ABC Radio National

Ockham's Razor





Date/Time 31 Aug 2015 7:09:36pm
The problem with the generalization, that experts know more, is that it fails to acknowledge the gulf of distinction between qualification and competency.

If you need a simple standard job done, a qualified person will more than likely succeed provided adequate supervision. If you are going where 'no man has gone before', nobody is qualified and there is no such person as an expert. If there are already experts in your topic of research, your research is unoriginal and unpublishable. It is the very nature of original scientific research that nobody is an expert. There were no geologists at the time of Smith, Hutton, and Lyell. There were no evolutionary biologists at the time of Darwin. The geological time scale was in fact assembled by devout Creationists as there were no professional palaeontologists to do the job for them.

In complex issues, the historical track record favours amateurs rather than professionals. Copernicus the church official, Galileo the mathematician, Bruno the friar, Redi the medical practitioner, Spallanzani the lawyer, Snider-Pellegrini the geographer, and Mendel the priest all made their greatest contributions outside their professional fields. These clearly amateur contributions outclassed the best efforts of the contemporary expert consensus and show that the fallacy of expert-ism in complex areas is not an isolated case.

Science is empirical, not conjectural.

Timothy Casey B.Sc.(hons.)
Consulting Geologist
