoddy,’nothing more than ‘simplified pop’.”
Today’s New York Times published an essay on the masses of junk science, misconceptions and voodoo doo-doo that passes for neuroscience in articles written by non-scientists. The essay, points out that:
“’…logically irrelevant neuroscience information imbues an argument with authoritative, scientific credibility’.”Another way of saying this is that bogus science gives vague, undisciplined thinking the look of seriousness and truth.”
The implications go far beyond simple misinformation and misconceptions: In a democracy where informed decisions are supposed to produce rational policy, junk science steers debate and thinking into irrationality where pseudo-scientific thinking like eugenics can take root.
“Voting Republican? Oh, that’s brain chemistry. Success on the job? Fortuitous neurochemistry! Neuroscience has joined company with other totalizing worldviews — Marxism, Freudianism, critical theory — that have been victim to overuse and misapplication.”
What the Times essay does not point out is the reality that scientists and educators deserve a great deal of the blame.
I have been a scientist and I have been an educator. Unfortunately, the unrelenting arrogance, pig-headed adherence on dogma and intolerance for new ideas in both those professions are the primary reasons that I decided to leave full-time employment in both fields (although I seem to be headed back toward teaching at the university level next year).
My experience has taught me that poor scientific education has reduced the average American to a the level of a scientific and technical savage where cell phones and GPS are spiritual mysteries beyond their comprehension.
The situation seems to be evolving into a sad state much like the dark past when science was a total mystery, completely in the thrall of religion with all truth residing in the priesthood and beyond challenge by the laity. In this new era of scientific illiteracy, the sun has begun to revolve around the Earth again.
Concurrently, the scientific elite have fostered and enjoy their own priesthood of scientific dogma. Scientists seem incapable of admitting that they don’t know everything. They can’t admit — even to themselves — that today’s dogma is not infallible and that the best science of today may shift drastically tomorrow. This has cost them respect and moral authority and allowed the rise of pop science. And complicating it all is the reality that the scientific “establishment” is remarkably close-minded and hostile to new ideas. I wrote about this at some length in Slatewiper.
And, yet, people want to understand. And that very desire for the truth leads them to the false prophets of pop-neuroscience and other twisted but logical sounding explanations that bear no resemblance to reality.
The re-alignment of orbits is not yet complete, but the Sun has started to revolve around a newly flattened Earth.
