John Horgan's Skepticism

John Horgan is a journalist, not a Scientist. A very successful journalist.

You can get the thrust of his approach in

The End of Science

or a short video

Soft vs. Hard Targets
Interview

Science is a vast endeavour and Horgan is bound to miss as often as he hits. His main technique is to go around and interview famous Scientists, then write articles for the layman exposing the flaws in the reasoning of the experts. His main thesis, which he has tirelessly defended for decades is that there nothing fundamentally discovered in Science since, say, the 1950's. This is ridiculous on its face and he's buried with opposition. He's just plain annoying.

His response to the critics is

• Lots of "advances" are simply not true. He especially likes to cite fads in medicine, but these are "straw men". Does proving that some results are false establish that no advances are being made? Anyone who follows the subject is stunned at how often we find answers to questions we never thought of asking. For example, knowing how a cell "knows" how to grow into a horse instead of a tulip sounds like fundamental knowledge to me.
• The promise of many discoveries is over-hyped. The promise implied in decoding DNA is in this category. But he's confusing public confusion and Science Fiction with actual claims and assuming that major breakthroughs are not possible since they have no already happened. For example, we don't know how DNA is decoded into proteins. Paradoxically, there may be a good reason why we will never know, but this is, itself, a major discovery.
• All discoveries are simply working out of existing theory. This is "reductionism", the idea that you can understand the whole by understanding the parts. Reductionism is on its death bead. The explosive growth of the field of complex systems (including chaos, self-organizing systems) is challenging all branches of Science to re-think fundamental assumptions. It's a revolution on a "Copernican" scale and Horgan doesn't see it. I suspect that he doesn't understand how Science works or how Scientist think. That's why he's likely to miss major change to the culture.
• He loves to bash the modern theologies of Multiple Universes, String Theory and Super Symmetry because they are (so far) immune to disproof. But just because many Scientists have followed unproductive lines of research doesn't prove that no productive lines of research remain.
• He is particularly abstruse when it comes to Biology. This field has grown explosively since Darwin provided its organizing principal - Evolution. "Natural Selection" must now take it place among dozens of other theoretical frameworks. 
• He is resolutely ignorant of the fundamental differences between the various branches of science. Why is it so difficult to use Quantum Mechanics to predict useful things in Chemistry? Why do economists so famously fail to predict anything about the economy? There are very good answers to these questions and these answers qualify as major breakthroughs. If, as he claims, we have hit some kind of wall that prevents further progress, the discovery of that wall is itself progress. We are, in fact, learning a lot about these walls. Horgan suffers from a common misconception about Science. Many major findings tell us what is not possible.

As a journalist, Horgan lacks a solid grounding in advanced mathematics, or possibly any mathematics. He was an English major in University and took a few undergrad courses in Physics and Math that left him with a seriously warped idea of what science and math is all about. Undergrads don't "do" science or mathematics. They just learn the answer to exam questions.

His grasp of philosophy also seems wobbly at times. He often mentions Relativity and Quantum Mechanics as fundamental breakthroughs, but these fields cannot be understood without grasping the philosophical and mathematical underpinnings. He underestimates the breakthroughs achieved by Galileo and Newton, chiefly because he's a bit weak when it comes to the history of Science, which is, in the end, his subject. You can't plausibly claim that Science is "over" if you have no idea what Science has been doing in the past. What, exactly is "over"?

I wound up reading Horgan, the journalist, just after I read two books by Laughlin, the Nobel Prize winning scientist. Horgan thinks science (not really his field) is over. Laughlin thinks science is finally purging itself of its fundamental misconceptions and it's just getting started. If I hadn't read Laughlin, I think I might have been seduced by Horgan's writing style without instantly spotting his pathetic ignorance of his subject.

In spite of the fact that he constantly passes judgement on scientists, Horgan doesn't claim to know anything substantial about science itself. But is he a good journalist? He seeks out outrageous comments by "leading" scientists, then quotes them out of context to support his thesis. "The End of Science" is packed with this kind of stuff: completely wrong assertions presented without a shred of evidence. In the end, it's just bad journalism.

Horgan can be safely ignored.