Science
Some thoughts about science... I spent thirty years actually doing science, and another ten as a science educator. In all that time, I learned some things about the scientific enterprise that I wasn’t aware of when I began.
Science is done by humans. While obvious, that isn’t always appreciated. Because science is a manmade endeavor, it’s subject to all the characteristics, good and bad, associated with humanity. I’ve known scientists who were brilliant, creative, serious, honest, capable, modest, and courageous, perhaps not all at the same time. And others who were stupid, dull, underhanded, incompetent, boastful, and timid. Some have been genuine scholars, others have hidden their ignorance and incompetence behind bluster, long words, and fancy phrases. I knew some who cheated, while others who were scrupulously honest. I knew one who was so narrowly focussed that he refused to read a newspaper or watch the news on television, thinking that would take away from his time devoted to research. And yet another who gave up what turned out to be Nobel Prize winning studies in order to serve heroically in the French resistance during the Second World War. Still another could have been a professional musician if she hadn’t turned to lab work.
Because science is conducted by practitioners who are so varied in personality, ability, and character, it is bound to be flawed, at least on some occasions. To deal with its deficits, science makes use of a variety of tools, all of which, because they were devised by humans, are also imperfect. One such is peer review. When an article is submitted for publication it is vetted (usually anonymously) by two or three colleagues in the same field. They are supposed to check whether the authors have made errors in technique or experimental design, and whether the data support their conclusions. As you can imagine, there are many problems with peer review. Reviewers may favor their friends, or fellow scientists that they know. They may adversely judge their rivals or those whom they personally dislike. As a result, some papers are published that shouldn’t be and vice versa. But peer review is a useful first check.
Once an article is accepted and published, it is exposed to the scientific community and subjected to its scrutiny. In practice, the vast majority of publications make only tiny incremental contributions to scientific understanding. Because their impact is so small, they are seldom repeated and checked. Only if the work has widespread implications or makes unexpected predictions or overturns previous dogma, does it generate sufficient interest in the scientific community to warrant replication.
Assuming that some scientist have published a consequential piece of work and the consensus of the community has given it a seal of approval, when should it be accepted as truth? The correct answer is “never”. We scientists are always trying to find the absolute truth, but never quite get there. Science is always a tentative enterprise. There’s really no “proof”. But of course some conclusions are less tentative than others.
Confronted with a scientific finding, acknowledging that it is a tentative truth, how do you decide whether it’s probably right? That’s an important question. What we should be doing about global warming depends on whether scientists have shown that it is actually occurring. Vaccinating our children is dependent on whether or not it causes autism or some other terrible ailment as some have averred. Even deciding where to send out our kids to school can be complicated by the fact that some people’s religious views may be challenged by the teaching of evolution in classrooms. How are we to judge?
The problem is that science has no Pope or bible. No one individual or group speaks for science and there’s no book that lists all the “facts” that science has validated. There are textbooks that try to summarize what is known and what is still controversial. But these are only the views of their authors, and not gospel.
One solution is to go with the consensus, what the majority of scientists believe about an issue. But that too is problematic. How do we know what the majority believe? The scientific community doesn’t commonly conduct polls. If it did, should every scientist’s opinions be given equal weight? Or should we depend on only those with expertise in the given area? And even if every scientist, or nearly all, agreed upon some issue, it’s clear from past performance that this carries no guarantees. Continental drift was rejected by nearly everyone in the scientific community for decades. Doctors used bleeding to help cure illnesses because there seemed to be scientific consensus that the procedure was effective. In my own field, molecular biology, the consensus of the community was that proteins were the heredity material, not DNA, until the early 1950’s.
In a democratic society, another solution suggests itself: allow the various sides of an issue to debate and let the decision rest on the basis of who presents the most effective argument. In some ways that’s the way science is conducted. Scientists publish their findings and advance their theories, and the community deliberates and experiments, in an effort to decide whether they are correct. But when scientific debates enter the public sphere, when non-scientists try to decide scientific issues, good results seldom ensue. Many scientific issues are too complex for non-scientists (and even scientists from other disciplines) to comprehend. Can you imagine the lay public deciding an issue based on a deep understanding of the mathematics of quantum mechanics? And resolving a scientific question that way may depend who is the better debater, not the validity of the argument. One more problem: objectivity. For example, in the debate some years ago about whether smoking caused lung cancer, many scientists were paid by the tobacco companies to conduct their research. It’s difficult to be objective under those circumstances.
It would seem we are helpless to know what science thinks in the face of these difficulties. What is there to do? I don’t have a ready answer. But, despite its many flaws, in my view, science, or more accurately the scientific method, has proved itself over the centuries as the best way we’ve developed so far for mankind to understand the physical world, and to manipulate it to our purpose. Granted, science doesn’t have the solution for moral and ethical issues. Religion is the place to go there, although it too is imperfect even in these limited domains.
The fact is that the scientific community in a disorganized and clumsy way, does seem to reach a consensus. In fits and starts, over the centuries, science seems to build an edifice of interrelated findings that grows stronger as more parts are added and hypotheses are examined from different points of view. DNA is the genetic material (not protein) and 60 years and thousands of direct and indirect evidence seems to sustain the idea. Continental drift is probably real because thousands of data points say it is so. Bleeding is not a good therapy for most ailments because long experience and properly conducted experiments are in agreement that it doesn’t work.
There are two other lines of evidence that this consensus often yields the “truth”. The first is technology. For example, every time we turn on our computers, we validate a host of scientific findings. X-ray machines, MRI’s, and PET scans are among the innumerable examples of devices that seem to work well (at least most of the time) despite the tentative nature of the scientific enterprise. Secondly, good science results in accurate predictions. One example: Global positioning systems have to take into account Einstein’s bizarre predictions about time slowing down as objects speed up in order to work properly. Again, these kind of predictions offer evidence that science, despite its imperfections, can be a wonderful tool for making sense of our physical world.
What are the alternatives? Mysticism, the supernatural, and fantasy, other similar tools that have been used in the past have shown themselves to have profound limitations. They haven’t advanced civilization or technology well. Scientific consensus isn’t perfect either, but it does seem to move us forward. Even with all its defects, science appears to be the best we’ve got.
Some thoughts about science... I spent thirty years actually doing science, and another ten as a science educator. In all that time, I learned some things about the scientific enterprise that I wasn’t aware of when I began.
Science is done by humans. While obvious, that isn’t always appreciated. Because science is a manmade endeavor, it’s subject to all the characteristics, good and bad, associated with humanity. I’ve known scientists who were brilliant, creative, serious, honest, capable, modest, and courageous, perhaps not all at the same time. And others who were stupid, dull, underhanded, incompetent, boastful, and timid. Some have been genuine scholars, others have hidden their ignorance and incompetence behind bluster, long words, and fancy phrases. I knew some who cheated, while others who were scrupulously honest. I knew one who was so narrowly focussed that he refused to read a newspaper or watch the news on television, thinking that would take away from his time devoted to research. And yet another who gave up what turned out to be Nobel Prize winning studies in order to serve heroically in the French resistance during the Second World War. Still another could have been a professional musician if she hadn’t turned to lab work.
Because science is conducted by practitioners who are so varied in personality, ability, and character, it is bound to be flawed, at least on some occasions. To deal with its deficits, science makes use of a variety of tools, all of which, because they were devised by humans, are also imperfect. One such is peer review. When an article is submitted for publication it is vetted (usually anonymously) by two or three colleagues in the same field. They are supposed to check whether the authors have made errors in technique or experimental design, and whether the data support their conclusions. As you can imagine, there are many problems with peer review. Reviewers may favor their friends, or fellow scientists that they know. They may adversely judge their rivals or those whom they personally dislike. As a result, some papers are published that shouldn’t be and vice versa. But peer review is a useful first check.
Once an article is accepted and published, it is exposed to the scientific community and subjected to its scrutiny. In practice, the vast majority of publications make only tiny incremental contributions to scientific understanding. Because their impact is so small, they are seldom repeated and checked. Only if the work has widespread implications or makes unexpected predictions or overturns previous dogma, does it generate sufficient interest in the scientific community to warrant replication.
Assuming that some scientist have published a consequential piece of work and the consensus of the community has given it a seal of approval, when should it be accepted as truth? The correct answer is “never”. We scientists are always trying to find the absolute truth, but never quite get there. Science is always a tentative enterprise. There’s really no “proof”. But of course some conclusions are less tentative than others.
Confronted with a scientific finding, acknowledging that it is a tentative truth, how do you decide whether it’s probably right? That’s an important question. What we should be doing about global warming depends on whether scientists have shown that it is actually occurring. Vaccinating our children is dependent on whether or not it causes autism or some other terrible ailment as some have averred. Even deciding where to send out our kids to school can be complicated by the fact that some people’s religious views may be challenged by the teaching of evolution in classrooms. How are we to judge?
The problem is that science has no Pope or bible. No one individual or group speaks for science and there’s no book that lists all the “facts” that science has validated. There are textbooks that try to summarize what is known and what is still controversial. But these are only the views of their authors, and not gospel.
One solution is to go with the consensus, what the majority of scientists believe about an issue. But that too is problematic. How do we know what the majority believe? The scientific community doesn’t commonly conduct polls. If it did, should every scientist’s opinions be given equal weight? Or should we depend on only those with expertise in the given area? And even if every scientist, or nearly all, agreed upon some issue, it’s clear from past performance that this carries no guarantees. Continental drift was rejected by nearly everyone in the scientific community for decades. Doctors used bleeding to help cure illnesses because there seemed to be scientific consensus that the procedure was effective. In my own field, molecular biology, the consensus of the community was that proteins were the heredity material, not DNA, until the early 1950’s.
In a democratic society, another solution suggests itself: allow the various sides of an issue to debate and let the decision rest on the basis of who presents the most effective argument. In some ways that’s the way science is conducted. Scientists publish their findings and advance their theories, and the community deliberates and experiments, in an effort to decide whether they are correct. But when scientific debates enter the public sphere, when non-scientists try to decide scientific issues, good results seldom ensue. Many scientific issues are too complex for non-scientists (and even scientists from other disciplines) to comprehend. Can you imagine the lay public deciding an issue based on a deep understanding of the mathematics of quantum mechanics? And resolving a scientific question that way may depend who is the better debater, not the validity of the argument. One more problem: objectivity. For example, in the debate some years ago about whether smoking caused lung cancer, many scientists were paid by the tobacco companies to conduct their research. It’s difficult to be objective under those circumstances.
It would seem we are helpless to know what science thinks in the face of these difficulties. What is there to do? I don’t have a ready answer. But, despite its many flaws, in my view, science, or more accurately the scientific method, has proved itself over the centuries as the best way we’ve developed so far for mankind to understand the physical world, and to manipulate it to our purpose. Granted, science doesn’t have the solution for moral and ethical issues. Religion is the place to go there, although it too is imperfect even in these limited domains.
The fact is that the scientific community in a disorganized and clumsy way, does seem to reach a consensus. In fits and starts, over the centuries, science seems to build an edifice of interrelated findings that grows stronger as more parts are added and hypotheses are examined from different points of view. DNA is the genetic material (not protein) and 60 years and thousands of direct and indirect evidence seems to sustain the idea. Continental drift is probably real because thousands of data points say it is so. Bleeding is not a good therapy for most ailments because long experience and properly conducted experiments are in agreement that it doesn’t work.
There are two other lines of evidence that this consensus often yields the “truth”. The first is technology. For example, every time we turn on our computers, we validate a host of scientific findings. X-ray machines, MRI’s, and PET scans are among the innumerable examples of devices that seem to work well (at least most of the time) despite the tentative nature of the scientific enterprise. Secondly, good science results in accurate predictions. One example: Global positioning systems have to take into account Einstein’s bizarre predictions about time slowing down as objects speed up in order to work properly. Again, these kind of predictions offer evidence that science, despite its imperfections, can be a wonderful tool for making sense of our physical world.
What are the alternatives? Mysticism, the supernatural, and fantasy, other similar tools that have been used in the past have shown themselves to have profound limitations. They haven’t advanced civilization or technology well. Scientific consensus isn’t perfect either, but it does seem to move us forward. Even with all its defects, science appears to be the best we’ve got.