Slashdot Mirror
Can Science Ever Be "Settled?"
StartsWithABang writes "From physics to biology, from health and medicine to environmental and climate science, you'll frequently hear claims that the science is settled. Meanwhile, those who disagree with the conclusions will clamor that science can never be 'settled,' and then the name-calling from 'alarmist' to 'denier' ensues.
But can science legitimately ever be considered settled, and if so, what does that mean? We consider gravitation, evolution, the Big Bang, germ theory, and global warming in an effort to find out."
all attempts to disprove it have failed and until evidence can be presented to disprove or bring the results into question it is settled
it doesn't mean "this is doctrine never challenge it" it means challenge it knowing that it has been challenged before and the theory has held
Newton's laws have been pretty much settled. Einstein found a way to get more precision under certain circumstances, but Newton is good enough most of the time.
That's not a summary, that's a click bait.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
It's a process.
No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.
-- Albert Einstein
For well over a thousand years Aristotle's work in the physical sciences (including zooology) was considered settled... until people started testing his theories
We called that period the "Enlightenment"
Or maybe Evolution is just supported by so much overwhelming evidence that 99%+ of scientists accept it as the best theory. Most of the scientific discussions around Evolution are centered around how we dot the i's and cross the t's, not whether Evolution is a better theory than "last Tuesday God said 'abracadabra' and the Universe was formed as is with its 'history' as an illusion."
In a school's science class, students should learn what the prevailing scientific theories are. They should learn why those theories are the prevailing ones. However, school is not the place for students - who are just learning the material and who will have a highly incomplete knowledge of the subject - to make a determination of which theory is the "right" one.
Whenever someone says "we need to teach the weaknesses of Evolution", what they really mean is "I would like schools to teach Creationism, but that was struck down by the Supreme Court... as was Intelligent Design... so maybe if we sow enough doubt about Evolution in the students, they'll grow up believing that God created it all 10,000 years ago."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Absolutely. Settled doesn't mean True - science is unconcerned with Truth, perhaps even actively opposed to it. Because there is no theoretical way to distinguish between Truth and an extremely accurate and reliable misunderstanding. Accepting something as Truth denies the ability to challenge it - and those challenges are the very essence of science.
Settled means it has so thoroughly withstood all challenges that nobody much even bothers to challenge it anymore, and you'd better have some really solid new evidence to back any new challenge or expect to be laughed off the stage.
This is why the vast majority of anti-AGW positions are considered so ridiculous: The studies they're based on are almost universally either so laughably bad as to be obvious paid "science" propaganda, or are so badly misrepresented that the researchers themselves object to the claims being made by the pundits. Meanwhile the handful of potentially legitimate challenges are largely ignored by the media, presumably because they're either so esoteric they can't be expressed in sound bytes, or so outlandish that only other scientists could take them seriously. Unlike the propaganda being fed to the public, the larger climatology community generally treats those challenges with polite skepticism and constructive criticism because they are at least plausible, even if they need a *lot* more supporting evidence before they could be considered viable alternative explanations.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
First class example is that evolutionary criticism (missing intermediate species or disputed claims of finding them, Darwin's doubled-down denial of genetics, etc) is completely forbidden in US schools.
They're not "completely forbidden", and they're certainly not forbidden in private schools. What is forbidden is using petty nitpicking of details, which are at best only marginally relevant to the validity of evolutionary theory, to advance religious doctrine, which is the only reason these issues are ever raised in the first place. If you want religion taught in public schools, move to Iran or some other country where superstition is mandated by law.
The idea that questions about evolution are only raised to advanced religious doctrine is a bit of a religious doctrine in and of itself. Literally the moment that anybody questions anything main stream the immediate response is that those people must be backwoods religious extremists. You see it EVERYWHERE. Somebody raises questions about monetary policy and excessive spending and people immediately go straight to conservative therefore religious. Anybody had the gall to suggest that it was possible for some people to be predisposed to have a negative reaction to something in a vaccine you'd immediately hear "right-wing-religious-nut-job" thrown into the conversation somewhere.
At some point public branding began happening that if you ever dare to discuss an issue, point out flaws, or raise dare I say "valid" discussion points that your question was invalid simply by invoking "right-wing-religious-nut-job" in the conversation.
The sheer fact that so many people immediately use that as a go-to rather that even thinking of defending any questions would seem to indicate that those people feel their own doctrine is being questioned, which makes the idea of those people calling others extremist nut jobs kind've ironic.
One of my all time favorite quotes:
"The test of first rate intelligence is to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." - Dwight Whitney Morrow
There's a lot of people who believe themselves to be intelligent who cannot allow themselves to try to see things from another angle. Nobody holds a viewpoint strongly without having a good reason for doing so. If more people recognized that and tried to understand the other side you'd see a lot less vocal hostility.
Odds are very good that if you feel strongly about something there are a whole lot of times where you're right and a whole lot of times where you're also wrong.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
My interpretation is that there is enough confidence from the scientific community for anyone who is not a scientist researching the topic to accept the current understanding as fact. It doesn't mean they should think it is a fact, just that they should lead their life and form opinions based on the assumption that it is a fact.
Research should of course continue, probably until the end of time, but at a certain point the general population should no longer question the findings. They simply are not trained enough to form an opinion that differs from the general consensus.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
In the past 30 years Darwinists suppressed information about inheritance of acquired traits. The Lamarckian-looking genetics that explain this are now FINALLY being accepted as science and are called, as a group of phenomenon, "epigenetics".
This simply demonstrates your ignorance of the field. Epigenetics is far more fundamental and complicated than Lamarckian inheritance - it's a basic mechanism of genetic regulation in all multicellular organisms. This wasn't even remotely controversial 15 years ago, when I started studying biology; any freshman biology course would cover the subject. It still isn't terribly well understood, but what can you expect when we still don't know the function of half of our genes?
What was genuinely controversial was the extent to which epigenetic regulation affected germ cells and was therefore heritable. It was not controversial because "Darwinists" (whatever that means) tried to suppress information, it was because none of the loudest proponents of the theory had found molecular evidence to support it. This is now slowly changing, as biologists are realizing (yet again) that genetic regulation is even more complex than they imagined.
In any case, none of the new information contradicts modern evolutionary theory; likewise, it does not have any relevance to the issue of whether modern life forms were designed or evolved. It also doesn't overturn the "central dogma" of molecular biology or prove that Lamarck's overall hypothesis was correct. We still have every reason to continue to believe that the unmodified genome is the most important carrier of genetic information and determinant of phenotype, and the extent to which epigenetics is heritable is still an unsolved debate. That makes it a fascinating target for more research, and I'm sure there will be more startling discoveries (and perhaps Nobel prizes) in the near future. I'm also very confident that any new discoveries will be made by actual scientists doing actual research, not theologians.
I have no idea how monetary policy or vaccine reactions are relevant to this debate, or what they have to do with religion. Nor are politics particularly relevant, since you can find scientists of all ideologies working productively without making extravagant pseudo-scientific claims.
As a biologist, I do know that nearly every single objection I have ever encountered to evolution - and, in particular, common descent, especially as applied to humans and apes - has ultimately been driven by a religious viewpoint, usually a belief in the literal truth of the Old Testament. (I was going to say that the panspermia advocates were the biggest exception, but even they aren't really arguing with the fact of evolution, but the origin of life, which is a different matter.) This goes doubly for the age of the earth, which is even less controversial than common descent. The creationists are also almost uniformly not practicing scientists (or even trained as biologists, in all but a handful of cases); I have yet to meet any biologist who continues to be productive while completely ignoring 150 years of scientific evidence. Conversely, I've known a decent number of biologists who were religious, but did not see the need to distort every scientific finding to fit into their theological worldview. (Francis Collins and Ken Miller are two of the most famous examples, but I've never met them, although I think I used Miller's textbook in high school.) In fact, the one who found "intelligent design" the most infuriating was a conservative Catholic.
In summary: why shouldn't I assume that creationists are religious? You've given me absolutely no reason to think otherwise.
My money is being used to expose children to views I don't agree with.
My money is being used to enforce laws I disagree with, and buy weapons I don't approve of. It's called representative democracy; deal with it, or move somewhere else. We do, however, have a specific clause in our constitution about establishment of religion, and the courts have decided that teaching religion in taxpayer-funded schools is included in this prohibition. (This does not equate to disallowing all criticism of science; you are welcome to spout any nonsense you wish, as long as you do not expect the government to pay for it.) If you're unhappy with that, work on getting the 1st Amendment repealed, or move to another country. I'm sure you won't find much support for teaching evolution in, say, Somalia. (But they're probably not going to be wild about your religion either.)
How is asking critical questions about view points being pushed onto children with my money establishing religion?
Stop playing dumb. We all know that the only reason these "critical questions" (which never come from actual scientists) are ever introduced into a classroom is to promote a religious alternative. Pretending otherwise is just disingenuous and insulting. At least Ken Ham has the honesty to admit this is his goal.