N.Wells
Posts: 1836
Joined: Oct. 2005
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| Quote | | It's absolutely depressing to see him making a fool out of me |
You are doing a fine job of that all by yourself.
| Quote | | (from Gary at NCSE) No offense but: science classrooms are not for teaching "history". |
Well, that's just not true. All scientists need to know at least a little of the history of their field - beside providing crucial context for modern research, knowing your field's history prevents people making a bunch of mistakes all over again, and it also makes their work more efficient and focussed. (A case in point is that if you understood some of the history of evolutionary thought better, you'd have been less likely to have turned yourself into a laughingstock.) I just ran through a mental list of 31 college science courses that I've had over the years that came to mind quickly, and all but two had a "history of thought in the field" component.
Over on Sandwalk, you whined about BioComplexity requesting academic or organizational email addresses from their authors, but you have previously levelled charges about standard science rejecting amateurs. I won't defend BioComplexity, because those are fake scientists applying very low standards to fake science, but proper scientific journals are not going to reject an article that you submit because you are an amateur. Now, make no mistake, they are without doubt going to reject your stuff, but that will be not because you are an amateur but because your ideas are ridiculous and unsupported, because you don't have valid operational definitions of key terms and your other definitions are insupportable, because your arguments don't make sense, because you refuse to ground-truth your models, because you can't document your claims, because you aren't proposing and testing valid hypotheses, because your stuff does not lead to logically valid predictions, because too much of your stuff is unfalsifiable, because your work is full of non-sequiturs and incorrect basic facts, and so on and so forth.
Historically, there have been many amateurs who made important contributions in science, who range from highly famous to largely overlooked:
A famous example within her field is Margaret Morse Nice (nearly 250 papers, 3,000 book reviews, and Birds of Oklahoma and The Watcher at the Nest)
(and in a similar vein, D. Summers-Smith)
Others from history include:
Michael Faraday
Henrietta Levitt
Charles Darwin
Gregor Mendel
Joseph Priestly
Grote Reber
Felix d'Herelle
Clyde Tombaugh
(Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin made some scientific contributions as well)
Hedy Lamarr is worthy of mention as well, and you might look up the exact location of Einstein's first "Department of Theoretical Physics" (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/einstein-the-nobody.html , if you need a hint).
Amateurs have become less visible in recent years, because science has become more expensive, but they are still out there making significant contributions:
David Levy of Shoemaker-Levy fame
Ely Silk
Bill Hilton
Forrest Mims
Garrett Lisi
You are just doing it all wrong. (And, far from the first time, you are making assertions that are just plain incorrect because you don't know what you are talking about.)
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