Let's begin.
I will rate each subdiscipline or topic using a scale from zero to ten.
0.0 = New Age mystical hogwash
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10.0 = Corroborated, indisputable fact
Disciplines garnering a low rating on this scale are ripe to be attacked by any anti-science vigilante operating under the flag of philosophy. In the case of funding, low ratings are independent of the issue to pull funding. Some of these wobbly disciplines need to have their entire department shut down (cog sci for instance). However, other disciplines are suffering from wobbliness on account of not having enough funding (abiogenesis research). Challenging an entire scientific discipline is not an easy task, but it can be rewarding. It requires enormous amounts of digging into research publications far off the popular-science media trail. In several cases "digging" requires that you obtain a key textbook of the discipline. This is especially important in Ai and Quantum Mechanics. More on this below.
Cognitive Science (rating = 2.0)
In what way is Cognitive Science a "science"? A crow will take a wire in its beak, wedge the end of the wire underneath a bar of its cage, then walk sideways to bend that wire into a J-shape. The crow will take this makeshift tool and use it to pull a stopper out of a plastic tube. It will do this in order to fish a treat out of the bottom of the tube. A number of things should be mentioned here. First, crows do not have an organ in their brain called the cortex, which is very developed in mammals and moreso in primates. No birds have a cortex in fact. Second, no one in the world has the foggiest idea of how the crow's brain is able to do the wire trick on the stopper.
So let's break this down: Cognitive Scientists are running around claiming they understand how a human brain "processes language", yet in reality they cannot even explain how a bird can use a wire as a tool. Birds do not have a cortex, so this should have been cake for them. It's not cake. They are completely baffled by this. Cognitive Science does not even have
useful principles to begin to form a theory of how this works.
It seems to me that Cog sci was created too early, mostly by portions of academia who believed a Golden Age of artificial intelligence and neuroscience was upon us. Despite this irrational exuberance, AI has still not delivered on any of its promises, and neuroscience is not producing a "revolution" that everyone expected. Cognitive Science is not a science. It is barely a humanities. Painting and music have more technical principles than Cog sci.
Artificial Intelligence (rating = 3.0)
Hollywood has destroyed the public's understanding of the academic subdiscipline loosely called Artificial Intelligence. Ai has existed for 60 years, and not once has it delivered on any of its promises. $700 thousand dollar military-funded robots cannot navigate a woodland park without getting their tires stuck on tree trunks. Hand-eye coordination is arguably worse. $200 thousand dollar robots in laboratories take 45 minutes to make a ham sandwich. And even then, their "calibration drifts" and they have to be stopped and rebooted by the grad students. Titan supercomputers at Los Alamos can recognize cats in youtube videos, but only 30% of the time. When pressed to explain this 30% , the researchers invariably respond
"Oh! But 30 percent is statistically way above random chance!". Textbooks on AI are little more than dry collections of reasoning procedures in grid worlds, and lots of statistical regression algorithms.
The above paragraph is the state in which Ai is in today, in 2013. If you are in the mood to attack science, Ai is your sitting duck.
Formation of the Solar System (rating = 9.0)
The formation of the solar system from an accretion disk of hot elemental gas is a common theme in PBS Nova, Science Now, and the other public-broadcasting type science documentaries with fancy graphics. It dovetails with the origin of chemical elements quite nicely. Despite my ignorance of this (and I was ignorant all the way up into my 30s) science is in possession of smoking-gun evidence for these explanations. Scientists did not concoct these stories in order to "fit with their secular agenda" or to otherwise "remove God from Creation". They tell these stories of the formation of the solar system because they have a giant body of physical evidence showing that it happened that way. To make an analogy, if the scientific explanation for the origin of the solar system were put on trial in the USA -- the jury would come back after 30 minutes with a verdict. I will not enumerate them here, but yes, the evidence is that strong. Solar System formation thus rates a solid 9 on my scale.
Quantum Mechanics (rating = 9.99)
You anti-science types should learn to pick your battles wisely. And to be wise is to not even look at Quantum Mechanics with a shifty gaze, let alone try to challenge it openly. You will be made the fool. Quantum Mechanics is the most successful scientific theory ever created by human beings in all of history. By merely manipulating equations on a chalkboard, physicists were able to predict the existence of a particle which had never before been seen in nature. 10 or 11 years later, the exact particle came zipping out of an accelerator. This story did not happen once -- oh no -- it happened over and over and over again in the 20th century. The Kaon, the muon, weak neutral currents, gauge bosons, top quarks, and positrons. They were all reasoned to exist on chalkboards and then came spitting out of a lab at exactly the "Giga-electron-volts" predicted by the scientist. Trying to wage your philosophical battle against quantum mechanics will only lead to pain.
But if it is pain you are willing to endure, it is dangerous to go alone, and you should take this. You will need to get more than 1 textbook on QM. A single textbook on QM will confuse the living hell out of you (I gaurantee it). To stifle the confusion, you must cross-check your first textbook with another one, making sure to notice the parts that match between them. Slowly you will find out how they designed the first atom bomb. And slowly you will come to understand exactly what this sentence says:
"The Standard Model is a relativistic quantum field theory."
Only then should you consider waging an intellectual battle with physics. But generally speaking I advise against it.
Abiogenesis (rating = 1.0)
The grass is much greener in these pastures for you anti-science vigilantes. Abiogenesis today is a hodgpodge of various hypotheses about how some lump of molecules starting making a copy of itself 3.4 billion years ago. Abiogenesis research had nothing resembling foundational principles thus making it a bunch of arm-waving. Let the following facts be your weapons:
- Challenging this discipline will make people think you are a creationist double-agent. Just be ready for this.
- DNA does not self-replicate, it must be replicated by a replicase enzyme supported by a handful of proteins. Here is the catch-22, the replicase enzyme is itself encoded by DNA, leading biologist Steen Rasmussen to refer to this as a quote, "vicious chicken-and-egg problem".
- No laboratory has taken raw material in the front door and produced a living, replicating thing out the exit door. Never happened. This is one of the reasons why abiogenesis has no foundational principles. Don't mince words: Abiogenesis has never been observed in nature.
- No replicator of any kind has been produced using physical materials in the real world. Let alone at the molecular level. (They did it in computers though, yipee). This holy grail of atheism is called a "kinematic self-replicator". It aint done never been built.
- The amount of phosphorous in the biosphere of earth is a profound mystery. Phosphorous is a key element in the backbone of DNA and all nucleic acids. Science is not aware of any process, geothermal, climactic, geological, that could have fixed this much phosphorous into a forest.
- All the amino acids in the animals and plants outside your window are of a certain type called Left-Handed amino acids. In all lab experiments in which amino acids are synthesized, the processes all create equal amounts of left and right handed amino acids. So what the heck is..? Listening to scientists try to explain this left-handedness in earth's organisms is downright embarrassing. I often cringe when reading their attempts to arm-wave an explanation. This again reinforces the lack of foundational principles in this discipline.
Evolution by Natural Selection (rating = 8.0)
Richard Dawkins would rate this a 10.0 He has said the evidence for natural selection is equal in portion to the evidence that Napolean existed. Feel free to challenge the theory of evolution, and I hope that you do, because in reading your literacy of science will increase by leaps and bounds. I give it a solid 8. There is no agreement among academics regarding the level at which selection operates (gene, organism, group?) Explanations of the Cambrian Explosion are unsatisfactory, and might involve a totally different theory related to cell-to-cell communications that is not at all contained in Darwin's theory. Although I am not a part of this debate myself, an internal struggle exists among the ranks between "Mainstream Biologists" and several outliers who are derided as "Ultra-Darwinists".
Neuroscience (rating = 6.0)
If Hollywood has destroyed the public's understanding of Ai, then popular news media has tainted the public's understanding of neuroscience.
Neuroscience the discipline is doing quite well inside itself. I rate a low 6.0 here only because of the manner in which neuroscience is abused by popular science magazines. There are entire blogs dedicated to "neuro-nonsense" which are basically rants at how neuroscience is mischaracterized by the popular media. I rate a 6.0 here as a warning; a warning that almost every article you read about neuroscience in places like MSNBC and Huffington Post are all absolute hogwash. Those media outlets are prone to make sweeping claims that no self-respecting scientist would ever agree to in public or private or in writing. Learn you true, raw neuroscience but do so out of respect for science and out of rebellion against scientism.
The reality of our situation is that the brain is not very well understood at all. Dissent and debate rages inside of neuroscience regarding the manner in which the calls communicate. One popular model is sum-and-fire, while another model suggests noisiness of one neuron with error correction by whole networks, yet a third theory suggests "spike-timing plasticity". The number of cell types in the brain seems to fluctuate between publications, with a general upward trend.
Cosmology (rating = 4.0)
Despite Brian Greene's tough demeanor, philosophers still hold equal footing as the scientists when it comes to Big Bang Cosmology. Theories are hodge-podge in number and occasionally downright flakey.
I will mentioned a flakey one off the top of my head. This is the story that a metastable vacuum decayed into a lower energy state via quantum tunnelling. The result was the universe gained an inflaton field that inflated the baby universe to nearly its present size in a fraction of a nanosecond. The inflaton field cooled down, and underwent a phase transition that created baryonic matter.
The above paragraph I could barely type while keeping a straight face. I was obligated to type
"and then the magical Dark Energy Fairy waved her super Antigravity Wand", but I talked myself out of it. If you philosophers want to attack cosmology, you have my rubber stamp of approval.
Human origins from Africa (rating = 1.2)
Every single time an article is released on this topic, the entire narrative is turned upside down. This is the stuff you keep reading about homo erectus being replaced by robust and gracile forms of homo sapien in eastern Africa. Or those articles about how neandertals were already in europe when humans arrived thus wiping them out via warfare. (err, scratch that. Replace "wiped them out" with "comingled with them and had offspring together". Pardon me!)
And while we are at it, here is a Denisovan hominid, which doesn't even fit the picture we had drawn up previously , so they must have been a minor species in Asia. (no wait.... scratch that... they lived all over Asia for a long time. Silly me!)
And then there are short hominids in a cave in Indonesia, which don't match any of our previous species categories. Gee I wonder how they got there. Oh I know! They must have comingled and had offspring with a Denisovan. (...right?)
Homo Erectus was a hairy slope-headed ape man who grunted instead of talked, and who ran around in loin cloths throwing spears at antelope. (No wait.. scratch that.. I meant to say they cooked food on fire and used complex language.) (No wait..scratch that too.. I guess they built seafaring boats too, and lived on islands in houses. Woops! Silly me. I guess I got that wrong the first few times I was just making up guesses.)