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In the last post Professor Regan was mention together with the fact that she recently had a series of programs on the BBC. One of the things it was said she insisted on was that the findings should be published in a recognised scientific publication. In another magazine I subscribe to had an article which raised questions as to what she meant by that.

Those who want us to, as they say, be scientific, also want us to believe that scientists are objective with no bias, and they only want to find out what is correct. This is not the case. No one, even scientists, are completely objective, we all have a way of looking at the world, which is governed by our core beliefs, which are never tested, and in many cases cannot be.

The above mentioned publication mentioned Stephen Gould, who in 1982 in How Science Changes with the Political Climate. U.S. News & World Report said:

“People need to realize that scientists are human beings like everyone else and that their pronouncements may arise from their social prejudices, as any of our pronouncements might. The public should avoid being snowed by the scientist’s line: “Don’t think about this for yourself, because it’s all too complicated.”"

And in Natural History Issue 103 he said:

“Our [scientists] ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective ’scientific method; with individual scientis as logical and interchangeable robots, is a serlf-serving mythology.”

The magazine is from the U.S. and reason it was published was because President Obama is promoting what is being called “consensus science”. This doesn’t mean that scientific experiments have to be conducted and each time they are those conducting them get the same results. What it means is that when enough scientists agree about anything it become the new orthodoxy, in other words it becomes a religion and those who do not belong to it are marginalised. There is another danger Professor John Christy said on 13th November 2007 on the BBC News:

“The tendency to succumb to group-think and the herd-instinct (now formally called the “informational cascade”) is perhaps as tempting among scientists as any group because we, by definition, must be the “ones who know”….. You dare not not be thought of as “one who does not know”….. This leads, in my opinion, to an overstatement of confidence in the published findings and to a ready acceptance of the views of anointed authorities.”

History provides many examples of lone individuals who take on The Establishment and are persecuted by those in authority for daring to do so. And in most cases they have proved to be right and those who opposed them wrong.