Encyclopedia of Evolution.pdf - Online Reading Center

0 scientific method
scientific research in the United States today may be similarly
discredited by scientists in other countries if current trends
continue.
Scientific research must adhere to scrupulous standards
of honesty. Scientists are among the most honest people in
the world. Why? The scientific method itself constrains people,
who might otherwise be no more or less honest than others,
to observe high standards of honesty. Success in business
depends on what a businessperson can get people to buy; for
preachers and politicians, success depends on whatever they
can get people to believe. But for scientists, success depends
on the reliability, therefore the honesty, of the research. Dishonest
science is science that ultimately fails. In the short
term, however, some scientists have pursued dishonest practices.
Examples include:
• Outright fabrication of data
• Altering or omitting a few data, which may alter the conclusion
• Unnecessary duplication of publication
A scientist may be tempted to omit a few inconvenient
data, especially if the scientist convinces himself or herself
that those particular data might be erroneous and need to be
omitted. In such a case, the scientist may legitimately omit
data, if he or she admits it and presents the reasons for it in
the resulting reports and publications. Duplication of publication
can make the research appear to be more extensive
than it is.
Temptations to be dishonest can have motivations such
as the following:
• Follow the money. Most cases of scientific dishonesty have
involved expensive research in the biomedical sciences. The
most notorious recent example was the claim by medical
researcher Woo-suk Hwang to have produced human
embryonic stem cell lines that contained nuclei transferred
from other human cells, a breakthrough that would have
greatly advanced biotechnology and medicine. He was,
very briefly, the national hero of South Korea and very
popular among top scientists in the United States. When
collaborators discovered that Hwang had not been honest
about the sources of the human egg cells used to create the
stem cell lines, they began to investigate his other claims.
They discovered in 2005 that his stem cell lines were fraudulent;
he had used computer image manipulation to produce
the photographs that were published by Science, one
of the leading journals in the world.
• Prejudices. Some scientists have fabricated data that confirm
their prejudices. The most famous example is Sir Cyril
Burt, whose data demonstrated a genetic and racial component
to intelligence, but which was later discovered to
be fabricated. Another example is Piltdown man, a fossil
discovery that appeared to confirm the northern European
origin of human intelligence.
• Tenure and promotion. Successful research, and numerous
publications, increase the chances that a scientist will have
academic success and research grants, which enhance the
chances of academic success even more.
If scientists ran the world, it would be more honest than
it is. At least the scientific method provides a system, however
imperfect, for verifying any one scientist’s assertions. In
contrast, no one can verify a preacher’s statement that “God
told me so.”
Science is beautiful. Scientific investigations, besides
being generally more reliable than other ways of knowing,
are also beautiful. Beauty is something people generally associate
with art, but when a scientific hypothesis, confirmed
by experiment, provides a simple explanation for what had
previously seemed a complex set of disconnected facts, the
result is something that professional scientists (as well as science
educators and amateur scientists) experience as beautiful.
Perhaps most beautiful of all is what William Whewell,
a broadly trained scholar in the first half of the 19th century
(and also the man who defined the modern use of the word
science), called “consilience”: When a hypothesis explains,
at the same time, the facts of several previously unconnected
fields of study, then it is very likely to be true. (This is not
exactly the same as Wilson’s use of the word, as described
earlier.) Whewell applied the concept of consilience to Newtonian
physics, which brought together the facts of physics,
mathematics, and astronomy into a unified explanation. A
creationist, Whewell refused to apply it to evolution, after he
read the book written by his former student Charles Darwin.
Most scientists today consider evolutionary science to be the
supreme consilience: it explains the facts of geology, paleontology,
ecology, genetics, and embryology all at once. How
could a false theory explain so many things so well? Consilience
is consistent with the ancient definition of beauty given
by Greek philosopher Democritus: “unity in diversity.”
Relatively few scholars have excelled in both science and
the humanities, but those who have, such as entomologistnovelist
Vladimir Nabokov, testify to the beauty of science.
Nabokov said that there is “no science without fancy, no art
without facts.”
Science is a community. It would be unreasonable to
expect all scientists to operate in the same way. Some classes
and textbooks present a detailed and numbered list of the scientific
method, but most scientists could not recite such a list.
Ask any two scientists, and one will get two different lists.
Not everything that scientists do in the enterprise of science
is strictly scientific research. In particular, there is a place
in the scientific community for crazy geniuses. Many scientists
would place astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle and chemist Sir
Francis Crick in this category (not crazy in the clinical sense).
The imagination of scientists, especially of the crazy geniuses,
draws connections and generates ideas that the more pedestrian
of humans could not have guessed. Scientists must be
free to do this, but being wrong is a real occupational hazard
of the scientific enterprise, especially from these geniuses.
Crick, at the Cavendish Laboratory in England, was 35 years
old and still had not finished with his Ph.D., when he elucidated
the structure of DNA, one of the major breakthroughs
in science. He did not work alone: he used data from other
people, such as chemist Rosalind Franklin; and he worked
with geneticist James Dewey Watson. But Crick has also