Today, roughly one in four American adults distrusts science (Pew Research Center report, Nov. 14, 2024). Science skeptics include those who believe that human influences on climate change are a hoax or that vaccines for contagious diseases do more harm than good. Some skeptics apparently embrace anti-science views because they find it’s politically or socially advantageous to do so, whereas some others appear to misunderstand how science works. My aim here is to reduce that misunderstanding. (Disclosure: My views are informed by the more than 40 years I spent as a research scientist.)
At its heart, the scientific method of uncovering facts is simply the trial-and-error method that most of us use to solve everyday problems. Suppose, for example, you discover that an electrical outlet has stopped working. To diagnose the problem, you first might test a nearby outlet to see if it, too, has stopped working. If that’s the case, you might next go to your electrical panel to see if a circuit breaker or fuse has tripped or failed. You continue down this trial-and-error path of gaining evidence until a clearer picture of the situation emerges. You ultimately may need to hire an electrician who has more knowledge and test equipment than you have, but each step along the way to diagnosis and repair applies the scientific method of obtaining verifiable evidence.
Science that’s as complicated as vaccine development or climate change assessment can seem mysterious because it commonly involves the use of complex instrumentation, mathematics, statistics and computation. Scientists use these tools for the same reason that an electrician uses test equipment: Because they’re effective for finding factual evidence.
Some Americans today believe that scientists commonly engage in conspiracies intended to mislead the public, but nothing could be further from the truth. Scientists gain prestige not by conspiring with one another, but instead by providing compelling, verifiable evidence that a widely held idea is flawed and that a new, alternative idea is better.
Judging the merit of new scientific ideas generally takes some time because it involves a peer review process that proceeds both before and after publication of the ideas in refereed scientific journals. The main purpose of scientific peer review is error detection and correction. Broadcasting scientific opinions via YouTube videos or social media websites is not part of the scientific process because it affords no opportunity for systematic review that leads to error detection and correction.
Like everything else created by humans, science isn’t perfect, and a tiny percentage of scientists are charlatans or frauds. But unlike some other forms of human endeavor, science is cumulative and self-correcting. As Isaac Newton famously wrote in 1675, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Newton was referring to his scientific predecessors such as Copernicus and Galileo, but his perspective is still relevant today.
Scientists today continue to build on a foundation of verifiable knowledge developed by generations of scientific predecessors. One can’t make the claim that modern works of art or literature are definitively better than those created in centuries past, but the claim is certainly true for modern science. Its cumulative nature allows it to stand on the shoulders of giants. Will modern humans use the resulting perspective to see further and take appropriate actions to address problems such as climate change or pandemic diseases, or will they find it more convenient to ignore science, stick their heads in the sand and wait for the axe to fall?
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Richard Iverson, of Hood River, spent most of his scientific career at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Cascades Volcano Observatory.
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