Science and Pseudoscience

Pseudoscience in its various manifestations is now enjoying enormous popularity, is increasingly well organised and politically powerful. We can not identify pseudoscience by its errors. Seven hundred years ago Astrology was as wrong as now but was not pseudoscience, we might call it protoscience. The discovery of Polywater and the rush of confirming experiments was not pseudoscience. We know now that it was due to contaminated apparatus and wishful thinking and no one now has any evidence for it, so eventually its errors became known,

We detect by the fact that it is not falsifiable. Sir Karl Popper was struck by the fact that freudians and Adlerians could account for every quirk of human behaviour in their theoretical schemes. In fact, everything provided more evidence for their theories and it was impossible to find any fact that could possibly gainsay them. Pseudoscience may be distinguished by the fact that nothing they say can be falsified, it is impossible that they may be wrong. Thus if you catch an astrologer having made a false prediction (in the Tare case where it is not so vague as to be untestable) he will say that there was a further refinement of the theory which he did not take into account. Astrology is indeed complex and there will always be one more planet whose influence was not allowed for. Or if you tell a creationist that the fossil record shows a graduation of creatures with the simplest at the bottom and the more complex at the top he will blithely say that in the Noachian flood, men were better swimmers and floated to the top. Or again, if you tell a believer in the authenticity of the Turin shroud that it is remarkable that thé face of Jesus shows drops of blood which would surely have been wiped away by the disciples he will say that it was Friday evening and they were in a hurry. Darwin was well aware of the need for falsifiability. He pointed out on many occasions what experimental evidence would completely invalidate his theory. (Editor's note: many contemporary evolutionists and especially sociobiologists seem to be falling into error here, every physical and behavioural trait is taken as evidence of natural selection at work).

(name inaudible) has taken Popper's ideas a stage further. For something to be a pseudoscience there must also be a better, well-known account. Thus those who accepted the Ptolemaic theory of the planetary orbits were: not pseudoscientists because the Copernican theory was not available and because the scheme of Ptolemy was remarkably successful in predicting the paths of the heavenly bodies.

The main characteristics of Pseudoscience:

1) they are now more sophisticated and are prepared to say that their views are falsifiable but that it is very difficult to do so in practice. Thus it is very hard to determine is a man has the qualities that the astrologer had predicted. Again the Shroud Crowd are prepared for the carbon dating of the material to give an unfavourable result and ready with the excuse that it has been contaminated by recent handling.

2) They make big conclusions from small data. An example is the claim that the dinosaur footprints at Paluxy are intermingled with human prints and So are contemporary. In discussion later, it was pointed out that the creationists no longer cite the Paluxy prints and that perhaps that they are beginning to abandon some of their poor experimental methods. However, one speaker was not prepared to give them much credit. Erosion has worked on the so-called human prints and now they obviously have three toes. Even so : credulous a digger as Rev Carl Baugh can no longer regard them as human.

3) They cheerfully disregard basic laws of Science. Thus ESP effects are held to be independent of distance in their efficacy, i.e., they do not follow the inverse square law (which follows from the fact that we live in a three dimensional world). Again, UFO buffs are happy to talk of space ships "breaking the light barrier' in the same way that airplanes break the sound barrier

4) Although they claim to be scientists, they delight in headlines like "Science Baffled". "Mysterious" and "Break Through to New Realms". Thus creationists argue that as there are so many faults in Biology and geology, the only alternative is the miracles of Genesis. They look for completely new effects and accept them on the minimum of evidence.

5) When the evidence is too difficult, they ignore it. Thus creationists have largely given up trying to fault radioactive dating techniques, certainly to bridge the difference between their age for the earth compared to the dated one. Again, there is a man in Kentucky who is prepared to make another "Turin Shroud" for anyone who wants one.

In discussion, it was pointed out that New Zealand universities are hot beds of pseudoscience. How can people have areas of belief immune to rational discussion? Denis said that the only fault in our educational system is that undergraduates are not taught to think, they can not evaluate evidence

The talk concluded with warm applause.