The "exalted we".(The Last Word)

James P. Hogan is both an accomplished engineer and a highly regarded science fiction author. Hogan's new book, Kicking the Sacred Cow: Questioning the Unquestionable and Thinking the Impermissible, is a spirited polemic against those whom he designates "the exalted 'We' "--the high priests of the politicized scientific establishment.

Scientific progress begins when someone says four magic words: "I may be wrong." The scientific method is essentially an exercise in making educated guesses, then doing one's best to prove those guesses wrong. Any guesses that survive this pitiless process become things we "know" until someone, after saying the four magic words, offers a better guess--and the process begins anew.

"Science really doesn't exist," Hogan maintains. "Scientific beliefs are either proved wrong, or else they become engineering. Everything else is untested speculation." While Hogan, an engineer, might exaggerate a bit, he makes a valuable point: It is through development of practical applications that scientific findings are smelted into useable knowledge.

Speculative assumptions spared such practical tests often harden into dogmas, which are often used to buttress a political orthodoxy. Scientists favored by political elites seek to preserve the established consensus, rather than challenge it in the interest of intellectual and material progress. This corruption of science results in a degenerate, authoritarian religion that C.S. Lewis called "scientism."

Hogan critically examines several varieties of scientism, be ginning with the "humanistic religion" of Darwinian evolution. Like most educated people of his vintage, Hogan accepted the Darwinian view uncritically for most of his life, until he got to know "various people with specialized knowledge in various fields who, in ways I found persuasive, provided other sides to many public issues, but which the public wasn't hearing."

Darwinism, Hogan points out, offers a narrative of progress through adaptive change and differentiation entirely in keeping with the assumptions of 19th century Victorian society. The problem, however, is that "the story actually told by the fossils in the rocks is the complete opposite." Rather than a gradual, steady increase in animal species, as Darwin predicted, almost all types suddenly appeared at the time of what geologists call the "Cambrian Explosion."

Darwin predicted that the fossil record would consist mainly of transitional forms--species in a process of continual change. But such forms are conspicuous by their absence. Furthermore, the transformations Darwin described would involve "a lot more than simply switching a ...