"James P. Hogan - Kicking the Sacred Cow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

rationalizing when a reputation or a lifetime's work is perceived to be threatened. They value prestige
and security no less than anyone else, which inevitably fosters convergences of interests with political
agendas that control where the money and the jobs come from. And far from least, scientists are
members of a social structure with its own system of accepted norms and rewards, commanding
loyalties that at times can approach fanaticism, and with rejection and ostracism being the ultimate
unthinkable.
This book is not concerned with cranks or simple die-hards, who are entitled to their foibles and
come as part of life's pattern. Rather, it looks at instances of present-day orthodoxies tenaciously
defending beliefs in the face of what would appear to be verified fact and plain logic, or doggedly closing
eyes and minds to ideas whose time has surely come. In short, where scientific authority seems to be
functioning more in the role of religion protecting doctrine and putting down heresy than championing the
spirit of the free inquiry that science should be.
The factors bringing this about are various. Massive growth of government funding and the
direction of science since World War II have produced symbiotic institutions which, like the medieval
European Church, sell out to the political power structure as purveyors of received truth in return for
protection, patronage, and prestige. Sometimes vested commercial interests call the tune. In areas where
passions run high, ideology and prejudice find it easy to prevail over objectivity. Academic turf, like any
other, is defended against usurpers and outside invasion. Some readily trade the anonymity and drudgery
of the laboratory for visibility as celebrities in the public limelight. Peer pressure, professional image, and
the simple reluctance to admit that one was wrong can produce the same effects at the collective level as
they do on individuals.
I used to say sometimes in flippant moments that science was the only area of human activity in
which it actually matters whether or not what one believes is actually true. Nowadays, I'm not so sure. It
seems frequently to be the case that the cohesiveness that promotes survival is fostered just as effectively
by shared belief systems within the social-political structures of science, whether those beliefs be true or
not. What practical difference does it make to the daily routine and budget of the typical workaday
scientist, after all, if the code that directs the formation and behavior of the self-assembling cat wrote
itself out of random processes or was somehow inspired by a Cosmic Programmer, or if the universe
really did dance out of the head of a pin? Scientific truth can apparently be an elusive thing when you try
to pin it down, like the Irish fairies.
So today, I reserve the aphorism for engineering. You can fool yourself if you want, and you can
fool as many as will follow for as long as you can get away with it. But you can't fool reality. If your
design is wrong, your plane won't fly. Engineers don't have the time or the inclination for highfalutin'
theories. In fact, over-elaborate theories that try to reach too far, I'm beginning to suspect, might be the
biggest single menace affecting science. Maybe that's why I find that the protagonists of the later books
that I've written, now that I look back at them and think about it, have tended to be engineers.




ONE
Humanistic Religion
The Rush to Embrace Darwinism
 I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable
to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.
—Richard Dawkins, professor of zoology,
Oxford University

History will judge neo-Darwinism a minor twentieth-century religious sect within
the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon biology.