Against "consensus" science

>I often cringe when I hear the media use the word consensus in reference to some area of science. The concept of consensus is antithetical to the scientific method. I have no problem talking about "mainstream" or "conventional" science, or saying that "most scholars accept" some claim. But "consensus" is not right.

Much like the equally bad phrase "settled science," consensus implies that the debate is entirely over. That indisputable proof exists. That anyone who disagrees is simply wrong as a matter of objective fact. Worst of all, it implies that truth can be determined by a majority vote. ...<

Jason Richwine
[The whole article: Against "consensus" science (Feb 2014)]

Women in Science

Women in Science: Biological Factors Should Not be Ignored
Kingsley R Browne; 2005
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=877664 (full download)


Abstract

Harvard President Lawrence Summers was repeatedly denounced for suggesting that innate sex differences might be causally related to the scarcity of women in certain scientific fields. Yet data from a variety of fields reveal that Summers's tentative suggestion could legitimately have been stated with much greater force. Sex differences exist in mathematical, spatial, and verbal abilities; "people versus thing orientation;" competitiveness; dominance-seeking; risk preference; and nurturance. These differences appear to be at least in part products of different selective pressures acting on the sexes during our evolutionary history and are proximately mediated by sex hormones acting primarily during fetal development and at and after puberty. 

Cognitive and temperamental sex differences appear to play a substantial role in observed workplace outcomes. The more spatial, mathematical, and abstract a field, the lower the frequency of women tends to be. Moreover, fields in which women are scarce tend to have the lowest social dimension, while those attracting larger numbers of women tend to have higher social content. An analysis that takes into account biological sex differences provides a richer and more plausible account of occupational distributions than one that assumes that no such differences exist.

Science, Art, Religion & Intuition:

The difference between science, on the one hand, and religion and the arts, on the other, is obvious in general terms to everyone. Science applies empirical search, as in experiment and discovery, along with explicit logical reasoning, whereas leaders of religion have applied intuition, and have made claims also to a direct, divine revelation. Incidentally, if we define intuition as reaching a conclusion without specific awareness of (not without resort to), all the logical steps and factual supports taken into the final judgment, then both the bulk of everyday reasoning and some of the finest first steps in science itself must also be recognized as the product of intuition. Here the only difference of science and religion is that in the former the intuition is subsequently checked by logic and experiment.

Raymond Cattell, Beyondism - A New Morality From Science, 1972

Chinese Science:

>Nevertheless ... Chinese science remained too practical in its orientation and did not formulate a theoretical outlook which assumed a rational, orderly universe guided by universal laws.

Chinese science did not contain the idea of a natural world governed by laws in the mathematical sense; it spoke neither of the ultimate, constituent elements of nature nor of a law-governed reality underlying the appearences of the senses (Needham). Instead of "elements", Chinese thinkers spoke of "phases" and recurring "cycles", and instead of "causes" they spoke of "correlations" or analogies. It also had no concept of a "cosmos", a single entity called "nature", and it did not employ a deductive method of a rigorous demonstration according to which a conclusion, a theorem, was proven by reasoning from a series of self-evident axioms.<

TUoWC, Ricardo Duchesne, p250