No, his hard-drive is safe (as far as I know), but he’s hacked at the seduction of sciency by agenda. He recently gave a waaay-politically incorrect speech at Caltech in which he lambasted those he felt were passing off phony science as real science.
This is an important speech, in which Crichton says a number of important things about some very important subjects. Unfortunately, he says so many worthwhile things that the sheer length of the speech will prevent many people from absorbing and benefitting from what he has to say.
Therefore, over the next few days I will serialize excerpts from the speech. These will not be the entirety of the speech, and I strongly encourage you to read the original speech in its entirety, but these excerpts will give you a taste of what he had to say.
First up, Crichton comments on the Drake equation for predicting how many communicating extraterrestrial civilizations there may be in the Milky Way:
This serious-looking equation gave SETI an serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses-just so we’re clear-are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be "informed guesses." If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It’s simply prejudice.
As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from "billions and billions" to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. 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.
The fact that the Drake equation was not greeted with screams of outrage-similar to the screams of outrage that greet each Creationist new claim, for example-meant that now there was a crack in the door, a loosening of the definition of what constituted legitimate scientific procedure. And soon enough, pernicious garbage began to squeeze through the cracks.
MORE TOMORROW.
This is good stuff, although of course we will have to demur on the following point:
This is, of course, a highly problematic definition, at least depending on what is meant by “proof.”
As commonly used, the term “proof” can include degrees of evidence that fall short of scientifically testable, mathematically certain, absolutely irrefutable proof — e.g., “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.” And articles of faith, such as the existence of God and the resurrection of Christ — as Antony Flew has recently acknowledged — can admit of degrees of evidence. So faith is not believing in “something for which there is no proof,” but it does mean a kind of certitude that goes beyond the kind of confidence that the evidence would warrant on purely scientific grounds.
The reason that it can be rational to go beyond the kind of confidence that the evidence would warrant on purely scientific grounds is that the scientific method is not a method for the whole of life. A scientist is a scientist in the laboratory, but when he falls in love and gets married he must be capable of a kind of faith and trust in his spouse’s love and fidelity that goes well beyond what would be warranted by any evidence he might have if he were to weigh it by the principles he applies in the laboratory. At the same time, his belief in his spouse’s love and fidelity is not belief in something “for which there is no proof.”
Crichton, who normally rocks, errs when he says SETI is a religion. Even his own terms don’t support that conclusion. Go back and look at them carefully. What he SHOULD have said was: “Belief in ET life is a religion; the search for it is (or can be under the usual conditions) science.” Science searches for things all the time that do not in fact exist. Some of those searches are prompted by “religious” beliefs, but that does not render the search unscientific. Elemental mistake by a man who normally gets these things right.
PS: We lent our pc to SETI a few years back, and after taking one of the on-line polls, I was suprised to see that nearly 10% of the people doing SETI AT HOME did not believe in the existence of ET life. And I thought I was the only one. Anyway, I had read the protocols of SETI and concluded it was good science, regardless of the motives that might have prompted the project.
The definition of faith vis-a-vis proof and evidence is notoriously thorny. Aquinas notes that there are proofs for some things that are items of theology (e.g., God exists), and Vatican I later confirmed this infallibly.
However, Aquinas notes that for many (most) people, these proofs are inaccessible, and so for them the same item is an article of faith rather than something that has been proven.
Crichton steers onto the rocks here by defining faith in such a way that it excludes this (i.e., an item of faith is one for which there *is no* proof, not for which *I personally* have no proof).
But he’s a science-guy, not a philosophy/theology-guy, so you have to cut him some slack.
It seems to me, though, that there is a more substantial criticism to mount of his assertion that the Drake equation is non-science due to being non-testable. It seems to me that it *is* testable to some degree. If you listen up at the sky and you hear aliens talking and count the number of civilizations then that tends to tell you how many Drake civilizations there are up there.
Recent planetary observations about other solar systems also allow us to start to get a handle on other variables in the Drake equation.
So it seems to me not that the Drake equation is untestable and therefore non-science but that it is a slowly and laboriously and perhaps only partially testable hypothesis.
What *is* non-scientific is the confident announcement of any particular number of communicating civilizations. That is a number that, as Crichton points out, can swing between billions and nothing. But the Drake equation offers at least the shape of the factors that need to be taken into account when making a prediction that may one day be verified or falsified about the number of communicating civilizations.
In other words, there’s a difference between the immediately-testable and the never-ever-testable.
If this distinction isn’t recognized then every hypothesis that hasn’t yet been subject to a research grant can be ridiculed as non-science and dismissed.
“Can’t verify it just yet” doesn’t equal “Not worth checking out.”
That doesn’t mean I’m prepared to pronounce the Drake equation “science” (“SCIENCE!”), but it is a tool to be used in thinking through the question of communicating with alien civilizations.
By the way: I think the Drake Equation is horse-hocky, though I still think SETI is good science. I once ran my own Drakey looking at the total number of dry matches in the world and the total number of dry leaves in the world, and concluded that every forest on earth should have burnt to the ground millions of years ago.
We lent our pc to SETI a few years back, and after taking one of the on-line polls, I was suprised to see that nearly 10% of the people doing SETI AT HOME did not believe in the existence of ET life. And I thought I was the only one. Anyway, I had read the protocols of SETI and concluded it was good science, regardless of the motives that might have prompted the project.
You believe that the search for something you believe does not exist is good science? 😉
> You believe that the search for something you believe does not exist is good science? 😉
You’re misquoting Ed. He didn’t say he BELIEVES ET life DOES NOT EXIST — only that he DOES NOT BELIEVE IN ET life. Ed’s statement is compatible with open-minded ET agnosticism; your rephrasing implies active disbelief.
Barring any positive evidence for the NON-existence of ET life (and I’m very skeptical about the possibility of anyone EVER coming up with anything that could constitute such evidence), it is reasonable to be an ET agnostic rather than an ET disbeliever, and therefore reasonable to make some effort to search for something that might or might not exist, on the chance that if it does exist one might find it.
Why don’t you let Dr. Peters answer the question of whether or not I “misquoted” him (not that I put my interpretation of what he wrote in quotes). If I did, then I apologize. But if I did not. . . .
Anyway, I fail to see the utility in pointing out the flaws of what was obviously a jocular remark. Would it be more helpful if I wrote “You believe that the search for something in whose existence you do not believe is good science?”
Right, Steve. (You’d make a good lawyer.) And I insist inquiry about things one does not beleive exist CAN be (not always IS) good science nonetheless. It’s called exhausting possibilites, and is at root really an economic question (applying limited resources to unlimited applications), NOT a religious or scientific one. Science can never prove that hope disappears upon attaining beatific vision, so it would be a waste of resources to try to prove the religious assertion scientifically. But science often investigates matters that, as a matter of personal opinion (well-supported, etc.) people don’t “beleive” in. Will drug X11B cure blipophobia? No evidence suggests it will, but resources permitting (nb: economics!) we try the question scientifically. And guess what, drug X11B does not cure blipophobia. That does not mean the experiment was bad science (though it might have been a bad decision economically) indeed it was likely very good science. Else we haven’t proven anything, have we. SETI was scientifically rigorous and in context very inexpensive. What people do with data, how they interpret it, that’s another question.
Will drug X11B cure blipophobia? No evidence suggests it will, but resources permitting (nb: economics!) we try the question scientifically. And guess what, drug X11B does not cure blipophobia. That does not mean the experiment was bad science (though it might have been a bad decision economically) indeed it was likely very good science.
Do you have an actual example of a drug that was tested on a disease for which there was no evidence that it might be used to treat the disease? What you describe doesn’t sound like good science to me at all. “Evidence,” of course, would include folk traditions (cowpox and smallpox!), old wives’ tales, theoretical conclusions, etc. Evidence might even be found in the course of the drug being used to treat other diseases.
Not believing in the existence of something is not agnosticism. An agnostic would not say: “I do not believe that God exists,” but “The question of whether God exists has yet to be answered.” Likewise, a SETI agnostic would not say: “I do not believe in the existence of ET life,” but “I accept the possibility that ET life may exist.” I don’t see how, logically, one might accept both statements as being true. If a priest announced to you before Mass: “I do not believe in the Real Presence of Our Lord in Holy Communion,” would you take that as a statement of agnositicism on transubstantiation?
Do you have an actual example of a drug that was tested on a disease for which there was no evidence that it might be used to treat the disease? What you describe doesn’t sound like good science to me at all.
dcs, you’re factoring economic considerations into science. Science is about figuring out the answers to question in a rigorous manner, and you can investigate a question rigorously even if you know in advance or strongly suspect what the answer is.
If someone were to fund a study to prove that the sky is blue, it would be possible to conduct the study in a rigorous manner. We could take photographs of the sky, note the viewing conditions, do analysis on the spectrum of the light bouncing through the atmosphere, and in the end conclude–by the most rigorous means available–that the sky is indeed blue to the human eye under idealized daytime viewing conditions.
The level of rigor brought to bear on the question would make the study good *science.* What would be bad about it would be wasting the money on a project to prove such a trivially obvious fact about the world. That makes the study bad *economics* (which, one will remember, is the study of the application of limited resources which have more than one use), but it would not be bad *science.*
The badness lay in the decision to apply resources to such a study, but it is how the study itself was executed that determines its scientific quality.
DCS, I’m sorry if I read too much seriousness into what was meant as a jocular comment, but yes, frankly, there can indeed be an important distinction between saying “I believe X is false” and “I don’t believe X is true.” Not ALWAYS — the latter CAN mean the same as the former, but it doesn’t HAVE to.
In your example of the priest who says before Mass, “I don’t believe in transubstantiation,” obviously the gravity of a priest of all people saying such a thing and the magnitude of making such an explosive statement in this way strongly suggests that his disbelief goes well beyond agnosticism, or he would have been careful to phrase himself more clearly. But here is a counter-example without all that freight:
I have a friend who is Protestant but married to a Catholic, who generally attends Mass with her, even on holy days of obligations. Recently, however, he commented to me, “I didn’t go on December 8 because I don’t believe in what the HDoO celebrates.” Now, does that mean “I reject the dogma as false,” or “I don’t affirm it as true” without necessarily excluding it as false? It would be rash to assume the former.
And here is another example: When a man who is participating in SETI says that he had supposed that nearly everyone so participating would believe in ET life, but that in fact as much as 10 percent did not, including him, it would be rash to assume that this means more than “I am not among those who actively believes in ET life.”
“I didn’t go on December 8 because I don’t believe in what the HDoO celebrates.” Now, does that mean “I reject the dogma as false,” or “I don’t affirm it as true” without necessarily excluding it as false? It would be rash to assume the former.
Well, to add to the set of lawyerly distinctions in this thread, I might remark that saying: “I don’t believe in what the HDoO celebrates” is different from saying: “I don’t believe in the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary.” I would assume that a person who claimed the latter in fact meant “I reject the dogma.”
I also expected science to banish the evils of human thought—prejudice and superstition, irrational beliefs and false fears. I expected science to be, in Carl Sagan’s memorable phrase, “a candle in a demon haunted world.”
Unfortunately, he maybe dissappointed. His is giving science a much greater role in answering questions raised by the human spirit that he later seems to acknowledge are not the role of science. Frankly, while it may be very interesting in a Trivial Pursuit sort of way to know about subatomic particles, the big questions of why they exist in the sense of purpose, not just mechanics, science simply can’t answer.
I would be curious to know his thoughts about one of the biggest scientific frauds of all time – the “fact” of macro-evolution. Seems that many of his criticisms of ETI and global warming apply equally to macro-evolution.
Well, to add to the set of lawyerly distinctions in this thread, I might remark that saying: “I don’t believe in what the HDoO celebrates” is different from saying: “I don’t believe in the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary.” I would assume that a person who claimed the latter in fact meant “I reject the dogma.”
I’m not glomming to your distinction. I take “what the HDoO celebrates” to be a circumlocution for, and synonymous with, “the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary,” and therefore take the former statement to be a circumlocution for, and synonymous with, the latter.
And whichever one my friend said, I would take him to mean agnosticism, not rejection.
Columnist Inveighs Against “State of Fear”
Posted on January 12, 2005
It appears that only Left-wing movies built on sloppy science should be worthy of the public’s attention…