What Is Baker Examines Focusing On

By Author: asdas
Total Articles: 105
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Baker examines a series of current or recent disputes focusing on: sunscreens as a possible cause of cancer, cholesterol, clinical depression, global warming, conservation of biological diversity, and genetically modified (GM) foods. For each, he gives a comprehensive list, of possible worries and reassurances, presented largely in a narrative style with very little analysis or synthesis.
For example, the chapter on sunscreens addresses concerns that chemicals applied to the skin as protection in fact promote cancers. I would have liked to have seen more discussion of possible differences between sunscreens that are based on simple physical barriers (such as the Australian cricketer Shane Warne's colorful zinc cream), and more elaborate chemical creams. The extended discussion of GM foods underlines the differences in attitudes between North America and Europe, suggesting that the answer may lie in differences in national character ("perhaps Europeans really are more easily panicked than Americans"). There is, however, no mention of the converse situation in the 1970s when, after the 1975 Asilomar meeting on the safety ...
... of recombinant DNA research, research on "gene-splicing" went ahead in Europe, but met strong opposition in many North American university towns.
Baker concludes that "very often we can scarcely believe anything biological scientists tell us". His final sentences are, "Today's best hypothesis once properly tested may well be tomorrow's joke, even if it's not so funny. But eventually, the correct hypothesis will come along and stand the test of time, another robust pillar amidst the scientific colonnade of
I doubt the validity of this image of science. Baker's relentless focus on what is uncertain, and on the "two sides" to every scientific story, seems to me fundamentally to mistake the nature of the scientific enterprise. Behind us lies a solid architecture of columns, the well-understood body of science. At the frontiers, where the tough problems lie, we do not have glass columns mistaken for the real thing, but rather workers assembling the masonry for what will be tomorrow's columns, and arguing, indeed often quarrelling, as they do so. Most of them recognize that, at the edges of the known, what we have is sometimes "two sides", but more usually it is a landscape of scientific hypotheses and opinions — for some issues single peaks, for others a complex topology. And, as time goes on and knowledge accumulates, these complicated and fuzzy landscapes become more sharply defined.