First, I am deeply sorry to see two of the boards intellectual giants, whereof one is our moderator, clash over a subject where I know they both agree.
I don't quite understand how the discussion between Curdis and Fable became heated, but I do hope you will reconsider your retirement from SYM @Fable: your posts has always been one onf the main reasons I myself stayed on this board.
I am very late in this discussion, but there are some topics I'd like to comment:
1. Science
2. Evolution
3. The effect of discriminating educational systems
I will not have time to post everything right now, so please bear with me a couple of days, one of my closest collaborators just went on paternal leave, so my workload is crazy right now....
1. About science
As you all know I am a neuroscientist. I am no expert in evolution biology. However, evolutionary biology and genetics are part of my basic education as well as psychology and neuroanatomy, and I work with genetics on an everyday basis.
As a part of the scientific community, I often notice that there are some common misconceptions about science among people who do not themselves work as scientists. Such misunderstanding often make discussions more difficult than they need to be, so I will try to clarify some concepts I have noticed here and elsewhere, regarding many different topics, that laymen often are not entirely familiar with.
Science is a system of paradigms and strategies to gain knowledge. A scientist is a person who is formally educated in his/her choosen topic, and works according to the
scientific method. The scientific method is a systemised way of collecting data and draw conclusions from those data, and it is constructed in order to be
objective so that individual personal interpretation and an individuals subjective experiences, feelings and opinions do not matter in the sense that it does not affect neither data nor conclusions drawn from data.
Some people believe science is a belief system, just like religion or political ideologies. This is however not so. Whereas an individual scientist can hold personal believes, and whereas a certain scientific discipline may contain speculations, these views and speculations must be handled in a special, systemised way in order to become science. I may have a personal speculation that A is related to B in a certain way. Then I must make this speculation into a
testable hypothesis. That is why questions such as "Do god exist?" or "Which political system make most people most happy?" are not science. To this date, there is simply no way to
test and falsify this question empirically, so those issues are not scientific hypothesis (and even less theories). The question whether god exists or not, is like asking whether pink unicorns exist or not. Some individuals may claim they do indeed exist, and argue they have personal knowledge and personal experience of this. Personal experience however has no place in science - a phenomenon must be objectively measureble, independent of the observer. Other people may claim they do not exist, arguing that they indeed lack personal experience of the phenomena in question. This is however not evidence that the phenomena does not exist - the pink unicorn may exist in another solar system, in a different dimension, or what have you. You cannot test and falsify a phenomenon that cannot be objectivly observed in the first place, and you cannot demonstrate scientifically that something does not exist either. Thus, religion is not science.
Political systems on the other hand, are not testable and falsifyable because you have no control over the variables. All you have is
anecdotal evidence such as "in this and this country, at this and this time, that and that happened". You cannot
replicate the exakt conditions, and study whether the same results would occur. Theoretically, you could build up good replicas of a certain type of society, control sets of variables, and study the outcome - but this would be unethical and practically impossible. Thus, you can only study single events and draw conslusions from them, and this makes political science a
field science as opposed to the
experimental sciences where you can conduct experiments under controlled circumstances. Modern economy however, has recently started out a very fruitful experimental line, as seen in Modern Game theory. So at least part of politics could hypothetically be a science, based on generalisations from controlled experiments. People in general however, do not seem to wish to found their political views on scientific basis, but rather on personal belief and personal experience, similar to how people form religious values.
So, the difference between scientific speculations and "normal" everyday speculations or believes, is that scientific speculation must make predictions that can be tested and falsifyed. Otherwise it's not defined as science. A
scientific theory, as
Voodoo has already posted, is equal to a scientific fact. A theory is a big system of observed empirical data and many times tested and re-tested hypothesis, that fits together and has not been falsified. It must fulfil these criteria:
- it must have internal consistency
- it must be testable and falsifiable
- it must make testable predictions
- it must have a higher explanatory power that the currently dominant theory (ie it must explain at least those phenomena that the dominant theory is explaining)
Among laymen, I sometimes see the confusion that "fact" is a stonger word than "theory", and that "law" is also something stronger than "theory". I have no idea where this misconception stems from, but I guess it emanates from how the words are used in the "normal" language. In the scientific discipline physics for instance, you sometime use the term "law", ie "Newton's laws of gravity". But as Scayde points out, these laws have been partly falsified by modern physics, still - most of Newton's laws are correct, and gravity is a fact although we have still no evidence for the mechanisms that mediate gravity. There are both speculations and hypothesis around, such as the hypotheisis of quantum gravity and "gravitones", ie particles that mediate the gravity just as there are particles exerting the other known physcial forces (ie electomagnetism, the weak and strong nuclear forces).
In the same fashion as gravity, evolution is an undisputed fact although the exact mechanisms behind this "force" is not known, and biology you don't call things "laws" and "forces". But just as in physics laws, there are lots of "if A -> B" that has repeatedly turned out to be correct. It is just not called "laws" in biology, instead they often have specific names.
Nothing in science is final. Science is a method for accumulating knowledge, and as such, is must always be self revising. Everlasting truths are for religion, science is a process.
