All scientific results are in their nature provisional – they can be nothing else. Someone will come along, either the next day or the next decade, with further refinements, new methods, more nuanced ways of looking at old problems, and, quelle surprise, find that conclusions based on earlier results were simplistic, rough-hewn – even wrong.
Science: the religion that must not be questionedIt's time for the priesthood to be taken to task – and journalists aren't up to the job
The problem is that we (not the royal we, but the great unwashed lay public who won't know the difference between an eppendorf tube and an entrenching tool) are told, very often, and by people who ought to know better, that science is a one-way street of ever-advancing progress, a zero-sum game in which facts are accumulated and ignorance dispelled. In reality, the more we discover, the more we realise we don't know. Science is not so much about knowledge as doubt. Never in the field of human inquiry have so many known so little about so much.
As discussed in Dr McLain's article and the comments subjacent,
scientific experiments don't end with a holy grail so much as an estimate of probability. For example, one might be able to accord a value to one's conclusion not of "yes" or "no" but "P<0.05", which means that the result has a less than one in 20 chance of being a fluke. That doesn't mean it's "right".One thing that never gets emphasised enough in science, or in schools, or anywhere else, is that no matter how fancy-schmancy your statistical technique, the output is always a probability level (a P-value), the "significance" of which is left for you to judge – based on nothing more concrete or substantive than a feeling, based on the imponderables of personal or shared experience. Statistics, and therefore science, can only advise on probability – they cannot determine The Truth. And Truth, with a capital T, is forever just beyond one's grasp.
None of this gets through to the news pages. When pitching a science story to a news editor, a science correspondent soon learns that the answer that gets airtime is either "yes", or "no". Either the Voyager space probe has left the solar system, or it hasn't. To say that it might have done and attach statistical caveats is a guaranteed turn-off. Nobody ever got column inches by saying that Elvis has a 95% probability of having left the building.
Why do we demand such definitive truths of science, but are happy to have all other spheres of human activity wallow in mess and muddle?
I think it goes back to the mid-20th century, especially just after the second world war, when scientists – they were called "boffins" – gave us such miracles as radar, penicillin and plastics; jet propulsion, teflon, mass vaccination and transistors; the structure of DNA, lava lamps and the eye-level grill. They cracked the Enigma, and the atom. They were the original rocket scientists, people vouchsafed proverbially inaccessible knowledge.
They were wizards, men like gods, who either had more than the regular human complement of leetle grey cells, or access to occult arcana denied to ordinary mortals. They were priests in vestments of white coats, tortoiseshell specs and pocket protectors. We didn't criticise them. We didn't engage with them – we bowed down before them.How our faith was betrayed! (This is the great unwashed "we" again.) It wasn't long before we realised that science gave us pollution, radiation, agent orange and birth defects. And when we looked closely, "we" (oh, I give up) found that the scientists were not dispensing truths, but – gasp – arguing among themselves about the most fundamental aspects of science. They weren't priests after all, but frauds, fleecing us at some horrifically expensive bunco booth, while all the time covering up the fact that they couldn't even agree among themselves about the science they were peddling us like so much snake oil. And if they couldn't agree among themselves, why should good honest folks like you and me give them any credence?
And all this because scientists weren't honest enough, or quick enough, to say that science wasn't about Truth, handed down on tablets of stone from above, and even then, only to the elect; but Doubt, which anyone (even girls) could grasp, provided they had a modicum of wit and concentration. It wasn't about discoveries written in imperishable crystal, but about argument, debate, trial, and – very often – error.
[...]
Even the more highbrow effusions on science have yet to learn this lesson. TV programmes on science pursue a line that's often cringe-makingly reverential. Switch on any episode of Horizon, and the mood lighting, doom-laden music and Shakespearean voiceover convince you that you are entering the Houses of the Holy – somewhere where debate and dissent are not so much not permitted as inconceivable. If there are dissenting views, they aren't voiced by an interviewer, but by other scientists, and "we" (the great unwashed) can only sit back and watch uncomprehending as if the contenders are gods throwing thunderbolts at one another. If the presenters are scientists themselves, or have some scientific knowledge, be they Bill Oddie or David Attenborough, their discourse is one of monologue rather than argument, received wisdom rather than doubt.
Why is this? The answer, I think, is that those who are scientists, or who pretend to be scientists,
cling to the mantle of a kind of religious authority. And as anyone who has tried to comment on religion has discovered, there is no such thing as criticism. There is only blasphemy.
Henry Gee is a senior editor of Nature.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/occ ... questioned