....Nobel
Prize or "Massive academic fraud"?
(...Plate Tectonics, ..the coin with two sides - both of them tails. ...)
....Nobel
Prize or "Massive academic fraud"?
(...Plate Tectonics, ..the coin with two sides - both of them tails.
...)
| Richard Horton, editor of
the British medical journal The Lancet, has said that "The mistake, of
course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means
of discovering the acceptability — not the validity — of a new finding.
Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review.
We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps
to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system
of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed,
often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently
wrong."
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_review#Criticisms_of_peer_review> |
So, ..if Plate Tectonics is so obviously wrong on so many fronts, why do so many scientists support it? The short answer to that one (and the longer answer too) is 'consensus' - it makes it easier to publish if everyone agrees on a single position. Why adopt a controversial position and struggle to publish two or three when in the same time-frame five or six are possible by adopting the consensus view? And when careers are built on publication?
| "...Your university does not care about scholarship and what research you are doing; they are concerned mainly with the overhead, the number of papers that you have published in refereed journals, and external recognition through medals, awards, and prizes. Your promotion and tenure depend upon these factors while only scant regard is paid to university service, teaching, and serious scholarship." John Dewey |
Whether the consensus is right or wrong doesn't matter to the career scientist, a framework is necessary to contextualise his work, to reference it to the work of others. Belief in the consensus view is not necessary to carry out research. What is imperative however (if publication is the intention) is that the results of the work not be presented in such a way as to overtly contradict consensus. If results are in fact contradictory then the scientist must find a way to ameliorate the contradiction. In extreme cases this may actually mean that the writer presents his conclusions ambiguously and ostensibly disowns them in favour of an insinuated position more compliant with perceived review requirements. Owning or not doesn't matter, ..the fact of publication stands, and that is the objective. Subterfuge is commonly used to by-pass or neutralise antagonistic reviewers. In this regard the coin of consensus has the same face on each side; publication is the object of both reviewer (concerned with maintaining 'standards') and author (concerned with getting published). And so, Consensus Rules.The justification for consensus compliance in the face of private demurral is the view that it is impossible anyway to be wholly right in anything - no matter how convinced one may be of one's position, and indeed how right one is, it is impossible to be all-knowing to the extent of being entirely right, .. ...science moves forward, ...today's respectable 'science' is tomorrow's ridiculous nonsense, .. and all of that. A scientist gains neither publication objective nor peer respect by insisting he is right and others are wrong - especially if it turns out that he is right, for to do so highlights science, not as some "quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller", but just a job like any other where careers, promotion and remuneration and all the pejoratives cited above by Mr Horton are rife. So, ..controversy is avoided.
In Plate Tectonics scientists are supporting consensus, not directly the science (how can they when they know it to be unsupportable and contradictory on so many fronts). Adopting a controversial position highlights the difference between the two, which on the science side of the fence is in no-one's interest. On the funding body side of the fence however (usually the public) there may well be keen interest in getting something other than stale regurgitations for its money, but the science lobby and its media cheer squad have a variety of strategies to deal with this one to secure the continuity of funds - mostly by representing science nowadays as BIG, and carried out by TEAMS, with PRESTIGE, and the results NEW (even though they are old hat) rather than offering the picture of lonely pursuit in a struggling garret. And capping the lot with exorbitant paygates designed apparently to exculude the public (and the more popular media) from scrutinising the results of research that public money, in one way or another, has mostly already paid for.The extraordinary thing about Plate Tectonics as a publication framework is that it is unashamedly presented as multiply-paired, parallel self-contradictory positions, each element of a pair contradictory of the other, and wholly or partly contradictory with other pairs, but all of which are purported to work. To represent this multiple doublespeak state of affairs as 'proof of versatility of the theory' is nonsense, to regard it further as laudable under the guise of 'multiple working hypotheses' is asinine, but for a senior figure in the field of geophysics to seriously claim that the development of the theory deserves a Nobel Prize, even when many proponents of the theory freely admit that nobody knows how Plate Tectonics really works (link to citations page) is, ..well, ..beyond comment.
"The development of plate-tectonic theory certainly warrants a Nobel Prize," said Dr. Marcia McNutt, president-elect of the American Geophysical Union. "There is no doubt that it ranks as one of the top ten scientific accomplishments of the second half of the 20th Century."
http://ftp.kermit-project.org/cu/pr/00/01/vetlesen.htmlHowever another senior figure in the geophysics world has seen fit to volunteer a description for the same state of affairs of Plate Tectonic consensus as "Massive Academic Fraud", highlighting the deficiencies of the peer review process in the caption quote above and underscoring the view here that even though crewed by Teams of Prestigious Scientists Plate, Tectonics is a sinking derelict ship, and as a framework for global tectonics is long past its use-by and should be abandoned. A theory of nothing is better than one which can be represented in such widely polarised terms and claim a 'consensus'. A theory that can mean anything means nothing.
| "I want to pause here and
talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called
consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious
development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically,
the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a
way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever
you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach
for your wallet, because you're being had.
Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant.
What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history
are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no
such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If
it's science, it isn't consensus. Period."
|
("...Tails, ... You lose.." )