Science---just what is it?

In 2000 I had to do a course in science philosophy and ethics as part of my honours course in biochemistry. After the course I got the distinct impression that philosophers where way out of touch with what science is and that those people who skipped the class to drink coffee in the ``Neelsie''¹ probably leant more than I did in the class.

Of course this got me thinking (which is probably what a philosophy course is all about) about what science is and what you can do with it.

Science is not a collection of facts or knowledge. Science is not the dull man or women standing in a room dressed in a white coat. Science does not offer the ultimate truth of the universe. Science is simply a methodology. People practice science, they do not store it in books or become it. Engineers can be scientists. Doctors can be scientists. Technicians can be scientists. Your grandmother sitting on the front porch watching the birds feed could be a scientist. Researchers are definitely scientists. All you have to be doing is testing ideas to see if they are valid. A scientist is anyone who follows the logic of scientific investigation.

What is this logical process of scientific investigation?

Science is composed of two inseparable facets: discovery and explanation. Many scientists (particularly zoologists and botanists) spend there entire careers discovering things. Many more scientists spend their entire lives trying to explain things that have been discovered or explained before.

Lets assume you discover something or rather, you observe something. You can now be very unscientific and jump to conclusions about the observation's origins, meaning and/or impact in the universe. If you are scientifically minded you will form several ideas (hypotheses) about the observation. You will then progress to test each of these hypotheses. Many of them may be untestable and are automatically excluded because science can only comment on what it can test. If you are lucky after testing all the hypotheses you arrive at one that cannot be refuted. Does this prove that the hypothesis is true? No. What this proves is that of all the options you could test with the technology at your disposal this is the only one your tools failed to refute. One of those hypotheses you disregarded earlier because you couldn't test them could be truth... the thing is you don't know until you have tools to test them.

This unrefuted hypothesis now becomes a theory. Two or more hypotheses may of developed into theories. At this point your scientific comrades may disagree and part ways, each taking his own pet theory with him.

In the course of testing your hypothesis you will of generated results that present more questions regarding your theory. The scientific method now convicts you to proceed further and test your theory to its extremes. The goal of science is to exclude all faulty hypotheses from consideration. Once this is done you will be left with the truth. A good scientist does not hold his pet theory sacred but should become more intent with every test to prove his theory wrong. A hypothesis is most rewarding when it is proven false. Only be removing one stumbling block on the path to truth do scientists make any impact to the world. Even if Einstein's theories of relativity not held he would still of been remembered as the person who proved Isaac Newton wrong. Wrong ideas get us nowhere.

Should your theory resist vigorous testing is will graduate into a model. Models are special theories. These are ideas that have been thoroughly tested and shown to be reliable both in explanation and prediction and able to generate many theories around it. Models are the paradigms of the science philosopher Kuhn in which normal science can take place. The best example of this normal science is the pharmaceutical industry.

We have a model of how our body works. This model has spawned many theories and professions such as medicine. With this physiological model we can perform surgery, treat headaches and cure disease. Every now and then there is a shake-up in the model but it remains strong with only minor modification to the ensemble of theories under its umbrella. Under this umbrella pharmacists work to develop new compounds to cure disease. Many cures succeed supporting the model of human physiology. Some treatments such as isoniazid² back fire revealing something new.

So, science does not produce truth. It produces theory and the ``facts'' supporting the theory are only as good as the tools used to procure them.

The failure of a theory or model is not a scientific failure. It is in fact a scientific triumph. The biggest asset of the nature of science is that it is self correcting. People dream up ideas to explain things and then smarter people come along and prove those dreams wrong and so advance every so slowly on the truth.

We as scientists are not concerned with the truth. Scientists replace the lies of today with new better more acceptable lies. We are advancing towards the perfect lie that has to be truth because we can find nothing wrong with it. And lies, as we well know, are good for getting us out of a jam but when revealed normally cause a lot of trouble.

A lot of the trouble can be prevented if we as scientists stop presenting our ideas as ``God's truth'' and more what they are: fictitious inventions that cannot be currently refuted.

In conversation with a physicist friend the topic of the ``Big Bang'' came up... And what he had to say went along the lines of: ``we don't believe the Big Bang to be fact or truth but rather a tool with which we can explain the universe in terms we can investigate.'' How does this compare to the public TV declarations that the universe was created in a ``Big Bang?'' Or how the media reports on evolution.

Dr. Richard Leakey (of save the elephants fame) had a father and mother (naturally), Louis and Mary Leakey who pioneered human fossil hunting in West Africa. They were respected anthropologists. Dr. Louis Leakey appeared on television with some other paleoanthropologists who all brought charts outlining their theory of the ascent of man from monkey. Dr. Leakey was their with his chart too. The other charts looked like elaborate connect the dots pictures with time lines. Dr. Leakey's was a collection pictures with dates running up the side indicating the age of the fossils.

Dr. Louis Leakey was clearly a scientist who knew very well you cannot connect the dots between fossils. To do so would be generate a hypothesis that could not be tested and so was scientifically untenable. Dr. Leakey was kind enough to say so on the tv presentation. In spite of this, these evolutionary timelines persist today in the popular media and even in some scientific circles. THERE IS NO PROOF THAT AUSTRALOPITHECUS AFRICANUS OR PARANTHROPUS ROBUSTUS WERE EVER DIRECT ANCESTORS OF HOMO SAPIENS ONLY THAT THEY FIT WITHIN PRIMATE EVOLUTIONARY GROUPING!

Mainstream evolutionary biologists know they cannot play connect the dots and don't. They will, based on anatomical features, group fossils together in accoradance with what they theorize to be their evolutionary lineage but that is the extent of it. While some speculate over the origin of life few if any declare to of developed a thoroughly tested scientific theory. Hypotheses abound (I like the ideas of Christian De Duve as they are so neatly biochemical) but few are or can be tested.

Did life first come together in a salty puddle 4 billion years ago on Earth or did it fall from the sky on a meteorite? Perhaps aliens planted it here? Was it a benevolent caring God who set everything into motion? Science cannot say because it does not have the tools to do the tests.

In science there are two sayings: ``In God we trust but everyone else must present their data;'' and ``a scientist must believe but no really believe.''

Everyone can be a scientist. When next you see something in media ask the question: is this true? And then set about testing that something. If it stands up to logic then believe it, but still don't believe it. Science doesn't supply truth it supplies the best guess of what the truth it and this guess can be wrong.