Blog of Revelation

About 52 years ago, a scientist published a paper in a journal in which he uses contemporary (for 1955) scientific data to make some logical speculation about what kind of chemical compounds could have existed during the period in which the earth was cooling.

Much of his speculation (I assume) proved to be unfounded as its scientific field grew in the ensuing decades. That scientist went on to publish more papers and probably gave little thought to that speculative work, until many years later he googled himself to find that the 1955 paper was being cited a lot.

Problem is, it's being cited by creationists. Turns out they are using that piece of outdated speculation as scientific evidence that life could not have begun without divine intervention.

That scientist didn't like it, so he retracted the paper.

That story in itself isn't too exciting to me. However, it reinvigorated memories of a rant I often feel like giving to anyone who will listen. That is: Scientists may be experts of their field but, like any expert of any field be it a doctor, a lawyer, a mechanic, or whatever, they are fallible and sometimes wrong.

Many logically minded, thinking, near-rational creationists are desperate for scientific validity so they scour journal articles as old as 1955 and older (Newton's Principia is often appealed to) just so they can do what their opponents in the argument are doing.

People tend to take expert advice for granted. The majority of the creationists citing the paper probably don't have the skill to read scientific articles (and it is a skill which requires practice). It seems like they couldn't even figure out that it was speculation with outdated evidence. It doesn't look like they knew that the author wasn't even an expert in astrophysics, but a material scientist. Yet somewhere through the grapevine, someone heard about (or researched) this paper, gathered what they wanted from it and began to pass that info along to people who just believed it and went on citing it.

This phenomenon is prevalent in our society. Take the atkins diet. If you ask the average atkins dieter to explain to you why this particular diet works, they don't know or have a basic, but probably fallacious or simplistic explanation of why carbs are bad for dieters. Little attention is paid to other health concerns about atkins, but they presume that the "doctor" who invented the diet is an expert and "diet" is inherently healthy. (carb elimination/all protein diets are actually quite old, suggested for obese patients who need surgery and must lose weight really fast, doctors have been putting people on these diets for a long time WITH THE STIPULATION THAT THEY NOT STAY ON THE DIET FOR LONGER THAN 3 OR 4 WEEKS lest their arteries explode)

Science reporting is bad. Scientists, even good ones, make all kinds of mistakes. The press often makes a big deal out of small discoveries and totally ignores important discoveries based solely on the news organizations' speculation regarding their viewership. And just because a scientist has done something amazing in, say, the field of genetics, doesn't mean he isn't an idiot when it comes to something like social biology.

Doctors are not all geniuses, in my experience I've met at least 2 very ignorant ones. Many many mechanics are amazing with machines, but many also exploit our ignorance and make us pay huge amounts of money for scams like "break pad cleaning". Lawyers have pretty amazing memory banks for all the texts they were forced to memorize by the educational system but few can extrapolate from those books to the real world simply because it isn't necessarily important to have that skill in the court of law.

I could go on, but my point is this: Don't look to experts for the definitive word. Question everything, be skeptical. A doctor is someone you need to trust regarding your health, a marine biologist is someone you need to trust regarding the health of polar bears and sea lions in a warming arctic, and your mom is someone you need to trust for advice when you're raising your first child. The real hard trick is to learn how much of what these people say is important, relevant, useful fact and how much is human self-deluding, inaccurate, harmful fiction.

When the creationists were looking for a paper to show how life couldn't have started on its own, they found a paper which supported that view and took it for granted that, being in a scientific journal, it weighed as strong evidence. I would like it if people hearing their claims would not take them for fact but would do something to learn for themselves whether those claims were accurate.