h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As far as I see it, we live on a piece of rock, circling around a small-sized star, in a medium sized galaxy in a very very very big universe filled with loads of galaxies like ours. We are decended from apes (or put it another way, if you go back far enough our decendants are the same decendants as every living creature on this earth). Matter is composed of atoms which is made up of loads of weird stuff. The DNA molecule is the foundation stone of living things.

Weird? Well at least it has stood up to extensive testing, has been formulated with the idea that it may actually be wrong, has enabled technology and medicine to develop by and large for the common good, and has discovered things about our world that no poet or philosopher could ever previously have dreamed possible.

So what is it with these people who spend so much mental energy on anti-science rot like UFO's, homeopathy, astrology, creationism etc? What is it with a society and culture that gives so much credence to these views? When anti-science and science are put on an equal footing in the popular media, I think we are in for some trouble in the future.

Any thoughts?

The biggest bag of psuedo-scientific rot ever ploped out the bunghole of misandrist lesbians! They make that stuff up as they go along!

I think you may be just a tad over-cynical.

Homeopathy does work... And it can and has been tested scientificaly. UFO's are not neccisarily anti-science -- Altho they probaly are not what we should be spending our energy and money on.
I can't defend astrolog and creationism, but they are not in of themselves anti-science. The form into which all of the affore mentioned things are offten put can be anti-scientific.
There is a large difference.
You could just as easily say that the light bulb is unscientific because T. Edison was violently against A.C. power -- but it's not the light bulbs fault. I wouldn't even day that T. Edison was Anti-science. He did do things that slowed the development of science and technology, tho.

Hmm. I see where you are getting and I think that mostly I would be in agreement. If I get you right you are making a distinction between the concepts themselves and how they are portrayed?

Of course we are all entitled to hold our own personal views on life just as I have done here (BTW that was my first article ever in H2G2 ). I could believe that the daytime sky as seen through the human cornea here on Earth is red, for instance.

Now, is that view anti-science? No. Not necessarily. It does not necessarily challenge science as an institution. It's just my personal belief.

Is it wrong? Probably. Why? Because repeated experiments have shown that the sky reflects similar electromagnetic frequencies as blue objects, and different electromagnetic frequencies than the colour red, and because no convincing argument has yet been created to disprove this evidence.

When would my belief become anti-scientific? Possibly when I start to convince loads of people that the sky is red, by using very selective evidence and ignoring all arguments to the contrary, and I then ridicule those people that tell me otherwise, and if I still get nowhere I start to tell people that there is a conspiracy against me and my fellow red-sky devotees!

So in short, I am in agreement with your clarification. However my point is that anti-scientific movements, and they are many, abound today. They are portrayed as fact in the media, and sometimes put on an equal footing with theories that have been deduced after painful scientific experiment. They are dangerous in that they are often used to justify a particular pet philosophy, and over time they create very paranoid people who could eventually start doing very bad things to other people because of their beliefs. They also chip away at the culture of scientific inquiry, which is the basis behind so much of the benefits available to so many people in today's world. Take food and medicine for instance.

Also I don't like anti-scientific movements because many of their views are just plain awkward, narrow minded, selective, simplistic and extremely human-centric.

Whew - that was quite a mouthful!

CR