More Words, Deeper Hole

Thank you. You have expressed my feelings exactly.

However, there are stretches in Darwin's Radio where the scientists, while saying pretty ridiculous things, act like scientists. There are other stretches where they act like characters from a popular novel, unfortunately.

Some of the things about how scientists act that are usually missed in novels are:

-- modern scientists, and in fact scientists in history as well, almost never work in isolation. They may work in secret, but in that case, there is a secret group, probably with a legitimate connection to a public institution, hidden in plain sight. The sure sugn of a nutcase who is wrong is one who has a hidden laborsatory, one assistant, and no correspondents.

-- modern science is expensive. there are institutions involved which have to approve the expenditures. scientists spend a lot of time on administration of finances, either getting the money, allocating the money, or defending the expenses. A consequence of this is that scientists don't like to work in secret, because publication is one of the things that gets them money. So if you're doing evil secret work, you do want to have aspects of it which can be boken off and published with some of the implications filed off.

-- modern scence is distributive. most scientists are working on pieces of problems and some scientists are mainly working on integrating the work of others and all scientists have to be aware of other work.

-- science always has involved a lot of tedium, a lot of plodding along making observations and notations and calculations. Your wild-eyed ranter is probably not the guy to be scared of: it's the calm, businesslike, conservative guy with the great big interconnected set of labs funded by the Pentagon under a black box clause, who spends his time quietly administering a bunch of bland-looking projects. The guy whose projects always seem to involve defense against bizarre, lethal, and highly unusual, or unlikely, or unheard-of threats.


And yes, we need to defend biology and its allied sciences from people who think that the existence of the quantum means that you can get away with anything you want. Somehow. Yes I meant to say the quantum.