Re-Up! You're outa your mind!

Well! 12 month gap. I'd apologize, but I'm fairly certain no one reads this.

We recently discussed the un-caused cause and the tenets of atheism. (Hey, the universe is billions of years old, compared to that one year is a statistical blip). Today we're going to talk about cats!

Well, that is a little bit of a lie. We're going to talk about the scientific method, its flaws, and why it still wins in the end. On the way, I'm going to mention my cats anecdotally. Atheists put a lot of trust into science, and it's worth digging into the dirt a bit on it's flaws, and why we still trust it over a book you try to hand to us.

The scientific method can be summed up in what my first NCO taught me as a young 2LT - Trust, but verify. Smart people sit in a room and do boring thinky stuff until they come up with a theory to explain something. Then they devise an experiment to test their idea. If it results in what they expected, they publish both in boring papers that very few people read and (very rarely) win a million dollars thanks to the guy who invented dynamite.

The problem(s) with the scientific method is that:

1. Sometimes scientists lie. We've seen in with Tobacco, Oil, Asbestos, etc. Fortunately, Trust but Verify applies to colleges. Thus, we learn that Tobacco isn't actually good for your health. Sure, it takes a few decades, but eventually reality wins out. Unfortunately, a few billion people die as a result...eggs and omelets.

2. Frequently scientists are wrong, as are people writing about science. Paul Erhlich famously claimed in his book 'The Population Bomb' that by the 1970s millions of Americans would be starving to death. If you are reading this, you know it didn't happen. This is because the scientific method relies on the current data we have - Erhlich wrote before modern food science was really understood. Monsanto's gene altered crops changed the game. We like to look back and laugh, but the beauty of the scientific method is that while Erhlich was focusing on the wrong factors, other scientists were testing their own theories and producing the world we live in today. We can afford a million wrong scientists for the few that produce game-changing ideas.

3. Change is at best incremental. We all think of science as a series of Eureka moments, but sadly (or not, based on your sexual preferences) the streets are not clogged with naked Europeans discovering what Dark Matter is. This means I won't be alive when teleportation or warp speed is discovered. However, in my lifetime I've gone from internet being a by-the-minute dial-up affair to it being a utility - if i lose my internet i respond roughly to how i view losing my water. And that's pretty awesome.

4. The scientific method is only as good as the researchers themselves. Meaning, they only discover the things they set out to. Gone are the days that whacky experiments are done just for the LOLZ. Back in the 60s we had people drugging other people without their consent to discover if LSD could warp reality, if dolphins could become terrorists, if monkeys could survive being fired out of space cannons, etc. Today, whether you are in government or the private sector everything is tied to funding, which means science mostly is discovering boring things like if chocolate can cure diabetes or if Elon Musk can conquer the world without anyone noticing. He can't, by the way, as Jeff Bezos has already prepared a counter assault. Still, we'll keep on learning new things regardless.

This brings me to my final bit and the promised cats. This morning I was reading about the mirror test, and which animals had passed. I was shocked to not see cats included, because my cat Aerie uses the mirror on a daily basis. She will look into the mirror to see me in the bedroom and will call out if she notices me looking at her. This is a clear passing of the mirror test, and yet nowhere do I see cats as either passing or failing the test.

But it's okay. Someday science will catch up. Hopefully without billions dying, but who are we kidding? We're talking about cats!

Bourbon Count: 0!