How Scientific Progress Is Made

[tongodeon]

Science is not inerrantly accurate, among other reasons because there is always a degree of inaccuracy in empirical observation, not to mention the potential to misinterpret those observations. Science is the set of procedures and techniques that we use to increase the accuracy of the theories we use to explain the world. Every step forward isn't

Comments

[annamaryse]

Just so's u know, when u make a post like this, I read it to everyone here, and save it to memories - so I can refer back to it, too. ^5

[ikkyu2]

Mendel falsified all of his data. Knowledgable scientists don't give him much credit for that. True genetics has more to do with Morgan and his fruit flies than Mendel and his notebooks full of cooked peas.

Watson and Crick get credit for educing the structure of DNA but not the concept or utility of nucleotide sequences. That discovery is usually laid at the feet of Marshall Nirenberg; he did win the Nobel for it.

Your main point, of course, is not affected by these factual errors and I do not dispute it.

[mmcirvin]

I was under the impression that there was still some question as to whether Mendel was a faker, or just a selective pruner of data in an era when experimental protocols weren't as solid as today, or something else.

[ikkyu2]

Mendel's original notebook, the one where he figured out about flower color and flower shape in pea plants and introduced the idea of the dominant and recessive gene, has been republished. There are about 10 experiments where he crossed pea plants and reported the results

[mskala]

I prefer Calvin's explanation of how scientific progress is made.

[jsbowden]

BOINK!

[rimrunner]

Some portion of most of my instruction sessions is given over to explaining what peer review is and how it works. There's usually at least one student who already knows, but a lot of times they don't know why a study in a journal gets more weight than, say, an article in The New York Times; they know it should, but they don't know exactly why.

It's a pretty powerful idea, really.

[flwyd]

Also wrong was the school of behaviorist linguistics. They had evidence that animals and people could learn from positive and negative reinforcement. They argued that language was acquired in the same way (essentially that positive/negative reinforcement was the only way we learn). They lacked significant empirical data on child language acquisition and a rigorous linguistic model. They were completely disproved when Noam Chomsky pointed out that the structure of human language makes their theory completely impossible.