Junk Science: An Overdue Indictment of Government, Industry, and Faith Groups That Twist Science for Their Own Gain - Softcover

Agin, Dan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312374801 ISBN 13: 9780312374808

Verlag: St. Martin's Griffin, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

"A passionate, minutely informed, and scrupulously fair analysis of all the abuses and misuses of science that are rampant today-a clarion call to action that concerns us all."-Oliver Sacks, M.D., author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

The American public is suffering from a rampage against reason by special interests in government, commerce, and the faith industry. In Junk Science, Dan Agin offers an overdue indictment of the groups that twist science for their own gain.

Provocative, comprehensive, and hard-hitting, Agin argues from the center that we will pay a heavy price for the follies of people who consciously distort the public's understanding of the real world. With entertaining candidness, he reveals the data faking, reality ignoring, fear mongering, and outright lying that contribute to intentionally manufactured public ignorance. Agin outs the factions twisting scientific data to maintain riches and power in sections including:

-- "Buyer Beware" (genetically modified foods, aging, and tobacco companies)
-- "Medical Follies" (chiropractics, health care, talk therapy)
-- "Poison and Bombs in the Greenhouse" (pollution, warfare, global warming)
-- "Religion, Embryos, and Cloning"
-- "Genes, Behavior, and Race"

We already pay a heavy price for many groups' conscious manipulation of the public's understanding of science, and Junk Science arms us with understanding, cutting through the fabric of lies and setting the record straight.

"Agin is one angry empiricist...focused, extremely articulate, skilled in debate, and above all, dedicated only to what can be experienced through the senses and duplicated in the laboratory."--Chicago Sun-Times

"An eye- and brain-opener, fraught with insight and plenty of astute observations and illustrative cases-in-point."--The San Diego Union-Tribune

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dan Agin, Ph.D.

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Junk Science

An Overdue Indictment of Government, Industry, and Faith Groups That Twist Science for Their Own GainBy Dan Agin

St. Martin's Griffin

Copyright © 2007 Dan Agin
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780312374808

Chapter One 
Science, Junk Science, and Dogma
 
Rome has spoken; the case is concluded.
—St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430)
 
There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any error.
—J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967)
 
What happens when dogma rules? We need the past as a guide, since only through the lens of history are the realities of the behavior of whole societies completely visible. To ignore our past, to avoid learning from it, is a mindless attitude that only increases the likelihood of personal and social calamity. What a tragedy it is that history is hardly ever taught to children as a cautionary tale. Instead, history is taught as an exercise in tribal self-glorification, a pedagogical scheme that may be useful to politicians in their manipulations of the public, but a scheme that in the long run produces social dangers and the catastrophes of war.
 
Galileo and the Moons of Jupiter
 
So we begin with Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), a man whose very name has come to signify the perpetual battle between dogma and science, a battle won by dogma, a defeat now recognized as a disaster for human society.
 
The story of the Church against Galileo has been repeated (and often distorted) over and over again in history and literature. But what was the crux of it? Some say that the officials of the Church of that time were aware of the truth of Galileo’s assertions that the Earth revolved around the Sun, but were incapable of publicly admitting this because of fear of demolishing the philosophical structure upon which the Church rested—the theological position, originating with the ancient Greeks, that a mechanistic interpretation of nature could never be more than a model, an intellectual artifact, since between theory and reality there would always be a gap that could not be bridged by human reason. The Church had received from the ancients a fundamental view of the cosmos that the Church had preached since the beginning of Christianity, and that view could not be denied without demolishing the foundations of the religion itself. At least, according to this interpretation of the crux of the conflict, that was the view of Church officials of the seventeenth century. Of course, eventually, after two hundred years, the Church did accept the Galilean/Copernican view of the solar system, and without destruction of its theological foundations. (Some may argue that if anything the foundations were strengthened.)
 
The other view of the crux of the matter is simpler and focuses on the elemental battle between dogma and reality, the refusal of the dogmatists to acknowledge reality, the stubborn efforts of the dogmatists to contrive and deny even when one is handed a telescope and told to look at the moons of Jupiter and see whether or not they are real. So goes the story of the Church and Jupiter’s moons, although if officials of the Church refused to look, many academics, the so-called philosophers of Pisa, also refused to look.
 
Why not look? Because to look and see what Galileo (and others) said could be seen would demolish the foundations of one’s reality. The dogma was that the Earth did not move. And even of those who accepted the Copernican idea that the planets (other than Earth) revolved around the Sun, many would not accept the idea that the Earth itself revolved around the sun—because they believed the Earth would then lose its moon. Thus, to see the moons of Jupiter was to understand that a planet could revolve around the sun without losing its moons, and that the Earth could do this also.
 
Here are Galileo’s own words about the import of Jupiter’s moons:
 
Here [in the Jovian moons] we have a powerful and elegant argument to quiet the doubts of those who, while accepting without difficulty that the planets revolve around the Sun in the Copernican system, are so disturbed to have the Moon alone revolve around the Earth while accompanying it in an annual revolution about the Sun, that they believe that this structure of the Universe should be rejected as impossible. But now we have not just one planet revolving around another while both make a large circle around the Sun, but our eyes show us four stars that wander around Jupiter, as does the Moon around the Earth, and these stars together with Jupiter describe a large circle around the Sun in a period of twelve years.
 
But the hard evidence that there were indeed people who refused to look at Jupiter’s moons is scanty, most of the evidence in comments by Galileo himself. The best surmise is that there were indeed people, academics, philosophers, Church officials, who refused to look, even when others did look and were looking all over Europe as soon as the announcement of the Jovian moons was made. And if they looked, did they believe the moons were there? In this context, the important point is not who looked and who refused to look—no, the important fact is that there were probably enough people of substance, even of eminence, people of the established order who refused to look, assuming that Galileo did not concoct the idea of refusals, as some have suggested.
 
Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter in the year 1610. On June 22, 1633, he received the final sentence of the Church, with the following words read out to him:
 
You have rendered yourself vehemently suspect of heresy, namely of having held and believed a doctrine which is false and contrary to the Sacred and Divine Scriptures, that the Sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west, and that the Earth moves and is not the center of the world; and that one may hold and defend as probable an opinion after it has been declared and defined contrary to Holy Scripture.
 
Never mind Galileo’s subsequent recantation, the question of who looked or who did not look, the question of how many Church officials quietly accepted the reality of Jupiter’s moons, the crux of the matter, the essence of dogma, the fundamental and unresolvable confrontation between dogma and science is clear in the above paragraph, in the accusation read to scientist Galileo Galilei as on Wednesday, the 22nd of June in the year 1633, he knelt on the floor in a room adjoining the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome. His crime was to refute a doctrine with a telescope, counter a dogma that suddenly, with the invention of the telescope, became a dogma based on junk science.
 
And the junk science endured. When Harvard University was founded in the year 1636, the assembled university scholars did not accept Galileo’s work and they remained firmly committed to the Ptolemaic theory of the universe. Were they too busy to look at Jupiter’s moons?
 
Galileo’s major work on the solar system, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was not removed from the Roman Catholic index of prohibited books until 1835, two hundred years after the Church forced his recantation.
 
Dogma is not easily melted.
 
Phrenology and Inherited Traits
 
The junk science foisted on human society by the Church during the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: St. Martin's Griffin
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312374801
• ISBN 13: 9780312374808
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland