Thursday, August 04, 2016

Outdated Memes in Science

Outdated Memes

As a Stanford University Law School graduate, the present author was pleased to read in the Scientific American at Science Research Needs an Overhaul, that John P. A. Ioannidis has co-founded a new center at Stanford University called METRICS (Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford) to deal with the costly problem that much mainstream research is wasted.

Ioannidis cites to The Lancet, which avers this applies even to 85% of medical research, a "hard" science.

So how bad are things in the soft sciences?

Ioannidis writes that the METRICS center:
"[W]ill seek to study research practices and how these can be optimized. It will examine the best means of designing research protocols and agendas to ensure that the results are not dead ends but rather that they pave a path forward. The center will do so by exploring what are the best ways to make scientific investigation more reliable and efficient."
We enthusiastically applaud this development.

We have been confronted for years by gullible, uninformed, and opinionated people in and out of science proclaiming the near infallibility of mainstream ideas and research methods and we really have little patience for it.

Having taught research ourselves at the university level, we know from experience that exactly the opposite is true: most of what is researched in science and is peer-review published as a result is a costly waste of time and often leads science in the wrong directions. It serves people's vanities.

One main reason for these follies of "scientific research", as we have written time and time again, is that science in the past has been predominantly "authority-based", i.e. it is not "what" but rather "who" determines the truth, whereas we think that "evidence-based" research must be given priority.

Outdated memes must be abandoned. That is our quest.

Meme is a term coined by Richard Dawkins, emeritus Professor for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University in England.

Memes are by his definition: "replicated ideas, symbols or practices".

We view memes as describing the state of mainstream science at any given time. Indeed, memes explain many of the aberrations of science.

A meme is defined at the Wikipedia as:
"[A]n idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture." A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.... The word meme was coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins ... as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. Examples of memes given [in The Selfish Gene] included melodies, catch-phrases, fashion, and the technology of building arches."
In our view, what is normally called a "school of thought" in academia is more accurately defined as being a "meme", because "thought" often has nothing to do with it.

Ideas -- whether right or wrong -- become entrenched in various disciplines of science and propagate themselves as if they had a life of their own.

The same is true for politics and religion.
Truth is not at all at issue.
Unfounded belief is everything.

As written at the Wikipedia in Memetics:
"Memetics is a theory of mental content based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution.... Proponents describe memetics as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer.... As with genetics, particularly under a Dawkinsian interpretation, a meme's success may be due to its contribution to the effectiveness of its host."
In other words, and contrary to the notion that "truth" is the objective in science or elsewhere, people thus actually adhere to a given idea, school of thought, cultural practice or religion because the adherent of a particular meme perceives it as providing the holder of that meme with advantages.

That essential understanding helps to explain many of the backward ideas that are maintained in science. Presumably "rational" people are holding fast to long-outdated ideas and ways of looking at things, often at odds with the available probative evidence.

We look to the probative evidence. Science must look forward.

The next posting in this series of postings is:

The Great Avebury Challenge - Introducing the Avebury Stones of Avebury Henge and Circle

Most Popular Posts of All Time

Sky Earth Native America


Sky Earth Native America 1:
American Indian Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds as Land Survey & Astronomy
,
Volume 1, Edition 2, 266 pages, by Andis Kaulins.

  • Sky Earth Native America 2:
    American Indian Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
    Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds as Land Survey & Astronomy
    ,
    Volume 2, Edition 2, 262 pages, by Andis Kaulins.

  • Both volumes have the same cover except for the labels "Volume 1" viz. "Volume 2".
    The image on the cover was created using public domain space photos of Earth from NASA.

    -----

    Both book volumes contain the following basic book description:
    "Alice Cunningham Fletcher observed in her 1902 publication in the American Anthropologist
    that there is ample evidence that some ancient cultures in Native America, e.g. the Pawnee in Nebraska,
    geographically located their villages according to patterns seen in stars of the heavens.
    See Alice C. Fletcher, Star Cult Among the Pawnee--A Preliminary Report,
    American Anthropologist, 4, 730-736, 1902.
    Ralph N. Buckstaff wrote:
    "These Indians recognized the constellations as we do, also the important stars,
    drawing them according to their magnitude.
    The groups were placed with a great deal of thought and care and show long study.
    ... They were keen observers....
    The Pawnee Indians must have had a knowledge of astronomy comparable to that of the early white men."
    See Ralph N. Buckstaff, Stars and Constellations of a Pawnee Sky Map,
    American Anthropologist, Vol. 29, Nr. 2, April-June 1927, pp. 279-285, 1927.
    In our book, we take these observations one level further
    and show that megalithic sites and petroglyphic rock carving and pictographic rock art in Native America,
    together with mounds and earthworks, were made to represent territorial geographic landmarks
    placed according to the stars of the sky using the ready map of the starry sky
    in the hermetic tradition, "as above, so below".
    That mirror image of the heavens on terrestrial land is the "Sky Earth" of Native America,
    whose "rock stars" are the real stars of the heavens, "immortalized" by rock art petroglyphs, pictographs,
    cave paintings, earthworks and mounds of various kinds (stone, earth, shells) on our Earth.
    These landmarks were placed systematically in North America, Central America (Meso-America) and South America
    and can to a large degree be reconstructed as the Sky Earth of Native America."


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