I’m busy working on a talk today, but there is a tidbit that lends itself to a brief (and hopefully amusing and educational) Sunday exercise. It comes, not surprisingly, from the anti-vaccine blog Age of Autism. It doesn’t actually have anything to do with vaccines per se, but it is a perfect encapsulation of the sort of fallacious statements and arguments that pseudoscientists in general make. Indeed, this comment could easily have come from a creationist, religious, alternative medicine, New Age, or 9/11 Truther website, among others and fit right in.
Specifically, it is a comment that the machers at AoA liked so much that they actually gave it an award for commenter of the week:
This whole “science has spoken” business is absurd and misses the point of what “science” is supposed to be. Somehow this country has traded religion for science apparently ignoring the fact that they are two totally separate things. Science isn’t something to be worshipped or even worse, to have faith in. Science is a method of questioning. To say “science has spoken” on an issue is to betray the very meaning of science.
Perhaps I’ll weigh in tonight or tomorrow; that is, unless you all have, as I expect you will do, so thoroughly and brilliantly deconstructed what is wrong about this burningly stupid quote that I don’t need to add anything. All I can say without giving too much away is that this quote demonstrates a profound lack of understanding of what science is and does, all wrapped up in a classic example of crank false equivalency.
No wonder AoA liked it so much.
