@farmerman,
Of course it is valid for an artist to use the color wheel or a musician the tonic scale. But it isn't valid for either to insist that their work determines how society is organised. Just so, it is scientifically valid to practice scientific methodology.
But only in the lab. Unless, of course, the scientific methodologist thinks of society as a lab as we well know all you totalitarians do.
The insistence that SM has precedence over elected representatives is what this is all about. And I see the point. Science has worked such fantastic wonders for us, at a certain level at least, the carnal one mainly as is easily seen from a study of adverts, the "stick rattling in a bucket" approach, that it, Science, feels that we owe it and should allow it to run things. And it is indignant that we don't. Or it is its public face that is either indignant or pretending to be like an actress in a Soap often does. Soaps would be nowhere without a high level of indignation.
Teaching evolution is merely one of the crowbars to prise the door open. Another one is penetration of media with hour long ads for Science interrupted regularly with ads for other stuff. That sort of thing, and I've seen a lot of it, nearly took me in. And I've read Catch 22. The carnality being tickled is the waves of pleasure the organism feels on being Abled to Think itself clever enough to be understanding the mush about galaxies and quarks, and black holes and string theory, and a seemingly endless Litany the priesthood of Science chants before your uncomprehending gaze usually accompanied by forceful gesticulations as ridiculous as they are random, unlike those seen in a decent High Mass, and nuanced facial distortions not all that dissimilar to those deployed by hospital visitors of the professional type. Quantum mechanics a perennial favourite. Physics being Top Dog. Natch.
And I am open minded enough to allow that full-blown scientific methodology may very well be the only sensible way forward. I'm not trying to rule it out at all. I'm trying to slow it down enough so it doesn't come in while I'm still here.
The waves of pleasure are usually pretty low key stuff although crescendos are not unknown where the victim of the hysteria comes to actually believe, H.G. Wells being an example, I don't know about Dawkins, I haven't ruled him out having us on yet, that scientific methodology is the fount of all Wisdom and everything else is a load of anachronistic bullshit riddled with base superstition, hold-ups, mumbo-jumbo and bushwhackings. And the belief in the logical consequence of such a belief: namely that SM, up to speed and bright-eyed and bushy tailed with the frozen dew on the peak of its cap, is the only way forward and that anybody who objects is trying to drag us back to the Dark Ages or to even earlier periods when the mobile organic tube with a hole at each end was the latest step up the ladder of evolution and judging by my compost heap it has got no further.
I have met two in my time. Victims of this obsession. One was an embarrassment at family weddings both in the Church and at the piss-up. Everybody in Church was pointedly made aware that they were a bunch of deluded idiots when it was obvious what the transaction at the altar was all about and an official can transact such business with an e-mail.
At the piss-up his attempt to boogie was a standing joke. In the Hokey-Cokey it was any leg or arm although he would have had a few. Very well turned out though. London tailor I suppose. Tailors were among the classified advertisers in some scientific magazines. The ones they sell on railway bookstalls mainly. Purveyors of lumbago palliatives, Beecham's Pills and sundry other specialities of interest to scientific methodologists.
It seems obvious to me that SM has not spotted its other enemy. Media. What our Media does with the tools science provides it with could not be done by Science alone.
You didn't ask yourself--valid for what fm? What is valid? What you think is valid I suppose. Round and round you go defining your own excellence.