Cheerful Charlie
Contributor
How science really gets done.
Faith Vs Fact - Why Science And Religion Are Incompatible
Jerry Coyne 2015
I learned about the nature of science the hard way. After an undergraduate
education in biology at a small southern college, I was determined to get
a Ph.D. in evolutionary genetics at the best laboratory in that field. At
the time, that was the laboratory of Richard Lewontin at Harvard’s Museum
of Comparative Zoology, for Lewontin was widely seen as the world’s best
evolutionary geneticist. But soon after I arrived and began working on
evolution in fruit flies, I thought I’d made a terrible mistake. Shy and
reserved, I felt as if I’d been hurled into a pit of unrelenting
negativity. In research seminars, the audience seemed determined to
dismantle the credibility of the speaker. Sometimes they wouldn’t even
wait until the question period after the talk, but would rudely shout out
critical questions and comments during the talk itself. When I thought I
had a good idea and tentatively described it to my fellow graduate
students, it was picked apart like a flounder on a plate. And when we all
discussed science around the big rectangular table in our commons room,
the atmosphere was heated and contentious. Every piece of work, published
or otherwise, was scrutinized for problems problems that were almost
always found. This made me worry that whatever science I managed to
produce could never make the grade. I even thought about leaving graduate
school. Eventually, fearful of being criticized, I simply kept my mouth
shut and listened. That went on for two years. But in the end, that
listening was my education in science, for I learned that the pervasive
doubt and criticality weren’t intended as personal attacks, but were
actually the essentialingredients in science, used as a form of quality
control to uncover the researcher’s misconceptions and mistakes. Like
Michelangelo’s sculpturing, which he saw as eliminating marble to reveal
the statue within, the critical scrutiny of scientific ideas and
experiments is designed, by eliminating error, to find the core of truth
in an idea. Once I’d learned this, and developed a skin thick enough to
engage in the inevitable to-and-fro, I began to enjoy science. For if you
can tolerate the criticality and doubt—and they’re not for everyone — the
process of science yields a joy that no other job confers: the chance to
be the first person to find out something new about the universe.
Until I started pondering the relationship of science and religion for this
book, I never really thought about what “science” was, although I’d been
doing it for over three decades. Most scientists never get formal
instruction in “the scientific method,” except perhaps for the rote (and
incorrect) recitation of “make hypothesis/test it/accept it”
sequence you see in textbooks. Literally and figuratively, I learned
science on the fly, simply by watching how my peers did it. But learning
it and defining it are different matters. In fact, it was not until I
wrote this book that I realized that my own notion of science is simply
that of a method: a process (to my mind, the only process) that hasproved
useful in helping us understand what is real in the universe. While I had
never pondered this issue, my training as a scientist had led me to
unconsciously internalize its methods.
Faith Vs Fact - Why Science And Religion Are Incompatible
Jerry Coyne 2015
I learned about the nature of science the hard way. After an undergraduate
education in biology at a small southern college, I was determined to get
a Ph.D. in evolutionary genetics at the best laboratory in that field. At
the time, that was the laboratory of Richard Lewontin at Harvard’s Museum
of Comparative Zoology, for Lewontin was widely seen as the world’s best
evolutionary geneticist. But soon after I arrived and began working on
evolution in fruit flies, I thought I’d made a terrible mistake. Shy and
reserved, I felt as if I’d been hurled into a pit of unrelenting
negativity. In research seminars, the audience seemed determined to
dismantle the credibility of the speaker. Sometimes they wouldn’t even
wait until the question period after the talk, but would rudely shout out
critical questions and comments during the talk itself. When I thought I
had a good idea and tentatively described it to my fellow graduate
students, it was picked apart like a flounder on a plate. And when we all
discussed science around the big rectangular table in our commons room,
the atmosphere was heated and contentious. Every piece of work, published
or otherwise, was scrutinized for problems problems that were almost
always found. This made me worry that whatever science I managed to
produce could never make the grade. I even thought about leaving graduate
school. Eventually, fearful of being criticized, I simply kept my mouth
shut and listened. That went on for two years. But in the end, that
listening was my education in science, for I learned that the pervasive
doubt and criticality weren’t intended as personal attacks, but were
actually the essentialingredients in science, used as a form of quality
control to uncover the researcher’s misconceptions and mistakes. Like
Michelangelo’s sculpturing, which he saw as eliminating marble to reveal
the statue within, the critical scrutiny of scientific ideas and
experiments is designed, by eliminating error, to find the core of truth
in an idea. Once I’d learned this, and developed a skin thick enough to
engage in the inevitable to-and-fro, I began to enjoy science. For if you
can tolerate the criticality and doubt—and they’re not for everyone — the
process of science yields a joy that no other job confers: the chance to
be the first person to find out something new about the universe.
Until I started pondering the relationship of science and religion for this
book, I never really thought about what “science” was, although I’d been
doing it for over three decades. Most scientists never get formal
instruction in “the scientific method,” except perhaps for the rote (and
incorrect) recitation of “make hypothesis/test it/accept it”
sequence you see in textbooks. Literally and figuratively, I learned
science on the fly, simply by watching how my peers did it. But learning
it and defining it are different matters. In fact, it was not until I
wrote this book that I realized that my own notion of science is simply
that of a method: a process (to my mind, the only process) that hasproved
useful in helping us understand what is real in the universe. While I had
never pondered this issue, my training as a scientist had led me to
unconsciously internalize its methods.
