Over at Physics and Physicists, I saw the post entitled Graduation Speaker Perpetuates Myth, in which the old “science says bumblebees can’t fly” canard is reported, yet again. What gets me is about such stores is the willingness to accept that scientists are imbeciles — embracing the idea that we would advance models as truth, despite the fact that they are so trivially falsified. In science, if the theory does not match the experiment, you know something is wrong with the theory, so you change the theory. (in this case, a combination of the assumption about the rigidity of the wing and the nascent state of aerodynamic modeling limited a back-of-the-envelope calculation at a dinner party)

Worse, in addition to (or perhaps a subset of) the willfully ignorant, we have the conspiracy theorists. Not only is the science wrong, but we’re all actively covering up the flaws. Never mind that if any technology based on the science actually works, it’s a bit troublesome for their position. My favorite is the anti-relativity crowd scrambling to explain how GPS actually can work.

In light of that, it was interesting to read about what has been termed scientific impotence: When science clashes with beliefs? Make science impotent

What Munro examines here is an alternative approach: the decision that, regardless of the methodological details, a topic is just not accessible to scientific analysis. This approach also has a prominent place among those who disregard scientific information, ranging from the very narrow—people who argue that the climate is simply too complicated to understand—to the extremely broad, such as those among the creationist movement who argue that the only valid science takes place in the controlled environs of a lab, and thereby dismiss not only evolution, but geology, astronomy, etc.

So now we have the addition of science isn’t equipped to answer that question.