MHB Questioning Science: Why Ecology is Subjective in Environmental Science

[find_the_fun]

For some reason every time I take an environmental science class the prof has a bone to pick with the scientific principle.

Last lecture he stated that "people think that theory is based on observations but this is wrong, what people observe is based on theory". He also made the point about how science is dependent on the current cultural beliefs, for example during the time when people thought the Earth was flat, all other scientific theories would attempt to be compatible with a flat Earth. One of the pitfalls of science is its hard to go against an already accepted theory (even though it may be wrong) and that everyone would try to find mistakes made in an experiment that disproved an already established theory.

Any thoughts? This course is supposed to focus on ecology and I don't know why profs in the ES department always try to give science a bad rap.

 

[Fantini]

I agree your professor is going on a tangent, but I also agree with some of his observations.

You'll probably like reading Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". One of the key ideas is that, more often than not, changes in how people view a certain area of science is brought about not because of experiments, but because people believing the old ways die.

New scientists, in a more neutral position, judge and commonly choose the latter view in place of the former.

 

[Ackbach]

I think it's helpful to remember here just who does science: people. And people are always biased. The honest thing is to come right out and say what your bias is. Then it's a known variable. What many scientists do is try to hide their bias behind passive sentences (really? experiments "were conducted"? How do experiments conduct themselves?) in order to avoid having subjects for their sentences. We can't have real people doing science! Then no one would blindly accept our propaganda results!

In the end, theory and experiment always leap-frog. Sometimes theory is based on experiments (that is, sometimes experiment is ahead), and sometimes experiment is based on theory (theory is ahead). It varies. It's an iterative process, more than it is one side always dominating.

It is definitely the case that bias and a prevailing paradigm (a la Kuhn, as Fantini has so rightly pointed out) can lead to extremely unfortunate results. I could point to a number of instances in which highly published and respected scientists have lost their jobs because of bias: their results conflicted with the established theory, and therefore they (meaning both the results and the scientists that produced them) had to go.

 

[topsquark]

There is a joke that is pretty on topic here.

A journalist approaches a college professor and shows him a graph of an experiment that has a distinct "dip." The journalist asks for an explanation to write about. The professor thinks for a moment and says "Well, you see, you should expect a dip in the graph here because...(etc.). Then the journalist suddenly realizes that the graph was upside-down. So he flips it over and the professor then says, "Well, you see, you should expect a peak in the graph here because..."

This is a funny joke because it is so often true.

Respect the Science facts but keep a close eye on the Scientists!

-Dan

 

[find_the_fun]

This is what I was trying to explain in this http://mathhelpboards.com/chat-room-9/science-vs-philosophy-9353.html about how when science finds something, other subjects yield to it or at least in the sense that when one piece of established science changes everything built on top of it must change.