• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The Ancient Engineers,

L. Sprague de Camp, Ballantine, 1973

Velikovsky: Scientists Confront Velikovsky,

Worlds in Collision Donald Goldsmith, ed., Cornell

University Press, 1977

The Emotional

Lives of Plants “Plant ‘Primary Perception,’ ”

K. A. Horowitz and others, Science,

189: 478–480 (1975)

A FEW YEARS AGO a committee of scientists, magicians and others was organized to provide some focus for skepticism on the border of science. This nonprofit organization is called “The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal” and is at 923 Kensington Avenue, Buffalo, N.Y. 14215. It is beginning to do some useful work, including in its publications the latest news on the confrontation between the rational and the irrational—a debate that goes back to the encounters between Alexander the Oracle-Monger and the Epicureans, who were the rationalists of his day. The committee has also made official protests to the networks and the Federal Communications Commission about television programs on pseudoscience that are particularly uncritical. An interesting debate has gone on within the committee between those who think that all doctrines that smell of pseudoscience should be combated and those who believe that each issue should be judged on its own merits, but that the burden of proof should fall squarely on those who make the proposals. I find myself very much in the latter camp. I believe that the extraordinary should certainly be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Scientists are, of course, human. When their passions are excited they may abandon temporarily the ideals of their discipline. But these ideals, the scientific method, have proved enormously effective. Finding out the way the world really works requires a mix of bunches, intuition and brilliant creativity; it also requires skeptical scrutiny of every step. It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science. In my opinion the claims of borderline science pall in comparison with hundreds of recent activities and discoveries in real science, including the existence of two semi-independent brains within each human skull; the reality of black holes; continental drift and collisions; chimpanzee language; massive climatic changes on Mars and Venus; the antiquity of the human species; the search for extraterrestrial life; the elegant self-copying molecular architecture that controls our heredity and evolution; and observational evidence on the origin, nature and fate of the universe as a whole.

But the success of science, both its intellectual excitement and its practical application, depend upon the self-correcting character of science. There must be a way of testing any valid idea. It must be possible to reproduce any valid experiment. The character or beliefs of the scientist are irrelevant; all that matters is whether the evidence supports his contention. Arguments from authority simply do not count; too many authorities have been mistaken too often. I would like to see these very effective scientific modes of thought communicated by the schools and the media; and it would certainly be an astonishment and delight to see them introduced into politics. Scientists have been known to change their minds completely and publicly when presented with new evidence or new arguments. I cannot recall the last time a politician displayed a similar openness and willingness to change.

Many of the belief systems at the edge or fringe of science are not subject to crisp experimentation. They are anecdotal, depending entirely on the validity of eyewitnesses who, in general, are notoriously unreliable. On the basis of past performance most such fringe systems will turn out to be invalid. But we cannot reject out of hand, any more than we can accept at face value, all such contentions. For example, the idea that large rocks can drop from the skies was considered absurd by eighteenth-century scientists; Thomas Jefferson remarked about