Science makes top ten worst ideas of all time

The Washington Post, famous for its outside-of-the-box thinking on scientific matters, has published a list of the worst ideas of the last one hundred years (sorry for the hyperbolifics in the title). Not surprisingly, science shows up not one, not two, not four, but three times. First, medical science, then technology, then geography.

The sciences better start getting serious, or else they will be relegated to the same mystical voodoo cesspool as Astrology, Psychology, Cultural Studies, and the feisty offshoot of Cultural Studies, Wicca.

Here’s my list of the top ten worst ideas of the last one hundred years (considering not just science, but all ideas):

(1) NASA (QED, QED)
(2) Nuclear Physics (QED TBA)
(3) The Apollo Program (QED)
(4) Special Relativity (QED)
(5) Quantum Mechanics (QED TBA)
(6)  Bayes theorem (QED)
(7) [REDACTED FOR FALSITY AND IMMORALITY]
(8) Bombing the moon (QED)
(9) Micro-Evolution (QED, QED)
(10) Dark Matter/Anti-Matter (QED, QED)
(10) More-than-three dimensional space (QED)
(10) Brian Greene/Stephen Hawking (QED)

I don’t yet have QED links for all of these, but you can find additional expliceration of these ideas, such as Brian Greene, in my comprehensive Science and Math Defeated Glossary of Terms.

The science of abortion

Last Thursday the United States Supreme Court, led by Sony Sotomoto, finally made a decision in the ongoing class action suit called Roe v. Wade, legislating once and for all that insurance companies cannot use their lavish tax breaks to give bonuses to doctors for performing abortions. The court’s decision was only loosely based on an historic agreement reached in 1885 called the “Dawes Act.” It’s no wonder that the Court decided to enforce this agreement only now, after Obama appointed the first minority to the bench. But PC is as PC does.

What is interesting to me in these debates is that no one pays attention to the science involved in this issue. As you can see by this astrological drivel, even the scientists don’t pay attention to the science. This is not surprising since, as Carl Hempel demonstrated, specialists frequently resist the truth in favor of their current theories.

So what is the science of abortion? Consider the following argument, which uses the scientific method:

(1) Abortions cannot be performed on unliving humans without unalienable rights to dreams, friends, and life [intuitive premise]
(2) Abortions are abortions [transitive property]
(3) If something is aborted, there must be a good reason for aborting it [from 2]
(4) If something is aborted, it was justified [adjusting the consequent; from 3]
(5) If something is aborted, it therefore was a living human with rights, albeit alienable, with respect to dreams, friends, and life [modus pondles; from 1 and 3]
(6) But 4 and 5 yield a negation of 2 [abductive disjunction of parts]
(7) Abortions, if they exist, must be unjustified [metaphysical necessity; ontological argument]
_____________
(8) Therefore, human beings are alive, and are not subject to a negation of at least some of the rights detailed in 1 [principles of logic; science]

It seems to me that this paradigm, a la cartes Thomas Küng, better explains the facts. Pro-Choicers and Pro-Lifers can whine all they want, but the truth is plain for all to see. My argument shows that abortions don’t exist but would be unjustified if they did exist. This shows that both competing paradigms – the Constitutional Paradigm, and the Religious Paradigm – are misguided. In a sense, like Newtonian physics, both are correct. I don’t have time to explain any further, but if someone wants to continue discussion in the comments they are more than welcome. As I’ve been known to throw my pearls to swine, I might respond.