Lewontin crushes Dawkins, Sagan, and reminds us of problems with #scientism

Very, very interesting. Just over halfway through this in-depth, and somewhat crushing, review of Sagan's "Demon Haunted World," Richard Lewontin notes that something like ... well, like epigenetics was on the empirical eyeballs of biologists back in the 1930s. But, because the observations didn't fit the empirical framework, into File 13 they went!

Here's the relevant point:

In the 1930s well-established and respectable geneticists described "dauer-modifications," environmentally induced changes in organisms that were passed on to offspring and only slowly disappeared in succeeding generations. As the science of genetics hardened, with its definitive rejection of any possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, observations of dauer-modifications were sent to the scrapheap where they still lie, jumbled together with other decommissioned facts.

And, here's the important preceding background:

 Second, it is repeatedly said that science is intolerant of theories without data and assertions without adequate evidence. But no serious student of epistemology any longer takes the naive view of science as a process of Baconian induction from theoretically unorganized observations. There can be no observations without an immense apparatus of preexisting theory. Before sense experiences become "observations" we need a theoretical question, and what counts as a relevant observation depends upon a theoretical frame into which it is to be placed. Repeatable observations that do not fit into an existing frame have a way of disappearing from view, and the experiments that produced them are not revisited.

A reminder that #scientism can work by the via negativa as well as the via positiva, if nothing else. The via positiva is the highly expansive claim of what all falls in the purview of science. The via negativa is just what theorizing is allowed within that expansive purview.

Sure, it's easy to say science covers everything, if you cut everything to a scientism-Procrustean bed.

Beyond that, though, the epigenetics angle shows that, even short of a full-grade scientism, the methodology of science, in actual practice, will always remain no more than human.