SCIENCE WARS: two-bodied POSITIVISM versus three-bodied COMMENSALISM

Michael Marshall

It must truly be a shock to be praised all your entire working life as a 'savior of humanity' for your work in advancing "scientific and industrial progress", only to find in your retirement that your peers think your earlier work is actually leading to the destruction of humanity.

No wonder that the vast majority of the climate-cum-nearly-everything-current DENIER spokesmen are retirees.

Retiree scientists (of a sort) .

Yes they are also predominantly male (even predominantly DOMINANT MALES (!) ), predominantly white, protestant, middle to upper middle class , native born.

But let us also admit that most of the DENIER spokesmen are scientists within a generous definition of scientist that widens it to include anyone with a BSc or a BA in a social science who were hired and paid to do a science-oriented job because of that science-oriented degree.

It is dangerous and misleading to assume that to be 'a scientist' one needs a PhD, post-doc experience at leading institutions, grants from recognized agencies, a series of publications in key journals, tenure-like status, and recognition from the important societies in the area you work in.

So this expanded definition includes a lot of people - most of who were in the broader applied science and technology field  - or have retired from careers in the those fields.

Add to the numbers of my expanded definition of scientist their largely supportive/defensive spouse and children.

This expansion of the definition of a 'scientist' moves their percentage of the entire population from well less than one percent to something like ten percent - if you defined them as voters or as subjects of a poll, donors to causes, etc.

You should know that my only really valuable,marketable, expertise is in electoral politics - immodestly I think I am damn good at it and I tend to view reality through its prism.

Electoral politics' use of numbers is dead simple in pure math terms but rather sophisticated in its interest in the excluded middle - we back room operatives tend to only see the grays between the black and whites.

We can connect a political/ideological/social position to a particular age cohort from a hundred paces.

Its our job, it is what we do.

A well educated,well connected,well-off, articulate ,confident ten percent of any population is one heck of a nucleus to build a social movement around.

So while I basically agree with DAVID ROBERTS  that "Climate Deniers won't change, but they will die" , I worry that their ranks will be steadily replenished.

Replenished from the pool of  positivist scientists we are still generating through our truly horrible science education structures at the senior high school and 101 undergraduate university course level.

Neat ,clean ,clear, quick results oriented exam questions demand a particular - and peculiar - type of teaching approach to science.

It requires a peculiar kind of science as well.

Blunt-simple: DENIERS are positivists/modernists/progressivists: people who live in a two-body world.

By contrast, we now know that the real world is a three-bodied science problem - and increasingly basic science questions examine that three bodied world.

But for a single teacher to train (and test) 20 to 100 students, 15 to 22 years old, in many scientific fields in a few months, with very little sophisticated equipment or techniques , only two-bodied science will do.

This linear , Newtonian-Daltonian science is NOT how the real world works , not how real science works.

But it is the sort of science  that we teach people who never venture much past a cursory MSc from an undemanding university but who still end up working in 'science-oriented' jobs.

In my mind, a science class is only truly successful if the student is less sure of the subject than when they entered the course.

Please God ! I hope they know a lot more about the subject as well - but always,always,always, pray they be less sure of what they truly know.

Only this sort of education will produce truly 'scientific' minds - the rest is mere technique and they might as well learn that via on-the-job-training....