What is Science and How Open are Scientists to New Ideas?

We scientists are human beings, with the same foibles and temptations as anyone else. Old careers are destroyed by new theories. Prestige, position, power are all at stake every time there is a scientific revolution. When Lister described antiseptic surgery, his career was almost destroyed by the British medical establishment. The idea threatened too many people in positions of power.

The Oxford English Dictionary has several definitions. I think the best one is:

A branch of study which is concerned either with a connected body of demonstrated truth or with observed facts, systematically classified and more or less colligated by being brought together under general laws, which includes trustworthy methods for discovery of new truth within its own domain.

So science should include observed facts, general principles derived from those facts, and trustworthy methods for testing new observations. Sometimes new observations cause us to change, or even discard, general principles — which happened to Newtonian physics when Einstein came along.

Science is not written in granite. General principles and theories can change, when new facts are discovered. That's what's going on at the moment with Darwin's theory, in my opinion.

It's a technique, a way of approaching scientific problems. You start with an hypothesis — an idea about how you think things work — and you figure out an experiment to test your idea. You control the various factors in the experiment so there aren't a lot of extra variables to confuse you.

You decide what data you are going to pay attention to, and then you conduct the experiment.

That's right.

A fact is a true statement. It's an observation which has consistently proven itself — one that various observers have agreed is true.

By testing through carefully planned experiments. And more than one experiment, by more than one scientist. It's not enough for one experiment to support an hypothesis. It has to be looked at from various angles, through different experimental approaches, preferably by multiple people, to diminish the chance of error, or even fraud. You can't just have one person or one experimental approach proving a point; it might not hold up when looked at differently, or by other people.

Yes, but everything in science is always tentative. The history of science is full of ideas which looked good for a while, until somebody came along who looked at the question from an entirely different angle, set up new experiments and blew the old idea out of the water.

I mentioned Isaac Newton and Newtonian physics. Newton's laws were unquestioned for 300 years, and then Einstein came along and imagined himself riding on a light beam — and out goes Newton. Or more accurately, Newton's ideas still work fine in everyday life, but when you get out at the edges — approaching the speed of light, for example, or at the subatomic level — Newton's ideas don't work very well, and Einstein's do.

But generally speaking, if a hypothesis appears to be true, it can be connected to other hypotheses. You create a theory to explain how the hypotheses fit together.

If it's disproved it gets thrown out, and everyone starts over trying to make sense of things.

You keep it open. People keep doing experiments, looking at the question from different angles, trying to decipher the riddle.

That's not scientific. If an hypothesis looks reasonable, it should not be discarded until it has been disproved. And it can only be disproved through experimentation, and the analysis of experimental data.

A big hypothesis, essentially, a way of tying together a lot of observations into an explanatory structure. If you think about an hypothesis as being like an umbrella, covering a certain amount of territory, then a theory is like a tent, covering a lot more ground, tying more observations together. Generally speaking, a theory also is a bit more proven than a hypothesis is.

Well, yes and no. Sometimes important advances can occur when scientists test theories which are based on unproven hypothesis — but more often that approach is a waste of time. Any theory based on unproven hypotheses cannot be held with much confidence, let alone dogmatism.

It depends on how central the hypothesis is. If you think of the tent analogy again, if the hypothesis is the central pole of the tent, then the whole thing might come down. If it's less important, then maybe only part of the theory will collapse, or need to find new support.

Absolutely. It happens all the time. I mentioned Einstein edging out Newton a little while ago. There are other examples. Science is not some kind of Darwinian accumulation of little changes over time.

It's a series of revolutions. New data overthrows the old scientific viewpoint. Darwin did that to biology in the 19th century. Copernicus did that to astronomy a few hundred years earlier. Pasteur did that to the idea that maggots grew spontaneously out of rotting meat.

It's just like any other revolution. The old careers are ruined, the old boys are driven out, the new boys come in and set up their new establishment on the ruins of the old. It's a violent process. The old establishment fights back.

Let me give you an illustration. In the mid 19th century there was a lot of new information suggesting that disease was caused by germs. People had microscopes, and saw bacteria in water, in blood, in infected tissues, and wondered if they might be the cause of disease. In Hungary, there was a physician named Ignatz Semmelweiss who suggested that the reason women died of childbed fever after having had their babies delivered by doctors, but not after having their babies delivered by midwives, was that midwives washed their hands, and doctors did not.

Semmelweiss had the nerve to suggest that the filth on the doctors' unwashed hands contained germs which infected and killed the poor women.

Semmelweiss was right, of course. But the idea was so shocking to the Austro-Hungarian medical establishment that they put him in an insane asylum, where he ultimately killed himself.

We're talking revolution here. Old careers are destroyed by new theories. Prestige, position, power are all at stake every time there is a scientific revolution. When Lister described antiseptic surgery, his career was almost destroyed by the British medical establishment. The idea threatened too many people in positions of power.

We scientists are human beings, with the same foibles and temptations as anyone else. And research directors at universities have to think about the implications of the work done in their labs: will it offend major donors — pharmaceutical companies, for example? It's quite likely that an experiment which will discover something that may cut into a drug company's sales will not get done, if that drug company is a major supporter of that lab.

But it isn't just financial considerations that matter here. Let's say, for example, that Dr. Jones is a senior scientist. He has spent thirty years — practically his whole career — working on a specific question. Then along comes some guy whose work blows his thirty years to kingdom come. If that young fellow is right, Dr. Jones has wasted his entire career. That's not easy to accept. Dr. Jones is going to try hard to prove him wrong.

Sometimes there's just inertia, as well. Scientists get caught up in their own pet ideas, and don't want to be bothered by data from a different viewpoint.

I can give an example from my own career. When I was doing liver physiology, it struck me that the main component of gallstones is mucus.

Now there was at that time a big debate — why do stones form in some people's bile, but not in others? And lots of physical chemists were looking at exotic sub-fractions of liver bile, trying to find some subtle chemical which could explain why some people got stones and others didn't.

So I came along and did an experiment which showed that the only difference between the two groups was mucus. If you had enough mucus in your liver bile, you got stones; if not, you didn't. So I published it in a very prestigious journal, and most of the gastro-enterology world said "That's it! It's mucus! Hooray for Bernhoft! Forget about those exotic chemicals — let's get on to preventing mucus."

But a lot of the physical chemists yawned and went back to looking at their exotic subfractions. They LIKED looking for exotic chemicals, and they may be still, if they can still get grants for that sort of thing. The mere fact that I had made them obsolete didn't change their research plans one bit.

Nobody likes their world view shaken. I mentioned Matthew Arnold, who found the transition from Creationist to Evolutionist painful. That works both ways. If you have a way of looking at science — and at life — which you've had for 20, 30, 40 years, and you've put your whole professional life into this, and a lot of personal emotion — it's not that easy to say "Oh. I was wrong."

You've based your whole professional career, and maybe your personal life, and moral life, on a specific viewpoint, and then someone comes along telling you that you've wasted the whole thing. It's just not that easy to accept.

There are a lot of entrenched emotions and egos and agendas here which we perhaps should talk about.

This debate is not a simple question of the reasoned assessment of scientific evidence. No. Human nature and human emotions are definitely part of the mix.

Now over the next few sessions we're going to be exploring the claims of evolution, using the scientific method. We'll be looking at the fossil record. We'll be looking at the steps necessary for life to have evolved in the first place. We'll be looking at biochemical and genetic evidence for and against evolution. We'll be looking at the probability of random selection resulting in life as we know it. And we're going to explore what the scientists themselves say about evolution when they're not in front of a television camera, examining documents that are in their own writings in the trade literature, things that not as readily accessible to the public. We will, in short, be holding the educational establishment to its own standard for evaluating the theory of evolution. We're going to look at the scientific merits of what is being presented to the students in the schools across America in the name of science.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Robin Bernhoft. "What is Science and How Open are Scientists to New Ideas?" From Is Evolution Fit to Survive?(National Parents Commission, 2001): 5-9.

To order Is Evolution Fit to Survive? please call (1-877-852-2595) or e-mail address (info@nationalparents.org) for more information. The National Parents Commission is at 206 1/2 Habicht St., Johnstown, PA 15906.

Peg Luksik co-hosts the radio program Welcome Home with Dr. Bernhoft.

THE AUTHOR

Dr. Robin Bernhoft, M.D. graduated from Harvard College with a degree in British History before going on study medicine at Washington University, St Louis. He did a residency in General Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, and a fellowship in liver and pancreatic surgery at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, London, England. In 1991 he was asked to lead medical opposition to the initiative which would have legalized euthanasia in Washington state. His campaign was successful. The following year, he helped craft another come-from-behind victory over a euthanasia initiative in California.

Dr. Berhoft is the author, with Fr. Robert Spitzer, S.J. and Camille DeBlasi, of Healing the Culture (Ignatius Press, 2000). He is currently Chairman of the National Parents Commission, a Catholic educational apostolate and co-host of National Parents' syndicated Catholic radio show "Welcome Home." Dr. Bernhoft is on the advisory board of the Catholic Educator's Resource Center.

Copyright © 2001 National Parents Commission