Anti-science

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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.

Political wokism?

Anti-scientific?

~ admin

It was a recommendation of and a listening to Professor Angus Dalgleish, physician, oncologist, pathologist, medical researcher and author that prompted the thoughts.

The Professor makes a good point. There is a lack of consensus in many areas of science, and perhaps especially true in the context of cosmological and the design of bio-chemical machines, where radically contrary views may be held by main-stream scientists, but who rise up together when anything approaching a Biblical perspective on the known facts is introduced to silence the proponents of what is an alternative and more credible explanation than their own. Even Coco’s use of the word design in the preceding sentence will provoke the ire of such opponents of the scientific method to which they pretend to adhere but abandon when it does not suit their ideology or philosophy.

It is difficult however for the layman to assess and test the different points of view and ultimately comes down the question, as Coco read elsewhere in a different context, ‘who are you prepared to believe?’ whilst at the same time keeping only a tenuous hold on the current scientific thinking, for as has been seen very clearly in the last 500 years at least, current scientific thinking can be rapidly overturned by a new and aberrant ‘fact’ or a new explanation for a well-known fact that had previously not been adequately explained.

What Coco would suggest however is that we should not believe those who seek only to silence the opposition and are not prepared to let you listen to any alternative presentation or explanation.

The first one to plead his cause seems right, until his neighbour comes and examines him. Proverbs 18.17


Anti-scientific woke

Coloured

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South Africa’s Tyla sparks culture war over racial identity

English is a very difficult language as we who were born to speak it know from the moment we meet someone from the other side of the railway track (Coco would have said over the border but English speakers from other parts of the world may misunderstand what that means). It is not merely the orthography that confuses. Every English reader, who has read the preface of the OED, knows how to pronounce ghotti and what also it means.

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A dangerous work(around)

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You may have heard the expression: Rubbish in, rubbish out.

Forty years ago Coco used a early version of SuperCalc (SC2 – a spreadsheet like Excel for those who cannot remember) for the preparation of monthly reports under the operating system C/PM. It was ‘cutting’ edge at the time using simple lists of transactions which were converted into a report showing monthly, cumulative and projected figures against a flexible budget. Coco shall not go into the technical details of this. It was not many months before Coco noticed that the report sometimes did not balance.

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Translation

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We use the word translation in many different ways, accountants and theologians having quite specialised uses of the term which may befuddle, without a translation, the poor man on the Clapham omnibus.

When you try to translate Do you feel special? and Do you feel different? into certain Romance languages the distinction found in Germanic languages may be lost. Difficulties abound when seeking to give the correct and proper meaning of words in one language in a second. But have you noticed that there is as much difficulty when translating from even very closely related languages?

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International Lymphoedema Framework – Uganda Framework

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There is excitement in the world as the ILF begins an epidemiological (for those of you who do not understand that word, let Coco stand alongside you) study to ascertain the prevalence of lymphoedema in Uganda.

It is well known that lymphatic filariasis is endemic in tropical countries, alongside other mosquito borne diseases, but the real extent of the problem and its expression among the people is not properly understood.

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John to Gaius

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When John was an old man, and probably in gaol on Patmos, he wrote to his friend Gaius in Ephesus a short letter essentially about three things, but there is a fourth hidden there also which lies behind all three.

It is a personal letter, and the manner in which he writes, hiding in some ways the matter of the things of which he is speaking, makes it clear that he wanted the letter to get to Gaius even if it meant that he would have to leave Gaius to make an intelligent guess about what he meant. Gaius knew John. He would know what John meant even if the uninformed reader did not.

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From the River to the Western Sea

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Coco had wondered whether a lengthy introduction would be wise, as Coco has been reliably informed on several occasions that a lengthy introduction, as well as being long-winded, normally puts potential readers off so that they do not become actual readers but merely passers-by, but having learned a lesson of late of one who did precisely that in order to avoid provoking the wrath of the censor, which in his case would have been the Roman governor of his gaol, Coco thought perhaps that he too should seek to avoid his wrath, but by placing this introductory paragraph to the introduction he has probably rather more drawn his attention to the possibility that what is about to be said may be more than a little controversial, though if you, dear reader, carefully read you will note that that there is not a single note of controversy about it at all.  The argument is clear; it is precise; it is too the point; it is not rambling; it does not stray; it is compelling, to the point and it leads to an inescapable and unavoidable conclusion which many may wish to avoid.

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Never too late

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It was a warm afternoon when Elmer and Wilma drove up the mountain from Brenzone through Prada. As they drove behind another tourist, whom they recognised as a tourist from the British number plates, for some reason his thoughts turned to his elder brothers, Barney and Homer. He missed them both, though they were quite different both in the characters and their careers.

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