Gatekeepers

 

Can I Get A Witness

Can I get a witness? I want a witness
Witness, witness, witness, witness
Everybody knows, especially you girls
But love can be sad
But half of a love is twice as bad

But what is an EXPERT witness?

In Law, the Daubert test on expert witnesses is

1. Has the expert's theory ever been tested?
2. Has the expert's theory been reviewed by their peers?
3. Are there standards that control the theory's operation?
4. Does the theory have a known or potential rate of error?
5. Has the scientific community accepted the expert's theory?
6. Have the expert's findings ever been published?

While this works for a long-standing theory, it doesn’t work so well when the theory challenges the accepted scientific wisdom.  If the theory is true, but new, it probably has not yet been tested.  If the theory is new, it probably has not been reviewed by its peers, never mind that those “peers” probably do NOT accept that theory.  The third and fourth standards do speak to the proof of a theory:  What are the controls of the theory; and its rate of error.   The last two standards place an overemphasis on the scientific community which reviews and publishes the theory.

If Daubert had been used to qualify Copernicus or Kepler as an expert witnesses, they would have failed.  Galileo not only was not an expert according to Daubert, but he had to recant his observations on the movements of the moon of Jupiter or be excommunicated, and supposedly uttered under his breath “But yet it moves”.  Truth is the truth, regardless of what the conventional wisdom says. In the past accepted wisdom has been: The world is flat; The earth revolves around the sun; Space is full of luminiferous aether in which light moves; The earth is only 6000 years old, etc.  If Daubert is the Law, then Charles Dicken was right in his novel Oliver Twist. "The law is an ass—an idiot."