{"id":66885,"date":"2018-11-02T14:31:47","date_gmt":"2018-11-02T20:31:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=66885"},"modified":"2018-11-02T14:31:47","modified_gmt":"2018-11-02T20:31:47","slug":"humility-and-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2018\/11\/humility-and-science.html","title":{"rendered":"Humility and Science"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Edelfelt's<\/a>
Louis Pasteur in his Paris laboratory, ca. 1885 (by Albert Edelfelt)
Wikimedia Commons public domain<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

These unpublished notes are focused on science. \u00a0But they shouldn\u2019t be taken as singling science out for unique censure. \u00a0All<\/em> human enterprises are fallible. \u00a0Science is actually, on the whole, pretty good at correcting itself \u2014 though not quite as good as some na\u00efve devotees of scientism imagine.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

A note on humility.<\/span><\/p>\n

There is no question that modern science, at least since (say) the days of Galileo, Copernicus, and Newton, has been staggeringly successful.\u00a0 Its achievements have been astonishing.\u00a0 It is one of the greatest enterprises of humankind, and it richly merits our admiration.<\/span><\/p>\n

We are, of course, all aware that science has a history.\u00a0 Before Copernicus, for example, just about everybody believed that the earth was the center of the universe.\u00a0 George Washington probably died because of the leeches that his physician attached to him, in a very up-to-date medical effort to cure what may have been merely acute laryngitis or a very severe cold\u00a0through bleeding.\u00a0 Lamarckianism gave way to Darwinism, which has been modified to various forms of neo-Darwinism.\u00a0 Newtonian physics has been revised by relativity and quantum theory.<\/span><\/p>\n

In recent years, contrary to what the biology textbooks led everybody to expect, scientists have found colonies of microbes thriving near hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean.\u00a0 Water, superheated by rising magma and laden with toxic substances like hydrogen, arsenic, lead, cadmium, and hydrogen sulfide, spews forth at temperatures rising up to 750 degrees Fahrenheit.\u00a0 Microbial DNA has been located two miles below the Antarctic ice cap. Living creatures have been found in solid rock at the bottom of deep mines, in brine pools that are five times as salty as the ocean, in volcanic rock twelve hundred feet below the sea floor.\u00a0 Where all living organisms were, until recently, thought to depend either directly or indirectly upon the energy of the sun (via photosynthesis, or by eating things that live by photosynthesis, or by eating things that eat things that live by photosynthesis), organisms have now been discovered that live off of sulfide, methane, iron, manganese, and hydrogen \u2014 which may suggest a greater potential for life on the exoplanets that we\u2019ve begun to discover.<\/span><\/p>\n

But let\u2019s take a very down-to-earth branch of science, nutrition. \u00a0When I was growing up, we ate margerine because butter wasn\u2019t healthy and should be avoided. \u00a0Now, though, butter is much healthier than margarine. \u00a0(I\u2019m not exactly sure when that change occurred; somehow, I missed the memo.) \u00a0And eggs aren\u2019t to be avoided anymore, either. \u00a0On the contrary, they\u2019re now some sort of superfood. \u00a0(I missed that announcement, too.) \u00a0Diet fashions seem to change like the seasons.\u00a0 In psychiatry, the lives of many patients were destroyed by lobotomies and shock therapy\u2014therapeutic techniques that are now so far out of fashion that we can scarcely imagine a time when they were (but they most definitely<\/em> were) the preferred methods of dealing with several mental health problems. \u00a0(Consider the notorious case of Rosemary Kennedy<\/a>.) \u00a0Just a few decades ago, virtually every kid had a tonsillectomy.\u00a0 That was just part of growing up, at least in America. \u00a0(I didn\u2019t, though I\u2019m not sure why not.) \u00a0Yet we now understand that tonsillectomies are mostly unnecessary, and that, in at least some cases, they can be problematic or even occasionally dangerous.\u00a0 We used to know that ulcers were caused by stress, or by excess stomach acid.\u00a0 Now we know that most ulcers are caused by a bacterium known as Helicobacter pylori or by the use of aspirin or nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. \u00a0Since the German physician, psychiatrist, and academic\u00a0Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich determined the mean\u00a0human body temperature in 1868, everybody has known that it\u2019s\u00a098.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37\u00a0\u00b0C). \u00a0However, in 1992, the Journal of the American Medical Association<\/em> published a study in which that temperature was more accurately determined to be\u00a098.2 degrees (36.8\u00a0\u00b0C). \u00a0[Reference] \u00a0It seems a small thing, but it\u2019s pretty fundamental.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

There is, in others words, good reason to be humble about our scientific understanding \u2014 just as in every other area of human endeavor.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 These unpublished notes are focused on science. \u00a0But they shouldn\u2019t be taken as singling science out for unique censure. \u00a0All human enterprises are fallible. \u00a0Science is actually, on the whole, pretty good at correcting itself \u2014 though not quite as good as some na\u00efve devotees of scientism imagine. \u00a0 A note on humility. 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