Pathological Science

Since I am in both the scientific and Evangelical communities, I've used my position to explain the scientific community to the Evangelical one, specifically the subgroup that believes in YEC and ID. Now I'm going to turn it around. When the scientific community looks at things like YEC and ID they scratch their heads. Worse, they come up with a theocratic conspiracy theory (not very parsimonious IMHO).

Irving Landmuir gave a talk in 1953 about what he termed as pathological science. This seems to explain some of the crazy scientific conclusions. Hat Tip: Dr. Randy Isaac, Executive Director of the American Scientific Affliation. His final note is well taken "No religious group has a monopoly on pathological science."

The characteristics of this Davis-Barnes experiment and the N-rays and the mitogenetic rays, they have things in common. These are cases where there is no dishonesty involved but where people are tricked into false results by a lack of understanding about what human beings can do to themselves in the way of being led astray by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions. These are examples of pathological science. These are things that attracted a great deal of attention. Usually hundreds of papers have been published upon them. Sometimes they have lasted for fifteen or twenty years and then they gradually die away. [emphasis mine]

Now, the characteristic rules are these

Symptoms of Pathological Science:

1. The maximum effect that is observed is produced by a causative agent of barely detectable intensity, and the magnitude of the effect is substantially independent of the intensity of the cause.
2. The effect is of a magnitude that remains close to the limit of detectability; or, many measurements are necessary because of the very low statistical significance of the results.
3. Claims of great accuracy.
4. Fantastic theories contrary to experience.
5. Criticisms are met by ad hoc excuses thought up on the spur of the moment.
6. Ratio of supporters to critics rises up to somewhere near 50% and then falls gradually to oblivion.

A lot of the "science" in ID and YEC have the above characteristics. Two approaches have come out of the scientific community in how to deal with what they believe is bad science (correctly IMHO). One treats the mistake as sincere and the other seeks to do battle with conspiracies. How the scientific community dealt with the Kansas situation is an example of the former. I encourage my scientific and engineering colleagues to continue along that path. If the other path is taken and you falsely accuse people of a conspiracy or belittle their faith it will only harden the bad science.