How do you react when someone says "science is just a bunch of facts and is not knowledge"? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Suzanne Sadedin, evolutionary biologist, on Quora:
Science is neither facts nor knowledge. It's a process, a method of looking at reality that works at a cultural level.
Most science students are taught a caricature of the scientific process that goes like this: first you makes some observations, then you formulate a hypothesis that explains those observations, then you test that hypothesis empirically, then you report your results. If your peers are convinced by your argument, and nobody else manages to falsify your hypothesis, it will eventually be accepted.
I am sure you can right away see numerous weaknesses in this approach. What if your initial observations were mistaken? What if the logic behind your hypothesis was wrong? What if your test design was flawed? What if you didn't implement the test properly? What if you lie?
On top of that, here's a secret: most scientists don't actually do much formal hypothesis testing. Many are more like explorers, looking for patterns and recording them. Others are theoreticians, who make toy worlds and play with them. And still others are engineers, who try to create useful things. There's no single approach to science across, or even within disciplines.
Given all that, you might be unsurprised to learn that most published scientific results are wrong. And the more prestigious the journal they are published in, the more likely they are to be wrong.
And yet, science works. It underlies all modern technology, provides the best explanations for most of what we see on earth, and vastly improves human health and well-being.
So, how does it work? It works because scientists are genuinely, passionately curious about reality, where reality means observable, replicable empirical phenomena. Glory, to a scientist, is advancing our understanding of reality. One way to do this is to destroy another scientist's theory with a better one. We're not gentle with ideas, either our own or other people's. Konrad Lorenz suggested that "it is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast."
But we're still human. We have limited perspectives, we're biased by a thousand needs, fears and preconceptions, and each of us can grasp only a tiny portion of reality. Individual scientists get things wrong all the time, and many won't ever see their errors. As Max Planck put it: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents finally die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
So science is a sort of conversation, where ideas are continually proposed, explored and discarded. The published scientific literature is like a fossil record of these ideas, layer built upon layer. Some ideas appear and vanish in the blink of an eye. Others flourish for a while, then abruptly die out. Still others languish for generations, then burst into sudden prominence to found whole new disciplines.
The net result is that the ideas that are still with us are very well-tested, very refined. There's no guarantee they are right: many will doubtless go the way of the non-avian dinosaurs. But they are the best of the very best of generations of human thinking and empirical testing, and you can see how well they work.
To me, there's something endlessly romantic and heroic about this enterprise. Science is how humanity pursues reality. It's the struggle to reach something we know is ultimately beyond us, to comprehend the incomprehensible. It's the labor of countless generations, a thread reaching back into antiquity, and leading us onward into an unimaginable future.
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