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Scientist Says Most Scientific Papers Are Wrong
An anonymous reader writes "According to epidemiologist John Ioannidis, the majority of published scientific papers are wrong. If Ioannidis's own paper is right, a randomly chosen scientific paper has less than a 50% chance of being true. He also says that many papers may only be accurate measures of the prevailing bias among scientists. However, a senior editor of a scientific journal says that scientists are already aware of this: 'When I read the literature, I'm not reading it to find proof like a textbook. I'm reading to get ideas. So even if something is wrong with the paper, if they have the kernel of a novel idea, that's something to think about.'"
"Science" is NOT the same as "fact" or "truth". It is a METHOD -- a PROCEDURE one follows in an attempt explain some event or phenomenon. It should hardly be surprising that "Scientific" papers are mostly wrong. There may be only one "right" or "correct" theory for a given phenomenon -- but there are countless wrong ones.
Not too surprising.
I wish people would be a little more weary of automatically believing everything they read in a scientific paper, or worse a crap article from a journalist who doesn't even understand the paper in the first place.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"See? Scientists don't know what they're doing! All your answers are in Teh Bile-Balllllllll! Praise JEEEEEEE-zussssssssss!"
Yes, but unlike religious dogma, scientific theories are meant to be falsifiable.
Unless someone in the ID camp is willing to admit that God is falsifiable, their theory will not be considered science.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
I thought 33% of the papers were wrong.... Then or this has 33% chance of being wrong, or the other has 50% chance of being wrong....
:-)
Can someone calculate, based on above, a better estimate on the chance of some paper being wrong?
note: don't publish this calculation on a paper, otherwise it will be subject to these probabilities and we'll have to recalculate all over again....
So Long and Thanks for All the Fish!
In ~10 years of trying to find scientific evidence of just a single god the ID people haven't published a single paper. So now they attack the school system when their original mission (evidence) has failed.
Trolling is a art,
It is well known that science can be wrong. For example, before about 1900 the model of the universe was based on Galilean relativity, which was proven wrong by Einstein and friends. Those results were based on well-conceived and performed experiments, all of which confirmed their hypothesis (b/c they couldn't get close to light-speed so they couldn't tell).
But if the creationists/intelligent design advocates/Christian fundamentalists want to use this to say that they're right, they're relying on a logical fallacy. Just because a few papers are wrong doesn't mean that their view is correct. Their view of creationism is not the only alternative to the view of evolution present in a few possibly flawed papers. Evolution may work in a way that we aren't sure about, but this doesn't prove that intelligent design is correct.
Science seeks the truth but never claims it. If someone claims something is absoutly true they are selling something.
What I do see as harmful is the attitude towards bad papers. To many academics try to accumulate more and more published papers the same way that slash-dotters try to build up karma. I understand that having papers published can reflect well on someone, but we need more accountability. Journals need to create a more strict system for reviewing papers that are to be published to weed out more of the crap plain and simple. If the evidence does not reflect the claims throw it away. If the research was conducted on a population that was too small or specific for a grand generalized claim about the topic as a whole, throw it out.
I understand that you will always have people just trying to throw their names around, but this needs to be looked at from the grander perspective.
"When I read the literature, I'm not reading it to find proof like a textbook.
Sure there are probably many scientists that think of it this way. But the problem is that bad research (or a bad paper) rarely dies after being published. They are often cited as evidence for years to come in other papers until enough evidence to the contrary comes out to raise questions. Plus, you have crazy professors giving this bad research for their classes to read, and often they don't explain to their classes where research is possibly flawed--so we find ourselves training generations of new scientific minds that run around spouting out bad research. I understand that we all need to take research with a grain of salt when we read it, however bad scientists trying to become famous with their bad ideas or bad papers can be very detrimental to any field.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
But seriously, reviewers are biased and sloppy, as are the editors. The fact that reviews are blind means that they are also unaccountable, which fosters even more bias.
Journals take months or years to respond to a submision, and often as not they respond with a rejection so the submitter has to give up or start the whole process over with another journal. There are so many scandals that one could quote. The whole process seems more designed to support the status quo than to promote knowledge.
I have discussed this with many people in academia and they react not with logic, but with horror that I would dare to question a system that they view almost mystical reverence.
Test 1 2 3 4
If a submitted paper is scientifically unsound, it should be rejected.
If a scientific paper is useless to the readership, that publication should reject it and recommend a different journal.
If a paper is wrong and the reviewers KNOW IT then they should send it back for corrections.
If it's WRONG but the reviewers don't or more typically can't know it because it is novel, then publish it. The rightness or wrongness will be sorted out soon enough.
Ever heard of Isaac Newton? Turns out his theories were incomplete in some very fundamental ways, but his theories regarding the motion of objects were the best approximations we had for hundreds of years and are still very useful for macroscopic objects traveling way below c.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Newton's original papers on physics are all wrong. So what?
They've been replaced by something else. Sure, they're generally true, enough to be taught in physics classes, but all the specifics on gravitation etc. are incorrect.
They're being replaced with: (pick your theory) quantum gravity, string theory, quantum mechanics and more things I don't know.
But so what? Science, by its nature, is always being improved upon. Any time you correct someone else's theory, you could say their theory is now wrong.
Well, maybe this description is even wrong or inapplicable, considering I didn't read TFA =)
"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be research"
That's what my supervisor used to say to me when I got depressed about lack of progress.
"In ~10 years of trying to find scientific evidence of just a single god the ID people haven't published a single paper."
It depends on which journals you're reading.
Tweet, tweet.
A lecturer at my old university told me that around 90% of papers get written, then put into a drawer somewhere. And nobody reads them again. I wonder what proportion of papers that are read are 'wrong'?
Your ancestors may have been designed by Kang, but *mine* were designed by Kodos!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Scientific papers often include a great deal of data and analysis. Some of this data can be somewhat inaccurate, much of the analysis can also easily be incorrect. How far off does something have to be before it is "wrong"? How much of a paper has to be "wrong" for the paper itself to be declared "wrong"? I think a better way to look at it is that in most papers, there is some wrong and some right.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
I didn't read the article but I don't believe the conclusions of the summary. Maybe in epidemiology it is true but not in physics where usually the results are reproducible and I very rarely find papers that are just wrong. I might agree that most of the papers are not 100% right (small mistakes in formulas happen quite frequently) but it does not impair the usability of a paper.
However, peer review does not solve all the problems. Most of the research takes a lot of time and effort and referees just read the papers. They do not reproduce the experiments or calculations. So peer review can weed out only obviously bad papers but not papers that looks OK but are wrong.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
Indiana Jones:
Archaeology is the search for fact, not truth. If it's truth you're looking for, Dr. Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
It took them 100 years but they spinned creationism into ID, in 100 years they'll come around. Evolution has always been evolution, their side twists and spins. The truth will always be right.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
So, if over 50% of scientific papers are wrong, does it make sense to be so concerned that Creationist / I.D. subscribers will use that fact to that advantage? These studies are important in our society; they have a large impact. From diets to car safety to prescription drugs to behavioral profiling, many aspects of our society are based on these types of studies. This information can change lives (or end them as we found out with Vioxx), so I think we need to be concerned about addressing the underlying causes of these problems rather than worrying about those crazy I.D. folks.
The thing is, there are different degrees of wrongness. It's one thing to write a scientific paper that may be "wrong" in the sense that the evidence for a particular hypothesis may not be quite as strong as the author would like; if that hypothesis is of any particular importance, and it is in fact false, sooner or later someone will come along and show it to be so. It's quite another to attack and try to tear down science itself, which is what the creationist/ID folks do. In the world they'd like to create, there would be no such thing as actual science -- and what passed for science in that world would be wrong, not just marginally wrong but drastically so, all the time.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Your missing the point: ID-ers are claiming their theory is falsifiable. Which made others come up with equally falsifiable theories :)_ Activating_Meatballs
e.g. Flying Spaghetti Monsterism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_%26_Pulsar
Science progresses when well thought out hypothothies based on a good data are replaced by more inciteful reasoning based on more complete data. Lamarck wasn't guilty of faulty reasoning. He just didn't have a complete enough data set.
But the article at hand, isn't talking about that kind of "wrong". He is talking about conclusions that can not be supported by the data presented. Either the reasoning is faulty or the data collection methods are so faulty that no meaningful conclusions can be drawn.
When a theory is proven wrong in the scientific sense, it is a good thing. We learn something new and that be the basis for further developments. But if a theory is proven "wrong" in the mechanical sense, we have no new insights, just a relief from further time wasting.
I don't dispute for a moment that intelligence can create new forms of life.
I do dispute the scientific validity of the claim that ONLY intelligence can create new forms of life.
Your straw man is now on fire.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Our biology provides us with excellent truth detectors: throughout most of primate evolution, if you were wrong about whether your food was poisonous or whether there was a lion hiding in the bushes, you didn't get to pass on your genes. You didn't get to debate social relativism with the lion before he made a tasty meal out of you.
Actually, no. As Alvin Plantinga has pointed out, any number of false beliefs would accomplish the same thing. For example, if the early primates wanted to be friends with lions, but a few believed that the best way to accomplish this was running away, those with that false belief would be far more likely to pass on their genes. What's required for survival is not truth-detection, but behavior consistent with survival, which can be prompted by belief in utter and complete falsehood.
He goes on to argue that belief in evolution is self-defeating because on the supposition that evolution is responsible for our reasoning ability, we have no confidence that the deliverances of reason (i.e. the theory of evolution) correspond to reality.
[snip irrelevant bullshit]
> Why would anyone want to close their eyes and cover their ears and say "I can't hear you - there is only evolution - there is no intelligent design - I'm not listening to you"? When actual real scientists are creating organisms which other scientists cannot distinguish from similar species found in nature?
I don't see anyone applying ID methodologies to determine whether this plant is the result of intelligent design or not. Any idea why?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Hate to get into metaphysics, but a scientific hypothesis or theory is only going to be able to predict a very restricted set of things.
People often quote Newton's physics as being "proved wrong" by Einstein's relativity (and those same people often barely understand the limits of relativity with respect to the quantum mechanical world). However Newtonian physics is good enough for most (though not all) space mission planning since it's still quite accurate so long as you don't get near a large gravity well like the sun or travel too fast. So Newtonian physics isn't "wrong" it's just accurate to within a certain margin and useful under less general conditions than previously thought.
That's what these non scientifically trained creationalist types miss. There is no right or wrong theory, even though that's how the popular scientific press reports it. There is only the ability of a theory to predict what can happen (or has happened) based on a set of conditions, and an accuracy under a given set of conditions. Newtonian physics is no more "wrong" than eating salad is. You just can't misuse it by applying it to the wrong set of conditions (don't eat that salad if you're allergic to the ingredients).
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Did anyone actually RTFP? It's one of the most spurious pieces of "research" I've ever read. And with a biophysics degree, I have read quite a few. The author actually didn't investigate any actual papers, but he builds a mathematical model out of his own biases, statistical projections, and some back of the envelope computation. Even then, his conclusions are much less stringent than the submitter makes them out to be. He "proves" that under all his assumptions, half the research papers *might* be wrong, but shows not even statistical evidence that they are.
I think PLoS is peer reviewed, but that paper should never have survived peer review. Occasionally, bad papers slip through, even in the so called hard sciences. This one seems to be one of them. Since PLoS Medicine is pretty well respected for an open access publication, lets assume that this was a lark and more on.
But it makes me curious what the fraction of bad papers looks like in an open access publication like PloS versus a traditional journal like, say, Nature, The Lancet, or New England Journal of Medicine. One reservation people have about open access (or author pays) models was that since PLoS gets paid about $1500 from they authors, they might be accepting vanity papers, or don't triage as well as traditional journals. I don't think they are, but if this paper is any indication, PLoS might take a second look at their peer review process.
The real point is, in the eyes of the common man, science is a brand of information, just like Walmart is a brand for stores or Nike is a brand for shoes, and the brand is taking a beating.
Here's the attitude.
"you want someone to believe human origins from a set of people that told me I would die if I smoked and ate a cheeseburger and I'm still living."
"well now basically you are just making up evolution to fit your story together. Well I can do that too. Can't test it either way, can we..."
This is my sig.
This obviously depends completely on the field of science that you are in. Epidemiology? Please, that hardly even counts as science. You're basing this on a field that you can't even do experiments in! You just wait for an outbreak to occur (fairly rare) and then see what happens and base all of your conclusions on a few isolated incidents. My advice to Dr. Ioannidis is to pick another field where you can do some concrete science.
When you think about it, that's positively astounding. There are vastly more ways to be wrong than to be right. We've managed to get 50% right answers out of the myriad wrong answers. Pretty impressive!
It would be better still if it was more than 50%, but we can just apply the process repeatedly to push up our confidence (50%, 75%, 87.5%, etc.). A little more attention to statistics would help us raise the base rate above 50%.
the level of religous dogma in some camps.
The only question is, who decides which science is wrong? I doubt very seriously any big money areas will have a published high rate of error. After the high money science the next protected type would be whatever is en vogue for the time.
Scientific integrity took a big dive in the late 80s as special interest groups suddenly realized that marketing, confusion, and intimidation were far better at advancing agenda than honest science.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Scientists publish papers to get tenure and paid.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
After reading the summary, I was under the impression that this artical was about a high rate misleading papers published by scientists.
Based on all of the anti-creationalist comments I thought maybe I had misread the summary, so I looked at the article itself.
Not once did I see mention of the universe's creation in the summary or in the linked artical, in fact the example stated was "such as whether a particular gene influences a particular disease."
It seems to me that lately a lot of comments on slashdot have been trying to start a witch hunt for advocates of ID. Can we please knock it off and stop screaming wolf every time some thing that is related to science is mentioned on slashdot.
the same way there in't enough evidence whether the Earth is flat or not?
generally, apart from America, the rest of the developed world has no question about the validity of evolution. there is so much evidence it doesn't even bear consideration except in the USA where extremists try to claim the bible is fact when historically no other Christians have had this opinion because religion isn't supposed to be about facts anyway.
the problem is that science has been so sucessful that now everyone looks at things in terms of true or false, including religion itself, which is not how things were supposed to be. religion used to be about things that science CAN'T answer, such as the PURPOSE of the universe, not about factual and historical things like the number of days it took for life to come about on planet Earth. seriously, how the fuck can it possibly matter?
but modern "Christians" are usually more concered with claiming they BELIEVE in the Bible than actually READING it and following its teachings. they'd rather scream about creationism than think about whether people are treating fellow human beings with the love and respect they deserve.
I wonder how many papers in mathematics he reviewed in his study. Many of them are incomprehensible to anyone who is not working in topic covered by the papers. I doubt you'ld be able to classify them as 'true' or 'false' in the same sense you might classify some biological research or some medical research. If a mathematics paper has been published in a well respected, peer reviewed journal, there's a pretty good chance it's true. (but not 100%)
I'm not asserting the certainty of anything. I will assert that both theories provide useful, predictive models of how the world works.
Newtonian physics works remarkably well to describe any number of macro-scale phenomena. Is the theory complete? No. Is it perfectly accurate? Certainly not. Is it a useful tool? Absolutely.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
If science can be wrong, then why trust it?
It is the only objective process for assessing facts from fiction.
In other words, if the best a scientist can tell you today is that, he might be wrong tomorrow, why even bother listening to him?
No one is forcing you to listen. You ignore the information provided by science at your peril.
So you can use science for real things, like physics and design of military weapons and consumer goods, but the rest of it is so much speculative nonsense.
Quantum physics is speculative, but you don't seem to be throwing your computer out the window.
The consequences of guessing wrong about the origin of humanity are completely immaterial to most people's lives.
Dead wrong.
Stalin believed that Darwinian evolution was just a bouguoise concept. He believed in Lamarckian evolution and directed his agricultural ministry to ignore studies that supported Darwinain evolution. Their agricultural industry suffered and people went hungry in the process.
You can't show people evolving any more than someone else can show God making something.
I can show a progression of hominid fossils leading to homo sapien sapien. The Bible is silent about these fossils.
It's immaterial, unprovable, and so why fight over it?
It may be immaterial to you, but the theory is consistent with the evidence we possess. You may not choose to believe it, but that the only thing immaterial about this discussion.
Yeah you can roll out the eliptical argument that evolution is somehow necessary for medicine but most doctors are concerned with the human species, here and now, and now plants and people are related.
Why bother? You obviously believe that the scientific method works differently for investigations related to the origin of humanity than it does when applied to chemistry.
To wit, you can get a Chem E degree and still get into Med School.
You are correct.
Just don't whine to me when you have difficulty making sense of the data you gather without using evolutionary theory.
You will never amount to anything more than a glorified technician.
I can live with that.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
It's amazing to see the bias here. A paper is written about how a lot of other research is wrong, and people automatically start associating it to the ID community. Come on, this does nothing for the progression of the search for the truth.
Realistically, I have been through grad school with a REAL science degree. I now work as a researcher at Penn State University. Even though I am not promoting wierdo pseudo-science, I am not to impressed with the scientific community as well. They pull some of the same crap as the so called morons who have the nerve to believe in a higher power.
Funding for research is tied to so called 'success'. Couple this with a 'bigger dick than you' attitude among academia, and people will publish whatever ever they can to try to show that they were right so the can get more money, or prove that they have a bigger brain.
A lot of controversial research (such as cosmology, etc.) conclusions are based upon very little on both sides. The problem is that a lot of people who have a little bit of science background (like those here) will fight to the death to back upon the mainstream view, even if they have very little first hand knowledge of evidence. After all, most people (including other scientists) take other research papers at face value, afraid to stray and be laughed at.
Do I believe in all the mumbo jumbo psuedo science out there? No Way. Am I always willing to listen to new ideas even if they seem implausible? Sure. The universe is an amazing place. They are so many fundamental questions that science may never answer. We are so arrogant to think that we are even capable of answering everything. Even if the PROCESS of evolution is true as we have theroized, so what? You still can't as the greater questions of why life wants advance. Why does life always seem to find a way to keep going. There is no requirement for life in the current models.
You could watch me playing ball with my daughter from a distance. Models could be formed about how the ball travels, gravity, etc. One could be very accurate about predicting the path of the ball. But, your models cannot tell me why we are playing ball. Why we choose to interact. Why I choose to develop a relationship with my daughter. After all, its not required to propagate the species. This interaction isn't required to get humans higher in the food chain. We could reduce love to electro-chemical processes in the brain, but there still is no answer as to what starts them.
Lets all be a little more open minded here. It's not moronic to recognize the mystery in the universe. Lets not get caught up in the bigger dick competition and enjoy the universe.
Its possible to use logic to prove things about a mathematical model but its not possible to prove that a model is an accurate description of the physical world.
... In the end its about being able to build things that do things that we want done.
A theory about the world might be proven wrong by the very next measurement/experiment. To prove a theory it would be necessary to perform all of the experiments that test every implication of a theory at all times. New measurements can support or disprove a theory but they can never prove it. In going about our day-to-day affairs its convenient to confuse the positive feelings that derive from repeated successful use of a well supported theory with the sense that the theory has been logically proven.
In addition to the unprovability of scientific theories there are additional issues that don't make it into the Jack and Jill stories about science. At any given time there is usally more than one theory that describes/organizes the facts about equally well. When new data comes in some of these theories die, others are generalized, and new ones come onto the stage.
Furthermore, it is both a practical and a cultural issue as to which theory is the dominant or textbook theory at any given time. Any theory that organizes, describes, and predicts enough of the facts with only a few assumptions and simple rules/patterns will be a useful theory. Theories that have to deal with most situations as a special case are the least useful from a scientific and engineering perspective but they can sometimes serve political and other purposes.
Good scientific theories don't explain all the data. They don't have to in order to be useful and some of the measurements are unrepeatable. Good theories explain most of the data with some margin of error that is small enough to make the theory useful.
Often times the implications of the theory are extremely complex when applied to large systems or to systems over long periods of time. Attempting to simulate a living cell starting from string theory with no approximations will take a bigger Beowulf cluster than you can afford.
Scientific theories about the world are just working models that give scientists guidance in making better measurements to form better theories to give better guidance
Misunderstandings about the notion of proof are common and costly. Galileo wanted to prove to everyone that the planets went around the sun. As I understand it the pope at the time didn't object to Galileo's teaching the solar centric model. What he objected to was that Galileo kept going on and on about proof. The modern debate about Intelligent design has its origins in this same issue. The theory that satisfies religious needs is not the one that satisfies scientific and engineering needs. Maybe if scientists and engineers shut up about proof and started teaching the real process of science then the people who think that their religion has something to do with logical proof of something or other will stop trying to subvert the beneficial scientific process.
If science can be wrong, then why trust it?
And to think you posted that with a device that is arguably high technology. Gee. It's a good thing those practical thinkers at Signetics and Intel didn't listen to those shifty eyed physicists.....
So you can use science for real things, like physics and design of military weapons and consumer goods, but the rest of it is so much speculative nonsense.
Newsflash. The same people that don't like evolution only like physics when it can be used to attack evolution. The rest of the time it gives rise to uncomfortable facts like the Earth being round and the Universe being billions of years old. They'll get around to rest of the so-called "useful" sciences once those pesky life sciences have been properly re-aligned. I'm also glad people like you don't decide what is "useful" in science. After a demonstration of electrical phenomena, the Queen of England asked Micheal Faraday what of what possible use was all this nattering about electricity. He replied, "Of what use is a newborn babe." Sheesh.
Science is all about being wrong. 99% of it is long painful slogging through mucky fields of sheer wrong and trivialities to find the occaisional nugget of right. I'm mildly amazed that Scientists Can Be Wrong is a subject of discussion. This is only a problem when people who don't have any idea how science works expect scientists to be some sort of infallible priesthood. It also doesn't help when the press seizes on new research that hasn't endured years of attacks and splashes it all over the place. It is as though Firebird 0.3 is headlined as the New Killer App. The press is the worst offender in this regard.
You can't show people evolving any more than someone else can show God making something. It's immaterial, unprovable, and so why fight over it?
You can show things that reproduce really fast evolving. It is quite easy with microorganisms and it isn't too awful bad with insects like fruit flies. It's a bit harder with some fast reproducing plants and an absolute pisser with anything that takes more than a week or two to reproduce. One can still do things like genome tracing and compare and contrast with currently living things that haven't changed in a long time. It is hard to show people evolving. It isn't all that hard to show the effects of evolution on people. Unless of course you live in the US.......
There's a famous quote by Box: "All models are wrong; some models are useful". That's what science is all about -- making models, which are useful until a better model comes along. So by definition, 100% of *all* scientific papers are wrong. But some are wrong in useful ways that inspire new generations of scientists to improve upon them.
Similarly, the things which evolution appears to imply could be mis-conclusions.
Cite the evidence to support your statement. You have posted more than once how evolution is lacking in scientific merit without one shred of evidence.
I'm calling your bluff. Post the evidence.
Face it, there's a new orthodoxy.
As the Who sang: "Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss." Reactionary religious people bashing scientific evidence is nothing new.
Post your evidence that evolution is lacking scientific merit.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Universities have failed a lot of scientists in that a) those papers are the result of stupid tenure policies and b) universities often do little to promote their researchers.
Engineers often read papers to solve problems. When they know about them! (Google Scholar might fix this)
A worse problem than them often being wrong is that:
a) there is frequently no way to determine if a given paper is accurate, has mistakes, is partially accurate, is laughable, was accurate at one point but is outdated, etc etc. At least from an outsider's perspective.
b) there is no good way to stay abreast of current interesting developments - hell, there's no way to see interesting things from 20 years ago easily! Again, this is from an interested outsider's perspective.
Once or twice a year I have the luxury of spending a week or two in an engineering library for the express purpose of finding out new and interesting things in my field. I'm SHOCKED at the amount of material that is being duplicated (often badly) in industry, material that is inaccurate or poor quality, and VERY GOOD material that never sees the light of day again.
..don't panic
The main reason why I'm not reading /. as much anymore is because I'm fed up with all comments about why religion sucks/creationism and ID is bad/Bush was wrong
I agree with you that's annoying when the whole ID/creationism thing gets brought up off-topic. However you have to recognise that the opposition to it is based on its proponents pushing it as science when it doesn't even meet the most basic requirements of a valid (ie. testable) scientifc theory or hypothesis. This whole idea of calling intelligent design/creationism a science is part of a christian fundamentalist political movement that has existed in one form or another since Darwin first published his work.
It's not a knee-jerk or prejudiced reaction against religion or Christianity. It's justifiable criticism of a political movement to misuse and distort the meaning of the word 'science' to have religious beliefs accepted as literal facts - the very definition of religious fundamentalism.
Pre-canned Evolution Links for all those Slashdot holy wars.
So, be careful of believing "science has told me there is no God."
I never made that claim.
You said:
Similarly, the things which evolution appears to imply could be mis-conclusions.
and:
Yeah but I would think you would look at the fundamental flaws in Newtonian physics as very, very instructive about how not to put too much faith in Evolution.
and finally:
If atoms aren't billard balls, how can you be sure we're monkeys?
You seem to run around in circles taking sideways shots at evolution, but when called on your words you shift away from what you have written and paint the results of evolution theory as being a refutation of God.
There is nothing in what you have written on this topic that is consistent other than that we should not believe what evolution teaches us. That statement by itself seems logical based on comparison to other scientific theories that have had to adjust to new facts. But then you make statments regarding evolution and "no God" or "we're monkeys" leading anyone who reads them to believe that is what evolution means.
Science is, for the most part, silent on the nature of God. He/she/it is, by definition, not measurable in this experience. It is my opinion that any discussion of God in a scientific context is pointless. There is no way to objectively sort out the competing claims for His/her/its existence.
So your backhanded claims about what evolution says lends support for improving education in the sciences. You seem to have failed to grasp the lessons of evolution from your science instructors.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Actually, they were probably a few random /. mods who said the article was "insightful".
Similar to the upcoming US election results
ID could be a valid theory if the people who currently advocate ID had never heard about it.
How so? How do you avoid an endless loop of "who created who"?
To make the Intelligent Design theory work, you need to arbitrarily stop at some point and declare that "this is where the intelligent designer ends, and this is where his/her/its works begin".
In other words, if God created the universe, who created God? And who created that God? After all, at each point one could argue that the preceding step in the creation heirarchy is too complex to have created itself through random chance and so necessitates the existence of a higher power.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Glad to see that a smart post got modded up. Darwin's theories are only a little closer to today's evolutionary theory than Ptolomy's are to Einstein's. Yes, survival of the fit is still a major component of evolution, but sexual selection has less to do with fitness than had been supposed, cooperation and co-evolution are more important than had been asserted, and heritability is far more complicated than had been believed. The central dogma of biochemistry (DNA->RNA->proteins [only]) has proven false, aquired methylation patterns can be inheirited, along with cytoplasmic, immune, and epigenetic/develpopmental influences that are not encoded in the base sequence of DNA. Evolution is not constant in pace as had been supposed, nor is random mutation the primary source of variations (aside from sex/crossover) as had been asserted. Species are less seperate than had been thought and genetic material often finds its way into one species from other species or even kingdoms by a variety of mechanisms. Pressures from commensal and parasitic organisms have as much or more to do with the evolution of species than predation per se. And despite denials of some in the field, biology still has no plausible hypothesis of the origin or even the nature of the first cells, let alone actual scientific verification. Despite the pant-hooting teritorial dispays from supposed scientists, the irreducible complexity argument is still one that has not been overcome, much as I would like to see that happen. Not even the origin of all the amino acids is fully explained yet, AFIK - certainly the sparks-and-soup experiments did not produce all the needed amino acids.
Someday these gaps in our knowledge will be explained rather than merely explained away, but the worst and most dangerous kind of pseudoscience comes from those who claim that science is already complete and attack those who point out evidence which isn't explained by current theories. Evolution is a fact, but it is not one single theory, but rather a changing assortment of related hypotheses, many of which will never be scientifically verified in the most rigorous sense of the term, and even if they were, would not categorically disprove hypotheses such as that intelligence is inherent in the universe and started the ball of life rolling or that life originally evolved on another planet and was seeded here by accident or on purpose, or any of hundreds of speculative variations on our current orthodox conjectures.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Ask them. To most kids, science is a class they take, where they have to regurgitate "facts" like why the sky is blue, or how hydrogen and oxygen combine to create water. It's a boring class, unless you happen to sit next to an attractive member of the opposite sex, but then, it's still not the class that's interesting...
Science is not 'fact' - Science is the best-known process by which truth can be reliably found.
Science is somewhat like the mathematical function x=1/y. Forever approaching truth, never (exactly) reaching it, forever leaving curious minds with new things to explore. Science is the magical combination of "what if" combined with the "feet on the ground" of experimentation, independent scrutiny, and validation of theories.
The "Scientific method" that is regurgitated by most Jr. High schoolers (in California, anyway) is never really *experienced* except in the case of the rare instructor who goes above and beyond the textbook curriculum. EG:What drudgery! If that really was science, I wouldn't be interested, either!
It's sad. Entire generations of people who never get to experience the awe, wonder, and magic of science, who then seek out that awe and wonder by (best case scenario) watching magicians and listening to Art Bell, or (worst case scenario) performing criminal acts and doing drugs.
How much of the interest in the pseudo-sciences (aliens, conspiracy theories, perpetual motion machines, telepathy, Scientology) comes from the fact that they have never really been exposed to the real thing?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Is there reason to believe that this hypothetical creator should have designed brains incapable of being tricked? Why didn't this creator make us able to fly, breath underwater, or stick to the walls? What else are you going to ask me to explain, and why should I be obligated to provide an answer?
Because if you make complaints that evolutionary theory can't explain phenomenon X, then you should make an attempt to explain how yours can. It's unreasonable to poke holes at one theory and then argue that your favorite theory doesn't need to address those issues.
Your argument is equivalent to: "You can't prove that X caused Y. Therefore Z must have caused Y. And no, I don't have to prove it!"
Next point:
#1
>> how do you know that he/she/it programmed [our reasoning capability] to accurately reflect reality?
>We don't.
#2
>>Prove the above statement wrong.
>I definitely can't prove that wrong.
You go on to say:
But if Plantinga's argument is true, then that statement is preferable to the theory of evolution because it at least is not self-defeating.
Then you'd better do an improved job of elucidating that argument. So far the only argument you've given that evolution as a belief is "self-defeating" is, in your words: "on the supposition that evolution is responsible for our reasoning ability, we have no confidence that the deliverances of reason (i.e. the theory of evolution) correspond to reality".
Yet in point #1 and #2 above you've admitted yourself that creation mythology cannot give us any greater confidence that our perceptions and reason reflect reality.
So please give a coherent argument about what, exactly, makes evolution "self-defeating", and indeed what that term even means.
The statement "I think therefore..." cannot provably end in any statement about the nature of the univers, creation, or a creator. As others have pointed out, this entire line of thinking suffers from the so-called "brain in a vat" problem.
Meanwhile, evolutionary theory has such an unbelievable wealth of data behind it that at this point in underlies the study of biology every bit as thoroughly as atomic theory underlies chemistry, or as quantum theory, relativity, and gravity underlie physics. Indeed there are things not yet explained or fully understood in evolutionary theory. But physicists have not yet reconciled gravity and quantum theory, either. Do you therefore doubt that gravity exists?
You also might be surprised to find that I've read Dembski quite thoroughly. The man has not the faintest understanding of complexity, which is a rigorously defined concept in information science. CSI is a hand-wavy term that approximately means "anything that appears difficult to understand" and/or "anthing for which Dembski claims he cannot conceive of an evolutionary mechanism".
"Irreducible complexity" is only slightly better defined. Yet the ability of a nonguided stepwise selection process to generate irreducible complexity, something IDers claim is impossible, has been demonstrated repeatedly and published. See for example Lenski et. al, Nature 423:139-145. I saw the process daily in the course of my PhD research. The fact that IDers claim it is impossible is just that: an empty claim with no evidence or research behind it.
If you are talking about Intelligent Design (which is in no sense a form of "fundamentalism")
Snort. ID is a dressed-up creationist argument artificially and consciously created by the Discovery institute to function as a social wedge, forcing rationalism/science apart from religon. This has been publicly documented for some time. It has few or no adherents who do not subscribe to a doctrine of biblical inerrancy.
It's no better than the early-Enlightenment jerks who created false mythologies designed t
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Wolfgang Pauli's comment on one scientific paper shows that there are worse things in science than just being incorrect. Science is always falsifiable.
Indeed, he showed that ID is worse than evolution, in that for evolution you can at least conclude that the mind works in a way that helps us to survive in the wild. ID cannot even conclude that (because the designer could have made brains which deliberately work bad for that purpose).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Well, this guy is an epidemiologist, not an epistemologist. So I cannot understand how he write a paper on a problem on which he is not competent. Maybe epidemiologist publications are all false, but not scientific publications. When I see how long it takes for a scientist to write its article, to check it for errors, I cannot understand that such a man says that they are all wrong ! Ok, some can be, that's science. But not 50% of scientific publications. And what does he call scientific publications ? Publications in "Nature" or in the "Scientific American" or in "Science for the n00bs" ?
Bonjour !
"That statement makes no sense whatsoever. So a nation has to believe in evolution to feed its people? For lack of better terminology at the time, that's stupid."
Except the grandparent didn't say that. He said that that Stalin couldn't feed his people because he directed his ministry to ignore studies that supported Darwinain evolution, which meant his country used inferior methods. The grandparent did not in any way conclude that a nation has to believe in evolution to feed its people. He merely pointed out that researching the origins of humans has valuable and real benefits beyond knowing the truth, and that to ignore such information can be detrimental to society.
This guy are sick.