THE  MODERN  RATIONALIST

Nobel laureatre Dr.Venkatraman Ramakrishnan proviked a few and enthralled many with his talk on ‘The Sceptical Scientist’ in the city on Thursday 29th December. He delivered the 2nd S.V.Narasimhan Memorial Lecture in Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan.

He asked the people to give up blind superstitious beliefs and to believe matters proved scientifically. “Science protects people from the danger of false beliefs”, he said

He termed astrology and alchemy fake disciplines that depended on the power of suggestion and said homeopathy was based on belief. Terms like ‘positive and negative energy’ used by various ‘quacks were complete mumbo jumbo’ and had no precise meaning, he said. Science, he added, had a particular definition of energy.

He said that just as good system of government guarded people from their worst instincts, the process of science ‘protects us from our biases and irrationality. “Scientific methods protect us from the danger of false beliefs. No system that does not incorporate proper testing, criticism from peers and other checks of modern science can claim to be ‘scientific’ regardless of the scientific jargon used,” he said.

He said beliefs persisted despite data, adding that hundreds of website and news articles continue to come out on cold fusion and benefits of Vitamin C. To pass the test, prescribed procedure or medicine should be the actual cause of the cure and not a coincidence or due tgo an unrelated occurence.

Dr.Ramakrishnan said homeopathy had been advocatged for life-threatening diseases like AIDS and cancer, for which there are real effective medicines, while astrology can be abused and used to influence decisions. “Both can lead people away from taking more effective actions based on logic and contemplation. A culture based on superstition will always do worse than that based on science” he said.

The idea of favouring experiment and observation over belief, and the empirical over the anecdotgal, which was at the core of the evolution of modern science, continues to be its most important guiding principle.

It was also not possible to have good science without fredom of thought, which was important for the development of sciences since the era of The Reformation in the 16th century. It is not possible to have very good science for sustained periods without complete freedom of thought.

He pointed out that modern science had its origin in the times of Copernicus and Galileo, who were proponents of the idea that if observation and belief failed totally, it was sthe belief that was deemed to be wrong rather than what was observed. It was they who ascertained and declared about the movements of the planets.

This idea was helped by the spirit of reformation across Europe in the 16th Century. It not only spaned a distrust of authority and freedom of thought, but also led to competing views of science - one that attached importance to the elegance of theory and a scientist’s statue and the other that debunked anything, however beautiful or whoever the votary, if the proposal was not verified by experiment.

Eventually, the empirical view won out and had since shaped the modern outlook of science, which had the capacity to transform societies. Pointing to the motto “On Nobody’s Word” of the Foundation of the Royal Society, one of the oldest scientific societies in the world.

Many widespread beliefs failed the evidence based test and yet got perpetuated primarily because of the human nature’s difficulty in separataing cause from coincidence. While the human predisposition to recognize patterns had had good consequences leading to mathematics, music and art - it also made us imagine patterns where they didn’t exist, he said.

The important thing, however, was that science by its nature was self-correcting as new evidence emerged, scientists refined their hypothesses and theories. “It is this built-in self-correction that distinguishes science from other systems of belief. In scince, it is not bad to be wrong, but it is definitely bad to falsify.

Science has developed, correctring itself from time to time according to the new inventions and emergence of new theories. Beliefs and thinking proved through empirical tests only is science. These are based on real facts.

Even in science, a thing thought to be correct in one time, was proved to be wrong subsequently. Many scientific decisions and beliefs were rejected after they were proved false through experiments.

Astorology is not based on science. The planets and stars are not determining our fate. There is no basis to say that our fate has been decided even at the time of our birth itself.

It was only because of the association of the medicine with modern science, the age of human beings doubled. Even in medicine, we have to believe only rational matters. We should not believe matters which do not have any basis or were not proved by tests.

We have to look at the world around us only with a scientific view. We have to accept only matters which were proved in many tests. Medicines founded by science have eradicated deceases like small-pox. We should not believe the system of medicines which were not proved by experiments.