At 07:51 AM 7/11/2006, David Bowman wrote:
>Regarding Moorad's request:
>
> >Perhaps we can hear someone's operational definition of science so
> that we all know what science is and what it is not.
> >Moorad
>
>I'm kind of partial to the definition put forward by John
>Zimon: "Science is the search for the widest possible consensus
>among competent researchers." ~ Dave Bowman
@ The chief science writer for Nature Magazine has a
definition. In the excerpted material of those who object to his
definition below, please note that I highlighted the words "INSOFAR
AS..", because they are the bottom line. ~ Janice
"The most trenchant criticism of historical science...comes from an
editor of Nature, Henry Gee (1999, p. 5, 8), who explicitly attacked
the scientific status of all hypotheses about the remote past; in his
words, ''they can never be tested by experiment, and so they are
unscientific. . . No science can ever be historical. Gee, H., 1999,
In search of deep time: New York, The Free Press, 267 p ...
...the differences in methodology that actually do exist between
historical and experimental science are founded upon a remarkably
pervasive feature of nature: a causal asymmetry between present and
past events, on the one hand, and present and future events, on the
other. Insofar as each practice is tailored to exploit the
information that nature puts at its disposal for evaluating
hypotheses, and the character of that information differs, neither
practice can be held up as more objective or rational than the other. ...
SUMMARY When it comes to testing hypotheses, historical science is
not inferior to classical experimental science. Traditional accounts
of the scientific method cannot be used to support the superiority of
experimental work. Furthermore, the differences in methodology that
actually do exist between historical and experimental science are
keyed to an objective and pervasive feature of nature, the asymmetry
of overdetermination. Insofar as each practice selectively exploits
the differing information that nature puts at its disposal, there are
no grounds for claiming that the hypotheses of one are more securely
established by evidence than are those of the other
In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life
by Henry Gee
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801487137/103-0432607-8714214?n=283155
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
For centuries, biological scientists have been using the Linnean
system of classification, organizing hierarchies of life forms by
their perceived similarities and differences. In the late 20th
century, some scientists have taken to using an alternative system
called cladistics, which bases taxonomic classifications on
ecological relationships. Under the first system, all algae fall into
a single large category, which is then subdivided into various genera
and species; under the second, green algae are grouped with plants,
chromophyte algae with waterborne fungi, and so forth to account for
the environments in which they live. Under the first system, dogs and
wolves and coyotes are separated; under the second, they are united,
for, the thinking goes, similarities of behavior and provenance are
more important than mere lines of evolutionary descent, which can
only be guessed at.
The debate over cladistics has largely been confined to seminar rooms
and laboratories. Henry Gee brings it to the general public in this
spirited look at how the science of paleontology, that grand tour of
what Gee calls Deep Time, is conducted. Replacing old family trees
with "cladograms," Gee challenges long-accepted notions about the
past (for example, the classification of Archaeopteryx, which walks
like a duck and quacks like a duck but is accounted for as a
dinosaur) and argues for a return to rigor in testing hypotheses. His
book, although about difficult issues, is immediately accessible, and
readers seeking to learn something about cladistics--which Gee
believes is "a revolution in thought as profound as that of Darwinian
evolution by natural selection"--are off to a fine start in these
pages. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to an out of print or
unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Deep Time, according to John McPhee, who coined the term, refers to
the millions of years in the geologic record, as opposed to our
everyday sense of time in which centuries and millennia seem endless.
In this eloquent treatise, Gee, a senior science writer for Nature,
asserts that the dramatically different scales on which deep and
ordinary time are measured have significant implications for
evolutionary biology and paleontology. He takes the provocative and
perhaps extreme view that scientists will never be able to
successfully answer evolutionary questions about the origins of
species, or about the pressures leading to various adaptations,
because events that occurred in deep time are not accessible to
experimentation. Indeed, he argues, such questions should be
considered outside the realm of science. In the place of traditional
biology, Gee offers the field of cladistics, "a way of looking at the
world in terms of the pattern that evolution creates, rather than the
process that creates the pattern." By using statistical techniques to
group anatomically similar organisms, both extant and extinct,
cladists assert that they are able to demonstrate testable
evolutionary relationships. While Gee does a superb job of explaining
the basics of cladistics and of revealing its use in the
controversies swirling around the origins of birds and of humans,
more cautious thinkers may find that he exaggerates both its power as
a tool and its acceptance by the scientific community. (Dec.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to
an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
~ Janice
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Received on Tue Jul 11 10:02:34 2006
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