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General considerations
This directory is divided in three sections. They are:
The physical sciences
The biologic sciences and
The metabiologic sciences.
Each one will have its subsections and hyperlinks.
This modern classification of the sciences goes beyond the division of its global object into the three traditional kingdoms of the mineral, the vegetal, and the animal. It reaches into many domains of inquiry that used to belong to Philosophy and transform them , from top to bottom , into branches of the natural sciences.
Sociology, for instance, is gradually becoming a part of the natural sciences, firmly anchored in biology. A more eloquent example is the study of the mind and of its relationship with the human brain. It used to be a field of inquiry strictly dominated by philosophers.
From the purely speculative inquiries done by philosophers we have inherited, for instance, the thinking of Descartes about the site of the soul Having no empirical knowledge about the inner workings of nervous system and without conducting any kind of comparative study, Descartes decided, by basing his opinion on a set of
inaccurate analogies, that the pineal gland was the habitat of the soul.
Because of his intellectual authority, this mistake became the opinion of many. Even today, specially for those who do not have a level of scientific literacy allowing them to make a difference between science and pure speculation or between science and pseudo science, the pineal gland is still the site of the soul.
We have also inherited the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and his
pseudoscientific explanations about the mechanisms of dreams. By using his psychoanalytic theory as a foundation,
 he concluded that dreams were produced by the subconscious mind.
Thanks to the advances in neurophysiology, specially in functional neuroanatomy, we know today that Descartes was wrong because it was discovered that the pineal
gland function is the secretion of melatonine. Thanks to the patient researches of many, we also know that the mechanisms of dreams are controlled by the P.G.O system, which is formed by the parts of the brain called: the Pont, the Geniculate Body and Occipital lobe.
One could emphatically say that, because of the tremendous advances in neuroscience, the study of the mind is becoming, more and more, a branch of
neurophysiology and of its chief anti discipline which is molecular neurobiology.
Much more than anything else, the goal of this section of our site will be to promote the understanding of science. We could, as it is done most of the time, present lots
of scientific facts. However, facts are not knowledge. Facts or data are information.
Knowledge is understanding. Without a clear understanding of the process underlying the transformation of scientific facts into scientific knowledge, facts will remain informations. As such, they can be integrated in all kind of intellectual constructs that could have the appearance of science but in fact would be
pseudoscientific. Scientific literacy is not the mere knowledge of facts but the ability to interpret them from a scientific perspective.
The lack of scientific perspective due to scientific illiteracy is the reason why the discoveries of modern science are sometime integrated into the intellectual
foundation of brain washing oriented religious sects, anti humanitarian political philosophies, bias racial opinions and practices etc. In most of the instances, we have just mentioned, the founder of the movement and his followers appear to have a mass of information on the target subject. Yet, the conclusion derived from this set of facts is false. One could incur the wrath of the followers of the gurus of
pseudo science by saying that the real creator of those sects is ignorance.
"How can you talk about ignorance when there is such a plethora of scientific information", would ask most people? The answer is that the ignorance we are talking about is not informational or textual but pertains to that of the context governing the meaning of the data. To be scientific, knowledge must be constructed with the time tested method of building scientific understanding.
The lack of knowledge of the scientific method for processing information cannot be called by any other name but ignorance. It is not necessarily informational but it is definitely processional Therefore, to be useful to the advancement of humanity,
this section of our site must not only present the scientific facts and the search engines devoted to the research of data but also educate the web surfer about the method to use in order to stop being a simple consumer of fact but an efficient creator of scientific knowledge.
In that sense, our science directory will not be a simple source where one could passively consume information but an interactive medium of constant creation and correction of scientific knowledge.
We will very soon start the publication of the subsections of this directory. Please come back to check it out.
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