Kevin Miller has a writer’s credit on the upcoming entertainment from Ben Stein, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”. To his credit, he has been engaging people in online discussion. To Miller’s shame, though, he seems to have a penchant for making unsubstantiated personal aspersions, in this case going after me as being a “scoundrel”, basically taking a statement from Michael Crichton as license to libel.
It’s a tiresome, shopworn tactic, but I’ve come to expect tiresome, shopworn tactics from “intelligent design” creationism advocates. Unable to defend his assertions with evidence, scholarship, and logic, Kevin Miller descends to name-calling. In years of discussions with various IDC cheerleaders, I’ve seen the same progression from making what appear, superficially, to be arguments based on principles and about concepts to simple nay-saying and name-calling, but Miller’s retreat into schoolyard bullying proceeded faster than most.
So above the fold here I’ll give a short version of the specific post, then I’ll lay out the exchange as it stands to date. Most of what I’ve entered has been in a thread at the Antievolution.org bulletin board. Miller’s attack on me concerns my use of the word “consensus” and not spitting after I say it. The way he develops his attack is via this title and a long quotation from novelist and gadfly Michael Crichton:
Consensus science, the first refuge of scoundrels–and Wesley R. Elsberry
Miller’s readers are not treated to any exposition of how I have had the dastardly bad taste to dabble in consensus. I’ll have to provide the context Miller fails to convey. When Miller objected to my use of “consensus” in a reply, I clarified my meaning as follows:
[Miller:] But you of all people should know that consensus science is like patriotrism–the last refuge of a scoundrel.
That statement alludes to facts not in evidence. The scoundrels I’m familiar with in the developing story of the forthcoming propaganda film are the producers, and it appears, the writer. The evidence speaks clearly that false claims are made in the movie and that false claims are made in promotion of the movie. It’s not just one “interpretation” that John Lynch was told that the Tempe, AZ screening had been cancelled when the promoter knew full well that the screening would proceed.
I’m not talking, as Kevin has to be, about “consensus” imposed artificially from the top down. We scientists know what that looks like. It looks like the Inquisition that harassed Galileo. It looks like Lysenko’s discarding of genetics and the evolutionary biology of the west in favor of a Stalinist form of Lamarckism. (Scientists died for standing up to Lysenko, by the way.) It looks like a socio-political movement that will do anything and call its arguments by any label to force them into public school classrooms without having passed muster via the scientific process.
What I was pointing out is that a scientific consensus is different, it proceeds from the evidence through hypotheses that are tested, and a community that criticizes the arguments until what convinces that community is the consilience of evidence and theory, not the personal authority of either any one individual or even the collective authority of the community. The process doesn’t always proceed smoothly, as Kuhn noted in discussing paradigm shifts. But what happens even then is driven by the various and sundry individuals of the scientific community, each of whom by Kevin’s earlier (and apparently abandoned) argument having their own separate worldview and thus without any expectation under Kevin’s argument that they could possibly agree upon some one view, and yet that is exactly what the history of science shows us has happened time and again.
I think that is a perfectly reasonable response not only to Miller’s specific objection but also Crichton’s general polemic. Sure, top-down ideologically-driven “consensus”, like Lysenkoism, is justly excoriated. But consensus that follows from the evidence and argument representing the hard work of scientific research is not that sort of thing. Confusing and conflating the two does nothing but further the aims of propagandists.
One can almost feel empathy for Miller. He’s in a bad spot. His conclusion about “Big Science” goes ‘poof’ if he admits that the conclusions of science proceed from evidence and tested theories convincing the scientific community rather than “Big Science” issuing an edict from the top-down that things must be so. It is so obviously the case that the bottom-up view of consensus is the one applicable to how science works that Miller can’t keep to a topical discussion, and instead has found it convenient to trash-talk me. I just noticed the category into which Miller placed the post in question: “Mofos”. I have exalted company there: Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, and Christopher Hitchens. Although I have disagreements with them on the relationship of science and religion, I’m thinking that I’d far prefer their company to that of Kevin Miller.
OK, so now for those who care about the picayune back-and-forth that is the background to Miller’s attack on my person, read on. Everybody else can figure out something useful to do.
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