Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us

Everyone a specialist now by elrous0 · 2012-01-31 10:17 · Score: 5, Insightful

As knowledge expands, it becomes harder and harder to see the big picture. Everyone becomes a specialist, focusing on narrower and narrower specialties.

But that's not a bad sign. It's just an inevitable wall. There are only so many years in a human life and only so much any one person can learn and retain in that time. We just have to work a little more at stepping back from our tiny cages and saying "So what does this really mean in the larger scheme of things?" and recognizing there is larger world beyond our narrowly-focused field of view.

Well, either that or we could just ask Jesus to tell us what to do.

--
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.

Re:Everyone a specialist now by Omnifarious · 2012-01-31 10:29 · Score: 5, Interesting

I agree.
I think we need to start focusing on systems theory. Many large systems share some very similar characteristics. We need people who are big picture people, who can see the forest for the trees. Of course, without knowing about the trees, a forest is something of a mystery. We need both kinds of people. But the usefulness of pure reductionism is at its end, and we need to recognize that and start taking a different approach to understanding.

--
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Re:Everyone a specialist now by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-31 10:45 · Score: 5, Interesting

"Many large systems share some very similar characteristics...We need people who are big picture people, who can see the forest for the trees."
Except that everyone who gets large systems dropped out of the current, fucked-up system long before being awarded a research post for their willingness to play along.
Re:Everyone a specialist now by SgtDink · 2012-01-31 11:18 · Score: 5, Insightful

This post and parents nailed it. If you don't do reductionist science, it is hard (but possible) to receive funding since everyone is trained in anti-systems (reductionist) theory. Very hard to get folks to understand that reality is complex so it needs to be studied that way when they are publishing and getting tenure. In biology it is now possible to do massively parallel reductionism using new technologies (genetic/genomic), but putting those measurements back into a system capable of predictive outcome is key. If diabetes goes away, people will listen. I am VERY excited that the roll out of applied network theory across all disciplines will reveal underlying principles that will allow for a massive shift in our ability to predict cause-effect relationships. Star Trek Tech is near...I can feel it.
Re:Everyone a specialist now by travisco_nabisco · 2012-01-31 12:01 · Score: 5, Funny

Then we will be one step closer to psychohistory!!
Re:Everyone a specialist now by Daniel+Dvorkin · 2012-01-31 12:07 · Score: 4, Interesting

We need people who are big picture people, who can see the forest for the trees. Of course, without knowing about the trees, a forest is something of a mystery. We need both kinds of people.
I think it's a mistake to think that these should be two different groups of people. There are a lot of "forest" people who don't actually know anything at all about trees, and whatever they think they know about forests will be complete nonsense as a result. You see this a lot on Slashdot, actually; it seems to be a common failing among computer scientists to think that just because you can write code to describe a system, in some fashion, that means you actually understand the system. Certainly scientists in a lot of fields tend to overspecialize, but in interdisciplinary fields such as bioinformatics, you just have to start with some of the tree knowledge, or you won't be able to say anything meaningful about the forest at all.
And yes, this means spending a lot of years in school studying many different and not-obviously-related subjects, and no, that blog post you read last week doesn't count.

--
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Re:Everyone a specialist now by Samantha+Wright · 2012-01-31 12:38 · Score: 3, Interesting

Realising you need the partnership is half the problem. :) Mathematicians and computer scientists didn't show up and say "Look, guys, you need to stop looking at this thing one gene at a time." The field was essentially founded as a result of Fred Sanger's early work with whole genomes, and he was a biochemist to the bone.
At any rate, the distinction doesn't matter; the point is that the problem of scaling up and looking at the big picture was resolved in the case of the biological sciences, and the view continues to get broader through approaches like environmental sequencing and metagenomics. The problem described in the article is exactly a case of an old-school, low-throughput mindset and insufficient concern for other variables. Reductionism can work very well when you don't accidentally leave things out! The trick lies in only reducing the system once you have good reason to believe that you've ruled out all the other possibilities.

--
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Re:Everyone a specialist now by tibit · 2012-01-31 12:41 · Score: 3, Interesting

The predictive outcome is you mention is otherwise known as a scientific theory, and is pretty much what science is all about. I don't care much whether a theory is "reductionist" or "systems", as long as it's a good theory (it works!), it's valuable. I do agree that many science teams could use an outsider systems guy to try an see the big picture better by not being absorbed in the minutiae.

--
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Re:Everyone a specialist now by TerranFury · 2012-01-31 13:32 · Score: 5, Informative

If you don't do reductionist science, it is hard (but possible) to receive funding since everyone is trained in anti-systems (reductionist) theory.
Wait. Really? There are entire fields that do nothing but systems theory. The names shift. Cybernetics. Systems theory. Control systems. Complex networks. Cyberphysical systems. There are lots of people doing work in precisely the areas you suggest. Take a look at the NSF's "Broad Agency Announcements." There is funding.
...
I do find it a bit amazing that science works at all. In machine learning, there are notions of the complexity of learning, and one of the basic ideas is that, as the class of models you are willing to consider grows, the amount of data you need to be sure, with reasonable statistical significance, which of those models describes it, grows very rapidly -- so rapidly that it is a miracle that we have apparently learned anything at all. See "VC dimension," "Rademacher complexity," etc.
The best explanation I can come up with is that the class of physical theories the human mind can conceive is actually quite limited (or, our priors are very good), and that it is evolution, over millions of years, that has gathered the necessary data to build a brain capable of conceiving of only the right theories, and that the role of conscious experimentation is only to narrow things down within this already-restricted set.
Because if the human mind is not much more limited than we like to think, then I do not know how we know anything.

Who says by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-31 10:18 · Score: 5, Insightful

that science is failing us? Define success...?

Re:Who says by IICV · 2012-01-31 10:34 · Score: 4, Insightful

Exactly! If this is failure, then I don't think I want to succeed!
Re:Who says by Beerdood · 2012-01-31 10:42 · Score: 5, Insightful

Maybe they could replace the header with "medical science" - as every example the TFA deals with some issue dealing with human biology. Science is not failing us (as the sensational headline indicates) in physics, or chemistry or even social / behavioral science. And it's not *failing* us in the medical department either really, there's just a lot more complexity when it comes to the human body. And when you throw in some other factors you don't see in other sciences, such as the placebo effect, or realizing that the body heals itself eventually, then maybe trial and error just doesn't work so well.

The story seems to focus on the pharmaceutical industry specifically, maybe that's the problem here and not the scientific method. Most of their money is made by spending billions into R&D, then hoping they get a useable drug out of it they can patent and make money off of. Well maybe the problem here is the corners that are cut and they're essentially racing to get it FDA approved (and with as few side effects as possible). That's bound to bring up some bad science, and questionable or skewed results in the name of profit. That's not "Science failing us" - that's greed and human error causing the problem.

--
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
Re:Who says by interkin3tic · 2012-01-31 11:04 · Score: 4, Funny

You say that, and yet I believe we were promised flying cars. I WANT MY FLYING CAR GODDAMMIT! Clear failure of science there.

That article could have been a whole lot shorter come to think of it.
Re:Who says by icebike · 2012-01-31 11:12 · Score: 4, Informative

Exactly.
There were way to many financial pressures to find a impartial result at way to many steps along the way.
Add that to the difficulty of actually testing anything in the human system and you have a prescription for frequent failure. "According to a recent analysis, more than 40 per cent of drugs fail Phase III clinical trials." A negative result is not a failure. Its the ultimate money (and life) saving step. That they went to clinical trials with little more than hunch, and the FDAs blessing that it "should cause no harm" simply says their internal standards were not tight enough, and testing in glassware and rats not nearly a good enough method.
It says nothing about science at all. TFA's indictment of science seems a little over wrought.
But its not surprising that this author would try to spin it that way when you review his bio you find this prescient quote:

"Lehrer fancies himself – and not without reason – as a sort of one-man third culture, healing the rift between sciences and humanities by communicating and contrasting their values in a way that renders them comprehensible to partisans of either camp."
Given the guys inability to operate in either camp successfully, he appoints himself a ambassador to both! He seems pre-disposed to doubt the methods of science rather than the motivation of the people involved. His training is in neuroscience, the epitome of un-testable theories. And so he presumes the entire world operates that way.

--
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Re:Who says by suomynonAyletamitlU · 2012-01-31 11:32 · Score: 3, Funny

We can make other things fly, just not cars. What we have here is clearly a failure of engineering.

What does this have to do with science? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-31 10:19 · Score: 5, Insightful

Science is not about explaining everything, it's about explaining stuff that what we know in a way that is consistent with other stuff that we know.

Re:What does this have to do with science? by vlm · 2012-01-31 10:38 · Score: 3, Insightful

Its more about coming up with the most efficient way to make falsifiable predictions about the future that work often enough to be useful. this explaining stuff is a part but not the whole thing.
The summary seems to be, science sucks because its not a bunch of non-science liberal arts philosophy babble. Which is right up there with music sucks because its not a good painting.
The real discussion question, is what happened to wired? It used to be cool, well, a long time ago it used to be cool. Now?

--
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger

What's the point? by kyrio · 2012-01-31 10:22 · Score: 4, Insightful

The title has nothing to do with the summary, in fact the summary doesn't even comment on the title's conclusion, so what's the point of this article? The only thing I've learned from the article is that science does what it does and nothing has failed anything.

Science isn't a goal by Fned · 2012-01-31 10:25 · Score: 5, Interesting

It's a direction.

Re:Science isn't a goal by UnknownSoldier · 2012-01-31 10:32 · Score: 3, Insightful

No, Science is applied philosophy, aka the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method. It is _one_ way to acquire Truth. And like any process, it works well with certain types of inputs, and completely fails at others.
But it is NOT the _only_ process; however it happens to work well, and handle many inputs.
Many people ignore the fact that it is an _incomplete_ process. Ignoring the weaknesses of any system is the height of arrogance.
Re:Science isn't a goal by jdgeorge · 2012-01-31 10:43 · Score: 5, Informative

The scientific method is a simple, well-tested, approach to empirical study of a subject. The scientific method is as complete as it needs to be. However, if the method is not applied rigorously, the results will not be reliable.
"Truth" is not part of the scientific method, and has a very ambiguous meaning. Furthermore, capitalizing the letter T in truth suggests interest in something other than science.
Re:Science isn't a goal by Missing.Matter · 2012-01-31 11:05 · Score: 4, Informative

It is _one_ way to acquire Truth.
The scientific method absolutely cannot determine what is true; it can only tell you what is false. That is, you cannot "prove" anything by applying the scientific method. The best you can do is falsify a hypothesis. Did you actually read the article you linked? It says it right in there.

And yet another troll headline by interkin3tic · 2012-01-31 10:27 · Score: 5, Insightful

Anyone see the massive irony in this being posted on the internet, run by computers, powered by electricity, declaring that science is "failing us?"

First example in the story: a drug that doctors thought was going to work... didn't... The scientists mixed up what was causing what.

They had a hypothesis and tested it. We can say that the hypothesis was wrong because of what? That's right, because of science.

To imply that science is failing, or we need to reconceptualize "causality," simply because it's difficult... that's idiotic.

Finally, this article falls into a common mistake with science writing: confusing clinical trials with ALL SCIENCE RESEARCH. I do basic biological research. Don't lump me in with clinical researchers, critique their methods, and then say that all science research is messed up.

Science may be failing us. But ... by 140Mandak262Jamuna · 2012-01-31 10:34 · Score: 3, Insightful

all the remaining methods fail us even more. So even if the mumbo jumbo you are saying is really true, I will stick with science. You ponder about whether or not science is giving right answers, next time when you are at cruise altitude inside a shiny aluminum bubble with less than 0.1 mm of aluminum between you and a -40 degree (F or C does not matter) atmosphere with pressure so low your blood will boil instantly at that temperature. Happy thoughts.

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sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact

Then we must live forever by mykos · 2012-01-31 10:35 · Score: 4, Insightful

Science needs to make it a top priority figure out a way to keep our consciousnesses around forever, or at least a very long time. Mortality is a cruel reset button.

Stop trying to cure diseases and work toward getting rid of the flesh, perhaps.

Re:Then we must live forever by Missing.Matter · 2012-01-31 10:56 · Score: 4, Insightful

I think curing all diseases is a much closer goal than unlocking the key to consciousness and replicating the mind as an eternal machine. Besides, disease is the reason many of us die at all. I remember reading a story about a 500 year old clam. Why do we even die at all?

Take a look at this ranking of causes of death. Turns out, by eradicating cardiovascular diseases, infectious and parasitic diseases, cancer, and respiratory diseases we eliminate 71.36% of the reasons people die. Next up on the list are unintentional injuries (getting hit by a car) and intentional injuries (jumping off a building). So as long as you avoid those two things you're going to live a long damn time.
Re:Then we must live forever by Nemyst · 2012-01-31 11:16 · Score: 3, Interesting

Your clone wouldn't, but you'd be dead. I doubt having two copies of the same brain suddenly make your consciousness share both of them.
When the original dies, you die. An undistinguishable copy of you lives on.
Re:Then we must live forever by Americano · 2012-01-31 11:34 · Score: 4, Insightful

Problem is, cardiovascular disease, cancer, stroke, and respiratory ailments are often caused (or highly exacerbated by) simple wear and tear and aging on the body. Damage accumulates at the genetic level, and the body slowly loses its ability to replace cells and tissue. By saying "eradicate cardiovascular disease," what you're really saying is "find a way to make the body infinitely self-sustaining," which we're barely scratching the surface of understanding today.
Entropy's a bitch, and not something we're likely to find a silver bullet for. Many increases in life span beyond our current point will need to address the "wear and tear" aspect of aging, and find a way to slow or reverse those conditions, in parallel with dealing with the lifestyle issues that expose us to carcinogens and the like.
Re:Then we must live forever by niftydude · 2012-01-31 11:42 · Score: 4, Informative

Ray Kurzweil likes to pop out his prediction that if the current rate of increase in life expectancy holds, then in 15 years time, human life expectancy will increase by more than 1 year per year.

So if you can hold out for another 15 years, maybe you will live forever.

Or maybe he is applying a linear extrapolation to a non-linear process.

Anyway - ask me in 15 years, and I'll tell you if science has failed us or not.

--
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Re:Then we must live forever by SoftwareArtist · 2012-01-31 13:05 · Score: 4, Insightful

On the contrary, death is one of nature's greatest inventions. If you want to keep making progress, you need to constantly keep clearing away the old to make room for the new. How would you like driving if every car (and horse drawn cart, and covered wagon pulled by oxen) ever made was still on the roads? Sure, it's not so nice when you're the old thing that's getting cleared away. But do you want to sacrifice the welfare of all the countless generations to come, just because you want to stick around past your time? What if the earth were crammed to the breaking point with every pre-human and dinosaur and trilobyte that ever lived, still alive and sticking around? We each get our turn, and when it's over, we need to step aside to make room for the future.
Besides, what is "a very long time"? A year? (That's huge for a fly.) 10 years? (Incredibly long for a mouse.) 100 years? 1000 years? We're already one of the longer lived animal species on this planet, and no matter how long you live, I doubt you'll ever consider it "long enough".

--
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Re:Then we must live forever by geekgirlandrea · 2012-01-31 15:11 · Score: 4, Interesting

Difficult, sure, but saying 'impossible' is pretty much walking around with "I have no idea what entropy actually means" tattooed on your forehead. The human body is in no way a closed system, and the second law of thermodynamics says nothing about the change of its entropy over time as long as it has an energy input and a universe-sized heat sink to dump excess entropy into.
Cancer just means that evolution is hack piled upon hack until it stumbles onto something, so it does much better than human engineers at designing really complex interacting systems without very much abstraction or modularization, but much worse at discovering things which you'd never, ever stumble onto without conceptual understanding, like Reed-Solomon codes. If it had, then it could make the mutation rate exponentially low for only a linear increase of complexity and energy requirements for manipulating genetic material, and cancer would be worth worrying about roughly as much as brute force attacks against AES-256.
Of course, re-engineering such a fundamental, low-level feature of an organism might very well be harder than just designing a new one from scratch, but 'impossible' doesn't pass the giggle test. There's nothing anywhere in the laws of physics to say such a thing is any less possible than the mutation-prone organisms we already do have.
Re:Then we must live forever by yanyan · 2012-01-31 18:16 · Score: 3, Interesting

Why do these organisms have longer lives than us?
Fewer moving parts?

This is a load of CRAP by wisebabo · 2012-01-31 10:39 · Score: 4, Insightful

I (very) briefly looked at TFA and saw something about how some drug trial didn't go the way some pharmaceutical company thought it would.

Then I saw something about how people looking at the relative positions of a red and blue ball couldn't reliably put them into a casual relationship.

For the WIRED editors who allowed the story to be published (and slashdot editors who allowed this story to be posted) to see this as a repudiation of Science (and Causality) is ludicrous. Why didn't they say that maybe the reason why their drug didn't work out is because Science doesn't claim to understand completely the biochemistry of the human body (yet). Why didn't they say that the human proclivity to create a narrative where none exists (like with the red and blue balls) is an interesting and not (yet) wholly understood psychological phenomenon?

Science has given us so much (flight, health, food, cities, mobility, global communications, etc.) and has proven itself on every scale from the cosmic to the nano-scopic that I can only ask:

Is WIRED a Fox subsidiary?

Not proper experiments. by RockoTDF · 2012-01-31 10:40 · Score: 4, Insightful

Science is not failing us. Apparently, the pharmaceutical companies and their correlational studies are. Science - whether behavioral, biological, or physical - does not necessarily depend on correlations. Manipulating an independent variable and comparing it to other conditions (a control group, for example) is what makes an experiment more than just a correlational study. This is what allows us to make causal relationships clearer, even if we don't perfectly understand the pathways that lead A to cause B. By failing to make this distinction, the article makes it sound as if scientists are merely fumbling around in the dark without a clue as to how anything works. Really this article just provides many fine examples of how correlational information used by medical doctors is failing us - not scientists doing actual experiments.

--
There is more to science than physics!

www.iomalfunction.blogspot.com

Randian by tmosley · 2012-01-31 10:45 · Score: 5, Insightful

It's like this article was written by a villain dreamed up by Ayn Rand.

The author's claim that you can't link cause and effect is utter hogwash. He claims you can't say that an apple falls to the Earth because of gravity, which is stupid because gravity is DEFINED by that action. What we don't KNOW is what causes the phenomena we have labelled as gravity. It is a very poor example. He then proceeds to talk about people assuming causation in an ANIMATED MOVIE. Well, of course one ball hitting the other ball on a screen didn't cause it to move. They are just light and shadow in patterns that change with time! Claiming that the people have faulty perception is like claiming that people who read superhero comics really believe in people with superpowers, and can't tell that they are looking at a piece of paper with ink on it. He ignores the suspension of disbelief that the original experimenters introduced when they chose to use a medium that wasn't based on physical objects.

This guy just presents fallacy after fallacy and expects us to accept his dumb conclusion that science is somehow "over". Fuck that, and fuck him.

It's the other way around, really by damn_registrars · 2012-01-31 10:45 · Score: 5, Insightful

Science isn't failing the public, rather the public is failing science - especially in the US. The American public expects great things from science for almost no money invested, and simultaneously refuses to make any effort to understand any results that are more complicated than "we just cured cancer!" (nevemind that such a thing is, inherently, massively complicated).

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Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.

So here's my gratuitous Science quote by smoothnorman · 2012-01-31 10:49 · Score: 5, Insightful

Es ist nicht das Ziel der Wissenschaft, der unendlichen Weisheit eine Tür zuöffnen, sondern eine Grenze zu setzen dem unendlichen Irrtum. -- Bertolt Brecht "Leben des Galilei"

here's my (dubious) translation: It is not the goal of Science to open a door to endless knowledge, but rather to place limits upon endless error.

this quote, i believe, it both filled with truthiness, and also reveals notable false-iness in the referenced article.

If we knew everything by Ukab+the+Great · 2012-01-31 11:05 · Score: 3, Funny

The universe would be boring. Next question?

Re:List of Scientific Reversals by gestalt_n_pepper · 2012-01-31 11:16 · Score: 4, Insightful

So theories change with new information. Sounds like science behaving correctly to me. Only an idiot thinks you always get perfect and correct information the first time around. All you get are higher and higher probabilities of accuracy. It's just not a boolean universe.

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Please do not read this sig. Thank you.

Re:Failed how? by Qzukk · 2012-01-31 11:45 · Score: 4, Funny

and base 10 has it's own flaws: one of which is Pi. Pi, in base 10, cannot ever be calculated out.

I've solved that by switching to base Pi!

Of course, I'm still working out how to write 10...

--
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.

Re:List of Scientific Reversals by NeutronCowboy · 2012-01-31 12:02 · Score: 4, Insightful

Sigh. What a load of crap.
1) Wrong. Never was claimed outside of magazines picking up some hypothetical and highly qualified (i.e. full of could be's and needs more info) journal studies.
2) Wrong. Mammograms are determined to not be required at 35. Different from self-inspection
3) Wrong. Alcohol-based sanitizers are recommended, triclosan ones aren't.
4) I can't even find a reference to that nonsense. Not to mention that it is incredibly unlikely that the reversal happened in 2012
5) The only ones who put SIDS research into such absolute terms are glossy magazines trying to be bought by anxious parents.
6) Wrong. The reason they're not recommended at the level they used to be is the number of false positives.
7) Hyperbole to make a point that didn't exist. Try again.
8) See 7)
9) Wrong year for initial prediction (both author and target) and non sequitur.
10) Hyperbole, non sequitur.
11) Wrong.
12) Hyperbole, and purposeful incorrect attribution of statements.

For someone who is bitching about science, you sure don't have a fucking clue what is going on.

--
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.

We've failed science, not the other way around ! by Taco+Cowboy · 2012-01-31 14:38 · Score: 4, Insightful

Science failed us?

Nope.

It's us, the human beings, who have failed science.

Science stays the way it is. Scientific principles stay the way they are.

It's us, the human, who have failed to put enough effort to get to know Science and now we blame Science for failing us.

Ridiculous !!!

--
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !

Re:The point is ... by ToasterMonkey · 2012-01-31 17:45 · Score: 4, Insightful

The story describes how the use of our usual scientific methods leads, very often, to failure. Such failures are measured in billions of dollars.

"The TV scientist who mutters sadly, "The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for," is suffering mainly from a bad script writer. An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don't prove anything one way or another."
- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Are you judging scientific methods on their ability to generate income???

Bottom line: As we try to understand very complicated systems, we find that our old trusted techniques of reductionism and correlation don't do a very good job.

I don't get it, reductionism and correlation don't work well at a high level of complexity... ?
Everything starts with a high level of complexity, that's why we employ reductionism.
The world is complex at ANY scale. We wouldn't have come to this level of understanding if we gave up, and bowed down fearfully to irreducible chaos.

Wait, what would you consider a 'good job' to be?

Re:We've failed science, not the other way around by Internetuser1248 · 2012-02-01 01:25 · Score: 3, Insightful

Science failed us?

Nope.

It's us, the human beings, who have failed science.

Science stays the way it is. Scientific principles stay the way they are.

It's us, the human, who have failed to put enough effort to get to know Science and now we blame Science for failing us.

Ridiculous !!!

What!? We have failed science? By being too subjective and human i guess. Because real science is objective and independent of humans? You have reduced science to a religion. Stop it, science is not a religion, it is a tool. Part of having a tool is having a handle for the human hand to grasp, or a monitor for human eyes to view what is going on. What is this 'Science' that you praise and worship so? This omnipotent, omniscient, universal force the embodies all that is good and pure in the universe. Go start a church if you like, the word scientology is taken though, I usually use the word 'scientism' to describe your particular religion. Now go, and leave this discussion to the tool-using animals that wish to improve their tools.

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