What I am trying to do here (in this discussion) is to "teach science".

I do not mean "teach biochemistry" (although we seem to cover more and more of it) nor teach any any specific science but to "teach science" in the sense "teach what it is that scientiets do".

Most people get some history, some math and some literature in their education but they don't really learn what scientist do as an intellecutal activity.

As I said, Science is a way to reason that is not natural, that is usually misunderstood by people who don't do it for a career but which is unexcelled at the only thing it tries to do: learn what the universe is and how it works.

I have no intent to convincing people who don't believe in evolution that evolution happened (or that the universe is 12.5 billion years old or that quantum indeterminacy is real). I won't convince them because the reasons they have for not believing in science are theological or philosophical and science, a different way to approach things, has nothing really to say about their religion or philiosophy.

But it would be nice if those who struggle through all these posts at least see how the reasoning works.

Of what Q posted there his definition of "Scientific Method" and the difference between that and what a philosopher or mathematician does is the type of reasoning I am talking about.

In the main discussion people seem to think that science is only able to investigate things someone can do over and over ("if I heat ice to 2 degrees C does it melt") not something that happened in the past ("Was there ever a glacier covering Minneapolis? Say during the last Ice Age")

Science is a way to reason. Yes, you can use science to try to figure out if something happened in the past. Even to figure out something that can only happen once. The Big Bang can happen only once (per universe. By definition) but you still can use science to test if it did happen.

You could do this in lots of ways (every one join in). But you can't say "I see that there are lots of small lakes in Minnesota. And I will theorize that small lakes were scraped out by glaciers. Now I will look at Minnesota, see lots of small lakes, and say "See - proof there were glaciers!"

That reasoning is circular.

The reasoning I gave for the Alvarez theory about an asteroid killing the dinosaurs off was different. The Alvarez, pere et fils, said _if_ you looked in the rocks (no one had yet) you would find elements associated with asteroids (iridium) and _if_ you then looked at where the iridium was relative to the dinosaur fossils, all the dinosaur fossils would be _below_ the iridium.

So they made a prediction as to what people would find in the rocks. Had anyone found a bunch of dinosaur fossils above the irdium the Alvarez hypothesis would have been junked.

Everyone see the difference? One theory (the small lakes idea) uses the data you were already looking at when you saw the correlation, then looks again at the same data to see if the correlation was still there.

The other (the fossils relative to the level of iridium) predicts something no one had looked for yet and, indeed, predicted correctly what was found (and the Alvarez theory didn't _prove_ the asteroid killed the dinosaurs, but showed a way people could prove the asteroid did _not_ kill the dinosaurs.)

Drew,

I understand the difference. I had never thought of it before, but I understand it. But that is still not what I would consider science. The Alvarez theory sounds really great. But it doesn't hold nearly as much water as gravity. No one saw the asteroid when it hit. No one saw the dinosaurs. Not only that, but no one has ever seen an asteroid do what Alvarez claims it did at any other time either(to the best of my knowledge). There may be a ton of evidence to support the theory, but there is no empirical data.

What if I have a theory that says the dinosaurs were nuked by aliens and that the bomb left a layer of iridium over the fossils? I go out and find iridium above all the fossils, and bam, great new science, huh? Now we could easily disprove that theory by showing that aliens don't use nukes that leave iridium behind, or that aliens don't exist, or something equally absurd.

But that doesn't seem like science does it? Tell me what's different between that and what Alvarez did.

When I was in school my professor loved to talk about cold fusion and how it was a perfect example of bad science. But what happened afterward was a perfect example of good science. After those two guys, I forget their names, claimed to have discovered cold fusion everyone else went to their own labs and tried to recreate it. No one could. Theory debunked.

Now if these guys had said that they had conducted cold fusion thirty years prior, and that they couldn't recall the conditions of the experiment then we would all be relegated to dealing with their claims like we deal with Alvarez's. We could theorize and speculate all we wanted, but we could never disprove their claim unless we disproved something ridiculous, like say that atoms didn't exist.

But just because atoms really do exist doesn't mean that cold fusion does. Doesn't that make sense? Can't you acknowledge the difference between something like gravity and something like evolution?

To Luke mostly:

Luke said “What if I have a theory that says the dinosaurs were nuked by aliens and that the bomb left a layer of iridium over the fossils?”

Actually let me give you a better example. Because I might be able to point at some feature in that layer of rock you would find if an asteroid strike occurred but would not find if a nuclear weapon went off. Why not just postulate that aliens caused the asteroid strike? That they pushed an asteroid out of orbit and into the earth?

I wouldn’t postulate alien intervention because of Occam’s razor ("you don’t needlessly multiply extra agents to explain what happened"). The problem with the alien nuclear weapon idea is that you can explain _anything_ by postulating a sufficiently powerful intelligent being, rather than the natural results of the laws by which the universe operates all the time.

Your idea is “unfruitful”. Science doesn’t choose to needlessly multiply outside agents, and by sticking to its rules science “works” (it succeeds at figuring out the laws by which the universe works). The proof it works are the difference between the world in 1500 and the world in 2004.

Luke said “that is still not what I would consider science” and “there is no empirical data”

But that is what scientists consider science. I am unclear what you mean by “no empiric data.” The iridium, its location in the rock and the location of the fossils in the rock are data. And the little glass and fuzed quartz droplets are data. How does my reading of a thermometer to see what the temperature of the solution was after that chemical reaction occured differ from my looking in a rock to see whether the fossil is above or below the iridium? Both are looking at the universe to see if the universe did what I predicted it would do.

Hmm, is this what bothers you: In the thermometer case _I_ caused the chemical reaction. In the fossil case I didn't cause the event. (But in both cases I look to see if it occured).

There are lots of features of the universe that scientists look at without causing the feature to appear. Stars (no human ever made one), lava flows, continental drift.

And your favorite, gravity. We didn't actually make gravity. We are just observing its activities "in the wild" as it were.

Re cold fusion:

Yes, sometimes science gets things wrong. More often it gets things inaccurate/incomplete. But science continues to measure itself against something (the universe or more accurately the things we measure/test/observe in the universe) and slowly makes progress learning about the universe. There is often a Two-Steps-Forward-One-Step-Back dance (the development of our knowledge of the structure of the atom had a lot of wrong ideas. For example for a while they thought electrons were _inside_ the atom and the nucleus (well, what they thought of as what we think of as the nucleus) was the whole shebang. Then they found the nucleus only occupied a small volume relative to the volume of the atom as a whole. Quelle Surprise!.

But progress was made and our knowledge of the structure of the atom has advanced.

Luke Said “Can't you acknowledge the difference between something like gravity and something like evolution?”

Tell me a difference. Both are ideas/hypotheses/theories. Both have data that support them. Both have been revised/fine tuned over the years as we have gathered more data.

You might say “Gravity is physical science, evolution is life science” but actually both are just the working of the few natural laws in practice (There are, so far as we know, only 5 really basic forces in the universe. The motion of galaxies and the mutation of DNA bases both are the results of those same forces).

No, I don’t see a difference in the sort of reasoning one uses as a physicist or a biologist. They use the same thought processes (with data about different objects).

Why do you believe gravity affects the motion of planets and galaxies?

To Luke, and to the other people who agree with Luke but aren’t being as thoughtful and verbal in expressing their opinions (hint hint-start chiming in people).

I gather you do believe in gravity.

There are 5 basic forces in this universe, at the present stage of development of this universe. (The forces have "changed phase" (mutate) over the history of this universe and might mutate again. But don't worry. If they do you will be dead (and matter as you know it will no longer exist) at the speed of light. They changed repeatedly during the first few minutes after the big bang but haven't changed "recently" (last 12.5 billion years). Those forces are in order from top to bottom:

Dark Vacuum Energy
Gravity
Electromagnetism
Strong Nuclear Force
Weak Nuclear Force

Not all of those operate at all scales of size/distance.

The Strong and Weak Nuclear forces operate only over very short distances (ie inside the nucleus of an atom). They do not have any effect on what happens over larger distances. For purposes of that last sentence the diameter of a water molecule from side to side is a “large distance”.

Gravity and Electromagnetism operate over medium sized distances and on medium sized objects. The reason they are familiar to you is that you are a medium sized object. So is the sun for purpose of this paragraph.

The Dark Vacuum Energy operates only over very vast distances. “Very Vast” means that over “small” distances like the diameter of this galaxy you can’t detect it having any effect.

I bring all that up to point out that showing a force explains a phenomenon/observation at one scale does not necessarily mean the force explains a phenomenon/observation at very different distance/size scale.

So Luke goes into the lab and makes a long vertical glass cylinder, makes a vacuum in the cylinder, drops a steel ball bearing inside the cylinder and measures how if falls and convinces himself by repeated experiments that “gravity” is a valid hypothesis. He might even then go up to the international space station and test two 10 kg lead balls and measure very accurately the attractive force between them at varying distances.

Then Luke looks at:

Jupiter orbiting the sun
A binary star pair orbiting each other at a distance of 3 Light Years
Two galaxies orbiting each other at a distance of 3 million light years.

And you conclude (I am assuming you conclude, tell me if I am wrong) that gravity is the reason those are orbiting at the speed and distance you observe.

Why do you conclude that? You will have (being careful) predicted from your measurements in the lab how the motion of Jupiter, the binary stars and the two galaxies should move based on your theory and calculating for those much larger distances and masses. But you will also have observed the motion of Jupiter, the binary star pair and the two galaxies to make sure the theory still is holding.

You have never actually made two galaxies and (repeatedly) put them near each other, given them a little shove, and seen how they move in an experiment you constructed yourself from top to bottom. You are observing things that were already happening before you started the experiment to make sure the hypothesis about gravity still holds at that scale of mass and distance.

And if you go to extremely huge distances (billions of light years) or extremely tiny distances (inside the nucleus of an atom of oxygen) you will find matter following very different rules.

So I think (if you reflect on it a bit) you will see your acceptance of gravity is based in part on observations of the universe as you find it, not just on specific configurations of the universe you set up in the lab.

Drew stated I don’t see a difference in the sort of reasoning one uses as a physicist or a biologist. They use the same thought processes (with data about different objects).

I know you don't see a difference. But, in yet another rare glimpse of Left Wing Drew, that is because you have a higher opinion of human nature than I. I work with "hard" scientists on a weekly basis and other social scientists on a daily basis. I rank the theories of human behavior as much less probable than the theory of gravity, but as much more probable than theories that represent what Luke dubbed "scientific history". I see how scientists think. However, I am loathe to just use personal examples, which is why I recommended you read Kuhn. Kuhn spent his career studying scientists and the history of science. Kuhn's main finding, with which my personal experience strongly supports, was that scientists rarely allow a discover (or many discoveries) to falsify their pet theories. They will keep changing it, or dismissing other evidence as irrelevant or non-scientific until the day they die. It is the younger scientists who have no attachments to the old theories who study the new theories.

Let me give you a personal example. In one of your comments to Lucy, you stated. Tell me some test, something you and I can both observe that will be "A" if the earth is 1 million years old but "B" if the earth is 4 billion years old. If you can come up with that test, and if we all observe A then the Old Earth theory goes the way of the heliocentric universe and your view is the new working hypothesis.

According to both Kuhn and my own observations about human nature, this is wistful thinking. Such behavior depends upon human beings acting in a logical, reasonable, and selfless manner. It rarely happens. The minute someone points out some tests (or discovers some data that disagrees with the original theory), human nature will assert itself. The champions of the old guard will either dismiss the evidence ("their methodology was sloppy" or "that's not science even if they did follow the scientific method"), state their theory has some holes in it, but it is still the best theory around so we'll keep it until something better comes up (while marshalling all their forces to attack any theories that may start rivaling it), or simply say that upon further review, the new evidence actually makes their old theory stronger, the old theory just needed some revising. This latter tactic, known to politicians as the "big lie", is only used when it is impossible to dismiss the new evidence.

Gould is a textbook case of this last category. Gould's theory of punctured equilibrium was completely data-driven. Darwin's theory predicted a slow change. The fossil record did not support this. This evidence could no longer be ignored, biologists had been doing so for over a century and their claims that eventually someone would find evidence were looking weaker every decade. Knowing the data in advance, Gould came up with the punctured equilibrium theory. This is a prime example of human nature, and scientists are just as human as everyone else.

Let's try another example. I know you are unfamiliar with many of the newer scientific theories (as judged by your stated unawareness of terms and theories that have become more prevalent over the last two decades). Early next week (hopefully Monday), I'll start the next post on our larger thread, one about the age of the earth and the universe. I'll anticipate the results and predict that we'll be able to come up with scientific arguments that should falsify both the old earth and new earth theories. Human nature being human nature, it will not. Both sides will go on thinking they are being scientific and that members debating the other side are allowing their own biases to cloud their thinking.

This is why I agree with Luke about some fields being much more reliable than others. The more easily a theory can be tested, the less room there is for human rationalization and subjectivity. The more difficult it is to test (and disprove) a theory, the less reliable the theory because of both the difficulties in testing and because of human nature.

Drew,

Forgive me for not being as clear as I should have. As far as Alvarez's experiment, it was a great example of what I would consider science. Make a hypothesis and test it. And then let everyone else test it. The issue I have with Alvarez, as I understand him from your postings, is that he then concluded that the asteroid killed the dinosaurs. If his hypothesis was that iridium would be on top of all the dinosaur fossils, then that is a reasonable hypothesis which can be tested. If his hypothesis was that the asteroid killed off the dinosaurs, then finding iridium above their bones is not sufficient evidence to support that claim. I think you said yourself that some noted scientists think that the dinosaurs were already dead by that point.

That is the point I am trying to make. Just becuase there is iridium above the bones doesn't mean that the asteroid killed them. There is no way to observe the dinosaurs dying. Contrast that with gravity. Like you said, I can observe it with my own eyes, or my own instrumentation. It doesn't have anything to do with whether or not I caused the phenomenon I am observing, only that I can observe it. Who observed the dinosaurs dying? Who observed evolution? Who observed gravity? Me and you and everyone else. That is the difference.

I think what you are defending is what they would call circumstantial evidence on Law and Order. I don't watch Law and Order and I'm not an attorney, so correct me if I'm wrong. That would be in contrast to whatever the name for that is, I'll call it hard evidence.

For instance, lots of people think that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK. No one saw him do it. But there is plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest that he did: he had a rifle, he was in a position to do it, he shot a cop right afterward. But there are still many people who think that it was someone else. Why? Because no one observed it. Contrast that with Jack Ruby killing Oswald. No one doubts that he did it. That's because we've all seen the video, hard evidence. There is no doubt, or at least very little doubt. Oswald killing JFK is like evolution. There may be evidence, but it is nowhere near as compelling as the evidence for Ruby killing Oswald, or gravity.

It doesn't have anything to do with biologists or physicists. Good science would be like a biologist hypothesizing that kangaroos have pouches. He finds a kangaroo, and observes a pouch. I want to verify this and I go and observe a kangaroo too and voila, hard evidence, good science. C'est magnifique, non? On the contrary, a physicist could hypothesize that the universe was created via a big bang. I want to verify this so I, what? Look at some circumstantial evidence, something that suggests a big bang but is not an actual observation of it. It may be very convincing, I may have to be well educated to understand it, but it is still mediocre science.

You are undoubtedly better educated than I am, and probably smarter too. But please don't keep introducing all these above our head discoveries and hypotheses. It is not necessary, and it only obfuscates the question. That is why it is so hard to ever address this issue because everyone gets lost in the jargon.

I've never seen a better explanation of why fisticuffs is called the "sweet science".

On the other hand, I just happened upon the assertion, sorting magazines a couple of hours ago, that Jack Ruby actually killed a man named Alek James Hidell, and that Oswald is in a secure hiding place. Oddly, every expose of The Truth about the Kennedy assasination offers a different selection of evidence, and comes to a different conclusion.

And by the way, Occam's razor is not science, that's philosophy. You can't say "This Universe actually does not care if you find evolution hard to believe. Evolution happens to be how this particular universe works, however, which is the only question on the table. This Universe also does not care if you find quantum indeterminancy hard to believe (evolution is nothing compared to quantum indeterminancy). Me, I would not have chosen quantum mechanics as the basic (probably only) building block on which to construct a universe. But I wasn't asked," and then discard theories because they are hard, or harder, to believe.

The First Time I Went to England

That last post by Q reminded me of something. The first time I went to England (I am from the United States).

The first time I went to England I had lots of problems. I assumed I spoke the same language as the Brits. Tread lightly here. I say "science" and he says "data-driven" and we don't have any idea what the other guy is talking about.

As usual my overheated brain sees 12 or 15 different things to say. I will try not to say all of them at once.

1) Q mentioned Social Scientists. I don’t know anything about Social Scientists. I think everyone who has struggled through all 32K of this thread understands what I mean by “reasoning using the scientific method (hypothesis/test hypothesis/revise hypothesis/test revise hypothesis). Do Social Scientists do that? I haven’t a clue. I gather there are different sorts of social scientists (sociology, anthropology, uh, other stuff) and they may not all do the same thing with their minds.

I do know the word “Science” on the door of the department has nothing to do with that. Political Science doesn’t use scientific method. It is that other, older, broader definition of “science” Q gave: knowledge. Computer Science doesn’t use scientific method. It is a first cousin of philosophy and mathematics and sort of a distillation of logic. Science it is not.

Psychology I know a little about (my daughter in law is about to get her PhD in psychology and we discuss it a little. And I know a little about it from my own training. It does try to sort out human behaviour and “the mind” (different from “the brain” that a biologist studies). Psychology strikes me as a science in its first, early stages before it has really sorted things out. Psychologists do try to use the hypothesis/test algorithm but they are (as an analogy to physics) not at the level Einstein understood gravity and not at the level Newton understood gravity but maybe at the level Galileo understood gravity. (I am being kind. I have a daughter-in-law in the field). This isn’t a failing on their part. One has to start somewhere (physics is about 350 years ahead of them) and “gravity” is probably easier to map out than “the mind”

Re Kuhn (and Lucy) and do scientists really change their minds:

Do you know about the Dark Vacuum Energy? Physicists didn’t either in 2002. Now they do. New data. They changed their position (on a dime). (Dark Vacuum Energy is basically anti-gravity. It is a force that _repels_ two masses whereas gravity attracts them. Actually (like gravity) it is a property of space-time, not of mass. But we found it this calendar year, as I recall, so there it is. Now everyone has to deal with it.

The “champions of the old guard” will try to refute the Young Turks data. (Take the “Dinosaurs are warm blooded” squabble.) Good. They should. You can’t just waltz in here and tell me dinosaurs were warm blooded. I will fight you every inch of the way, be really critical and make you actually prove it.

But then we will agree and move on.

There aren’t a lot of physicists left that believe in Newtonian, as opposed to Einsteinian mechanics anymore. Yes, some of the old curmudgeons had to die, but that conservativism serves a purpose. You need to be flexible, but not too flexible.

But Science (different from philosophy or religion or lots of other ways to reason) does have an ultimate arbiter: What really happens in the real universe.

Lastly (re Q) on “data driven”:
He tells me this is “one of the newer scientific theories” and I still have never heard of it. I am pretty current in physics, astrophysics, biology, biochemistry and paleontology. Never heard of it.

I am trying to think of an area of science that _isn’t_ data driven.

Newton didn’t hypothesize his view of gravity from first principles (like mathematicians do) then see if it held up. He already knew and was trying to explain the motion of planets and the motion of bodies (like a brick) near the earth. Einstein didn’t hypothesize General Relativity. He used a branch of mathematics somebody else had thought up previously (tensor calculus) and saw that gave a nice explanation to a perplexing observation (that the apparent speed of light is the same for you and I even if I am traveling parallel to the beam of light at 90% light speed) but he didn’t just muse on General Relativity, he was trying to explain a troubling observation (data).

(Newton, by the way, did the opposite. Newton invented a new area of math - calculus - to explain the observation. Einstein applied an already developed, but little used area of math).

I guess the Alvarez theory is sort of hypothetical. But that was based on data too (what causes 98% of all the species on earth to suddenly vanish at irregular intervals every few hundred million years?)

I await Monday’s post from Q.

Meantime I want to do some scientific reasoning here with the audience (to be continued)

There are some other qualities of scientists, if you are interested.

a) they assume things can be understood. Not all kinds of reasoning make that assumption. I am Catholic. Catholics believe there are things (what God is like “internally” when not dealing with our universe) that are completely beyond human understanding. (I agree). But regarding this universe I assume I can understand it because to do otherwise is “not frutitful”.

b) scientists, when stumped by a large problem they cannot see how to solve, turn instead to a smaller problem they do think they can solve. They assume that by solving a lot of small problems they will eventually make progress and see how to solve the big problem.

So I want to discuss why it is that Luke (and maybe Q and maybe others) see some marked division in kinds of science or data or experiments I don’t see.

I would ask you all to _not_ deal with evolution nor with biology for the moment. I am trying to isolate what the gap between my understanding and yours is, and I suspect it may be “living stuff” vs “inanimate stuff” but first I want to work out some questions about what an experiment is and historic data.

I suspect (other than the belief that animate matter has one set of rules, inanimate matter another set of rules) there is either a difference between me and Luke regarding

a) the kind of data one gets if one sets up an experiment in the lab and the kind one gets if one observes nature “in the wild”.

b) the kind of data one gets from looking at what _did_ happen in this universe in the past vs the kind one gets by doing a prospective experiment.

Does Luke, Q or anyone else see either of those as the problem?

There are experiments one sets up in the lab (“in vitro” literally “in glass, in the test tube as it were) and observes in nature as one finds it (“in vivo” literally “in life”).

There are a couple of reasons scientists gather data “in the wild”.

1) There are data one just can’t get in the lab. The thing you want to measure is too big, too hot, too dangerous for example. You may not be able to see the effect with something smaller than a galaxy (a galaxy isn’t large enough to detect the Dark Vacuum Energy. You need to look at about 3/4 of the visible universe to see it).

You could, in theory, study supernovae by making them and setting them off. To survive the experiment you want to set it off some distance from you (another galaxy is about the right distance. Say 1 million light years). Now that _is_ possible (make a huge star, set it up that it will go supernova when you push a button (the button dumps a lot more hydrogen into the star), push the button and look in your spectrophotometer.

Since you want to be 1 million light years away, it will take 1 million years for the signal from your button to set off the supernova. And another 1 million years for the light to get to your spectrophotometer. 2 million years all told (much shorter and you are dead, not published). Do you have any idea how long it will take you to get tenure if each experiment takes 2 million years?

But that _is_ possible.

There are experiments that just are not possible (if you and the universe intend to be around to see the answer).

Remember I mentioned that this universe has changed phase (changed its physical laws) a few times. That was in the first second (millisecond). What was the universe like then, when gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak forces were just one force?

That happened when the energy (uh, temperature) of the universe was really high. So you could try to duplicate that in a supercollider. If you _should_ succeed in achieving sufficient energy something bad will happen (in the physicist sense of “bad” These guys regard thermonuclear bombs and supernovae as “interesting”). The universe will have a phase change. It will extend in all directions at the speed of light. Behind the wave-front of that phase change a) people will be dead b) atoms won’t exist c) even electrons, neutrons and protons won’t exist (the rules of physics will be wrong). Basically you will destroy this entire universe.

Physicists are building a really powerful collider (“cyclotron”) at CERN. It is so large it is part in France and part in Switzerland. It is intended to make energies closer to the Big Bang than what we currently can make, so we can learn more about the Big Bang.

Being sane, the physicists first calculated the energies to make sure they wouldn’t be so large as to cause a phase change. Because otherwise when they pushed the on button the universe as we know it would disappear.

But CERN is safe and under construction. They will likely do the math again before building the next generation after that.

(Sidebar on parnoia:
There are billions of stars on the surface of a sphere with a radius of 100 million light years from earth. If, anywhere on the surface of that sphere, any physicist built a collider that is too powerful and didn’t do the math first, and he turned it on 100 million year, 5 minutes ago the universe is toast. And the wave front will be here in 5 minutes, to tear your subatomic particles to pieces. But you can’t see it coming because it is coming towards you at lightspeed.

Have a nice day)

So you _cannot_ test in the lab the energies of the first microsecond of the universe (and have the universe survive).

So physicists look at “fossils” (their term): Things left over from that microsecond. Strange particles that are still flying around. The large scale structure (how the galaxies and voids between galaxies are distributed), the cosmic background microwave radiation (the left over heat) and the smoothness of distribution of that heat in space.

Those are the only data they can collect.

2) In Vivo vs In Vitro.

Remember what I said about the genesis of elements (Hydrogen to Oxygen to Iron). We know that _can_ happen in the lab. But is that how is _did_ happen in the evolution of the universe?

Biologists spend a lot of time worrying about this. Just because you can break this carbohydrate down into that sugar by this specific chemical reaction in a test tube doesn’t mean that a red blood cell in your spleen uses that particular reaction instead of some other reaction.

So you need to look in the real live sauvage universe to see if it does in the wild what you can do in the test tube.

Those are two reasons scientists collect data in ways other than laboratory bench experiments.

(Going way back)

Does the collection of historic data or the collection of data “from the wild” bother anyone that such data invalidate the scientific method?

Q said "Gould's theory of punctured equilibrium was completely data-driven. Darwin's theory predicted a slow change. The fossil record did not support this."

No. There is slow change. All the time. That explains those beaks on the finches in the Galapagos. And the small horse to medium horse to large horse (losing toes gradually in the process).

Gould is talking about the mega changes when 98% of all species vanish in the blink of an eye. After those happen (in a world full of opportunity and with no competition anymore for "large plains grazer" or "shoreline scavenger" there is a burst to fill all those open niches from some unlikely survivor.

Luke stated:

It doesn't have anything to do with biologists or physicists. Good science would be like a biologist hypothesizing that kangaroos have pouches. He finds a kangaroo, and observes a pouch. I want to verify this and I go and observe a kangaroo too and voila, hard evidence, good science. C'est magnifique, non? On the contrary, a physicist could hypothesize that the universe was created via a big bang. I want to verify this so I, what? Look at some circumstantial evidence, something that suggests a big bang but is not an actual observation of it. It may be very convincing, I may have to be well educated to understand it, but it is still mediocre science.

Exactly. If something is not observable, testable, and repeatable, it is mediocre science at best. That is not to say we should not try to understand the past, but it is foolish to give any theories about origins science (another word for Luke's historical science) the same credence we give operational science.

Drew had a question about social scientists.

Q mentioned Social Scientists. I don’t know anything about Social Scientists. I think everyone who has struggled through all 32K of this thread understands what I mean by “reasoning using the scientific method (hypothesis/test hypothesis/revise hypothesis/test revise hypothesis). Do Social Scientists do that? I haven’t a clue. I gather there are different sorts of social scientists (sociology, anthropology, uh, other stuff) and they may not all do the same thing with their minds.

OK, another sidebar. We have a lot of those at our roundtable, especially on this megathread :-)

In academics, most scientists (social and otherwise) have very little background on the philosophy of science. It is not until a person pursues their doctorate that they actually spend more than a week on the subject. And even then, it depends upon the department and the school. Until I became interested in obtaining my Ph.D., I didn't realize that various schools have their own philosophies about how to research. It is important to this discussion because some schools strongly stress the scientific method (such as the research university I attended) and some do not. The two camps also argue quite a bit with each other. For example, those who do not give much emphasis to the scientific method argue that ever since Hume pointed out that the modern science depends upon two major assumptions (causality and induction) which are unproven articles of faith amongst scientists, science is no more accurate than other methods of research. These post-modern schools of thought depend more upon qualitative studies instead of quantitative studies. There are relatively few post-modern folk in the hard science community - at least those who admit it, I place many macro-evolutionists in this camp ;-) - but there are many amongst those who study societies and individuals. Those who use the scientific method to study societies and people are social scientists. I consider myself one of these. This is nothing new – social scientists have come up with many theories of human behavior and continually test them. Many end up on the ash heap of history, but others seem to work quite well (especially in the aggregate; it is much, much easier to predict how a mass of people will behave verses predicting the behavior of an individual).

This background is why I rank some "hard science" theories, such as the theory of gravity, as much higher than "social science" theories. However, both "hard science" and "social science" theories are operational science, they may be repeatedly observed and tested. This is why I give even social science theories much more validity than I give origins science (aka Luke's scientific history).

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Re the Luke/Kangaroo/Pouch thing:

No. Dead wrong. Here is how it works:

I hypothesize a kangaroo has a pouch for some reason (no eggs and babies born too small to survive in the world (both of those are true).

You go find a kangaroo, test if the kangaroo has a pouch, find it does NOT have a pouch (we are talking female kangaroos here obviously).

You have _disproved_ my theory.

See the difference?

Re repeatable:

The experiment (a way to look at a kangaroo or a way to look at an early star for iron in the spectrum) is something that is repeatable in that any scientist (trained and with the right equipment) can also see the pouch.

If some other person can't also look at the star, or the kangaroo, _that_ is not reproducible.

More in a bit.

I want to do something "as an experiment" (Scientists think you can break a large, insoluble problem into small soluble problems. At least that is their operating assumption).

I want to talk (for the moment) not about life/evolution. I don't want to talk about the Big Bang.

I want to disect out the "can science tell what happened in the past" idea and deal with that thing I said about evolution of the elements (Hydrogen to Oxygen/Carbon/midweight elements then to Iron etc).

To recapitulate: This sequence is compatible with lab (cyclotron/accelerator) data and this is compatible with our general picture of the atom. But we would like to know (even if this is a possible way to get iron atoms) if this is actually the way this universe got its iron atoms. So we look for historic data too (in the spectra of old, middle aged (second generation) and new (third generation like the sun) stars to see which elements are in the spectra.

Those are repeatable experiments (anyone with a telescope (a big enough telescope) and a spectrophotometer can look at the spectral lines too). It is not "make a star, set off a supernova in the lab, look at the showere of elements" experiment though. And that (making your own supernova) wouldn't answer that question I asked about the history of this particular universe.

Do Luke, Quixote and others see that as "mediocre science" and if so, why?

I will get to the causality thing Q brought up eventually. It is a big subject because it has to do with time (how fast does it move and does it only go in one direction and does it go at the same speed for everyone) and probability.

There is a _lot_ of background before we can understand each other there.

I want to disect out the "experiment about what happened in the past" problem explained in my immediate prior post first (as if "immediately prior" has any meaning to the photons coming out of your computer screen . . . )