When Science Goes Wrong

Science, when idealized, is a flawless system. Nothing is put forth as fact; there are only theories that have not been disproven and postulates that are impossible to disprove (for example, the fact that our senses are capable of providing information as it actually is).

That idealized system is an awesome thing. It is not perfect, as there are some areas of experience (mostly subjective) that are difficult or impossible to explore, as well as many systems (life) that are too complex to isolate variables within. But as far as it goes, the scientific method should be capable of telling us the facts behind our lives and the world that can help us in our daily lives.

Unfortunately, science is performed by scientists -- who are human. As such, they can be blinded by ambition, excitement, or greed, and make mockeries of the ideals of the scientific method in their exuberance. This is often not a huge problem to the rest of society, but occasionally a scientist or an issue is in just the right place to get that flawed idea pushed into the public sphere -- into the media, the mouths of politicians, or published by reputable publishers despite verifiable problems with their methods and/or results.

Bad Science is a forum for exploring these issues.

The Holy Prophet of the Muslims said a lot of things. Many if not most of them were recorded, to serve as an example for the Muslims of the future. A lot can be said of the Muslims, their Prophet, and their traditions -- some of it is even true. Here are a few things that Mohammed did say:

"The quest of knowledge is obligatory for every Muslim."
"Verily the men of knowledge are the inheritors of the prophets. "
"Seek ye knowledge from the cradle to the grave. "

Islam, when not forced into a position of self-defense and civil war by the politico-economic manipulations of the West (look up what Europe did to the Middle East at the end of World War I), was able to motivate an empire to what were, at the time, the heights of scientific inquiry and progress in the world (China might disagree). They were in an ideal place, it's true -- they gleaned insights from Greece, India, Rome, and other centers of civilization -- but they also treated the quest for knowledge itself with reverence.

Today, we in the West really only do science for one of two reasons -- most often, a corporation pays for the research in hopes of profit; sometimes, a scientist gets a government grant and tries to make money and/or acquire a reputation with his work. I believe that the motivation behind the science we do is destroying the results we obtain, and with them, our society as a whole.

That may seem a bit overreaching, but consider:
* The entire set of "diseases of civilization" (obesity, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, etc.) has come into existence since we listened to Ancel Keys, a scientist who told us that fat was bad and carbohydrates were good.

* Our government wastes billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize and promote the transformation of food into feul (ethanol), which is provably incapable of accomplishing its stated goal of making the US independent of foreign oil, because a bunch of scientists got together and determined that they could make themselves famous by making this a hot-button issue.

* Similarly, we waste billions of dollars fretting about carbon dioxide emmissions when it is mathematically provable that we cannot be meaningfully contributing to global warming through carbon dioxide -- but again, a scientist named Michael Mann saw an opportunity to get famous, and artfully concealed the intense data manipulation he had to go through to make Global Warming a genuine political concern.

These are some of the better known examples of profit-driven science and how it is bringing our society to its collective knees. To say nothing of the fact that corporate scientists literally perform study after study to attempt to discern new ways of getting people to buy things they do not need or even actually want.

America is no longer interested in contributing meaningfully to the pool of human knowledge and ability. The only measure of our society's success that we attend to is the Gross Domestic Product -- a standard that tells us nothing of our relationships with each other, with the world we live in, or with our own inner voices. If we want to stop hearing the now-constant refrain "Entertain me! I'm bored!", we need to start by retraining ourselves to stop pursuing knowledge for the purpose of fame and fortune, and start pursuing it for the purpose of enhancing other people's lives.

That applies equally to the education of school-age children, and the science performed by thinking adults -- only one will quell the boredom within a household; the other will quell the deep dissatisfaction that Americans have with their entire lives.