Science and Studies

Chapter summary

• Good scientific process separates reliable information from waffle.
• Scientific progress comes from different approaches, and in biology they are blending.
• Question the science, including the science in this book.

Newton’s apple is not the whole story

• The apple story hides the years Newton spent on mathematics, the cosmos, and fitting theory to measurement.
• Ideas rarely arrive in a flash. They follow long preparation.

Two traditions: hypothesis and “stamp collecting”

• Rutherford’s view: There were only two types of science, mathematics and “stamp collecting”. He regarded mathematics as the basis of all science.
• Hypothesis-driven: Form a theory, then design an experiment to prove or disprove it. The Large Hadron Collider is an example. The Standard Model predicted the Higgs boson in the 1960s. It took decades, billions of euros and about 5,000 physicists and engineers to find evidence, and it raised new questions.
• Collecting and classifying: Robert Brown collected over 4,000 new plant species in Australia from 1801 and used the microscope to lift botany into a professional science. Mendeleev’s periodic table (1869) moved chemistry from measuring reactions to hypothesis and prediction.
• The counter-view: Descriptive science is not a lesser hobby. Observation often provides the questions that experiments then test.

Biology is slow and still changing

• We first thought genes were the important part of DNA. Then the “junk” DNA between genes proved just as important.
• More recently the environment has been shown to switch genes on and off (epigenetics).
• We do not yet understand the brain’s trillions of connections, yet it shapes our health.

The plural of anecdote

• People’s experiences are valid. Their cause, or their application to everyone, may not be.
• Pro-anecdote: Raymond Wolfinger said “the plural of anecdote is data”. Many accounts can reveal patterns worth testing.
• Anti-anecdote: Others turn it around: the plural of anecdote is not data. “My friends smoked all their lives and lived to ninety” is true, but smoking still reduces life expectancy by about 15 years.
• It all depends on the statistics.

Take-away points

• Ask what kind of evidence you are looking at: experiment, observation or anecdote.
• Treat single studies and single stories with caution.

References

• Rutherford’s remark on physics and “stamp collecting”, as cited in the book.
• Mendeleev, D. (1869) Periodic table of the elements.
• Wolfinger, R. (1969-70) Remark at the University of California, Berkeley, on anecdote and data.
• CERN. The Standard Model and the Large Hadron Collider.