My post What people need to know about science…according to scientists generated some interesting responses. Quick rejoinders:
My rather spare and parsimonious emphasis on the paramount importance of systematic method, with a further decomposition into rational, empirical and skepticism elements does not mean I believe these are the only things necessary for good science, rather, I think they are the pith at the heart of the difference between Western science as it crystallized over the past few hundred years and non-Western “science,” medieval “science” and yes, even Greek “science.”
Intuition, curiosity, hard-work and passion are all crucial cogs in the machine that is the individual scientist, but I hold that all are irrelevant without the aspects noted above. European and Taoist alchemy for example no doubt had practioners with all of the listed laudable characteristics, to no avail.
Science also works within a community. This means that falsification can come from any direction, hypotheses are scrutinized in the public eye and data is pooled. But, it also opens up the Kuhnian point about “paradigms” and the socially mediated aspect of science. This is true of course, but the important thing to note is that paradigms do shift, reality is the final arbiter. To use a genetical analogy, a locus (topic) might be polymorphic (alternative hypotheses) for a time, but eventually one allele (theory) fixes so that it becomes part of the “genetic background” (fundamental laws and established models) against with evolution (science) works.
I suspect what John was saying in asserting that science “isn’t something special or different” is that the method of science works because the content that science chooses to examine is carefully pre-screened. One can imagine a scientific method as an enzyme binding on to the substrate which is the content, but for the binding to take the substrate and enzyme must “fit” in a lock and key. Instead of the scientific method dictating the terms of what is to be science, scientifically tractable problems might have dictated the methods and forms that science took.
Addendum: An acquaintance of mine mentioned offhand that he had a strong suspicion that the Manchester School of liberal economics had a strong influence on the individual-centric competitive perspective that colored early Darwinian evolutionary theory (Malthus was also a strong influence). Though my acquaintance abhors individualistic capitalism and the Manchester School’s neoliberal descendents, he admitted that evolution seems to work on just those principles (this is most clear after the work of William D. Hamilton and George C. Williams in the 1960s that placed the individual, as opposed to the species or group, front and center in evolutionary theory). The moral of the story is that even if a social milieu has a powerful shaping influence on the models that science might produce: that does not necessarily imply that the model is flawed (most models are flawed after all). In contrast, deep into the 1980s the Japanese promoted theories about primate ethology (in particular macaques) that emphasized unselfish behaviors “for the good of the species” as opposed to intraspecies competition. In the end, such models had to cede ground to the data. In the end the data trumps culture.
Posted by razib at 08:12 PM