Science as self-correcting is a precept that merits a closer, critical examination. In trivial cases, yes, sure; the strict Hypothesis-Test formalism is internally self-correcting, in theory.
Eugenics had a long run – a full half century, a good couple generations, plus – as a productive but controversial area of scientific inquiry, and the fundamental unacceptibility of it only became evident after it was championed by and became associated with the ugliness of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. In other words, the error of eugenics was not determined or admitted by science itself, but by factors & forces outside the body of science.
Lysenkoism as a science-story is dismissed in the West as an aberraton peculiar to Russia and the USSR. That couldn’t happen in enlightened societies, because we don’t subject scientists to existential threats. However, scientists need money both to live as people and to conduct science; control of the funding of science by our government does create a reasonably absolute need for compliance. And Lysenkoism fell into disarray and disfavor for an extended period toward the end … yet when it was weak & vulnerable science itself did not put it to rest; rather the government eventually administered the coup de grâce, for their own reasons. Again, an external actor effected the ‘correction’.
Lobotomy was always controversial, yet it may have been that the tragedy of Rosemary Kennedy – and the resulting political backlash – had more to do with its decline than did any science-work. The sister of Tennessee Williams suffered the same outcome as Ms. Kennedy, creating pressure from the entertainment industry. The Nobel Prize was awarded for this technique, in 1949, by which time the dubious elements of it were quite clear. Science overall embraced the crude and high-risk methodology, despite major counterindications. If it were a major Corporation, it would have been sued out of existence.
Stomach ulcers were addressed in the surgical theater for generations after antibiotics became available. Heroics were necessary, and then were only grudgingly accepted, to show that an oral dose of penicillin – a pill – sufficed to cure ulcers. The story of ulcer-surgery exposed strenuous resistance to the internal correction of science, by the scientific process itself.
Big Pharma continues to repeatedly prove scientifically, that science & medicine cannot police themselves against simple, everyday, bald-faced corruption.
Martian Canals, as signs of not just life, not just intelligence, but as evidenced of highly advanced civilization on Mars, was promoted & celebrated by a charismatic American astronomer. Yet when Orsen Wells’ radio-play depicted an invasion by these Martians, the ensuing incidents of panic were blamed on the credulity & foolishness of the Public … and not the Science that had used its authority to give them cause for concern.
Yet we are expected to accept without question that Science, and Scientists, operate on a higher plane than the rest of humanity; that they can resist, are immune to what makes normal humans, human. Obviously, the very premise of science-specialness is facetious.
