Does the Vaccine Matter? - The Atlantic, part ii
people who think the practice of science is
basedsteeped in rationality are fooling themselves. as i keep saying, science has taken on the mantle of religion; dogma / doctrine, these are things held holy by too many.My gripe is less about the controversy re: vaccines and more on these scientists acting like a bunch of children by ostracizing someone with whom they disagree. Granted it’s a step up from burning at the stake but it’s still another WTF on the human race.
It’s fine & dandy to intellectualize this stuff and talk about the sociological contexts from which these situations arise, but how much intellectual firepower does one need to note what any high school freshman could tell you?
Well, the point is that E. O. Wilson would tell the high school freshman that s/he is wrong, and in the public authority war of E. O. Wilson vs. Jo/sie the high school science plumber, Ed is going to win every time. Unfortunately, Ed is committed to the dogma of science as the bastion of all that is orderly and reputable in the world.
(Well, that is a bit of an unfair dramatization. But you get the idea.)
One approach to this situation is go get sociologists to do science on scientists. Unfortunately, this turns out not to make scientists very happy, so it turns out to not ‘solve’ the ‘problem’ after all. But it’s somewhere to start.
It’s funny because the last half of the last sentence in my response originally read something like: but until the conversation expands to include its subjects (scientists), nothing will change. =)
