When you speak with a man like Professor Angus George Dalgleish you quickly recognise the incisive mind of the man. If you wish to disagree with him you really must be sure of your ground. He is an eminent scientist, being a fellow of organisations of which an ordinary mortals like Coco could not even aspire to associateship, let alone membership.
So in this interview Death of Science where he speaks of the death of science if we disagree with him, we must be careful in what we say. It is patently true that science can have no forbidden views. All views are permitted and must be examined until they can be irrefragably shown to be false. Newton’s thoughts and propositions about motion were once thought to be so certain that the became the Laws of Motion. No-one had succeeded in devising any test that could disprove them. They stood firm for two hundred years, until someone noticed that they seemed to break down at relatively high velocities. It took an Einstein to find the correction to Newton’s Laws and, as yet, no-one has dared to elevate the theory of relativity to the status of Law. We are wary that it too may suffer the same fate as Newton’s Laws.
Of course that is not to say that Newton’s Laws are not of immense help and use to us. For most everyday matters, and even not so everyday matters as planning a trip to Mars, they provide the correct answers, but their falsification is a warning to every scientist that he may be wrong however sure he is that he is right. Indeed, as Coco has noted elsewhere, if hypotheses were never falsified science could make no progress. So let the scientist make whatever hypothesis he wishes to explain any matter, and then let it be tested. If it fails the test we reject it, but until it fails, we should respect it. Pity it is that many in the scientific community are driven by the political wokeness that Professor Dalgleish condemns in this interview. If they were careful scientists they would understand that Darwin’s own tests have failed. Simply listening to a discussion about molecular machines, DNA wrapping or replication would provide enough information to understand that life requires not merely chemicals, but information and machines to read and respond to that information.
The learned professor mentions several matters in the interview which are controversial, but the alternative views must not be put down on the grounds of political correctness. Until they are not properly addressed, and evidence against them shown to be sound, they are valid scientific hypotheses. Just as they, who would not listen to Galileo Galilei, found themselves wanting, so shall our contemporaries.
So, shall you, dear reader, be, or continue to be, anti-science, or will you open your mind to the possibility that the interpretation of the facts my not be all it seems to be, If the interpretation is driven by a priori assumptions, then the conclusion may be far from the truth. Remember that there are many sciences: statistical, forensic, historic and empirical. Ask yourself which method has been applied to reach the conclusions proposed, ie the hypothesis, then apply the appropriate tests to the hypothesis. Are there any other plausible hypotheses which could rest upon the same set of data? When we look at complex systems, empirical science is unlikely to be possible, so we are left with a set of probabilities. Consider then the underlying assumptions. What if they a not quite right? How dependent upon the assumptions are the conclusions? If chaos theory permits the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in China to drive the tornado in Texas, then before we accept any conclusions we should be informed about the range of possible conclusions for all of the possible changes in the variables. after all, you, dear reader, would not place your money on any horse until you knew not only the odds, but the conditions of the course, the quality of the other horses, how each of them responds to the weather of the day and who the jockeys are; Coco hopes for other reasons that you would not place your money on any horse for any reason even if you knew completely and perfectly each of those things, and how to use that information to determine the ranking of all possible outcomes of the race.