My grateful thanks to all persons involved in this article, and the costs they bear for it. (John B)
An unfunny thing about political revolutions [at least the ones that succeed, anyway]: Those who “RAGE” against the ‘machine’, the revolutionaries, upon taking power, eventually becomes the ‘Establishment’, the powers that be,, the ‘machine’ [even if another model] that they once raged against. And with rare exceptions, the new machine, becomes as dogmatic and intolerant of dissent. ( JB: as what they fought and replaced in the first place) . [Sometimes even more so!]
This motif doesn’t happen only i n political revolutions, i.e., the French, The Cuban, the Bolshevik, et,. Arguably, the most consequential revolution ever, the scientific revolution, is a powerful case i n point.
Because of science’s overwhelming epistemological ( to believe in the study of origin) and intellectual dominance of today..[ but it’s SCIENCE], few realize that science and scientists were once iconoclasts, outcasts, troublemakers, even revolutionaries. After all, it wasn’t called the “Scientific Revolution”, for nothing.
In many way the “scientific Revolution’ was the final expression of the Renaissance, and another manifestation of the Enlightenment. From the sixteenth century (1700′ s) onward, in Europe what occurred wasn’t just in what people knew, but in what it meant TO KNOW SOMETHING. “Natural Philosophers,” (The word ‘scientist’, was a 19th century invention) were rejecting the old authorities, seeking to study the world on its own terms. Breaking free from the stranglehold that ARISTOTELIANISM, held on the intellectual thoughts for all those centuries, they began to see the world quantitatively, with its Aristotelian “perfections”, and the like. Such men as Francis Bacon, Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilee, Isaac Newton, and Rene’ Descartes slowly but surely broke the nooshphere free from the old intellectual regime. Francis Bacon (1561-1626), in trouble for rejecting Aristotelianism, declared in one most revolutionary lines ever: “I cannot be called on to abide by the sentence of a tribunal which itself is on trail.”
By the 19th ans 20th centuries science’s intellectual dominance had become all but absolute {JB remember all the noise from the Scope’s trail, and man decent from monkeys, as Mr. Scopes taught Creation in his class?] And, as all absolutist, the scientific-industrial complex brooks little {JB NO dissent] dissent or tolerance for those who challenge its canon and creeds. [JB remember, to these people its their RELIGION!]
And just how little {tolerance] can be see in the story of Mark Armitage.
THE MICROCOPIST:
Mark Armitage, now in his 60’s is a microscopist, a microscope scientist, having served as the President of the Southern California Society for Microscopy, which describes itself as “Dedicated to increasing interest and information in all areas of microscopy and microananlysis, including, but not limited to: Transmission electron, scanning electron and electron microscope, ion probe, microbeam analysis, optical and confocal microscopes, and microspectroscopes.
In 2009 Amaritage had been hired, part-time but permanent, by California State University Northridge, (SCUN) to install and run the electron microscope and confocal microscope suite of laboratories in the Biological Department at SCUN. He was to set up a $million electron microscope laboratory for the Biology Department and to make sure that the microscopes were running to specifications. He was also to acquire and install a $350,000 confocal microscope and was to be the point man in the Biology department, for the training of the confocal microscope. He was also to train the professors and undergraduates and graduate students in the art of microscopy. Over the next two years he trained six professors and 44 students on the use of the system, and in 2012 Armitage was asked to teach a graduate course for the Department in Biological Imaging.
In 2012 he was characterized by top department personal, as a person who is “Tops” and was called a” superb microscopist with many decades of experience.” In May of 2012 the department had him produce a 12 hour training vidio complete with examinations to prepare students for further training on the confocal Microscope– a video that is STILL in use this today!
At the very same time, all this was happening, a subtext existed: Mark Armitage was a creationist, whose views were know when he was hired. “During the interview,” he testified in a deposition, “We discussed my being a creationist. In fact, I told the panel that Lorence Collins, in the CSUN Geology Department, published a critique of my research on SCUN web site. ( It remains there to this day.) My creationism was also apparent from the list of my publications (30 or more), which I provided the interviewers on my resume’. My resume’ also identifies my having obtained a Masters’s degree from the Institute for Creation Research.
Nevertheless, probably given the mechanical-technical nature of his work, he got the job, and, from all indications, Mark Armitage was very good at it.
THEN CAME THE ANOMALY:
I the summer of 2012 Armitage participated in a dif at Hell Creek Formation, in Montana, a world-famous dinosaur graveyard. On the dig he and others uncovered the largest Triceratops horn, ever found at that location. It weighed 18 pounds. He coauthored a peer-review paper in a scholarly journal about the find. The abstract to the paper read:
“Soft fibrillar bone tissue were obtained from a supraorbital horn of Triceratops horridus collected at the Hell Creek Formation in Montana U.S.A. Soft materiel was present in the pre- and post decalicified bone, Horn material yielded numerous small sheets of lamellar bone osteocytes. Some sheets of soft tissue has multiple layers of intact tissues with osteocyte-like structures featuring filipodial-like interconnections and secondary branching, Both oblate and stellate types of osteocyte-like cells were present in sheets of soft tissues and exhibited organelle-like micro-structures, SEM analysis yielded sions of 18-20 UM (? JB) in length Filipodial extensions were delicate and showed no evidence of any permineralization {fossilization- JB} or crystallization artifact and therefore interpreted to be soft tissue.. This Triceratops horn bearing layers of osteocytes, and extends the range and type of dinosaur specimens known to contain non fossilized material in bone matrix.
In laymen’s terms, what that meant was soft tissue existed in the Triceratops horn. The problem? IF THE TRICERATOPS, is 60 million years old, as IT IS SUPPOSED to be,then it would be very highly unlikely, if not impossible, for soft tissue remains, to have been found there. But is WAS! Which meant that this discovery was another Classical Example of a “Kuhnian Anomaly” in the paradigm” A Kuhnian Anomaly in the Paradigm? What is that, and why did it get him fired?
THOMAS KUHN’S CHALLENGE:
The words “anomaly” and “paradigm” though long existing in the English language, took on a whole new significance with a book by scientist Thomas Kuhn. Published in 1962, Kuhn’s
“The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” became a Phenomenon that has impacted the way people have thought about science, and the claims of science, ever since.
NOTE(JB): Who among us would enjoy, the destruction, of pet ideas we have held or formulated for a longest of time? All of hate to be moved from the ideas held dear, right? Change is not comfortable.
Loved and hated, emulated, and reviled, Kuhn’s book still reverberates today!
NOTE(JB) Silly me, and here all these years I was under the impression, that human science, is the human search for truth! But truth , like beauty, must be in the eyes of the beholders?
According to Kuhn, science doesn’t work in anywhere near as rational or objectively as the hoi polloi are led to believe. Instead, science and scientific research are, really, just another subjective way that we humans can view the world they are apart of and can interact with. It’s often a fruitless interaction, for sure, but fruitless isn’t synonymous with correctness or truth.The conclusions of the scientists are, Kuhn wrote, “possible determined by his prior experience in other fields, by the accident of his investigations, and by his own individual makeup?
….An apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time.”
Kuhn made the word “Paradigm” a household term (at least in households interested in the philosophy of science). For Kuhn, a paradigm is the background, the ASSUMPTIONS, the framework or model, in which scientific research takes place. The paradigm determines the question asked, the places to look for answers, and the methods considered legitimate in looking for those answers. Paradigms are kind of superheros or meta-theories that sustain an entire tradition of scientific research and theorizing.
NOTE(JB) Research like this has already the answers precluded, before research? The victim is truth!
I n the N.F.L when a play is challenged by an opposing team, the referees examine the play itself, but only within the context of pre-established rules, It’s not that rules are challenged, or questioned,, instead the rules are what determines if the challenge or question, is valid. For Kuhn, the paradigm is, simply, the rules of the game.
When a scientist works within a pradigm, they ar3e doing what Khun famously referred to as “Normal Scince”. When engaged in “nor,al Science”, the scientist is NOT questioning the paradigm; on the contrary, the paradigm is what is questioning everything else. The framework is not judged by what unfolds with it; no, the framework judges what unfolds instead! The truth or the falsity of a hypothesis is determined by how it jives or matches, with the paradigm.
Enter the “ANOMALY”. As normal science progresses, Khun argued, over time, “anomalies”- phenomena that don’t do what they are supposed to do ( at least don’t according to the paradigm)– might arise. Anomalies are data that don’t seem to be reading the scientific literature: they are experiments producing results that shouldn’t be there, according to the paradigms. X should occur when you do Y, but Z does does instead, and z does so over and over, persists,, and can’t be explained away within the paradigm, science reaches a “CRISIS”, and the paradigm that dominated that branch of science is called into question. When it’s overturned, that’s what Kuhn called a “Revolution”
And if anything ever qualified as a Kuhnian anomaly in the paradigm, soft tissue in a dinosaur fossil SUPPOSEDLY, 68 millions years old, would indeed be one!
THE TERMINATION OF MARK ARMITAGE.
The implications of Armitage’s findings were not lost on his employers. Not long after Armatige returned from the dig, and word got around about the soft tissue, one of the biology professors confronted him in the lab and shouted, “We are not going to tolerate your religion or your pet creationists projects in this department!”
As per Mark, he never, in the context of the find, talked about his religion. He didn’t need to: soft tissue in a fossil dated 68 millions of years old, said it all for him! No he was not the first one to find soft tissues on Dion fossils and science has been wrestling with this ever since. First, it’s not really soft tissue, but even hard-core evolutionist agree that’s not what it it is. Second, there must be some unknown mechanism that can preserve the tissue, the remains of red blood-cells for millions of years. That’s what some scientists are trying to do. The third is to question the paradigm itself– an unthinkable option, for the scientific-industrial complex, which so readily explains what followed for Mark Armitage.
After the outburst Armitage was told by his supervisor to keep doing his job in the Lab (Armitage studies the horn in his own personal lab, on his own time). Then on February 13, 2103, “Soft Sheets of Fibrillar Bone From a Fossil of the Supraorbital Horn of the Dinosaur Triceratops horridus” was published online then in Acta-Histochemiice vol 115, issue 6 July 2013. PP. 630-608 , a paper he wrote with biologist Kevin Lee Anderson, of Arkansas State University-Beebe. Nothing in the paper mentioned god, the Bible, the Genesis creations account, Noah’s flood, nor anything religious. It din’t make an attempt to explain how the {soft} tissue got there.
It didn’t need to. The implications of the soft tissue itself, the anomaly and the threat it posed to the paradigm, were so clear that within days of the publication, Armatige had been warned by a fellow employee that a “Witch-hunt” was one, and in progress, and that Mark was deemed to be the witch! Later he was asked to resign, and refusing, was fired. The given reason was that the Lab was being closed due to “lack of financial resources”. (It never was closed)
In short, two weeks after he published an article in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal– never mentioning god, faith, divinity, or creation in the article– Mark Armatige became another victim of the scientific-industrial complex’s intellectual intolerance.
NOTE(JB): This is the very reason many scientists keep their private thoughts private, at the sacrifice of truth, upon the alter of a income!
THE SUIT:
Despite the anomoly of Armitage’s find, nothing was anomalous about his firing. On the contrary, it’s the scientific-industrial complex doing another version of it’s own kind of “Normal Science”– which is shutting down opposition when ever and where ever possible, to protect the prevailing paradigm, especially one with the metaphysical implications of soft tissue in a fossil that’s supposedly is 68 millions of years old.
The commonly promoted idea of cold rationalistic scientists objectively following the evidence wherever it leads has long been known to be a myth!
NOTE(JB) Ditto in Justice-Judicial system, how oft do we hear about a long-time prisoner finally released due to innocence? Or one charged, but not ever on trail, yet where do they go to get their good name back?
It was a direct challenge to their paradigm, and nothing short of the Nuclear Option is off the table!
Knowing the injustice of what happened to him, Armatige sued.
servantsite 