Over at Living the Scientific Life, the question was asked:
"I have sometimes heard it said that all kids are natural scientists (i.e., ask questions), but that most have it trained out of them as they grow up so that the few who become scientists as adults are the few whose ability to question is strong enough to survive this training."
Asking questions is the first step of science, but it is not science. After all, creationists ask questions all the time: how did the eye evolve, where are the transitional forms, if we evolved from monkeys then why do we have Larry King? None of this is science. It is far more like religion, where one asks questions, gets answers, and moves on.
What seperates science from other epistemologies is the insistence on setting up falsifiable experiments to answer those questions, and doing so in a way that others can replicate. This is decidedly NOT the way children think. Children do tend to ask questions, but they ask them of whatever authority they trust, and often accept the answer at face value. When they don't, they reason it out for themselves, as far as they are able. What they rarely do is go perform experiments to validate their theories.
I'm of the opinion that growing up, if you will, from this rationalistic mode of thinking, to doing real science is what is lacking from pseudoscientists of all ranks. Whether it is IDers/creationists, UFOlogists, or moonlanding conspiracy theorists, the common thread is rationalization, not science. In a sense, they never grew up, and still think like children. There is a reason Jesus said "suffer the children to come to me". He needed to get to them before they learned to do science, because once that happens, the gig is up.
The budding scientist isn't the kid asking you lots of questions, it's the kid digging in the ant mound to see what's there. After all, there is a reason science is done in peer-reviewed journals demanding detailed descriptions of replicable experiments. It is so anyone who doubts the results and wishes to replicate them can. Science is not satisfied with just questions and answers.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Here’s a question for you SA: do you think human evolution will come to an end? Will genetic engineering and nanotechnology allow us to discard everything (we consider undesirable) from our evolutionary past?
Will we become post-human with a rewritten genome? Will we be able to abolish all suffering?
If pain (including psychological pain) evolved into existence only to serve as an evolutionary genetic regulator, perhaps we can make it redundant! Will we be able to replace pain with some form of hedonistic scale as ‘motivation for progress’. Will we be unimaginably happy; potentially living forever, never having to experience death and therefore sadness?
"do you think human evolution will come to an end? "
No. At most, when we are able to control the genomes of our offspring, there will be no natural evolution. However, that will just be replaced with human-driven evolution, since parents will for one reason or another choose for their children to be different from them, and some proportion will choose to let nature run its course. Can't you see the protesters now saying we shouldn't play god?
"Will genetic engineering and nanotechnology allow us to discard everything (we consider undesirable) from our evolutionary past?"
Well, that's the high side of it, assuming we don't eradicate ourselves in the mean time. Keep in mind too that what is considered undesireable is going to vary person to person and culture to culture.
"Will we become post-human with a rewritten genome?"
Yes, but that would happen eventually naturally anyway. Contrary to the blather of the creationists, macroevolution is just a lot of microevolution strung together. All it takes is time.
"Will we be able to abolish all suffering?"
Well, perhaps all suffering deriving from genetic problems, like inherited diseases and birth defects. But alas, we'll still have all the other sources of suffering to deal with. Genetic engineering isn't going to solve world hunger.
"If pain (including psychological pain) evolved into existence only to serve as an evolutionary genetic regulator, perhaps we can make it redundant! Will we be able to replace pain with some form of hedonistic scale as ‘motivation for progress’.
I'm not sure what you mean by "genetic regulator", but in any case even if we could eradicate pain we wouldn't. A rare few people are born with a genetic defect called CIPA that prevents them from feelng pain. Their lives are hell, not heaven. Pain is a warning we ought to keep.
Will we be unimaginably happy; potentially living forever, never having to experience death and therefore sadness?
Eliminating death via bodily function failure seems possible, but cracking the genetic code isn't going to keep you alive if you fall into a volcano.
Excellent questions, I hope you found the answers helpful.
Post a Comment