Pseudoscience And Post-Scientific Thought - What A Crock

To quote Squidward, “Just when I thought they couldn't get any stupider...”

It never ceases to amaze me the willingness of people to swallow all kinds of pseudo-scientific twaddle while at the same time discarding the hard, verifiable sciences because they're too “icky”.

Whether it's astrology, palm-reading, or post-feminist condemnation of such things like logic and scientific method merely because someone believes it has some mysterious phallic meaning that denigrates women, minorities, or one of the newer “victim” classes, it's all crap. Every bit of it.

As I have stated many times before, I am an engineer. I deal with scientifically proven concepts every day while practicing my profession. No amount of wishing or thinking positive Gaia-centric thoughts or consulting the stars or planets will change the physical laws that dictate how the electronic circuits or optical components I work with every day will function. Logic gates in digital circuits will always behave in ways dictated by physics of electronics (and computer science), unless acted upon by yet another scientifically proven natural force. There's no getting around it. Yet there are still folks out there that insist we must discard such foolishness in order to understand how the universe ought to work.

Yeah. Right.

A few examples:

Some of you may have fond memories of Dr Sandra Harding, an alleged “feminist philosopher of science,” who claims that Einstein’s theories of relativity are “gender-biased” and thus disreputable. Ms Harding famously described Newton’s Principia as a “rape manual” and claimed that rape and torture metaphors could be used to usefully describe its contents.

So theories that describe, in part, how the universe works are “gender biased” or a thinly disguised “rape manual”? How effin' stupid can people be?

There's more:

Biology is a socially constructed concept too - dated. It categorizes and defines ‘organisms’ a certain way - not wholistically - and not the only way possible, I might add.

First, I have to ask; what the hell is “wholistically”? I can't find it in the dictionary and Google does link to a number of sites using the term, but nowhere is it defined. Could they mean “holistically”? And why would it, whatever it is, be more valid than a system that's been used by biologists world-wide for hundreds of years? And what would we use in its stead?

Then there's this:

I am no science major, but I know Einstein’s theories and physics has already proven most of the fundamentals of biology to be faulty.

I had the same reaction as David Thompson on this one: How exactly do the theories of General and Special Relativity have anything to do with biology? Unless one is talking about the bits and pieces of biology at the quantum level (the quarks that make up the protons, neutrons, and electrons that in turn make up the molecules that are necessary for life), there's no connection between the two.

The diatribe David links goes on to explain how science is nothing but a belief system no different than any other religion. Hmm. I never saw science as a religion, particularly since, unlike religion, it has no room for blind faith in something unprovable or unproven. Instead, science is built upon a foundation of proven theorems, where at any time they can be proven right again and again through observation and experimentation. The science that built our modern civilization is not religious belief. As we learn more we create new hypotheses, and use the evidence we gather and the experiments we try to prove or disprove them. Others will do likewise. No amount of wishing or pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo will change that. Though that won't stop some folks from trying.

That's fine with me....as long as they leave me alone and let me get on with my work.