There’s a very interesting and thought provoking article in this Week’s New Scientist magazine under the above title. In it Harry Collins looks at the ways and effects of individual mavericks on mainstream science. He concludes that the mavericks do have their place and that mainstream science and scientists are often blibkered and misdirected in their responses to them. Here are a few quotes from the article:

If science were a matter of combining unambiguous data from perfectly conducted experiments with flawless theories, assessing the claims of “outsider” scientists and their maverick ideas would not be that hard. But the logic of science is not so far removed from the logic of ordinary life … and so fallible human judgement still determines what happens at the heart of even the hardest science.

… it is impossible to explore every new scientific idea to the standard set by science: there are just too many.

… after a hundred years, no one has absolutely proved the non-existence of extrasensory perception. If anything, the findings run very slightly in its favour.

No-one has definitlely proved its existence either.

Take the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism affair in the UK. Andrew Wakefield, the doctor behind the furore, published some evidence in The Lancet suggesting a link between autism and measles-related virus particles in the gut. But these particles were never linked to MMR vaccine. There was word-of-mouth testimony from some parents, but no link between MMR and autism has ever been proved. Wakefield simply speculated about a relationship at a press conference – and no one has ever gone further than to hypothesise about it … Because it is so hard to prove a negative, none of this shows that there is not a hidden link between MMR and autism lurking below the statistics. But there is no evidence to show there is.

A tentative claim about, say, telepathy, can provoke a sort of fundamentalist zeal among some scientists refuting the claim, which in turn undermines their claims for science as an exemplar in a divided world. They should say merely this: “Well, it’s not inconceivable, I can’t absolutely prove you wrong, but my time is better spent doing things I judge to have more potential.”

I am also not sure how it helps if they assume omnipotence in the name of science, as Richard Dawkins did recently when he insisted that scientists must be atheists. And Stephen Hawking has been turned into a new kind of religious icon, with his books taking the place of the incomprehensible Latin Bible in our homes … The Dawkinses and the Hawkings threaten to make the hard-won victory of science over religion a pyrrhic victory by replacing old faiths with new.

Ah-ha! At last someone else has seen through Dawkins and exposes him for what he is: as big a bigot, and science fundamentalist, as any religious believer knows how to be. He claims to have an open mind. Very far from it. His mind is closed unless things conform to his fundamentalist scientific view. Bah! Humbug! Evil man!

If science is essentially ordinary life albeit conducted in extraordinary circumstances, it must contradict literal interpretations of texts that clash with its findings, but it should not claim the right to address deeper questions of existence.