Hogan, James P - icking the Sacred Cow

VIP免费

2024-12-19 0 0 2.32MB 186 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Kicking the Sacred Cow:

Questioning the Unquestionable and Thinking the

Impermissible

James P. Hogan

form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-7434-8828-8

Cover art by Allan Pollack

First printing, July 2004

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hogan, James P

Kicking the sacred cow : questioning the unquestionable and thinking the

impermissible / by James P. Hogan.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-7434-8828-8 (HC)

1. Science I. Title.

Q158.5.H65 2004

500--dc22

2004009764

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

DEDICATION

To Halton Arp, Peter Duesberg—

and all other scientists of integrity who followed where the evidence pointed, and stood by their

convictions.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The help and advice of the following people is gratefully acknowledged—for generously giving their

time in describing their work and answering questions; providing invaluable material without which the

book would not have been possible; giving more of their time to reading, criticizing, and offering

suggestions; and in some cases for the plain, simple moral support of wanting to see it finished. A few

words at the front never seems enough to repay this kind of cooperation.

John Ackerman, Firmament & Chaos, Philadelphia, PA; Halton Arp, Max-Planck Institut für

Astrophysik, Germany; Russell T. Arndts; Andre Assis, Universidade Estadual del Campinas-Unicamp,

São Paulo, Brazil; Petr Beckmann, Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering, University of Colorado,

Boulder; Michael J. Bennett; Tom Bethell, Hoover Institution, Stanford, CA, andAmerican Spectator ,

Washington, DC; Anthony Brink, South African Bar, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa; Candace Crandall,

Science & Environmental Policy Project, Arlington, VA; David Crowe, Reappraising AIDS Society,

Alberta, Canada; Peter Duesberg, Department of Molecular & Cell Biology, University of California,

Berkeley; Fintan Dunne, AIDS Watch, Dublin, Ireland; Hugh Ellsaesser, visiting scientist, Lawrence

Livermore Laboratories, Livermore, CA; Scott Fields; Charles Ginenthal,The Velikovskian , Queens,

NY; Tim Gleason, Unionville, CT; Larry Gould, Department of Physics, University of Connecticut,

Storrs; Tina Grant, Venice, CA; Lewis Greenberg,Kronos , Deerfield Beach, FL; Sheryl Guffrey, Tulsa,

OK; Ron Hatch, GPS Consultant, Wilmington, CA; Howard Hayden, Professor Emeritus of Physics,

University of Connecticut, Storrs; Marjorie Hecht, 21st Century Science Associates, Leesburg, VA;

Alex Hogan; Jackie Hogan; Joe Hogan; Mike Hogan; Bob Holznecht, Auto Air, Coco Beach, FL; Kent

Hovind, Pensacola, FL; Les Johnson, NASA, Marshall Spaceflight Center, Huntsville, AL; Phillip

Johnson, Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley; Jeff Kooistra, Champagne, IL; Eric

Lerner, Princeton, NJ; Robert Lightfoot, Chattanooga, TN; Anthony Liversidge, New York, NY; Scott

Lockwood, Lubbock, TX; Christine Maggiore, Alive & Well, Venice, CA; George Marklin, Houston,

TX; Paul Marmet, University of Ottawa, Canada; Mike Miller, Quackgrass Press; Bill Nichols, Seattle,

WA; Mike Oliver, Carson City, NV; Henry Palka, Farmington, CT; Robert Pease, Professor Emeritus

of Physical Climatology at the University of California, Riverside; Peter Perakos; Thomas E. Phipps Jr.,

Urbana, IL; C. J. Ransom, Colleyville, TX; Lynn E. Rose, Solana Beach, CA; Peter Saint-Andre,

Monadnock, NH; S. Fred Singer, SEPP, Arlington, VA; Michael Sisson, Tampa, FL; Patrick Small;

Toren Smith, Studio Proteus, San Francisco, CA; E. D. Trimm, Covington, GA; Valendar Turner,

Royal Perth Hospital, Australia; Ruyong Wang, St. Cloud State University, MN; Brent Warner, NASA,

Goddard Spaceflight Center, Greenbelt, MD; Jonathan Wells, Olympia, WA; Eleanor Wood, Spectrum

Literary Agency, New York, NY.

Introduction

Engineering and the Truth Fairies

Science really doesn't exist. Scientific beliefs are either proved wrong, or else they

quickly become engineering. Everything else is untested speculation. —JPH

My interest in science began at an early age, as a boy growing up in postwar England. One of my

older sisters, Grace—I was the baby by a large gap in a family with four children, two boys and two girls

—was married to a former Royal Air Force radio and electronics technician called Don. He was one of

the practical kind that people described as "good with his hands," capable of fixing anything, it seemed.

The shelves, additions to the house, and other things that he created out of wood were always true and

square, with the pieces fitting perfectly. He would restore pieces of machinery that he had come across

rusting in the local tip, and assemble a pile of electrical parts and a coil wound on a cardboard custard

container into a working radio. I spent long summer and Christmas vacations at Grace and Don's,

learning the art of using and taking care of tools ("The job's not finished until they're cleaned and put

away" was one of his maxims), planning the work through ("Measure twice; cut once" was another), and

talking with people across the world via some piece of equipment that he'd found in a yard sale and

refurbished. Kids today take such things for granted, but there was no e-mail then. Computers were

unheard of. Don would never pass by a screw or a bolt lying on the roadside that might be useful for

something one day. His children once told me ruefully that they never got to play with their presents on

Christmas Day because the paint was never dry.

Although Don was not a scientist, working with him imbued in me an attitude of mind that valued

the practicality of science as a way of dealing with life and explaining much about the world. Unlike all of

the other creeds, cults, and ideologies that humans had been coming up with for as long as humanity had

existed, here was a way of distinguishing between beliefs that were probably true and beliefs that were

probably not in ways that gave observable results that could be repeated. Its success was attested to by

the new world that had come into existence in—what?—little more than a century. From atoms to

galaxies, phenomena were made comprehensible and predictable that had remained cloaked in

superstition and ignorance through thousands of years of attempts at inquiry by other means. Airplanes

worked; magic carpets didn't. Telephones, radio, and TV enabled anyone, at will, anytime, to

accomplish things which before had been conceivable only as miracles. The foot deformities that I had

been born with were corrected by surgery, not witch doctoring, enabling me later to enjoy a healthy life

mountain hiking and rock climbing as a teenager. Asimov's nonfiction came as a topping to the various

other readings I devoured in pursuit of my interest: Science was not only effective and made sense; it

could actually befun too!

I would describe science as formalized common sense. We all know how easily true believers can

delude themselves into seeing what they want to see, and even appearances reported accurately are not

always to be relied upon. (My older brother was something of a card sharp, so there was nothing

particularly strange in the idea of things sometimes not being what they seemed.) What singled science

out was its recognition of objective reality: that whatever is true will remain true, regardless of how

passionately someone might wish things to be otherwise, or how many others might be induced to share

in that persuasion. A simple and obvious enough precept, one would have thought. Yet every other

belief system, even when professing commitment to the impartial search for truth, acted otherwise when

it came to recruiting a constituency. And hence, it seemed, followed most of the world's squabbles and

problems.

So it was natural enough for me to pursue a career in the Royal Aircraft Establishment,

Farnborough—a few miles from where Grace and Don lived—after passing the requisite three days of

qualifying examinations, as a student of electrical, mechanical, and aeronautical engineering. On

completion of the general course I went on to specialize in electronics. Later, I moved from design to

sales, then into computers, and ended up working with scientists and engineers across-the-board in just

about every discipline and area of application. Seeing the way they went about things confirmed the

impressions I'd been forming since those boyhood days of working with Don.

The problems that the world had been getting itself into all through history would all be solved

straightforwardly once people came around to seeing things the right way. Wars were fought over

religions, economic resources, or political rivalries. Well, science showed that men made gods, not vice

versa. Sufficiently advanced technologies could produce plenty of resources for everybody, and once

those two areas were taken care of, what was there left to create political rivalries over? Then we could

be on our way to the stars and concern ourselves with things that were truly interesting.

When I turned to writing in the mid seventies—initially as a result of an office bet, then going

full-time when I discovered I liked it—a theme of hard science-fiction with an upbeat note came

naturally. I was accused (is that the right word?) of reinventing the genre of the fifties and sixties from the

ground up, which was probably true to a large degree, since I had read very little of it, having come into

the field from a direction diametrically opposed to that of most writers. The picture of science that I

carried into those early stories reflected the idealization of intellectual purity that textbooks and

popularizers portray. Impartial research motivated by the pursuit of knowledge assembles facts, which

theories are then constructed to explain. The theories are tested by rigorous experiment; if the predicted

results are not observed, the theories are modified accordingly, without prejudice, or abandoned.

Although the ideal can seldom be achieved in practice, free inquiry and open debate will detect and

correct the errors that human frailty makes inevitable. As a result, we move steadily through successively

closer approximations toward the Truth.

Such high-flying fancy either attains escape velocity and departs from the realities of Earth totally,

or it comes back to ground sometime. My descent from orbit was started by the controversy over

nuclear energy. It wasn't just political activists with causes, and journalists cooking a story who were

telling the public things that the physicists and engineers I knew in the nuclear field insisted were not so.

Other scientists were telling them too. So either scientists were being knowingly dishonest and distorting

facts to promote political views; or they were sincere, but ideology or some other kind of bias affected

what they were willing to accept as fact; or vested interests and professional blinkers were preventing

the people whom I was talking to from seeing things as they were. Whichever way, the ideal of science

as an immutable standard of truth where all parties applied the same rules and would be obliged to agree

on the same conclusion was in trouble.

I quickly discovered that this was so in other fields too. Atmospheric scientists whom I knew

deplored the things being said about ozone holes. Chemists scoffed at the hysteria over carcinogens. A

curious thing I noticed, however, was that specialists quick to denounce the misinformation and

sensationalized reporting concerning their own field would accept uncritically what the same information

sources and media said with regard to other fields. Nuclear engineers exasperated by the scares about

radiation nevertheless believed that lakes formed in some of the most acidic rock on the continent had

been denuded of fish (that had never lived there) by acid rain; climatologists who pointed out that nothing

could be happening to the ozone layer since surface ultraviolet was not increasing signed petitions to ban

DDT; biologists who knew that bird populations had thrived during the DDT years showed up to picket

nuclear plants; and so it went on. Clearly, other factors could outweigh the objective criteria that are

supposed to be capable of deciding a purely scientific question.

Browsing in a library one day, I came across a creationist book arguing that the fossil record

showed the precise opposite of what evolutionary theory predicts. I had never had reason to be anything

but a staunch supporter of Darwinism, since that was all I'd been exposed to, and everyone knew the

creationists were strange anyway. But I checked the book out and took it home, thinking it would be

good for a laugh. Now, I didn't buy their Scriptural account of how it all began, and I still don't. But

contrary to the ridicule and derision that I'd been accustomed to hearing, to my own surprise I found the

evidence that they presented for finding huge problems with the Darwinian theory to be solid and

persuasive. So, such being my bent, I ordered more books from them out of curiosity to look a bit more

deeply into what they have to say. Things got more interesting when I brought my findings up with

various biologists whom I knew. While some would fly into a peculiar mix of apoplexy and fury at the

mere mention of the subject—a distinctly unscientific reaction, it seemed—others would confide

privately that they agreed with a lot of it; but things like pressures of the peer group, the politics of

academia, and simple career considerations meant that they didn't talk about it. I was astonished. This

was the late-twentieth-century West, not sixteenth-century Spain.

Shortly afterward, I met Peter Duesberg, one of the nation's leading molecular biologists, tipped by

many to be in line for a Nobel Prize, suddenly professionally ostracized and defunded for openly

challenging the mainstream dogma on AIDS. What was most disturbing about it after talking with him

and his associates and reading their papers was that what they were saying made sense; the official party

line didn't. Another person I got to know was the late Petr Beckmann, professor emeritus of electrical

engineering, whose electrical interpretation of the phenomena conventionally explained by the Einstein

Relativity Theory (ERT) is equally compatible with all the experimental results obtained to date, simpler

in its assumptions, and more powerful predictively—but it is ignored by the physics community. I talked

to an astrophysicist in NASA who believed that Halton Arp—excommunicated from American

astronomy for presenting evidence contradicting the accepted interpretation of the cosmic redshifts that

the Big Bang theory rests on—was "onto something." But he would never say so in public, nor sign his

name to anything to that effect on paper. His job would be on the line, just as Arp's had been.

Whatever science might be as an ideal, scientists turn out to be as human as anyone else, and they

can be as obstinate as anyone else when comfortable beliefs solidify into dogma. Scientists have emotions

—often expressed passionately, despite the myths—and can be as ingenious as any senator at

rationalizing when a reputation or a lifetime's work is perceived to be threatened. They value prestige

and security no less than anyone else, which inevitably fosters convergences of interests with political

agendas that control where the money and the jobs come from. And far from least, scientists are

members of a social structure with its own system of accepted norms and rewards, commanding

loyalties that at times can approach fanaticism, and with rejection and ostracism being the ultimate

unthinkable.

This book is not concerned with cranks or simple die-hards, who are entitled to their foibles and

come as part of life's pattern. Rather, it looks at instances of present-day orthodoxies tenaciously

defending beliefs in the face of what would appear to be verified fact and plain logic, or doggedly closing

eyes and minds to ideas whose time has surely come. In short, where scientific authority seems to be

functioning more in the role of religion protecting doctrine and putting down heresy than championing the

spirit of the free inquiry that science should be.

The factors bringing this about are various. Massive growth of government funding and the

direction of science since World War II have produced symbiotic institutions which, like the medieval

European Church, sell out to the political power structure as purveyors of received truth in return for

protection, patronage, and prestige. Sometimes vested commercial interests call the tune. In areas where

passions run high, ideology and prejudice find it easy to prevail over objectivity. Academic turf, like any

other, is defended against usurpers and outside invasion. Some readily trade the anonymity and drudgery

of the laboratory for visibility as celebrities in the public limelight. Peer pressure, professional image, and

the simple reluctance to admit that one was wrong can produce the same effects at the collective level as

they do on individuals.

I used to say sometimes in flippant moments that science was the only area of human activity in

which it actually matters whether or not what one believes is actually true. Nowadays, I'm not so sure. It

seems frequently to be the case that the cohesiveness that promotes survival is fostered just as effectively

by shared belief systems within the social-political structures of science, whether those beliefs be true or

not. What practical difference does it make to the daily routine and budget of the typical workaday

scientist, after all, if the code that directs the formation and behavior of the self-assembling cat wrote

itself out of random processes or was somehow inspired by a Cosmic Programmer, or if the universe

really did dance out of the head of a pin? Scientific truth can apparently be an elusive thing when you try

to pin it down, like the Irish fairies.

So today, I reserve the aphorism for engineering. You can fool yourself if you want, and you can

fool as many as will follow for as long as you can get away with it. But you can't fool reality. If your

design is wrong, your plane won't fly. Engineers don't have the time or the inclination for highfalutin'

theories. In fact, over-elaborate theories that try to reach too far, I'm beginning to suspect, might be the

biggest single menace affecting science. Maybe that's why I find that the protagonists of the later books

that I've written, now that I look back at them and think about it, have tended to be engineers.

ONE

Humanistic Religion

The Rush to Embrace Darwinism

I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable

to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.

—Richard Dawkins, professor of zoology,

Oxford University

History will judge neo-Darwinism a minor twentieth-century religious sect within

the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon biology.

— Lynn Margulis, professor of biology,

University of Massachusetts

Science, Religion, and Logic

Science and religion are both ways of arriving at beliefs regarding things that are true of the world.

What distinguishes one from the other? The most common answer would probably be that religion

derives its teaching from some kind of supreme authority, however communicated, which must not be

questioned or challenged, whereas science builds its world picture on the available facts as it finds them,

without any prior commitment to ideas of how things ought to be.

This is pretty much in accord with our experience of life, to be sure. But I would submit that, rather

than being the primary differentiating quality in itself, it comes about as a consequence of something more

fundamental. The difference lies in the relationship between the things that are believed and the reasons

for believing them. With a religion, the belief structure comes first as an article of faith, and whatever the

recognized authority decrees is accepted as being true. Questioning such truth is not permitted. Science

begins by finding out what's true as impartially as can be managed, which means accepting what we find

whether we like it or not, and the belief structure follows as the best picture that can be made as to the

reasons for it all. In this case, questioning a currently held truth is not only permissible but encouraged,

and when necessary the belief structure is modified accordingly. Defined in that way, the terms

encompass more than the kinds of things that go on in the neighborhood church or a research laboratory,

and take on relevance to just about all aspects of human belief and behavior. Thus, not walking under

ladders because it brings bad luck (belief in principle, first; action judged as bad, second) is "religious";

doing the same thing to avoid becoming a victim of a dropped hammer or splashed paint (perceiving the

world, first; deciding there's a risk, second) is "scientific."

Of course, this isn't to say that scientific thinking never proceeds according to preexisting systems

of rules. The above two paths to belief reflect, in a sense, the principles of deductive and inductive logic.

Deduction begins with a set of premises that are taken to be incontestably true, and by applying rules of

inference derives the consequences that must necessarily follow. The same inference rules can be applied

again to the conclusions to generate a second level of conclusions, and the procedure carried on as far

as one wants. Geometry is a good example, where a set of initial postulates considered to be

self-evident (Euclid's five, for example) is operated on by the rules of logic to produce theorems, which

in turn yield further theorems, and so on. A deductive system cannot originate new knowledge. It can

only reveal what was implicit in the assumptions. All the shelves of geometry textbooks simply make

explicit what was implied by the choice of axioms. Neither can deduction prove anything to be true. It

demonstrates merely that certain conclusions necessarily follow from what was assumed. If it's assumed

that all crows are black, and given that Charlie is a crow, then we may conclude that Charlie is black.

So deduction takes us from a general rule to a particular truth. Induction is the inverse process, of

inferring the general rule from a limited number of particular instances. From observing what's true of

part of the world, we try to guess on the basis of intuition and experience—in other words, to

"generalize"—what's probably true of all of it. "Every crow I've seen has been black, and the more of

them I see, the more confident I get that they're all black." However, inductive conclusions can never be

proved to be true in the rigorous way that deductions can be shown to follow from their premises.

Proving that all crows are black would require every crow that exists to be checked, and it could never

be said with certainty that this had been done. One disconfirming instance, on the other hand—a white

crow—would be sufficient to prove the theory false.

This lack of rigor is probably why philosophers and logicians, who seek precision and universally

true statements, have never felt as comfortable with induction as they have with deduction, or accorded

it the same respectability. But the real world is a messy place of imperfections and approximations,

where the art of getting by is more a case of being eighty percent right eighty percent of the time, and

doing something now rather than waste any more time. There are no solid guarantees, and the race

doesn't always go to the swift nor the battle to the strong—but it's the way to bet.

Deduction operates within the limits set by the assumptions. Induction goes beyond the

observations, from the known to the unknown, which is what genuine innovation in the sense of acquiring

new knowledge must do. Without it, how could new assertions about the world we live in ever be

made? On the other hand, assertions based merely on conjecture or apparent regularities and

coincidences—otherwise known as superstition—are of little use without some means of testing them

against actuality. This is where deduction comes in—figuring out what consequences should follow in

particular instances if our general belief is correct. This enables ways to be devised for determining

whether or not they in fact do, which of course forms the basis of the scientific experimental method.

Darwinism and the New Order

The Triumph of the Enlightenment

Scientific method played the central role in bringing about the revolutionary world view ushered in

by such names as Roger Bacon, Descartes, and Galileo, which by the time of the seventeenth-century

"Age of Enlightenment" had triumphed as the guiding philosophy of Western intellectual culture. No

longer was permissible Truth constrained by interpretation of the Scriptures, readings of Aristotle and the

classics, or logical premises handed down from the medieval Scholastics. Unencumbered by dogma and

preconceptions of how reality had to be, Science was free to follow wherever the evidence led and

uncover what it would. Its successes were spectacular indeed. The heavenly bodies that had awed the

ancients and been regarded by them as deities were revealed as no different from the matter that makes

up the familiar world, moved by the same forces. Mysteries of motion and form, winds and tides, heat

and light were equally reduced to interplays of mindless, mechanical processes accessible to reason and

predictable by calculation. The divine hand whose workings had once been invoked to explain just about

everything that happened was no longer necessary. Neither, it seemed to many, were the traditional

forms of authority that presented themselves as interpreters of its will and purpose. The one big

exception was that nobody had any better answers to explain the baffling behavior of living things or

where they could have come from.

The Original in "Origins": Something for Everyone

A widely held view is that Charles Darwin changed the world by realizing that life could appear and

diversify by evolution. This isn't really the way it was, or the reason he caused so much excitement. The

notion of life appearing spontaneously through some natural process was not in itself new, being found in

such places as the Babylonian creation epic,Enuma Elish , and ancient Chinese teachings that insects

come from nothing on the leaves of plants. Ideas of progressive development are expressed in the

philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus, while Amaximander of Miletus (550 b.c.) held that life had

originated by material processes out of sea slime—in some ways anticipating modern notions of a

prebiotic soup. Empedocles of Ionia (450 b.c.) proposed a selection-driven process to account for

adaptive complexity, in which all kinds of monstrosities were produced from the chance appearance of

various combinations of body parts, human and animal, out of which only those exhibiting an inner

harmony conducive to life were preserved and went on to multiply. The line continues down through

such names as Hume, who speculated that the random juggling of matter must eventually produce

ordered forms adapted to their environment; Lamarck, with his comprehensive theory of evolution by

the inheritance of characteristics acquired through the striving of the parents during life; to Charles

Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who studied the similarities of anatomy between species and

speculated on common ancestry as the reason.

The full title of Charles Darwin's celebrated 1859 publication wasThe Origin of Species By Means

of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life . The case it

presents hardly needs to be elaborated here. Essentially, species improve and diverge through the

accumulation of selected modifications inherited from common ancestors, from which arise new species

and eventually all of the diversity that makes up the living world. The solution that Darwin proposed was

simple and elegant, requiring three premises that were practically self-evident: that organisms varied; that

these variations were inherited; and that organisms were engaged in a competition for the means of

survival, in the course of which the better equipped would be favored. Given variations, and given that

they could be inherited, selection and hence adaptive change of the group as a whole was inevitable.

And over sufficient time the principle could be extrapolated indefinitely to account for the existence of

anything.

None of the ingredients was especially new. But in bringing together his synthesis of ideas that had

all been around for some time, Darwin provided for the first time a plausible, intellectually acceptable

naturalistic and materialist explanation for the phenomenon of life at a time when many converging

interests were desperately seeking one. Enlightenment thinkers, heady with the successes of the physical

sciences, relished the opportunity to finish the job by expelling the last vestiges of supernatural agency

from their world picture. The various factions of the new political power arising out of commerce and

manufacturing found common ground from which to challenge the legitimacy of traditional authority

rooted in land and Church, while at the same time, ironically, the nobility, witnessing the specter of

militant socialist revolution threatening to sweep Europe, took refuge in the doctrine of slow,

imperceptible change as the natural way of things. Meanwhile, the forces of exploitation and imperialism,

long straining against the leash of moral restraint, were freed by the reassurance that extermination of the

weak by the strong, and domination as the reward for excellence were better for all in the long run.

There was something in it for everyone. Apart from the old order fighting a rearguard action, the

doctrine of competitive survival, improvement, and growth was broadly embraced as the driving

principle of all progress—the Victorian ideal—and vigorously publicized and promoted. Science

replaced the priesthood in cultural authority, no longer merely serving the throne but as supreme

interpreter of the laws by which empires and fortunes flourish or vanish. Darwin's biographer, Gertrude

Himmelfarb, wrote that the theory could only have originated in laissez-faire England, because "Only

there could Darwin have blandly assumed that the basic unit was the individual, the basic instinct

self-interest, and the basic activity struggle."1

A Cultural Monopoly

Since then the theory has become established as a primary guiding influence on deciding social

values and shaping relationships among individuals and organizations. Its impact extends across all

institutions and facets of modern society, including philosophy, economics, politics, science, education,

and religion. Its advocates pronounce it to be no longer theory but incontestable fact, attested to by all

save the simple-minded or willfully obtuse. According to Daniel Dennett, Director of the Center for

Cognitive Studies at Tufts University and a staunch proponent of Darwinism, "To put it bluntly but fairly,

anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is

simply ignorant—inexcusably ignorant."2

And from Oxford University's professor of zoology, Richard Dawkins, one of the most vigorous

and uncompromising popularizers of Darwinism today: "It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet

somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked,

but I'd rather not consider that)."3

Dennett also expresses reservations about the suitability of anyone denying Darwinism to raise

children.4

Like the majority of people in our culture, I suppose, I grew up accepting the Darwinian picture

unquestioningly because the monopoly treatment accorded by the education system and the scientific

media offered no alternative, and the authority images that I trusted at the time told me there wasn't one.

And nothing much had happened to change that by the time of my own earlier writings. The dispute

between Hunt and Danchekker inInherit the Stars5 isn't over whether or not the human race evolved,

but where it happened. And eleven years later I was still militantly defending the theory.6 By that time,

however, my faith in many of the things that "everyone knows" was being eroded as a result of getting to

know various people with specialized knowledge in various fields, who, in ways I found persuasive,

provided other sides to many public issues, but which the public weren't hearing. Before long I found

myself questioning and checking just about everything I thought I knew.

Sweeping Claims—and Reservations

As far as I recall, doubts about evolution as it was taught began with my becoming skeptical that

natural selection was capable of doing everything that it was supposed to. There's no question that it

happens, to be sure, and that it has its effects. In fact, the process of natural selection was well known to

naturalists before Darwin's day, when the dominant belief was in Divine Creation. It was seen, however,

as a conservative force, keeping organisms true to type and stable within limits by culling out extremes.

Darwin's bold suggestion was to make it the engine of innovation. Observation of the progressive

changes brought about by the artificial selection applied in animal and plant breeding led him—a pigeon

breeder himself—to propose the same mechanism, taken further, as the means for transforming one

species into another, and ultimately to something else entirely.

But on rereadingOrigin , I developed the uneasy feeling of watching fancy flying away from reality,

as it is all too apt to do when not held down by the nails of evidence. The changes that were fact and

discussed in great detail were all relatively minor, while the major transitions that constituted the force

and substance of the theory were entirely speculative. No concrete proof could be shown that even one

instance of the vast transformations that the theory claimed to explain had actually happened. And the

same pattern holds true of all the texts I consulted that are offered today. Once the fixation on survival to

the exclusion of all else sets in, a little imagination can always suggest a way in which any feature being

considered "might" have conferred some advantage. Dull coloring provides camouflage to aid predators

or protect prey, while bright coloring attracts mates. Longer beaks reach more grubs and insects; shorter

beaks crack tougher seeds. Natural selection can explain anything or its opposite. But how do you test if

indeed the fittest survive, when by definition whatever survives is the "fittest"?

By Scaffolding to the Moon

All breeders know there are limits beyond which further changes in a characteristic can't be

pushed, and fundamental innovations that can never be induced to any degree. Some varieties of sheep

are bred to have a small head and small legs, but this can't be carried to the point where they reduce to

the scale of a rat. You can breed a larger variety of carnation or a black horse, but not a horse with

wings. A given genome can support a certain amount of variation, giving it a range of adaptation to

alterations in circumstances—surely to be expected for an organism to be at all viable in changeable

environments. But no amount of selecting and crossing horses will produce wings if the genes for

growing them aren't there. As Darwin himself had found with pigeons, when extremes are crossed at

their limit, they either become nonviable or revert abruptly to the original stock.

Horizontal variations within a type are familiar and uncontroversial. But what the theory proposes

as occurring, and to account for, are vertical transitions from one type to another and hence the

emergence of completely new forms. It's usual in the literature for these two distinct types of change to

be referred to respectively as "microevolution" and "macroevolution." I'm not happy with these terms,

however. They suggest simply different degrees of the same thing, which is precisely the point that's at

issue. So I'm going to call them "adaptive variation" and "evolutionary transition," which as a shorthand

we can reduce to "adaption" and "evolution." What Darwin's theory boils down to is the claim that given

enough time, adaptive variations can add up to become evolutionary transitions in all directions to an

unlimited degree. In the first edition ofOrigin (later removed) he said, "I can see no difficulty in a race of

bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their habits, with larger and larger

mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale." But, unsubstantiated, this is the same as

seeing no difficulty in adding to scaffolding indefinitely as a way to get to the Moon, or changing a

Chevrolet a part at a time as a workable way of producing a Boeing 747. Regarding the generally held

contention that there are limits to natural variation, he wrote, "I am unable to discover a single fact on

which this belief is grounded."7But there wasn't a single fact to support the belief that variation could be

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

KickingtheSacredCow:QuestioningtheUnquestionableandThinkingtheImpermissibleJamesP.HoganCopyright©2004byJamesP.HoganAllrightsreserved,includingtherighttoreproducethisbookorportionsthereofinanyform.ABaenBooksOriginalBaenPublishingEnterprisesP.O.Box1403Riverdale,NY10471www.baen.comISBN:0-7434-8828-8Cov...

展开>> 收起<<

Hogan, James P - icking the Sacred Cow.pdf

共186页,预览38页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Hogan, James P - icking the Sacred Cow

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: