Three Types of Science, pt. 3: Fantasy Science

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Science, Philosophy, Astronomy, Society & Culture, Life Sciences

4 • 993 Ratings

🗓️ 2 August 2024

⏱️ 16 minutes

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Summary

On this episode of ID the Future out of our vault, biophysicist Kirk Durston completes a three-part series on three categories of science: experimental, inferential, and fantasy science. Fantasy science makes inferential leaps so huge that virtually none of it is testable, either by the standards of experimental science or by those of the historical sciences, which reason to the best explanation by process of elimination. This is Part 3 of a three-part interview. Source

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution. Hi there, I'm Andrew McDermott.
0:16.0	Today I'm pleased to talk again with writer and speaker Kirk Dursden.
0:20.0	Dursden holds a PhD in biophysics, a master's in philosophy, and undergrad degrees in physics and mechanical engineering.
0:28.0	Author of several papers and peer-reviewed science and philosophy journals, he has for decades studied the possibility that meaningful information and genetic information specifically is the fingerprint of intelligence.
0:41.0	One of his current research projects involves working with a team of scientists to develop software that can help us better understand the sub-molecular structure of proteins and how they fold.
0:52.0	Kirk, glad to have you back with us.
0:54.0	Well, thank you, Andrew, and I'm glad to be back here discussing these things.
0:58.0	This is a third episode of a three-part series,
1:02.0	exploring a series that you wrote recently for your blog
1:05.2	at Kirkderston.com and it was actually also cross-posted at evolution news.org
1:12.3	and it looks at the differences between the major categories of science,
1:15.9	experimental, inferential, and fantastical or science fiction. Today we'll look at this third category, fantasy in modern science.
1:26.7	Let's review a bit for those who haven't yet heard parts one and two of our discussion.
1:31.2	Can you tell us what experimental and inferential science are and a few of the pitfalls associated with each?
1:37.6	Sure. In my own experience with 21st century science or modern science, I could see that it really does need to be divided into three categories.
1:47.0	And the first category that I would divide things into would be experimental science and that is where you can actually do experiments, produce
1:55.2	results, publish those results, and then other people can attempt to reproduce those results
2:00.9	and if they do reproduce them, then you have something that can be very
2:06.3	trustworthy indeed.
2:08.6	The pitfall in that area would be what nature, an article in nature called perverse incentives or people may be tempted to
2:15.6	that say massage their statistical analysis or the results to get results so that they can
2:21.9	qualify for funding next term or maybe for academic prestige.
	...

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