science

The word ‘crackpot’ is a bit harsh and not meant as an insult in this post. Although I may not share all of their opinions I actually look up to some of the following people and also read and enjoy their books and other works. Neither I’m saying that the following people are necessarily wrong in their extraordinary opinions. Figure it out on your own. While doing so, don’t forget to check the context of the excerpts and quotes below.

• Francisco J. Ayala who “…has been called the “Renaissance Man of Evolutionary Biology” is a geneticist ordained as a Dominican priest. “His “discoveries have opened up new approaches to the prevention and treatment of diseases that affect hundreds of millions of individuals worldwide…”
• Francis Collins (geneticist, Human Genome Project) noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the Human Genome Project (HGP) and described by the Endocrine Society as “one of the most accomplished scientists of our time” is a evangelical Christian.
• John C. Wright (science fiction author and former atheist). You can read on his blog that he not only turned into a Christian: “I spoke to a ghost, an apostle, the Madonna, the Paraclete, the Messiah, and the Father. And Mary. I spoke with her.”
• Peter Duesberg (a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley) claimed that AIDS is not caused by HIV, which made him so unpopular that his colleagues and others have — until recently — been ignoring his potentially breakthrough work on the causes of cancer.
• Georges Lemaître (a Belgian Roman Catholic priest) proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe.
• Kurt Gödel (logician, mathematician  and philosopher) who suffered from paranoia and believed in ghosts. “Gödel, by contrast, had a tendency toward paranoia. He believed in ghosts; he had a morbid dread of being poisoned by refrigerator gases; he refused to go out when certain distinguished mathematicians were in town, apparently out of concern that they might try to kill him.”
• Karl Popper (one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century). Falsifiability is an important concept (made popular by Karl Popper) in science and the philosophy of science. “Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research program.”
  
• Mark Chu-Carroll (PhD Computer Scientist, works for Google as a Software Engineer) “If you’re religious like me, you might believe that there is some deity that created the Universe.” He is running one of my favorite blogs, Good Math, Bad Math, and writes a lot on debunking creationism and other crackpottery.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky (principal contributor to the blog Overcoming Bias and founder of lesswrong.com, devoted to refining the art of human rationality). Writes essays like ‘Twelve Virtues of Rationality‘, “Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own.” Says, “Legitimate occupations in our current world are (1) working directly on Singularity-related issues, and (2) donate money to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.” — “If you don’t sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent.“
• Nassim Taleb (the author of the 2007 book (completed 2010) The Black Swan) Can’t track reality with science and equations. Religion is not about belief. We were wiser before the Enlightenment, because we knew how to take knowledge from incomplete information, and now we live in a world of epistemic arrogance. Religious people have a way of dealing with ignorance, by saying “God knows”.
• Kevin Kelly (editor) is a devout Christian. Writes pro science and technology essays.
• William D. Phillips (Nobel Prize in Physics 1997) is a Methodist.
• George Coyne (a Jesuit priest, astronomer).
• A neuroscientist charged with trying to kill American soldiers and F.B.I. agents in Afghanistan who’s been faking her symptoms of mental illness.
• Lynn Margulis (an American biologist and University Professor  in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst). In addition to rejecting Neo-Darwinian evolution as an explanation for diversity (on the grounds that speciation due solely to random mutation and differential survival has yet to be proven), Margulis holds a number of opinions outside of mainstream science. “It is totally wrong. It’s wrong like infectious medicine was wrong before Pasteur. It’s wrong like phrenology is wrong. Every major tenet of it is wrong,” said the outspoken biologist Lynn Margulis about her latest target: the dogma of Darwinian evolution.
• Jerry Fodor (an American philosopher  and cognitive scientist) argues that the theory of natural selection is “fatally flawed.”

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