What Science Is and Isn't

I've always had a thing for the natural sciences. You see, when I was a kid, I was something of a bookworm. Okay, I still am, sort of, but back then I had lots of time to read, and play, and do all that other childish stuff that we should all be doing more often, but aren't. Anyhow, in between all of Encyclopedia Brown's reasoned use of information to solve mysteries, and Long John Silver's attempts to mislead and bully his way to a fortune, I read books about dinosaurs. If you were ever a little boy, you probably did too.

But, the thing about dinosaurs is, you can only read about them. You can see people trying to solve problems with information, if you look really hard, and you can see people lying and bullying for money, whether you're looking or not, but dinosaurs are tough to spot. Which leads little kids, like the one I once was, to ask questions, like, how can people possibly know about dinosaurs if no one's ever seen one?

The answer, it turned out, was science. And once I could figure out some of those words scientists liked to use, I couldn't get enough of what they were saying. Scientists, after all, have this way of answering a lot of those questions that kids like to ask. But they didn't answer all of them. In fact, real scientists didn't even try to answer all of them, and they had this irritating way of pointing out that none of their answers were certain, because if they were certain, then they wouldn't be scientists.

Science, I learned, was a very narrow, and very peculiar, way of looking at some aspects of the world. Specifically, it's a vaguely-defined process of reducing things down to their constituent parts, imagining how those parts interact with each other, dreaming up ways to observe those parts doing their thing, and then measuring the degree to which they do or don't behave in accordance with a theory. If they do appear to do what your theory predicts, then you tell lots of other scientists about it and wait for them to replicate your experiment and confirm your theory. It's really pretty clever.

A bunch of guys in the 17th century, who called themselves natural philosophers, came up with this, and, right away, they discovered something that scientists have known ever since. This process, which they eventually called the scientific method, worked great, but it only worked for some aspects of our world, which they eventually named physics, chemistry, and biology, and it never, ever, allowed for a concept which already had a name, called certainty.

Well, all kids have to grow up, and when I did, I went off to have some scholastic adventures in academia. Not surprisingly, one of the subjects I studied in school was geology. Not only was it one of the natural sciences, it was the meta science, which combined all the other sciences: physics, chemistry, and biology. It was great. Well, it was great up until I figured out that what most geologists end up doing is wandering around in the middle of nowhere looking for oil.

And so I wandered around looking for a discipline that wouldn't lead to a job that would make me miserable. And my academic meanderings were pretty interesting in and of themselves. I spent some time in the liberal arts, which was filled with people who scoffed at the natural sciences, because, while science could tell you why a pigment was a certain color, or why an instrument produced a certain sound, or why people are capable of writing, dancing, and singing, it couldn't tell you what any of those things meant or distinguish a good painting, or fiction, or song, from a lousy one. No surprises there. I knew that, and so did all those people over in the science department.

What was surprising, however, was what I saw when I wandered over to some of those other fields, such as economics, or engineering, or mathematics, or sociology. There, I found people who, sometimes, referred to themselves as scientists, but rarely practiced science. Odder still, when they did try to apply the scientific method to some subject in their discipline, things would go wrong. No, that's not the surprising part. Of course things will go wrong when someone tries to use the scientific method on subjects it can't be applied to. What was surprising was that these people knew they weren't scientists, and they knew science wouldn't work for their disciplines, but they would still do it every once in a while, mainly, they admitted, so they could call themselves scientists.

So, what was going on? Why would people who knew better pass themselves off as scientists and use a way of learning that they knew wasn't going to work? Well, remember those physicists and chemists and biologists? They discovered some astonishing stuff, didn't they? And we were all very impressed by it, weren't we? We were so impressed that, at some point, we decided that the word "science" really meant "enigmatic but certain," even though scientists tried to tell us that it meant nothing of the sort. We also, because we liked the word "science" so much, decided that it would work for anything at all.

Want to know a secret? Science doesn't even work for everything it's supposed to work for. Several years ago, some biologists wanted to see what effect genetics had on alcoholism. They used three labs, in three different locations, with several genetically identical sets of mice, and conducted the same experiments on the mice at all three labs, at the same, local, times. But they didn't find the "alkie" gene they were looking for. Instead, they discovered that the mice behaved differently in each lab, depending on, apparently, nothing more than their latitude and longitude. This, of course, didn't make any sense. It did, however, remind these biologists of an inherent limitation in science. As one of the biologists said, "You're looking into something that people would like to believe is not a problem."

What is that problem? It has to do with what science is and what it does, and doesn't, do well. Remember that bit about reducing things to their constituent parts? This only allows science to see a few interactions at a time, but most things interact with many other things in a variety of ways, so science isn't always useful for understanding this sort of, very common, holistic, phenomenon. And that observation and experimentation stuff? It's fine for inanimate objects, but flora and fauna deliberately adjust to their environments, including experiments, and this makes the results of those experiments difficult, and sometimes impossible, to interpret. And what about quantifying and replicating data? As we've known since forever, not everything is quantifiable. And even some of those things that seem like they are, turn out to be trickier than we suspect. If scientists can't be sure of their measurements, or can't make any meaningful ones at all, then how can they know when they've reproduced results?

Now that I'm all grown up and out of school, I can see why those scientists whose words I read and whose classes I attended were so determined to tell anyone who would listen what science was, where it could be applied, and what its limitations were. I'm sure they saw things even more unsettling than a few academics running into dead ends. They, no doubt, saw the same sort of things I'm seeing now. Because, now, I see things like executives claiming that chaos theory requires their corporations to do randomly destructive things. I see companies and think-tanks paying "scientific researchers" to create evidence that supports their policies. I see marketers swearing that their "innovative" products are beneficial, or, at least, harmless, because they're the "products of science." I see poll-takers crowing, endlessly, about how scientifically-accurate their questionnaires are. I see theologians saying that their notion of intelligent design should be taught in biology classes because, hey, it's scientific too. And, most distressingly, I see financiers, educators, and politicians deciding that science is so important to our economy that it should be taught at the expense of other subjects.

Whether you're a scientist or not, none of this is good news. It is, instead, an indication that our society is systematically neglecting thousands of years of philosophy and the humanities — subjects that enable us to understand the world and each other — for no reason other than because pseudo-scientists want to claim that whatever they say is true, and know they can get away with it because we've been led to believe that "science" is universally applicable and that it brings us a certainty about the universe that will solve all our problems.

Science is great, but it's not that great. It isn't the end-all and be-all of thought and knowledge. Scientists know this, and they always have. You should know it too, because if you don't, you might end up doing something Encyclopedia Brown would never do, using the wrong process to gather the wrong information while trying to solve the wrong problem. Or maybe, you're like Long John Silver, and you know you're not a scientist, but don't care, as long as saying so gets you closer to some buried treasure.

And it doesn't really matter whether these experts who are misusing, and misrepresenting, the natural sciences are fools or charlatans, because, either way, if we don't start calling them out and start using some of those other methods of thinking and understanding that mankind has developed over the millennia too, we're going to end up like those dinosaurs I read about as a child, plodding along with one train of thought, oblivious to the fact that their world was collapsing around them. We are smarter than dinosaurs, aren't we?