Thursday, 19 June 2008

Science Made Stupid

Since the dawn of time, man has looked to the heavens and wondered: where did the stars come from? He has looked at the great diversity of plants and animals around him and wondered: where did life come from? He has looked at himself and wondered: where did I come from?

Later, he began to ask more complicated questions. He looked in his wallet and asked: where did my paycheck go? Am I on the right bus? Who do you like in the series? To the former questions, at least, science has provided answers.

(via Neatorama)

2 comment(s):

Anonymous said...

"Science is a highly elaborated set of conventions brought forth by one particular culture (our own) in the circumstances of one particular historical period; thus it is not, as the standard view would have it, a body of knowledge and testable conjecture concerning the real world. It is a discourse, devised by and for one specialized interpretive community, under terms created by the complex net of social circumstance, political opinion, economic incentive and ideological climate that constitutes the ineluctable human environment of the scientist. Thus, orthodox science is but one discursive community among the many that now exist and that have existed historically. Consequently its truth claims are irreducibly self-referential, in that they can be upheld only by appeal to the standards that define the scientific community and distinguish it from other social formations."

Gross, Paul R. and Levitt, Norman. Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1998.

nobody said...

The entirety of both Science Made Stupid and Culture Made Stupid (Cvltvre Made Stvpid) is available online in high-resolution color scans.