John writes:

> In defense of Wirt, I think he was mostly trying to be funny and couldn't
> resist a tantalizing "straight line", but that "humor" was at Brice's
expense
> and seemed mean-spirited.

If you think about it for a moment, all humor, except for that which is
self-deprecating, has a tinge of meanness to it and is generally at someone else's
expense.


> Denys posts links to two very thought-provoking articles about the problems
> of orthodoxy in scientific research and publication, and because we all
know
> Denys is a Republican, some of the Democrats among us seem to want to
dismiss
> or discredit the premise.

I read the Michael Crichton article and there's nothing fundamentally wrong
with it. Although Crichton is not a working scientist, he's not saying anything
that scientists say to one another every day, although there is enough
technically wrong in the article to have filled up a night's worth of writing if I
had had the time.

But Denys' not as innocent as you may make him seem. Denys has the uncanny
knack of finding and advocating the wackiest people and ideas that he can find.
The two web pages that he recommended are run by two completely different
organizations, one by a "research" organization funded by the Reverend Moon intent
on proving that anthropogenically induced global warming isn't real, and the
second by the Discovery Institute, whose sole mission is to promote the idea
of theistic evolution in schools and textbooks. Their intent is to inject the
presence of God-driven miracles into the "scientific" discussion as possible
explanations for the evolution of life and the universe rather than leave
everything to comprehensible, mechanical, natural causes.

These two organizations are attempting to increasingly disguise themselves as
normal research organizations by incorporating perfectly reasonable texts
into their webpages, publications and discussion groups. But it's a tactic that's
also used by even wackier groups such as the flat-earthers, hollow-earthers,
man-older-than-coal advocates, purveyors of perpetual motion machines, etc. In
effect, they're all saying, "Look, respected scientists agree with me!", when
in actual fact, nothing is probably further from the truth. The process is
called "quote mining," and the intelligent design people are especially adept at
it.

But you can ignore all of that and read Crichton's article for what it is.
Let me just respond to one point. In it, he writes:

=======================================

The Drake equation cannot be tested and
therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion. Faith is
defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof. The
belief that the Koran is the word of God is a matter of faith. The belief
that God created the universe in seven days is a matter of faith. The belief
that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There
is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty
years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no
evidentiary reason to maintain this belief. SETI is a religion.

=======================================

In this, he's dead wrong and he should have known better.

The "belief" in the presence of extrasolar planets has been with us for at
least 3000 years, but most especially so for the last half century, when we
"knew" that they had to be there, regardless of the fact that we had not a
scintilla of evidence of their actual existence. But that "belief" didn't make the
desire to hunt them out a religion. We "knew" their existence to be based on
simple hypothetico-deductive reasoning. Everything we knew about physics,
chemistry and astronomy suggested that their existence was inevitable. If they didn't
exist, it could only have meant that either (i) we didn't understand the
universe we exist in, or (ii) we exist in a very special manner in that universe,
the special creations of some God-like being who distorts time and space for
our pleasure. We automatically reject the second notion nowadays and presuppose
mediocrity. Every bit of evidence we have strongly suggests that there is
nothing special about us or our corner of the universe.

Beginning in 1995, we began finding the planets, solely because of increased
technological capabilities, and in the intervening nine years we have
discovered more than 123 additional planets, beyond the nine in our solar system.
Within the next 20 years, and perhaps sooner, we will begin imaging some of them.

SETI is no different in effect. It's no more a religion than the search for
extrasolar planets was. Everything we know at the moment suggests that the
universe should be filled with life, being as common as warm mud, and everything
we're doing now in space exploration is to search out that warm mud.

My personal intellectual hero is Dmitri Mendeleev, who first arranged the
elements into a "periodic table" based on their atomic weights and chemical
properties. No one before him had noticed the deep patterns that existed among the
elements. But far more than that, Mendeleev had the intellectual courage to
say that because his observed patterns implied deep mechanism, there had to be
elements unknown to science at that time, and he left holes in his table, one
here, one over there, another there.

That's a very difficult thing to do. It requires real personal courage. But
it's also the height of hypothetico-deductive reasoning. Was Mendeleev's
"belief" in the presence of those unknown elements a religion? Absolutely not. But
it certainly didn't mean that Mendeleev automatically knew that they existed
either. If they later proved to be non-existent imaginings, then it meant that
Mendeleev didn't understand the universe nearly as well as he thought, but
that's science too. Either way, you learn something fundamental about the universe
in which you exist.

The different sciences progress at different rates. Some sciences are so well
understood that they can be expressed extremely precisely mathematically.
Others are still in an exploratory phase. As a result, every science has its own
unique culture. At a recent conference, Steve Benner of the Univ. of Florida,
a molecular biochemist who sits on NIH grant review panels, said that his
committees would have said of the Hubble Space Telescope, "Let's reject it, it's
just a fishing expedition," because the vast majority of the outcomes couldn't
have been predicted in advance.

The next day in response, Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute said, "I'm
reminded about what Steve Benner said of molecular biologists' response to the
Hubble Space Telescope yesterday, 'Let's reject it, it's just a fishing
expedition.' SETI is a fishing expedition, too. But it's one where we're going after
very big fish."

Is then science without surprises? Our we so smart that we can predict the
world with absolute accuracy? Of course not. Although our "faith" in the
presence of extrasolar planets was nearly absolute, everything we learned from the
first discoveries came as a near total surprise. We never expected massive,
Jupiter-like planets orbiting just off of the surface of their stars. In fact, we
still don't fully understand their existences, but we now know that they're
there. The same will be true if we ever do discover another intelligent
civilization in the universe, but it's likely to be so much of a surprise that our
primary problem may be in first recognizing it.

Nevertheless we do expect microbial life to be common, and every bit of
evidence suggests that the life that inhabits the galaxies is very likely to be
much like the life we find here on Earth.

Wirt Atmar

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