Michael Vassar
The Darwinian Method
People have always thought and achieved useful understanding of the world around them. Despite this, there is an important sense in which science only began a few hundred years ago. We resolved this apparent paradox by recognizing that humans have developed many different tools to allow reason to guide their collective actions. One of those tools, which we will call ‘Enlightenment Science’, grew out of philosophical skepticism to transform the world quite recently. Many scientific controversies can best be understood as conflicts between those who accept an earlier scientific method, that of ‘Scholarly Science’, and those who believe ‘Enlightenment Science’ to be the only source of authoritative knowledge. In truth, the scholarly and enlightenment scientific methods contain both serious drawbacks and great utility. From Darwin's theory of evolution to the theory of global warming, important science often depends on a proper synthesis of the two methods. The strongest arguments for anticipating a technological Singularity fall squarely into this synthetic paradigm. I will explain why these two scientific methods work, where they come into conflict, and how such conflicts can be resolved.
