As we try to reformat the blog a bit, I will be making weekly posts on tuesday, wednesday, or thursday. Well, technically it’s friday morning right now, but close enough. I will continue to post about a few topics that interest me, mainly biology (especially evolution), environmental issues, and how either of these topics intersect with politics. One issue I’ve been thinking about lately is what makes something science. Here a few widely held ideas and some critiques:
1) Predictive power
Physics and chemistry in particular are well known for their ability to make accurate and often incredibly precise predictions about the natural world. While prediction is important, it’s a nonsensical requirement for many historical sciences like evolution which study events which may never occur again.
2) Methodology
Others argue that science is a set of methods. In practice, it’s probably true that a lot of what gets called science is called so because it employs the “scientific method.” I’m not a big fan of this because 1) many people who do “experiments” are nevertheless quite unscientific (e.g. studies that attempt to measure the efficacy of prayer when there is zero prior probability that prayer could work); and 2) while the scientific method as we are taught in school applies very well to physics and chemistry especially, it is not always the best method for other sciences (e.g. in many sciences we want to know the probability of two of more events having occurred, not to truly rule out one event or another).
3) Approaching truth
Science might be united by a search for true reality. However, many quite famous scientists who have formulated theories with amazing predictive power and employed experimental procedures to verify them, have nonetheless based the fundamentals of their theory on entirely erroneous premises. Darwin, for example, was totally off on the mechanism of heredity (how genetic information is passed on from parent to offspring), yet he was still basically correct about much of evolution. So merely approaching truth doesn’t qualify either since many wrong ideas are still quite useful and scientific.
I’m absolutely sure philosophers of science have through about these ideas much more - I lifted some ideas directly from them - but I haven’t gotten to reading all that yet. Some day…