A reader writes:
I notice that Prof. Giulio Fanti’s name seems to have been quietly withdrawn from the list of scientists who were part of the Valencia Consensus. Am I right? So much for consensus.
Yes. It always was, anyway, a “consensus” of a select few people. In my opinion the five remaining scientists are not sufficiently representative of all shroud researchers for the purpose at hand. See: Image specialists agree on a basic set of image characteristics on the Shroud of Turin.
A scientific consensus occurs when experts in a subject agree. There is no scientific consensus when lawyers and geologists express their opinion about genetics. In Valencia there was no scientific consensus.
Michael Crichton from a speech at the California Institute of Technology on Jan. 17, 2003.
I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.
Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus.