Science says...

[Willtor]

"Science says X" is distinct from "A scientist says X." "Science says X" means that X has been published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal or conference and has withstood scrutiny from the community in that context. A blog or a book or a miniseries doesn't meet this criterion.

If it were synonymous with "A scientist says X" then we have scientists who talk about many things from atheism to evangelical Christianity. But these things can't both be scientific. In fact, neither of them are, since neither has been published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal.

Is this controversial?

 

[crjmurray]

Seems fairly simple.

 

[Willtor]

Seems fairly simple.

One would think so. But then there are posts like this:

So what you are saying and telling the class is that it doesn't matter what the data is as long as someone says its evolutionary you don't need to apply your grey cells. So then if a scientist says tomorrow something that makes no sense whatsoever well then you as the good Christian will accept whatever he or she says. Well lets get going Krauss is a scientist. He states the science backs the idea that the universe and everything out of it popped into nothing out of nothing not even a God. There it is - A scientist telling you that believing in God is anti science. Ton loads of other scientists agree. So question. What are you doing here claiming anything about theistic evolution? Based on what these scientist have said and according to your "theres no need to explain anything" or look at any data......

So, surprisingly, I think there's some disagreement, here.

 

[Jan Volkes]

"Science says X" is distinct from "A scientist says X." "Science says X" means that X has been published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal or conference and has withstood scrutiny from the community in that context. A blog or a book or a miniseries doesn't meet this criterion.

If it were synonymous with "A scientist says X" then we have scientists who talk about many things from atheism to evangelical Christianity. But these things can't both be scientific. In fact, neither of them are, since neither has been published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal.

Is this controversial?

You start talking about science then you bring in religion? the one has nothing to do with the other,
science deals with reality and religion deals with spirituality which is all in the mind.

May I ask what this thread is about?

 

[Willtor]

You start talking about science then you bring in religion? the one has nothing to do with the other,
science deals with reality and religion deals with spirituality which is all in the mind.

May I ask what this thread is about?

The point of the thread is to engage with people who think that scientific ideas draw their science-ness from the fact that scientists say them. This idea is a fundamental barrier to understanding what science is, how it works, and how statements like "science says..." can be appropriately made.

 

[Jan Volkes]

The point of the thread is to engage with people who think that scientific ideas draw their science-ness from the fact that scientists say them. This idea is a fundamental barrier to understanding what science is, how it works, and how statements like "science says..." can be appropriately made.

There is no such thing as science-ness and science does not say a thing unless reality presents it with something to say,
which is why science has nothing to say about Gods, there is nothing there for science to see or identify [there is nothing there for anyone to see or identify but that's another story].

If I claim something I need to back it up with something more than just words, I need to be able to test my claim to see if the claim is falsifiable, the best explanation for Falsifiability is this:
Falsifiability or refutability is the logical possibility that an assertion could be shown false by a particular observation or physical experiment. That something is "falsifiable" does not mean it is false; rather, it means that if the statement were false, then its falsehood could be demonstrated.

When a claim is un-falsifiable it is not science, for example:
The suggestion that I would be very happy if I were ten years younger is not falsifiable, because it is impossible to test the hypothesis by making myself ten years younger and seeing how I feel.

 

[KWCrazy]

Science doesn't say anything. Science is a field of study, not a sentient being capable of original thought and possessing the ability to convey those thoughts. There are laws in science. A law is a generalized rule to explain a body of observations in the form of a verbal or mathematical statement. Scientific laws imply a cause and effect between the observed elements and must always apply under the same conditions. The laws of thermodynamics are laws. The theory of general relativity is not.

To say that "Science says this" or "Science says that" one must put the integrity of the field of study behind the statement. If science says it will not rain and it does, then science has no credibility. Basically, whenever anyone claims that "science says..." they likely don't have a clue what they're talking about.

 

[Willtor]

There is no such thing as science-ness and science does not say a thing unless reality presents it with something to say,
which is why science has nothing to say about Gods, there is nothing there for science to see or identify [there is nothing there for anyone to see or identify but that's another story].

I agree with the second part, but not the first. One can definitely say that "science says X" colloquially to refer to the fact that there is a body of research on that topic that uses X as a model. In the context of this subforum, science actually does say that humans share common ancestry with chimpanzees. It is appropriate to say this, not because scientists say it, but because there is peer-reviewed research to that end.

If I claim something I need to back it up with something more than just words, I need to be able to test my claim to see if the claim is falsifiable, the best explanation for Falsifiability is this:
Falsifiability or refutability is the logical possibility that an assertion could be shown false by a particular observation or physical experiment. That something is "falsifiable" does not mean it is false; rather, it means that if the statement were false, then its falsehood could be demonstrated.

You don't need to do this. This is already part of the scientific process. It isn't on every person to try to falsify it for it to be scientific. On the contrary, typically you need specialized knowledge in the field to do so. For example, when assembling a genome, it turns out that one of the sequencing methods causes the reads to have what's called a poly-A tail. It doesn't matter, here, what that is. That tail has to be removed before any analysis can be done, but the raw data is typically what's stored on the NCBI website (where the data from papers are often stored). The average person doesn't know they have to remove the tail, so if they download the data and try to reproduce or falsify results, they will not succeed.

You're certainly right, of course, that if you're an expert in the field, this is something that you can do. But if you aren't, typically you can't. But it's okay -- as I say, it's baked into the process, already.

When a claim is un-falsifiable it is not science, for example:
The suggestion that I would be very happy if I were ten years younger is not falsifiable, because it is impossible to test the hypothesis by making myself ten years younger and seeing how I feel.

Sure.

 

[Willtor]

Science doesn't say anything. Science is a field of study, not a sentient being capable of original thought and possessing the ability to convey those thoughts. There are laws in science. A law is a generalized rule to explain a body of observations in the form of a verbal or mathematical statement. Scientific laws imply a cause and effect between the observed elements and must always apply under the same conditions. The laws of thermodynamics are laws. The theory of general relativity is not.

To say that "Science says this" or "Science says that" one must put the integrity of the field of study behind the statement. If science says it will not rain and it does, then science has no credibility. Basically, whenever anyone claims that "science says..." they likely don't have a clue what they're talking about.

Colloquially, we say that "science says X." Yes, we all know we aren't talking about a sentient being.

 

[whois]

You don't need to do this. This is already part of the scientific process. It isn't on every person to try to falsify it for it to be scientific. On the contrary, typically you need specialized knowledge in the field to do so. For example, when assembling a genome, it turns out that one of the sequencing methods causes the reads to have what's called a poly-A tail. It doesn't matter, here, what that is. That tail has to be removed before any analysis can be done, but the raw data is typically what's stored on the NCBI website (where the data from papers are often stored). The average person doesn't know they have to remove the tail, so if they download the data and try to reproduce or falsify results, they will not succeed.

wait a minute, a "poly-A" tail?
what is the real world analogy of this poly-A tail?
if there is no real world equivalent of this tail then i submit that it cannot be any kind of real world simulation.
it sounds to me as if you are throwing out data.

can you provide any links to this process that a layman would understand?

 

[[serious]]

wait a minute, a "poly-A" tail?
what is the real world analogy of this poly-A tail?
if there is no real world equivalent of this tail then i submit that it cannot be any kind of real world simulation.
it sounds to me as if you are throwing out data.

can you provide any links to this process that a layman would understand?

im not sure exactly what hes trying to say, but i can tell you about poly a tails. basically, when dna is tranzcribed into rna, it is also processed to make it more stable so it reaches its destination intact. part of this is putting a bunch of extra As on one end. 100-200 of them. im not sure what hes talking about ncbi. i assume the BLAST tool for searching dna, but i cant recall ever seeing a poly a tail when searching dna, nor should it be in tonraw data since dna polymerase is used to amplify the dna rather than poly a polymerase

 

[Willtor]

wait a minute, a "poly-A" tail?
what is the real world analogy of this poly-A tail?
if there is no real world equivalent of this tail then i submit that it cannot be any kind of real world simulation.
it sounds to me as if you are throwing out data.

can you provide any links to this process that a layman would understand?

Poly-A Tail

"A" is short for "Adenine" which is one of the nucleotides that makes up DNA and RNA. "Poly" means "many". These A's are added at the end of transcription (the process where DNA is read and RNA is output). So you have some RNA sequence that has a whole bunch of A's at the end that weren't there in the DNA and aren't used in translation into a protein.

A "real world" analogy might be the blank pages added at the end of a book. If the printer decided it was cheaper to use pages that they had lying around that already had text on it, you'd have a book that has more text after the author's work has ended. An illiterate person might watch someone read the book and stop before the text did. The former might conclude the latter was ignoring part of the story, but the latter knows the story has ended and that the remaining text is meaningless. It's been added to fill out the binding. Well, in the case of the poly-A tail, it's been added to make the RNA last longer.

Correction: In my earlier post, I mentioned genome assembly. I was wrong. As [serious] says, this is part of transcription, and isn't related to DNA-Seq. This isn't my field, so I only have tangential knowledge of this stuff.

---

The point is (and I feel that I've demonstrated this more than adequately with my own error): reproducing or falsifying results typically requires a lot of domain-specific knowledge that most people don't have. This isn't like dropping a grape and an orange and seeing that they fall at the same rate, any more.

 

[whois]

Poly-A Tail

"A" is short for "Adenine" which is one of the nucleotides that makes up DNA and RNA. "Poly" means "many". These A's are added at the end of transcription (the process where DNA is read and RNA is output). So you have some RNA sequence that has a whole bunch of A's at the end that weren't there in the DNA and aren't used in translation into a protein.

A "real world" analogy might be the blank pages added at the end of a book. If the printer decided it was cheaper to use pages that they had lying around that already had text on it, you'd have a book that has more text after the author's work has ended. An illiterate person might watch someone read the book and stop before the text did. The former might conclude the latter was ignoring part of the story, but the latter knows the story has ended and that the remaining text is meaningless. It's been added to fill out the binding. Well, in the case of the poly-A tail, it's been added to make the RNA last longer.

Correction: In my earlier post, I mentioned genome assembly. I was wrong. As [serious] says, this is part of transcription, and isn't related to DNA-Seq. This isn't my field, so I only have tangential knowledge of this stuff.

okay, i guess.
i will try to find some links somewhere.

This isn't like dropping a grape and an orange and seeing that they fall at the same rate, any more.

exactly, and i think this is the primary reason koonin and noble both call for darwinism to be replaced.
evolution is not a simple matter of "adding up mutations".

 

[Willtor]

okay, i guess.
i will try to find some links somewhere.

exactly, and i think this is the primary reason koonin and noble both call for darwinism to be replaced.
evolution is not a simple matter of "adding up mutations".

If you can replace evolution with something that is more like dropping a grape and an orange that we can all test, that would be tremendous! In fact, you'd get a Nobel Prize for that kind of work. The question is: What is the new theory, and does it have the same kind of predictive power that evolution has?

 

[essentialsaltes]

"Science says X" is distinct from "A scientist says X." "Science says X" means that X has been published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal or conference and has withstood scrutiny from the community in that context. A blog or a book or a miniseries doesn't meet this criterion.

If it were synonymous with "A scientist says X" then we have scientists who talk about many things from atheism to evangelical Christianity. But these things can't both be scientific. In fact, neither of them are, since neither has been published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal.

Is this controversial?

I would be somewhat more conservative. If "X has been published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal or conference and has withstood scrutiny from the community", I would say that means "a scientific study says X".

We've all seen the local TV news trump up stories like "Red wine is good for your lumbago" followed three months later by "Red wine is bad for your lumbago".

As others have pointed out, 'science' doesn't say anything, but as a short-hand, I think we can use that to refer to results that are certain due to well-established uncontroversial measurements, or are the result of many studies coming together into a scientific theory. They have lost their connection to one study or one researcher. They are the result of many independent studies and many independent researchers.

Science says there is no measurable link between vaccines and autism.
Science says that current species on earth are products of evolution from ancestor species.

 

[Willtor]

I would be somewhat more conservative. If "X has been published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal or conference and has withstood scrutiny from the community", I would say that means "a scientific study says X".

We've all seen the local TV news trump up stories like "Red wine is good for your lumbago" followed three months later by "Red wine is bad for your lumbago".

As others have pointed out, 'science' doesn't say anything, but as a short-hand, I think we can use that to refer to results that are certain due to well-established uncontroversial measurements, or are the result of many studies coming together into a scientific theory. They have lost their connection to one study or one researcher. They are the result of many independent studies and many independent researchers.

Science says there is no measurable link between vaccines and autism.
Science says that current species on earth are products of evolution from ancestor species.

That's reasonable.

 

[[serious]]

Poly-A Tail

"A" is short for "Adenine" which is one of the nucleotides that makes up DNA and RNA. "Poly" means "many". These A's are added at the end of transcription (the process where DNA is read and RNA is output). So you have some RNA sequence that has a whole bunch of A's at the end that weren't there in the DNA and aren't used in translation into a protein.

A "real world" analogy might be the blank pages added at the end of a book. If the printer decided it was cheaper to use pages that they had lying around that already had text on it, you'd have a book that has more text after the author's work has ended. An illiterate person might watch someone read the book and stop before the text did. The former might conclude the latter was ignoring part of the story, but the latter knows the story has ended and that the remaining text is meaningless. It's been added to fill out the binding. Well, in the case of the poly-A tail, it's been added to make the RNA last longer.

Correction: In my earlier post, I mentioned genome assembly. I was wrong. As [serious] says, this is part of transcription, and isn't related to DNA-Seq. This isn't my field, so I only have tangential knowledge of this stuff.

---

The point is (and I feel that I've demonstrated this more than adequately with my own error): reproducing or falsifying results typically requires a lot of domain-specific knowledge that most people don't have. This isn't like dropping a grape and an orange and seeing that they fall at the same rate, any more.

Could you have been conflating telomeres with poly A tails? You don't really need to strip them out to analyze anything, but they are kinda similar to poly A tails in that they get added on to the end of DNA at certain times to acts as a kind of buffer.

You are right in the sense that it's a bit more complicated than dropping a grape and an orange, but at least in the field of biology, it is still generating predictions testable in a small lab. Heck, for some of the stuff you could probably built your own stuff at home for a couple hundred bucks an apparatus. The data processing thing really only requires publicly available sequences and enough knowledge about computers to set up the analysis. For example, we could look at fetal hemoglobin sequences in various animals and see if they fall into the expected nested hierarchy.

 

[[serious]]

Oh, and poking around, it appears that I either forgot about BLASTtx or it's been added since I last worked with that stuff, but that is a post transcription search system which probably would have poly A tails included. I could even see a reason to strip it out. If you had some RNA sequence isolated in an organism, searching for a possible originating gene may require such a recognition and removal.

So I take it back, your initial statement was mostly right, other than the DNA/RNA confusion.

 

[Willtor]

Could you have been conflating telomeres with poly A tails? You don't really need to strip them out to analyze anything, but they are kinda similar to poly A tails in that they get added on to the end of DNA at certain times to acts as a kind of buffer.

Yeah, that was my mistake. And telomeres get shorter over time, and they don't get counted as part of the genome, etc.

You are right in the sense that it's a bit more complicated than dropping a grape and an orange, but at least in the field of biology, it is still generating predictions testable in a small lab. Heck, for some of the stuff you could probably built your own stuff at home for a couple hundred bucks an apparatus. The data processing thing really only requires publicly available sequences and enough knowledge about computers to set up the analysis. For example, we could look at fetal hemoglobin sequences in various animals and see if they fall into the expected nested hierarchy.

Okay, I'm (pleasantly) surprised to hear that one can set up apparatuses to sequence at home. Actually, now that you say that, I'd be interested in trying to do this myself.

I still contend that even if the cost of generating the data were prohibitive to an ordinary person, that would be okay. It's a good thing, sure, if it's more accessible. But it isn't on average people to falsify or reproduce studies. In parts of computer science, like high performance computing, the architectures (and power requirements) necessary to reproduce or falsify results are inaccessible to most people.

 

[Loudmouth]

"Science says X" is distinct from "A scientist says X." "Science says X" means that X has been published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal or conference and has withstood scrutiny from the community in that context. A blog or a book or a miniseries doesn't meet this criterion.

If it were synonymous with "A scientist says X" then we have scientists who talk about many things from atheism to evangelical Christianity. But these things can't both be scientific. In fact, neither of them are, since neither has been published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal.

Is this controversial?

We can see the same thing in other professions. For example, CNN says that ISIS attacks are increasing. The USGA says that you get a one stroke penalty for grounding your club in a hazard. The NFL says that LA is an attractive market.

If we run into a CNN anchor and they say that vanilla ice cream is better than chocolate ice cream (which is heresy, btw), would you think that CNN is saying that vanilla is better than chocolate? Of course not, right? As it turns out, scientists have opinions just like anyone else, and sometimes they voice those opinions. Doing so does not mean that science accepts the same things.