Eye of the beholder? This had better involve a gaze-attack instead of science...

My Environmental Law class today discussed varying approaches to environmental issues in response to an article we read detailing a simple hypothetical. The hypo’s details are unimportant (as are the facts of all cases), but the values which are being weighed are clear in the scenario. We were asked to choose between illimitable benefits to humankind and environmental degradation on the one hand, and a slightly harsher reality where the environment was spared on the other.

In the course of discussing one of the possible ways of judging how to deal with such a simplified issue (Cost-Benefit analysis), one factor kept coming up with students in class. Several students eschewed the reliance on science to determine the probable dangers and benefits of the various proposed actions because "good science is in the eye of the beholder."

Such a sentiment is shocking to say the least and portrays the total lack of success that scientists have had in educating the lay public about the shared endeavor of all children of the enlightenment. Science, as a discipline, is NOT in the eye of the beholder. In fact, the objectiveness of science is one of the factors which distinguishes is most clearly from disciplines like philosophy, religion, and literature.

In a former life of mine, before I found that I was ill-suited for a life in a white lab coat, I studied microbiology. I still miss using my platinum loop to plate bacteria onto the agar. I still wish that I had those tools just so that I could enjoy the pleasure of growing little critters on a plate and looking at them under a microscope. One thing is certain, however, about the work that I did. When I write that a certain mutation will occur when Serratia marcescens is exposed to some level of radiation, my results are either true or false.

Their truth or falsity (whether they match to the objective world or not) is not a matter of philosophy. It is not a matter of politics. It is not a matter of ideology or personal interpretation. A model I might make of how nosocomial (hospital-acquired) infections spread and a way to combat them is not a matter of politics. It is a matter of empirical research. Whether to implement my ideas might be a matter of politics, but the truth or falsity of my ideas is not.

Bad science does exist. Scientists are human, and all humans make mistakes from time to time. Some scientists have fabricated their results. Some have engaged in unethical scientific research. Some have mis-interpreted their data or made errors in calculations. Still others have had the proper numbers in front of them but reached the wrong conclusions from those numbers.

But this fact alone does not indicate that science is a subjective discipline. In every case where such fabrications, falsifications, or miscalculations have taken place, science has stepped in and discovered and corrected the errors.

Drs. Pons and Fleishmann (I may have misspelt the names) thought that they had created a functioning cold fusion reactor during my lifetime, and their scientific discovery was widely touted throughout the media as the dawn of a new age of energy for mankind. But their results were quickly found not to be repeatable and their methods highly dubious.

Ideology is static. A classical liberal (using liberal in the technical sense, not the political sense) feminist will believe that males and females are born the same inside and that purely social forces shape our gender identities. No scientific evidence to the contrary (and there is quite a lot of it) will dissuade him from his belief. A person who clings to the idea that mankind was created in its present form just over 6,000 years ago will not be convinced by the overwhelming evidence that such is not the case.

Science is not of the nature of ideology, though. Science, because of its reliance on methodology to reach conclusions (instead of assuming the conclusions in advance), is self-correcting. Bad science and Good science are not matters for the beholder to decide. Science sorts itself out fairly rapidly, and the bad science is thrown on the dust-heaps of the past, just like cold fusion, Lamarckian evolution, and the witchcraft theory of disease.