Wednesday, January 29, 2014

"Emergent Phenomena": Failed Thinking Infesting Science



I submitted the following comment to the wuwt site of Anthony Watts, where Willis Eschenbach reiterates his idea of climate as "emerging phenomena" (and which I understand as "magical self-creation"):

"Emergent phenomenon" is an argument from incompetent, third-rate thinkers like Richard Dawkins, determined to push Darwinian, or undirected, evolution upon students of science, despite its by now obvious failings; back in the 1980's, it was called "order out of chaos", elevated to the airy status of a "meme", and "chaos theory" was misapplied to support it (for the latter really only supports "order behind the apparent chaos", not order produced--"surprisingly", as Eschenbach himself emphasizes--BY chaos, or randomly-working physical processes).

But the idea fails, and fails here on a very basic level. "Emergent phenomenon" does not "explain" the "extremely stable system"--and the outstanding stability SHOULD be emphasized, as I have also done--it cannot, it is in fact logically opposed to it ("emergent phenomenon" is change, as Eschenbach's examples well show, while "extreme stability" MEANS unchanging).

The truth, as I mentioned when Eschenbach first brought out this recycled idea here, is much simpler (but more surprising, of course, in the tattered intellectual atmosphere of current, officially unquestionable, scientific dogma), and should have been obvious by now, if science had not gone so determinedly wrong following Darwin:

"Emergent Phenomenon", Or Design?

"Emergent phenomenon" is a desperate renaming of the observable truth, in order to avoid that truth. It is anti-scientific nonsense, which science will have to reject before real progress can be made. It is, in short, the same as saying "magic", which science once so proudly scorned, and by which it lifted itself up out of the ancient pit of superstition and "sacred writ".

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