Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [10]
As Bacon so adequately argued four centuries ago, and as cognitive psychologists have experimentally demonstrated the past couple of decades, the facts never speak just for themselves. Science is a very human enterprise. Nevertheless, like democracy, it is the best system we have so we should use it to its fullest extent and apply it wherever we can in our quest to know why.
This précis on knowing and not knowing introduces this volume, a collection of fourteen research articles and personal essays that I have written over the past decade—most (but not all) published in various journals and magazines (but none appearing in my other books)—about how science operates under pressure, during controversies, under siege, and on the precipice of the known as we peer out in search of a ray of light to illuminate the unknown. I have grouped them into four general sections, each of which embodies science on the edge between the known and the unknown, in that fuzzy shadowland that offers a unique perspective on both knowing and not knowing, and how science is the best tool we have to discern which is which.
Part I, “Science and the Virtues of Not Knowing,” begins with chapter 1, “Psychic for a Day,” a first-person account of an amusing and enlightening experience I had spending a day as an astrologer, tarot card reader, palm reader, and psychic medium talking to the dead. I did this on invitation from Bill Nye (the “science guy”) for an episode of his television series, Eyes of Nye. With almost no experience in any of these psychic modalities, I prepared myself the night before and on the plane flying to the studio, then improvised live-to-tape in studio, managing to completely convince my sitters that I had genuine psychic powers, reducing several subjects to tears when we “connected” to lost loved ones. It was at this point that I realized the emotional impact that psychics can have on believers, and the immorality of the entire process and industry that has built up around these claims.
Chapter 2, “The Big ‘Bright’ Brouhaha,” presents in narrative form the results of an empirical study I conducted (I include data charts as well) on the skeptical movement and the attempt to unite all nonbelievers, agnostics, atheists, humanists, and free thinkers under one blanket label—The Brights—and why, in my opinion, all such attempts will ultimately fail. The movement began at the Atheist Alliance International convention in 2003, and I was the first to sign the petition. The “Bright” movement gained momentum when myself and such luminaries as the evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins and the philosopher Daniel Dennett came out of the skeptical closet through opinion editorials. The reaction was swift and merciless—almost no one, including and especially nonbelievers, agnostics, atheists, humanists, and free thinkers, liked the name, insisting that its elitist implications, along with the natural antonym “dim,” would doom us as a movement. The entire episode afforded a real-time analysis of how social movements evolve.
Chapter 3, “Heresies of Science,” presents six heretical ideas that promise to shake up everything we have come to believe about the world: The Universe Is Not All There Is, Time Travel Is Possible, Evolution Is Not Progressive, Oil Is Not a Fossil Fuel, Cancer Is an Infectious Disease, and The Brain and Spinal Cord Can Regenerate. With each heresy, I consider the belief it is challenging, the alternative it offers, and the likelihood that it is correct. Since this is cutting-edge science, my conclusions are necessarily provisional, as in most of these claims the data are still coming in and resolution