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BGonline.org Forums
OT: Who's your chemical daddy?
Posted By: mamabear In Response To: OT: Who's your chemical daddy? (Daniel Murphy)
Date: Friday, 13 June 2008, at 11:27 p.m.
I will agree with what Mr. Boyle has to say as long as he stays within the bounds of science, and considers only matters (such as Boyle's Law, of course) that can be determined and proven by experiment. But to "trust to nothing but facts" means one can never run one step ahead, using incomplete knowledge and reasonable suppositions extending beyond what is known.
A civilization that used only science, and thus "moves but slowly, slowly, pressing on from point to point" (Tennyson) would have been wiped out by the neighboring one who built the first bronze foundry, not knowing whether copper and tin would mix well; what the right proportions should be; whether the items they cast would hold up well or be brittle and unreliable; and whether their equipment would operate successfully or blow up and kill them all. The demise of the more cautious civilization would be blamed on losing a war, but the real cause was their lack of well-focused imagination.
Running one step ahead, or several, is also a process that must be "well-focused" and guided by logic. Otherwise, you end up with one costly failure after another, and no successes to compensate. Or worse, you can produce the politically correct pseudo-science of the Soviet Union's Trofim Lysenko. He promoted the view that acquired characteristics of plants could be passed to the succeeding generations, setting Soviet agriculture and genetic science back for decades.
Lysenko's error wasn't a failure to "trust to nothing but facts". It was ignoring facts that were already known, such as the existence of genes and chromosomes and their role in inherited qualities. He also got too chummy with the pooh-bahs in power (notably Stalin, and later Kruschev), and put pleasing these people ahead of the search for truth. (Not that he probably had a choice, if he ever had second thoughts. If he had tried to recant, at best he would have had no further funding and at worst, would have ended up in Siberia, as was the fate of at least one scientist who opposed him.)
Lysenko seems laughable now, but future generations will be laughing just as hard at a lot of what we call "science", and what we are willing to accept as a standard of proof if it fits our preconceived ideas, or our political ideology.
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