A superb speech by Michael Crichton on the dangers of "consensus science" and shaky prognostication."
Crichton argues that scientists have too often ignored inconvenient data when it clashed with an established scholarly consensus. He also condemns the use of predictive models that use formulas to which no hard values can be attached and where "educated guessing" merely amounts to confirming one's own prejudices.
The late Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich come in for especially rough handling for their predictions of nuclear winter and mass starvation -- predictions for which they could offer no proof but which they hoped would advance particular social policies. Because these predictions seemed to serve noble causes, each generated a comfortable "scientific consensus" which discourages skepticism about their claims and stigmatizes those who questioned them.
The latest example of this smug disregard for the true scientific process is the consensus that has developed around global warming. Those who dared to challenge the latest orthodoxy, such as Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, have been subjected to smear campaigns and a very un-scholarly villification. Lomborg was the target of a brutal academic mugging by the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty which concluded he was a liar and unfit to comment on climate change. Greens around the world demanded that his editor be fired, that his publisher, Cambridge University Press, be boycotted and Lomborg be removed from his job as director of Denmark's Environmental Assessment Institute. Two weeks ago, however, the forces of climatic correctness got their comeuppance when the Danish Ministry of Science chose to back Lomborg and condemned the Committee on Scientific Dishonesty for its own dishonesty and lack of scientific rigor.
Anyone who has queried the consensus on Darwinism will be familiar with the rough ride given Lomborg. Proponents of Intelligent Design theory are accustomed to being accused of being fundamentalist rednecks out to turn back the clock to before the Scopes Monkey Trial. Perhaps at some future point they, like Lomborg, will be accorded a fairer hearing.
Posted by Dexter at January 3, 2004 12:01 PM