Scientific theories are not "proven", that is not how science works. All theories are always and forever open to falsification. The scientific attitude is one of eternal doubt. "Proof" is something that only exists in the realm of pure math.
I think the reality is more subtle than this. Is, for example, the discovery of DNA going to be falsified? I don't think so. Is the notion that living organisms evolve going to be falsified? Again, I doubt it. The case of Newton and Einstein is relevant here. Einstein didn't "falsify" Newton but rather enriched our understanding of physics. A better model seems to be that scientific theories fit into a spectrum of certainty: a very few that are certain up to the highly speculative. That scientists need to be open-minded and maintain a level of skepticism is necessary, however, the extreme skepticism you appear to be suggesting is not warranted.
Dna could be falsified. It's incredibly low chance but it could. Just like the discovery of the bacteria that causes influenza was falsified once it became clear it's a virus. Just like the so called central dogma of DNA->RNA->protein turned out to be not so central or not so dogmatic.
And Einstein definitely falsified Newton with the famous experiment with the eclipse and with more correctly showing Mercury's orbit, both of which contradicted fundamentally with Newton. Newton is an extraordinary breakthrough, and still useful as a model, but our understanding is no longer Newtonian. And, finding a way to enrich our understanding of physics even further means finding ways to falsify parts of einstein and quantum mechanics to provide the foundation for an even deeper understanding.
Completely agree. I think people are too hung up on the "falsifiability" term and don't look at the bigger picture
As your link puts nicely: "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
We're not saying they're equally falsifiable though. We have p values and sigmas and statistics to deal with different levels of wrongness and likeliness of being wrong. Nobody's saying that DNA and a bacteria causing influenza are equally likely to be wrong or equally wrong or something. The problem is saying that dna's existence is not falsifiable. That is an incorrect statement. That's all that's being pointed out.
When the likelihood of something starts to drop far below "universe spontaneously stops existing at the same time you're hit by lightning while checking your winning lottery ticket" levels, it might be valid to not treat it as a real option.
And that's what we do in science - after 5 sigma in physics, it's discovered. But remember, an experimental error is a thing, measurement error is a thing. We've been caught on that before, and while something like "this thing exists" is not as likely to be overturned (though things we were very sure existed have been overturned as new instruments and tools became available), our understanding of what that thing does and how it interacts with other things leave room for compounding uncertainty. The great thing is, we have tools in statistics to put a number to that likelihood and allow people to make the subjective calls of what they're willing to treat as an axiom and move on regarding.
Cool! That’s an interesting idea. I could see particular attributes of DNA being corrected, but How would a molecular basis for inheritance be disproven? After all, we see the molecule on microscopy, we modify it, etc. A dis-proof would have to remain consistent with all of that. What would that look like?
I think "could" is different from "will" - dna's existence is so heavily demonstrated that the chance of somehow disproving is is basically nil. But, the fact that we could disprove it (we look at it and don't see it there) helps us confirm its existence - in general in science something has to be falsifiable to be able to be demonstrated to be likely to be true if that makes sense, otherwise there's no way to obtain more evidence.
So it could be disproven, but will it? No. It definitely exists. But could it? Yep, that's how we know it exists in a scientific context. It's a bit counterintuitive, but it's the language of science. You see it in how physicists talk about discoveries - how many sigma they are. That's basically saying how likely it is the null hypothesis (sort of the falsification of the discovery) is true - and there's a point where it's so low (5 sigma traditionally) that it is considered "discovered." But that discovery is qualified with the chance that it's falsifiable.
I don't know if that was a clear explanation - if not let me know so I can try clarifying. It was something that took me a while to wrap my head around - that it's only demonstrable if falsifiable, but it's a core part of a lot of scientific theory today
The existence of DNA will never be falsified. The experiments which discovered DNA happened. New experiments don't make old experiments un-happen. Similarly, the fact DNA->RNA->protein is how it works at least some of the time isn't going to become false.
Those experiments could be wrong. They likely aren't and are like however many sigma accurate to the point that for all intents and purposes it's guaranteed to exist, but there's a reason that physisicts waited for 5 sigmabaccuracy before announcing the higgs for example. Other things people were really confident about existing because they thought they saw it, like a bacteria that causes influenza, with their own eyes, turned out to be false. you intellectually honest thing to say is that yes it is incredibly incredibly incredibly likely that DNA will not be falsified. But you can't say that with absolute certainty. it's not like in mathematics where you create the rules of the game and then can prove that within those rules you can accomplish XYZ which is a proof. We didn't write the rules of the universe.
Yes. It could all be a conspiracy or some sort of insane natural illusion. Or a dream.
Will a future experiment disprove it though? Of course not. But could one? Sure. There's an important distinction.
Also, we could end up redefining what we mean by a mountain, or come to some scientific consensus that somehow redefines mount Everest as not a mountain or something. I know that's not in the spirit of the question you posted (Pluto may be declared to not be a planet, but nothing actually changed and it doesn't know we put it in a different bucket). The height could be redefined, etc. All that is super nitpicky and of course, I'm being a bit unreasonable in this response, there will not be any experiment that disproves its existence. But there still could. In the binary of is there any possibility however minuscule or not, the coin lands on the side of there is a possibility.
The important point is falsifiability works as a tool here that actually helps continuously support the mountain's existence. If it was impossible to falsify and you could not conduct experiments where you would be able to evaluate whether or not the mountain is actually there, you'd have no way of being actually sure. One experiment is just looking at it. You could not see anything and falsify it, but because it's a testable hypothesis, you have run an experiment providing more evidence for its existence. It's why non-falsifiable statements are looked down on science. If it wasn't possible for a future experiment to disprove the existence of the mountain, many or all scientists would say it's either a meaningless question or a question of faith instead.
Sure, the existence of Mount Everest could be an international conspiracy for example. Or, you could be dreaming right now, and when you wake up you'll google "Mount Everest" and find no such thing exists
if scientific theories lie on a spectrum of certainty, then "prove" is at the maximum end of that spectrum
the "extreme skepticism" you claim the OP has seems more like a cautionary statement about avoiding the extreme assumption that a scientific theory can be "proven"
i think the OP is correct here; assuming evolutionary theory can be "proven" is a risky thing to say in a research article
There is a difference between discovery and theory. Discovery of Americas or Mars cannot be "falsified", they are scientific, objective, observable facts. Theory makes always some assumptions that can be invalid under some conditions - for instance Newtonian mechanics is not valid on quantum size scale or in case of huge masses or near speed of light velocities.
I don't know - I think that at some level our discovery of Mars could be dis-proven if you think that Mars is a solid terrestrial planet then in all likelihood you are correct, but you may be wrong - Mars could be gaseous with a floating mantel and some very strange properties... That all said I'm happy to tell bible thumpers that evolution has been proven since they aren't approaching the question from a legitimate point of skepticism and trying their best to misinform others.
For everyone who is earnest though - discoveries (even the earth being round) are only accepted until they're disproven, and there have been widely accepted theories that have been disproven in the past - like how relativity blew holes in Newtonian understandings.
The difference is that a "discovery" is the result of an experiment used to support a theory. The results of an experiment can't be falsified, just more experiments can provide better data.
From a purely theoretical point of view, there are things Newtonian physics and modern physics predict differently, particularly for very big or very small or very fast objects. So in that sense Einstein DID falsify Newton. What you're missing is Newtonian physics' subject was not very big or very small or very fast object so for the things scientists researched on, they predicted things quite well. But that only means they overfit to the universe around earth, and weren't able to model the universe in its entirety. Although you do have a good point, it's not true to say Einstein did not falsify Newton.
The existence of DNA is an observation: it's data. That DNA is the means by which traits are passed between generations, now that's a theory. It's open to falsification. No matter how many examples you can provide showing the theory to be true, all I need to do is provide a single counterexample to prove it false.
It's easy to take basic scientific discoveries for granted. The existence of DNA and micro-organisms, for example, or that living organisms change over time were important discoveries. It wasn't that long ago when people didn't know about them. These are the types of things I meant. The mechanism by which they work is, of course, far less certain.
But you’re using precisely the mindset that you should be using. You doubt that DNA or evolution will be falsified.
And, of course, Einstein’s theory absolutely did falsify Newton’s. I’m not aware of any epistemology or terminology within which you can claim that he didn’t.
I like to think of scientific theories as having a certain "resolution", à la photos. Over time, our collective resolution over some domain increases.
For example, Newton's Principia isn't wrong. Newton's gravity is just a lower-resolution photo than Einstein's; a first-order approximation to Einstein's second-order.
And the day will come (or so Brian Greene et al. hope) when Einstein's general theory of relativity will be "falsified", and so on, because any human interpretation of reality is necessarily that: an interpretation.
Theories just get more "granular" in the depth of their answers.
But evolutionary theories are so close to pure math (ie., they assume so little empirical knowledge) that it does happen once in a while to have some aspect of them proven on the literal sense.
Every scientific theory has this thing where a complex conclusion is proven to follow from a simpler set of hypothesis. It just tends to happen more often with Evolution.
Edit: On the old text it wasn't clear I agree on this case.
This is about the comparison of terrestrial mammal species and marine mammal species, and how many subspecies each one has.
They have to model how the natural and artificial barriers in each environment produce subpopulations that are isolated enough to produce subspecies. And compare the simulations of the models with the data of real mammal species to see if they have similar results. This is not so close to pure math.
to follow up on gus_massa's point, it's not the "math" of an evolutionary thoery/agorithm that's being "proved" here; it's the assertion that it "proves" something about the environment it's trying to model
and saying you've "proved" something about natural events is probably bad practice
In those cases, is something about evolutionary science proven, or is a mathematical concept proven derived from a model of evolutionary systems? We can create proofs and do real math in extending and understanding the implications of the mathematical models we use for the world, but I don't think proving anything about the behavior of the model implies any proof of the behavior of the underlying science - it suggests it's likely but proof?
The Popperian vision of science is good enough for students so that their naive mind can enter the field with idealistic perspectives but it's not how actual professionals practice it in real life. Oftentimes there are multiple theories competing, all with reasonable evidence, suggestions, and subscribers. The reason one theory prevails above another is not that the previous' subscribers were definitely convinced by the others' evidence, but simply that they died of old age. [0] The most egregious example is taxonomy: modern-day biologists have long switched to phylogenetics/cladistics to classify groups of individuals, while old school researchers still cling to traditional classification methods (sometimes using retired terms like "race").
In addition, different fields have different standards and methods for what qualified as evidence: for instance, mathematicians want nothing short of absolute proof - that's a given. But biologists are more from Missouri: they don't care that a theory is 'proven', they want to 'see' it [1]. For this reason they put very little trust in simulations no matter how advanced they are. On the other hand, they don't care that much about the mathematical rigor of the tools they use as long as it works out in the end and can be readily confirmed with something you can 'see'.
[1] Think of it as a 'constructive' view of evidence: everything must be explicit. For instance, if you want to show that trait X is 'genetic' you need to point out an explicit genetic mechanism and show it in action in model organisms. If you want to show that mechanism Y happens in one's cells you ideally need some microscopy to show Y happening live before your eyes, etc.
Actually I wonder whether Karl Popper is considered very important by philosophers of science. I have had arguments with people who claim that Feyerabend has a better "approach" to science.
On the other hand, practicing scientists consider Popper's falsification one of the great unifying themes guiding scientific research.
Though perhaps not as well-known, Popper's approach towards falsification of probabilistic claims is also a great read.
Feyerabend isn't so much a "better approach" as a lack of an approach. He does a good job trying to get past the numerous problems of Popper's work, but in doing so largely just reverses it without adding anything useful.
The way I read it, it really dates back to Hume and the problem of induction. Until we have a Final Theory to hand, we never really know anything. That is a statement of epistemology. But science can't proceed on that basis: people make decisions on where to focus their efforts, and not all hypotheses are equally worth considering. That is a statement of scientific pragmatism, and those two fields don't overlap as much as we'd like them to.
Feyerabend is easily read as continuing to conflate the two: "Hey, all knowledge is provisional, so you might as well study astrology." Maybe that's useful from an epistemological standpoint, but it's not helpful for grants committees to think that way. Nor is it helpful for epistemological anarchists to insist that grants committees never really know and therefore really should fund astrology. The question of how scientists actually work is an important one, but it's a separate question from what TRVTH actually is -- even though scientists would like to believe otherwise. They're not as close as they think.
> Feyerabend is easily read as continuing to conflate the two: "Hey, all knowledge is provisional, so you might as well study astrology." Maybe that's useful from an epistemological standpoint, but it's not helpful for grants committees to think that way.
It isn't helpful for anyone and we have very concrete examples of that to hand: Anti-vaxxers love to point out stuff like Vioxx, but never say a damn thing about all the drugs and therapies which are helpful, do much more good than harm, and which are "proven" to work for all practical intents and purposes. Being unwilling to attack stuff like anti-vaccine nonsense head-on because of some abstract epistemological nonsense kills people. There's no upside to that.
Saying "Nothing is absolutely certain, therefore it is absolutely certain that we know nothing" is bad enough. Actually believing it is dangerous in direct proportion to how much of a hand you have in shaping policy. The bus driver might believe in utter epistemological nihilism, but they'd better not veer into oncoming traffic just the same.
It's generally harmless for philosophers to believe stuff, since they don't drive buses, and they generally get their vaccinations regardless of the epistemological status of their effectiveness. For that matter, they continue to eat food, despite the uncertainty whether they're really holding a peanut butter sandwich and not, say, the average temperature of the asteroid Ceres.
They get to be anarchic, as long as you can't prove otherwise -- and "prove" in the mathematical sense, not the scientific one. All it costs you is paper, pencils, and the price of a trash can. (Which they never use.) If you shut down the line of reasoning just because other people are incredibly, dangerously stupid, you're going to have to shut down pretty much everything.
We discussed popper in some classes I took, the main theme for that for like an explanation yes it needs to be falsifiable, but also sometimes science is just "look I made a thing!" Or "look I found a thing!" And it's less relevant there. The unanimous belief accross different classes in the sciences I took was that yes, when we think about science we look at it from the perspective of falsification, but when we actually do science, we usually think of it as exploration until we have something we think falsifies the status quo or needs rigorous data collection to reject the mill. Nobody is really running an RNA sequencing experiment to evaluate the impacts of a drug on the rna transcriptome with falsification in mind (even if in a sense the null of "nothing changes" is what you're trying to falsify"). Psychologically it's just seen as some exploration to see what happens.
>Nobody is really running an RNA sequencing experiment to evaluate the impacts of a drug on the rna transcriptome with falsification in mind (even if in a sense the null of "nothing changes" is what you're trying to falsify"). Psychologically it's just seen as some exploration to see what happens.
Isn't this, along with and maybe encouraging p-hacking, a major cause of the non-reproducability crisis? Scientists hunting out supporting evidence instead of showing their theories don't easily break?
It likely is, but this is also an outgrowth of the "explorer" sort of mindset where people juts see themselves as diving into the unknown to see what they find. It's not malicious, but it could contribute to p hacking for sure
The explorer mindset is how scientists discovered penicillin, x-rays, and vulcanized rubber. Science isn't as cut and dry as the scientific method suggests.
I'd say to the extent that this behavior contributes to the reproducibility crisis, it has more to do with not backing that exploration with rigorous experimentation.
But more to the point, I'd argue that the lack of funding and publish-or-perish atmosphere has more to do with it. Academics don't necessarily publish because the results are noteworthy, but because they have to, regardless of the robustness of their methodology.
That's absolutely true as well, and in my reply above I wasn't contesting that, just contemplating what the poster above that mentioned about p hacking, how maybe this mindset makes it easier as a justification? But yeah we should never just discard the importance of exploration for the sake of it, it's how we also got crucial technologies like current PCR tools - some guy just really wanted to see what was up with those Yellowstone bacteria and found all sorts of heat stable compounds. That rigorous follow-up is super important though as you stated
While the history of science emerges from and has an ongoing productive dialogue with that of philosophy, the humanities dept. status panic confection of "philosophy of science" has very little to do with this.
I'm not sure what "status panic confection" is supposed to mean. Nor does philosophy generally fall under humanities departments.
The philosophy of science is an established field that is hundreds of years old and includes pretty serious thinkers like Kant, Popper, Kuhn, and quite a few others. Ignore it at your own peril.
The main thing is, "so-and-so proved that" or "he showed that" or "they demonstrated scientifically that" refer to processes that can't convey certainty. Even in mathematics there's no certainty because mathematicians are fallible and someone may eventually find a flaw in a proof.
