Excerpts from http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21stC/issue-2.3/sciphilo.html
JOHN HORGAN is a senior writer for Scientific American and the author
of The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Science in the Twilight of
the Scientific Age (Addison-Wesley, 1996).
Horgan: There's some proportionality between the lack of scientific
substance of a field and the degree to which its most successful
participants are good rhetoricians. For example, in evolutionary
biology at this point, all of the really prominent people are great
writers -- Gould, Dawkins, E. O. Wilson -- and that makes me
suspicious that they're not really getting at something important
scientifically, issues that can be empirically resolved, as opposed to
fields like molecular biology and nuclear physics where rhetoric is
pretty much irrelevant.
Pim: Does this explain why Philip Johnson is so succesful in the field if ID ? When in fact the field is totally lacking in scientific foundation ? But unlike in ID, there are thousands of other people working in the field of evolution. Me thinks Horgan has become a victim of his own rethoric.
[
[And, speaking of inflation:]
Horgan: On the other hand, I don't think there's all that much
difference between believing in astrology and believing in chaotic
inflation or string theory. I'm sorry.
Pim: The relevant words "I don't think". Not very convincing as such.