Sunday, March 9, 2008

Defining Science

In the January edition of Evolution: Education and Outreach is an article called What's So Special About Science? It was written by Ian Tattersall and does an absolutely fabulous job defining science.

Here are some excerpts from the article:

All any honest scientist is really trying to do is to approximate the truth, in the realization that ultimate truth is unknowable through scientific means and that the knowledge he or she generates is invariably susceptible to modification.

...the core of the scientific endeavor amounts simply to the corporate effort to describe nature and its workings as accurately as possible.

What matters is that science as a whole is a self-correcting mechanism in which both new and old notions are constantly under scrutiny.

For this system of provisional knowledge to work, it is necessary that, to the extent possible, scientific hypotheses be proposed in such a way that they are at least potentially falsifiable-provable to be wrong.


Essentially, to understand science, there are two very important concepts:

1) Falsifiability

Science cannot prove, only disprove. When a hypothesis contradicts observations, then it's disproven; if it agrees with the observations made thus far, it's not disproven. Science doesn't search for truth, because we can never be certain that future observations won't disprove what we currently believe to be true. And even if we thought we could search for truth, how would we verify it? We couldn't compare it to the truth, since we don't have the truth, therefore TRUTH falls outside the bounds of science.

Hypotheses that include the workings of sufficiently ineffable deities are useless to science, since they cannot be falsified. You are only doing science when you can answer the question "If I were wrong, how would I know?". When you can't answer that question, you aren't doing science.

2) Occam's Razor: the principle of parsimony

When there are multiple hypotheses that explain our observations equally (meaning our hypotheses have not been disproven) then scientists will choose the simplest one (meaning the one that requires the fewest additional assumptions).

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