Living with Uncertainty

So in my very first blog post I talked about studying science because I wanted to discover the the Truth. This seems straightforward enough when we first learn about the scientific method in high school. You develop a hypothesis, design an experiment to test that hypothesis, and then get an answer. When you first start studying science you think that the worst thing that can happen is that you prove your hypothesis wrong. But really this is one the best things that can happen! That means that you're learning something new. One of my biggest disappointments in studying science is in realizing that no matter what field you choose the process of doing science is a lot more messy than this. There are so many opportunities for the variability of the real world combined with human error to lead to confounding or inconclusive results. Every step of the scientific process must be done with care from choosing your question and designing your experiment and most importantly interpreting your results. In some ways this is exciting, doing science takes more creativity than most people would think and for most scientists thinking about what our results mean, what questions are yet to be answered and how to design the best possible experiments to test these questions is what keeps science interesting.

Recently an article in the Atlantic Monthly magazine titled Lies, Damned Lies and Medical Science suggested that a large percentage of studies, especially when it comes medical studies involving the development of new drugs, turn out to be incomplete, misleading or flat out wrong. Similarly an article in The New Yorker magazine titled The Truth Wears Off talks about a phenomenon in which a discovery that seems highly significant at first seems less certain over time. This does not mean that science is not a useful tool for discovering the truth but it does mean that we can't take the finding of every scientific study at face value, we have to evaluate data for ourselves, and we have to keep an open mind when new data comes about that challenges our preexisting ideas. There is tremendous pressure on scientists to publish quickly and make their results sound as exciting as possible. In the pharmaceutical industry there are large financial gains or losses at stake and in academia scientists are competing for ever shrinking grant dollars and a finite supply of tenure track positions.We can't go from a blind faith in myths or magic to a blind faith in every published scientific result. Science is a slow and evolving process. Each study adds one piece to the puzzle and we have to be careful not over-interpret our results. Over time scientific findings are corroborated or rejected as other scientists repeat and build on the work that has been done before. Science does not result in a bunch of facts that can never be challenged but rather is a slow accumulation of knowledge based on rigorous interpretation of the data we have.

In my first blog post I talked about taking comfort in having an answer to my question of why the dinosaurs died out stating that most scientist believe that a meteor impact on the Yucatan peninsula caused climate changes that resulted in the dinosaurs' demise. Of course this is likely not to be the whole story. Recently researchers at the University of Alberta used a new dating method on the bone from one dinosaur to show that this particular individual was alive 700,000 years after the mass extinction event that was thought to have killed off all of the dinosaurs. Future studies will show whether this finding was a fluke and will continue to explore how different factors contributed to the demise of the dinosaurs. For me this is exciting and I continue to believe that the scientific method is the best approach for answering big questions about our universe.