Trail Tool Tech

Piltdown Man is not so much a problem for Science, on account of it being a high-profile, historical hoax.  Rather, the problem is that it took 41 years for the combined Authority & Accumen of this Institution to acknowledge what was readily within Science’s technical ability to determine, from the outset in 1912. The supposed-fossil presentation was immediately controversial, and suspect. Multiple competent professional bystanders noticed on-sight that the jaw was from an ape.  “Not even ballpark”.  The real failures here have yet to be laid to rest … a century on & counting. Continue reading “Piltdown Man”

Lysenkoism is probably not, is at least partially not a very good fit for the knee-jerk anti-intellectual (science) goof that it’s usually posed as. Mr. Lysenko proposed – and sold – what substantially amounts to Lamarkism, or the transmission of acquired traits. In others words, that grains can be adapted to cold northern climates, simply by subjecting them to colder & colder growing conditions.

Under Lamarkism, when a given plant grows in colder conditions than it would prefer, changes occur in it that make it better-suited to the cold, and those changes are then encoded in its genes, and transmitted to its progeny when it produces the next crop of seed. This is counter to the Darwinian doctrine of Adaptation (and eventually, Evolution) through Selection of the Fittest.

It would appear more than marginally or incidentally feasible that the methodological practices employed by Lysenko could result in an inadvertent process of conventional selection: that given some intial variation in the seed he planted, poorly-adapted seedlings would tend to die or fail to set seed, and the subsequent generations of crops would improve. But the improvements would not actually be due to the mechanism of Lamarkism, but rather to “natural selection”.

And similarly, the leadership that embraced Lysenko’s ideas may well have harbored, on the one hand, a fondness for Lamarkian biology (it had adherents for a long time, and still is not entirely abandoned, even in the West), and on the other hand a recognition that Lysenko would in any event pragmatically improve the crop, whether the effecting mechanism was Lamarkian or Darwinian.

As the years went by, the situation spun out of control; Lysenko was used as a bald excuse for entirely non-scientific goals, and both the scientific community and individual professionals chose (understandably) to go along with the fallacious flow. Much the same happened in the West, in the case of Piltdown Man, except nobody had the excuse that they could end up in the Gulag if they rocked the boat.

Science as self-correcting is a precept that merits a closer, critical examination. In trivial cases, yes, sure;  the strict Hypothesis-Test formalism is internally self-correcting, in theory.

Eugenics had a long run – a full half century, a good couple generations, plus – as a productive but controversial area of scientific inquiry, and the fundamental unacceptibility of it only became evident after it was championed by and became associated with the ugliness of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. In other words, the error of eugenics was not determined or admitted by science itself, but by factors & forces outside the body of science.

Lysenkoism as a science-story is dismissed in the West as an aberraton peculiar to Russia and the USSR. That couldn’t happen in enlightened societies, because we don’t subject scientists to existential threats. However, scientists need money both to live as people and to conduct science; control of the funding of science by our government does create a reasonably absolute need for compliance. And Lysenkoism fell into disarray and disfavor for an extended period toward the end … yet when it was weak & vulnerable science itself did not put it to rest; rather the government eventually administered the coup de grâce, for their own reasons. Again, an external actor effected the ‘correction’.

Lobotomy was always controversial, yet it may have been that the tragedy of Rosemary Kennedy – and the resulting political backlash – had more to do with its decline than did any science-work. The sister of Tennessee Williams suffered the same outcome as Ms. Kennedy, creating pressure from the entertainment industry. The Nobel Prize was awarded for this technique, in 1949, by which time the dubious elements of it were quite clear. Science overall embraced the crude and high-risk methodology, despite major counterindications.  If it were a major Corporation, it would have been sued out of existence.

Stomach ulcers were addressed in the surgical theater for generations after antibiotics became available. Heroics were necessary, and then were only grudgingly accepted, to show that an oral dose of penicillin – a pill – sufficed to cure ulcers. The story of ulcer-surgery exposed strenuous resistance to the internal correction of science, by the scientific process itself.

Big Pharma continues to repeatedly prove scientifically, that science & medicine cannot police themselves against simple, everyday, bald-faced corruption.

Martian Canals, as signs of not just life, not just intelligence, but as evidenced of highly advanced civilization on Mars, was promoted & celebrated by a charismatic American astronomer.  Yet when Orsen Wells’ radio-play depicted an invasion by these Martians, the ensuing incidents of panic were blamed on the credulity & foolishness of the Public … and not the Science that had used its authority to give them cause for concern.

Yet we are expected to accept without question that Science, and Scientists, operate on a higher plane than the rest of humanity;  that they can resist, are immune to what makes normal humans, human.  Obviously, the very premise of science-specialness is facetious.

Lemuria, like Atlantis, is held to be a lost land or continent that sank beneath the ocean.  Unlike Atlantis, Lemuria is a hypothesis of modern science, proposed in 1864 by zoologist Phillip Sclater.  The fossil record – in this case the Lemurs of Madagascar and India (hence the name) – attests to related animal groups in regions now separated by oceans … which Sclater resolved with the proposal of a former prehistoric land-mass, which then later sank. Continue reading “Lemuria”