Barriers in Neuroscience?
engwam at vaxa.hofstra.edu
Fri Jun 23 15:36:24 EST 1995
A previous article writes:
> These people provided theories that science built on and is still
> building on. Something I really like about science is this... Say
> Joe Scientist develops ____ theory. For 10 years that theory adequately
> describes what it was supposed to. Along comes a new theory that
> completely proves the old theory wrong. Now Joe Scientist probably won't
> eagerly accept this new theory, but when presented with convincing
> evidence---Joe Scientist (if he's a good scientist) will admit that his
> theory was wrong and embrace the new one. Creationism doesn't seem to
> operate that way. Religion is supposed to deal with faith. It's just
> apples and oranges as someone else mentioned.
> More thoughts. Say we're teaching a science course and we do mention
> a famous theory that is no longer considered to adequately describe
> --whatever. In a science course it's perfectly normal to say that
> so and so developed such and such theory, but now we know that *this*
> is what is really going on. You can't do that with creationism. What
> they want is for their theory to be thought of as describing--whatever
> equally well as the scientific theory.
>>: the history of scienctific ideas and methods has a definite place in a
>>: science curriculum.
Whether an idea is wrong or not is not the only issue. How a scientist thinks
is also important. The ideas of yesterday prompted the questions of today. I
think it is important to learn about older (even incorrect) theories and
concepts. They show us how a problem was approached and (possibly) solved.
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