Kicking the Sacred Cow

The most laughable part of this kind of thing is the attempt to make unquestioned faith in an idea a part of science as it is the whole of religion. In science, there are no questions that cannot be asked, answers always take a bit longer, but that is why it is called research and not quesswork.

When a believer does not know something, the gap is filled by God.
When a scientist doesn't know something, the work begins.

The former has a very easy time of it.
The latter's work is never done.

Joe(we are not ashamed of not knowing)Nation

You have to understand where this type of thing comes from. Theists have tied their entire existence to a delusional ideology. It's the complete centre of their being. And every day it's being eroded under the crushing weight of logic and scientific discovery. They are terrified beyond description, and are becoming ever more rabid and desperate trying to prop it up. The fact that they are failing scares them more. It's sad and pitiful.

Not knowing something is nothing to be ashamed of; being studiously ignorant is.

What support do you see for your straw man in anything I posted above?

For instance Amazon's description of the book notes:




Where do you see the call back to the middle ages or religiosity in that??

Is the picture on the cover from the Hubble telescope?

Turns out there are a couple of bonus features in this one, the most interesting by far being what Hogan has to say about the question of AIDS and HIV, and which causes which.

This is the kind of information which can save lives.

there's also some really bad reviews

Quite disappointing..., August 30, 2006
By Yuri Kuzyk (Toronto, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews


Should be subtitled "Hogan finds religion"...

His thesis appears to be trying to point out some sort of religious-like conspiracy within science to discredit new ideas in various fields. Something like the "old boys" attacking the proponents of new scientific theories even though the new theories supposedly pass scientific scrutiny and point to new knowledge.

However, this is far from the truth in this weak book. Hogan picks up several proposals and tries to paint the "scientists" who developed them as being under seige by the establishment. But none of the theories presented in this book have any credibility in reality which is why no one in mainstream science gives them any credence at all.

Hogan's last example in the book, "intelligent design", provides more than enough fodder to discredit the entire book than any of his other pseudo-scientific examples. "Intelligent Design" is philosophy, not science, since its primary point is not provable (or disprovable) by science. This has been pointed out, ad nauseum, by legitimate scientists who have repeatedly had to defend their work in court against the fundamentalist religion-backed ID group.

Anyone who references Behe's work as "science" is not writing about science.

This cow has the staggers, February 4, 2007
By noman (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

Staggers is another name for a condition similar to Mad Cow disease and I suspect the author may have a passing contact with some tainted meat. It would take another book to point out all the flaws in this book but I'll make just a few observations.

1) For most, if not all, of Hogan's suppositions to be true it would be necessary for not just one or two or even a hundred scientists to be in on the fix, but tens of thousands of scientists, technicians,graduate students in dozens of countries to be working in concert.
Nobel prize winning biologists (James Watson for example) engage in bare knuckle brawls(of an intellectual nature, but with all the profanity of any sailor) over points of biology and theory.
No matter how big the scientists reputation there's always a graduate student or colleague ready to take him or her on. Science isn't static or even polite. It's dynamic and competitive. For Hogan, science seems to be composed of sheep and particularly docile and stupid ones at that.

2) Chemistry, Physics, Biology and all of the myriad sciences are interconnected. In order for Hogan's book to hold water, rather than sinking like the Titanic, all of science would have to be completely rewritten to account for his "facts".

3) I'll mention one of the names mentioned in the dedication, Peter Duesberg. Duesberg appears to doubt the HIV/AIDS connection.

According to "Prism Online May 1995" Peter Duesberg is quoted as saying: "If you get infected by an infectious disease, you will get sick within weeks?'months at the latest," Duesberg says. The latency period, according to Duesberg's theory, is much better explained by a build up of toxins in the body?'specifically drugs.

There's just one problem with this. Duesberg is wrong. Several diseases leap to mind quite readily that don't fit this simplistic profile. Tuberculosis, Leprosy and Presumed
Ocular Histoplasmosis.

People can be infected with tuberculosis for may years, yet remain symptom free. After infection with the mycobacteria that causes leprosy the incubation period can range from six months to forty years.

Presumed Ocular Histoplasmosis starts with mild flue like symptoms after exposure to Histoplasma Capsulatum and years (10-20) later can cause an auto-immune reaction
in the retina or lungs. The "Presumed" in the name comes from the fact that the exact connection is still not confirmed.

Messy, convoluted and complicated but that's how the world works.

Duseberg and Hogan appear to believe that A must always proceed directly to B and that any deviation or anomaly instantly overrides all preponderance of evidence.
Further, anyone who ignores the anomaly must be guilty of suppression or conspiracy. Certainly politics and dogma can override good science. Witness the communist
rejection of Darwin or Einstein's failure to accept quantum mechanics. However empiricism won out as it always does. Hogan seems not to understand this.

http://www.amazon.com/Kicking-Sacred-Cow-Impermissible-Thoughts/dp/1416520732/ref=sr_1_1/105-9031661-6471607?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1181179236&sr=1-1

Hogan points out, correctly, that a major new disease spreads geometrically through entire populations. AIDS doesn't; it resolutely sticks with the groups with the problematical lifestyles which cause it. That is, if there's any such thing as AIDS. Nobody ever seems to actually die of AIDS, just from the other disease which tag along.

He also points out that if it takes a billion-dollar publicity campaign to convince you you have a problem, then you don't really have much of a problem.

It's a very pretty painting, don't you think?

Well, he clearly doesn't know much about epidemiology. No, a disease doesn't always. Depends on the characteristics of the disease. And what groups does AIDS "resolutely stick with"? The groups it seems to stick with are heterosexuals and homosexuals, i.e., all of us.

And Velikovsky? Give me a break.

Just sad.

Joe(and gobbled up by those hoping, hoping, hoping)Nation

Heh. Used to be men of importance(from the church) criticized and ridiculed anything which did not confirm with their point of view. Luckily enough for us, today, men of importance(scientists) criticize and ridicule anything which doesn't confirm with their point of view.

For some reason, these two cannot work hand in hand. Sad, because I think the two can easily work in synthesis.

It's always a good thing when someone comes along and questions institutes we come to hold for granted.

TWo examples of orthodoxy unmasked were the


1 Plate Tectonics theory of the 60'and erly 70's. It was considered that "main strem" tectonics would prevai; and that all the evidence that was being amassed beginning with problmatic magnetic data recorded during WWII "mine sweeping exercises'. would somehow be neatly fit into the prevailing idea that the major earth forces were mainly "up and down" . Today, we have mountains (sorry) of evidence that shows that the earth is really reacting to primary forces that are lateral, and involve mainly the crust and shallow mantle.
Many careers of well known Structural , geophysical and economic earth scientists were dumped into History's dust bin.

2 The interconnectedness of the "bauplan" of life via unlocking genomes has shown the "non randomness" of evolution and how "fossil genes" help identify how life has developed on the planet.

It would be interesting to recognize that, only after years of heated debate and evidence collecting and re-analyses, does the work of many iconoclasts become "mainstream"


Ive heard Hogan on the "Up all night UFO shows", and I must say that hes entertaining and passionate but rarely informative. His major skill is to present a lead-in premise that is usually irrational and almost Evangelical. Like hell start a sentence with
"We all know that random mutations cant account for the development of new genes" -Except that it can and does.

Noones ever accused Hogan of being a serious chronicler of science. He doesnt have a clue how dogmatic science is swept away almost daily.

Look at M theory, lately its being recast as a "3 decade long waste of time" . Doesnt men that it was an irrational exercise, it only means that flaws in math and lack of any possible evidence are showing that big holes exist in its shirt cloth.
Also, many times, the real applications of theory need to have new "gizmos" to prove the foundation principals were even mildly correct. The creation of highly accurate detectors in MAss Specs has led to "proving" some of the basic LAWS of physics and chemistry , like isotopic decay series and material structure and ultimately , the makeup of the Universe and how"multiple" Big Bangs may have occured in sequence thus accounting for the compliment of heavy ions and their ratios in space.

Hogan wants the Velikovskys to have a place at the table. However , since he doesnt get it to start with, we must explain to Hogan that theres a big, unbridgeable difference between science and science fiction. "Worlds in Collision" will never become the basis for any real discipline. It has no basis in fact nor evidence. The very thing that science is willing to do, which is to tear down one of its own "Temples" after its been shown to be harboring an incorrect or incomplete explanation of phenomemna, is what most scientists love to see happen (or better, to be partnered in). Hogan doesnt have to write a book about the bleedin obvious. What he misses is that within the gazillions of workers in science, there exists a fine "self correcting" mechanism thats doing quite well thank you Mr Hogan.

Like one of my early professors, a world famous stratigraphy/tectonics res archer stated , after finally accepting the undeniable evidence for Plate Tectonics,"screw it" Im too old to relearn all this stuff. Im going fishing" And he quit .

I may read his book, if I can find one in a library, there may be some areas in there that are, while iconoclastic, close to some point of research need. However, from what gunga posted, most of his statue busting is over many areas where the evidence isnt helping him at all.

Except that Venus does in fact appear to be a new planet, and whether or not it arrived here per Velikovsky's scenario or some other, there is no way that a new planet could have been inserted next us without humans having noticed it.

Characteristics of a new planet include the 900 F surface temperatures, the lack of a regolith, the statistically random cratering, the 90-bar CO2 atmosphere, the out of thermal balance condition, the major upwards IR flux, and any number of similar things. Earth and Mars do not look like that and are clearly much older.

Even Babe Ruth hit a homer every so often. My big beef with Vellikovsky is his ability to recreate science to accomodate mythology.(The "flood" was caused by some interplanetary miscommunications) Did you ever read Earth in Upheaval? Hes a catastrophist clear and simple.

Eart itself is composed of material that is clearly multisourced , the bugger is in the details. Vellikovsky is about 75% wrong and about 25%(maybe) right (mostly based upon an Arthur Clarke type of science fiction production) . As someone said of him (It ws probably frank Hesse or Jay Gould )
"He wasnt a crackpot but he was gloriously wrong. He was willing to disband all physics in order to accomodate a pet myth "

As recently as 1950 based upon what we knew of Venus' atmosphere, its position in the solar system, and the assumption that it was of approximately the same age as our own planet, Venus was thought to be 20 - 30 degrees warmer latitude per latitude than the Earth. That is what you would call a SERIOUS problem with standard theories.

Scientists were in shock when they actually found out how hot the place was, and you'd think they'd have been lining up to apologize to Velikovsky who had PREDICTED the rality of the thing based upon his own studies and indications that the place was in fact a new planet.

Nonetheless what they actually did was to incorporate Sagan's patently idiotic "super greenhouse theory" as standard doctrine by way of an explanation.

Sagan claimed that solar energy reaching the surface of Venus as UV radiation was being prevented from rising through the CO2 clouds as IR and that was creating the 900 F temperatures.

Aside from the obvious problem that greenhouses only work when covered, there was the further problem that Russian scientists associated with the Venera probes indicated that the middle cloud layers were pitch black and that light at the surface was being generated locally by heat and chemical reactions, and possibly by electrical phenomena.

Clearly it is not Velikovsky who has the explaining to do in this sordid mess.

According to Sagan of course, super greenhouse and related theories are not limited to Venus; he claimed we'd all be dead by now from the nuclear winter which the gulf war in 91 would cause.

When I gave Vellikovsky credit for the above, I see that I was not quite accurate, and I should be criticized . Vellikovsky only said that VEnus was a comet from Jupiter that passed by the earth about 3500 years ago. All of gungas posting has no bearing because , the event just didnt happen. Vellkovsky ws trying to create some event that would explain some of the Biblical myths and the sinking of Atlantis and Sodom and Gommohra. I just Googled craters of Venus and , because of the evidence of craters being overprinted by yet other craters, the age of Venus is probably NOT 3500 y BP

Oh yeh, a thought in passing. If the earth was passed by a cometoid protoplanet named Venus, some 3500 yBP, we dont seem to show any evidence on our home planet . We do show meteorite strikes and these are age dated by asimple trick of stratigraphy. A meteorite is no younger than the oldest undisturbed sediment that overlies the meteorite crater. Eg, the Chesapeake BAy meteorite Crater was found to be no younger than the Chickahominy Formation that overlies the crater, and is the first undisturbed formation(eg , it was deposited AFTER the metroite hit).The age of the Chickahominy is about 33.5 My , so the crater is dateable by strat and also by tektite glass. The point is, we dont seem to see a cluster of meteorite frags hitting the earth 3500 years ago as would be predicted should Venus do a drive-by on us.


What gunga is doing is trying to conflate most recent scientific findings about Venus and ascribing THESE to Vellikovsky. V was just a crank sci fi writer (originally a shrink) who tried to make catastrophism the proof point of Biblical mythology.

Thats just the kind of "science"that gunga loves.