X-Message-Number: 4680
Date: 27 Jul 95 18:57:42 EDT
From: Mike Darwin <>
Subject: Re: "Sweep of History"
Thanks to edgar Swank for the message that follows.
It is particularly appropriate to me because I get to see the school work of
Freshman and Sophomore High School science students (including manadory health
sciences classes) which my lover teaches at a typical suburban high school in
Sourthern California (Note: we are not talking about West LA or Watts here).
The majority of these kids cannot even REASON, let alone write or read
competently.
One of the reasons I stopped going to high schools AND colleges to speak on
cryonics or other medical/research topics was it began to make me sick to my
stomach and cause me intense anxiety trying to fall asleep at night. Alright, I
admit it, I'm a coward. But dealing with this is like standing in front of an
advancing tidal wave with a leaky bucket.
---------- Forwarded Message ----------
From: Edgar Swank, INTERNET:
TO: Mike Darwin, 75120,575
DATE: 7/27/95 2:17 AM
RE: Re: "Sweep of History"
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To: Mike Darwin <>
Subject: Re: "Sweep of History"
From: (Edgar Swank)
Message-ID: <>
Date: Thu, 27 Jul 95 01:28:31 PDT
Organization: HighNRG (408)292-0679 San Jose, Ca.
Hello Mike,
I've been reading with interest your debate with Ettinger et al. I
don't know if you already subscribe to the Libernet mailing list, but
I ran across this article which, I think, tends to support your view
that "Sweep of History" is not all progress. I'm not sending this
article to cryonet, Ettinger, or anyone other than you, so feel free
to further distribute it as you think appropriate.
==================================================================
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 15:51:38 -0400
From: (R. Douglas Horton)
Subject: Defending Against Superstition
To: , ,
NEW YORK TIMES -- June 6, 1995
Scientists Deplore Flight From Reason - By MALCOLM W. BROWNE
SINCE at least the time of Archimedes, the third-century B.C. Greek
physicist who was slain by a Roman soldier, scientists have occasionally
had to defend themselves from forces anathema to rational thought. Once
again many scientists believe their backs are to the wall, and participants
at a meeting last week in New York resolved to start fighting back.
There is growing danger, many said, that the fabric of reason is being ripped
asunder, and that if scientists and other thinkers continue to acquiesce in the
process, the hobbling of science and its hand-maidens - medicine and technology
among them - seems assured. Moreover, many participants argued, the same
cognitive disease afflicting science in the United States and many other
countries could eventually even unravel democracy, which depends on
the capacity of citizens to reach rational estimates.
Some 200 worried scientists, doctors, philosophers, educators and thinkers
from around the country convened for a three-day meeting at the New York
Academy of Sciences to exchange views and plot strategy. Held under the
rubric "The Flight from Science and Reason," the meeting was organized as a
call to arms. Defenders of scientific methodology were urged to
counterattack against faith healing, astrology, religious fundamentalism
and paranormal charlatanism. But beyond these threats to rational
behavior, participants at the meeting aimed their barbs at "post-modernist"
critics of science who contend that truth in science depends on one's point
of view, not on any absolute content.
Participants deplored what they see as a growing trend toward the
exploitation of scientific ideas to attack science. They cited the physics
of relativity and quantum mechanics as pillars of 20th-century thought that
are sometimes distorted by critics of science into arguments that nothing
in science is certain and that mystery and magic have an equal claim to belief.
At risk is public trust in such scientific tools as statistical analysis,
controlled laboratory and clinical experiments, the rational analysis of
political oratory, and the study of history, anthropology and every other
field dependent on disciplined, rational thought.
Another weapon increasingly wielded by opponents of science, participants
warned, is the frequent allegation that fraud in scientific inquiry has
become so common that scientists cannot be trusted.
Dr. David L. Goodstein, a physicist and vice provost of the California
Institute of Technology, said that although fraud existed, it was not
nearly as common as critics of science contended. Dr. Goodstein, who has
worked with Federal agencies in developing guidelines for defining
misconduct in science, said that from 1980 to 1987 only cases of
misconduct came to light - involving some three ten-thousandths of 1
percent of all scientists receiving research grants. (All but five of
those cases involved doctors or biologists, Dr. Goodstein said.) Excessive
legal constraints on scientists, he asserted, can "endanger the scientists'
right to be wrong," hindering the scientific process.
Although most medical schools discount the claims of chiropractors, faith
healers and practitioners of "alternative medicine," many medical schools
lack the courage to stand by their convictions, Dr. Gerald Weissmann, a
doctor at the New York University Medical Center, said. "Silence is easier
in politically dangerous times," he said. "Medicine and science today are
being confronted by lunatics, fascists and the practitioners of bizarre magic."
Dr. Paul Kurtz, a professor of philosophy at the State University of New
York at Buffalo, contended that post-modernists of both the political left
and right denied that scientific knowledge was possible. The result, he
said, was an "erosion of the cognitive process which may undermine democracy."
Americans have become fascinated by angels and "out of body" experiences,
said Dr. Wendy Kaminer of Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Mass., and seem to
be discarding the habit of critical thinking. It is in this environment that
irrational ideas take hold, she said, asserting, "They tell us, for instance,
that there is no death, only 'energy transformation,' and that science,
born out of speculation, cannot help us understand the spiritual world.
"The dissemination of pseudoscience, including such things as the
fascination with near-death experiences, the growing belief by Americans -
34 percent of them - in reincarnation, and such books as the best seller
'Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens' by Harvard University's John E.
Mack, are dangerous. They help to break down the standards of reason, and
that can lead to such vicious doctrines as Aryan theories of race, and
Lysenkoism." The term is named after Trofim D. Lysenko, an agronomist who
erroneously believed that acquired characteristics could be inherited, and
nearly destroyed Soviet agriculture.
Organizers of the meeting acknowledged that it was not structured to give
enemies of science equal time; the latter have ample opportunity to express
their positions on television talk shows, popular books and in the press,
they said.
Among the writers sharply criticized at the meeting but not present were
Shirley MacLaine, the actress who espouses the certainty of reincarnation;
Dr. Mack, the author of the book about alien abductions; Dr. Sandra
Harding of the University of Delaware, who has argued that "value-free
research is a delusion" and has compared traditional methods of science to
"marital rape, the husband as scientist forcing nature to his wishes;" and
Betty J. Eadie and Curtis Taylor, the authors of "Embraced by the Light,"
a book about near-death experience.
But despite their unwillingness to transform the meeting into a debate,
speakers were subjected to some verbal brickbats from a few hecklers in the
audience.
His fists clenched, Dr. Daniel W. Miller, a Brooklyn psychologist,
stepped to the microphone to denounce one of the panels. "This is not an
objective platform, and I've heard nothing but vituperation from the
scientific power structure trying to reinforce its own image," he said.
"Your medicine and science are based on your presuppositions. I don't deny
the utility of conventional medicine, but you refuse to acknowledge that
alternative therapies may also be useful."
Dr. Miller's business card describes his specialty as "Organic
Process/Past Lives Psychotherapy."
Just as serious a threat to rational inquiry as paranormal nostrums,
according to several participants, is ethnocentrism and efforts by various
groups to rewrite history in the interest of raising self-esteem.
Dr. Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, an anthropologist at Wayne State
University in Pleasant Ridge, Mich., who directs a program to recruit
members of ethnic minority groups into the sciences, assailed what he said
was the distortion of history to enhance ethnic pride.
"A teaching aid widely distributed among teachers of African-American
studies asserts that African science developed along different and superior
lines," he said, in which the ancient Egyptians - portrayed as the
ancestors of modern blacks - supposedly led the way with their studies of
"trans-material causation," remote viewing, astrology and other forms of
magic. Students may leave such courses with the impression that ancient
Egyptian theological mysticism offers a more accurate view of the world
than do the canons of science.
But other speakers challenged the idea that education should take the blame
for superstition and belief in all that is supernatural or unreasonable.
"Take Russia and France," Dr. Weissmann said. "Both countries educate
their young people in science far better than we do. But the belief in
magic and the supernatural is certainly more widespread in France and
Russia than it is in the United States."
Dr. Dudley R. Herschbach of Harvard University, winner of the 1986 Nobel
Prize in Chemistry, spoke wistfully about opportunities lost in a series of
documentary programs broadcast recently by the Public Broadcasting System.
Dr. Herschbach and two other Nobel winners, Dr. Leon M. Lederman and Dr.
J. Michael Bishop, were the subjects of these three programs, called "The
Nobel Legacy," broadcast in April and May.
The three scientists sought to convey to the audience a sense of the beauty
and excitement of scientific inquiry, but in the broadcast programs, the
producers inserted frequent interjections by Dr. Anne Carson, a professor
of classics at Emory and McGill Universities who is a harsh critic of many
of the principles of science.
"I never met her, and I was sorry I couldn't engage her in a dialogue," Dr.
Herschbach said.
Dr. Saul Green, who for many years was a biochemist at Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute in New York, declared that "it's time to
get nasty - to launch a crusade against quackery." Patent medicines that
claim to "stimulate the immune system," for example, couch their
advertisements in pseudoscientific terms, he said, that impress buyers who
are educationally ill qualified to detect such fraud.
Dr. Gerald Holton, a physics professor at Harvard University, warned that
if science did not take some determined steps to protect itself, it would
succumb to the powerful social and political forces arrayed against it.
Referring to the Government hearings during the Communist-hunting McCarthy
era that deprived Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer of the security clearances he
needed to continue as leader of nuclear weapons research, Dr. Holton said:
"Oppenheimer acquiesced in his own destruction. He said later that during
the hearings 'I had very little sense of self.' "
The lesson, Dr. Holton said, is that "the moral authority of science depends
on maintaining a good sense of self, and recognizing the need to act in
self-protection." The need for American scientists to act has become
urgent, he said.
Copyright 1995 The New York Times
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