But your roguishness in including "folk music" amongst the "insular parochial shit" could be a bit counterproductive as to your points being taken seriously, IMO!

Well, Folk is religious too - it's all a matter of faith that leads to quite a groundswell by way of a sub-genre of popular music based on what remains an essentially pseudo-scientific theoretical perspective that, for the most part, remains unquestioned, or shouted down by the faithful when you do question it. Folk too is based on what is already there - albeit selectively calibrated to fit the ideology, with the facts tweaked & falsified along the way until its ultimate absorption into culture as a whole. Idiomatically I dare say that's always been the case, with the ballads of Longfellow and Kipling et al, but they weren't self-consciously Folk in the way that somehow links the outpourings of a select group of highly idiosyncratic Traditional Singers to the Theorists who went out and collected them, and to the faithful today who sing their songs in the belief they are somehow keeping that tradition somehow alive.

The main thing here is that ALL music is traditionally derived and perpetuated in exactly the same way as the various idioms that are accepted as being Folk. That is, demonstrably, what music is. To see the various tenets of (say) the 1954 Definition as being unique to Folk is rather akin to a Christian seeing such qualities as love, compassion, self-sacrifice, spirituality, nonviolence as being a) unique to Christianity and b) anathema to non-believers. Far from it. Religion is a consequence, not an inevitability. Like Folk it remains Optional, not Absolute, much less Real. Like Folk it is a matter of Faith and Theory of appeal to what is still a tiny minority of enthusiasts and specialists.

Science, OTOH, is like Pop Music, which is a transcendental artform simply because it transcends art & is as totally feral as the beings that make it. TheSnail is always banging about evidence for evolution (and ignoring it when it's presented to him) but it's right there in the evolution of popular musical idioms (including all the various idioms cited as being Folk and the oral processes thereof) in an unbroken tradition some 50,000 years young and renewing itself as each new generation comes of age (supposing a musical generation to be around 7 years or so).

There is unity, but, as in all Life on Earth, there is a myriad of diversity as a consequence. Each voice is unique, yet each voice is singing a song common to us all.

That's science right there. Like music, it belongs to each and every one of us to create and delight in, whatever peer-reviewed community tradition we belong to, be it gamelan, hip-hop, opera, Post-Delian Radiophonica, or whatever.