Evolving the Scientific Method - THE SCIENTIST

THE SCIENTIST Vol 24 Iss 12 P 30 
Date: 2010-12-01 

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Another interesting article on the relationship between "science" and "belief", or rather, between "science" and "truth".  Ideas, comments, anyone? All the best, Wendy By Kevin Kelly Evolving the Scientific Method Technology is changing the way we conduct science. Images: Wikipedia (from top): LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA; FRANCIS BACON; ROBERT BOYLE; KARL POPPER (COURTESY OF LSE LIBRARY); PLACEBO (COURTESY OF ELAINE AND ARTHUR SHAPIRO); ZUSE Z3 COMPUTER (COURTESY OF DEUTSCHEN MUSEUM IN MÜNCHEN) Science is our most potent invention because it has given us a method to keep reinventing it. All our collective knowledge and expertise (that’s science) began with relatively simple arrangements of information. The simplest organization was the invention of the fact. Facts became codified not by science, but by the European legal system in the 1500s. In court lawyers had to establish agreed-upon observations as evidence that could not shift later. Science adopted this useful innovation. Over time, the novel ways in which knowledge could be ordered increased. This complex apparatus for determining the factual correctness of information, and relating it to old knowledge, is what we call science. RELATED ARTICLES DNA Robots Get Sophisticated New Smoking Gun? The Problem of Perception Seeing in Numbers The scientific method is not one uniform “method.” It is a collection of scores of techniques and processes that has evolved over centuries (and continues to evolve). Each method is one small step that incrementally increases the unity of knowledge in society. A few of the seminal inventions that furthered the development of the scientific method are shown in the accompanying illustration. Together these landmark innovations created the modern practice of science. (I am ignoring various alternative claims of priority because the exact dates don’t matter for this illustration.) A typical scientific discovery today will rely on facts (data) and a falsifiable hypothesis; be tested in repeatable, controlled experiments, perhaps with placebos and double-blind controls; and be reported in a peer-reviewed journal and indexed in a library of related reports. The scientific method, like science itself, is accumulated structure. New scientific instruments and tools add new ways to gather and organize information. Recent methods build upon earlier techniques. Technological advances keep adding connections among facts and more complex relations among ideas. As this short timeline makes clear, many of the key innovations of what we now think of as “the” scientific method are relatively recent. The classic double-blind experiment, for instance, in which neither the subject nor the tester is aware of what treatment is being given, was not named or widely used until the 1950s. The placebo was not used until the 1930s. It is hard to imagine science today without these methods. The scientific method, like science itself, is accumulated structure. This relative newness makes one wonder what “essential” method in science will be invented next. The nature of science is still in flux; the technium is rapidly discovering new ways to know. What is the technium? As described on my Web site, TheTechnium.org, it designates the greater sphere of technology—one that goes beyond hardware to include culture, law, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types. In short, it’s anything that springs from the human mind. It includes hard technology, but much else of human creation as well. I see this extended face of technology as a whole system with its own dynamics. Given the acceleration of knowledge, the explosion of information, and the rate of progress, the nature of the scientific process is on a course to change more in the next 50 years than it has in the last 400 years. What might be some new processes in the future? One could imagine that the inclusion of negative results will become routine. And that computer proofs will become more reliable, common, and trusted. And that wiki journals will contain reports that are not fixed, but are continually modified and edited in real time—all could become part and parcel of the scientific method. At the core of science’s self-modification is technology. New tools enable new ways of discovery, different ways of structuring information. We call that organization knowledge. With technological innovations the structure of our knowledge evolves. The achievement of science is to discover new things; the evolution of science is to organize the discoveries in new ways. Even the organization of our tools themselves is a type of knowledge. Right now, with the advance of communication technology and computers, we have entered a new way of knowing. The thrust of the technium’s trajectory is to further organize the avalanche of information and tools we are generating and to increase the structure of the made world. Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine, which he cofounded in 1993. He is also editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website. Formerly, he was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news; he cofounded the ongoing Hackers’ Conference; and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. He is author of the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy and the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control. This essay is adapted from Kelly’s latest book, What Technology Wants (Viking/Penguin),published in October 2010. You may read the first chapter athttp://www.kk.org/books/what-technology-wants.php

Read more: Evolving the Scientific Method - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/57831/#ixzz19SpN0sBu

Evidence: A Seductive but Slippery Concept - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences

This article by Richard Smith goes to the heart of the problem: What is "evidence," and why is it considered "scientific" and definitive? How far can we take our reliance on "science"?
And I add: What about "sciences without (material) evidence"? Why is it considered "unscientific" to accept a truth that does not impact on the senses, and therefore, cannot be "measured"?
Yes, it is "philosophy" and "metaphysics"!
Hope to hear from you!

Wendy

Evidence: A Seductive but Slippery Concept - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences

Volume 24 | Issue 12 | Page 32 
Date: 2010-12-01 
 

By Richard Smith

Evidence: A Seductive
but Slippery Concept

Medical guidelines based on so-called scientific evidence
are not a panacea.

Andrzej Krauze

Much of what we know is wrong—or at least not definitively established to be right. My early years in science and medicine taught me that, so it was with some excitement that I heard the phrase “evidence-based medicine” in the early 1990s. Finally, we would work out what we knew and what we didn’t know.

Soon we had evidence-based everything: medicine, practice, policy, nursing, editing. Marketing departments learned the magic of the phrase, and it appeared four times in the BMJ (which I used to edit) in 1993, 15 in 1994, 285 in 2000, 327 in 2004, and 287 in 2009. Those figures tell a story of explosive expansion, and perhaps of recent decline.

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Richard Smith Audio

From the beginning there were different schools of evidence-based medicine, reminding me of the feuding schools of psychoanalysis. For some it meant systematic reviews of well-conducted trials. For others it meant systematically searching for all evidence and then combining the evidence that passed a predefined quality hurdle. Quantification was essential for some but unimportant for others, and the importance of “clinical experience” was disputed.

There was also a backlash. Many doctors resented bitterly the implication that medicine had not always been based on evidence, while others saw unworthy people like statisticians and epidemiologists replacing the magnificence of clinicians. Many doctors thought evidence-based medicine a plot driven by insurance companies, politicians, and administrators in order to cut costs.

We must never forget
the complex relationship
between evidence and the truth.

The medical establishment, however, soon recognized the need to embrace the term “evidence-based,” and wouldn’t have dreamt of producing a guideline that didn’t feature the two words in its title; various politicians also vowed to make everything evidence-based. Temples devoted to this new form of medicine—like the Cochrane Collaboration and the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE)—flourished, and the BMJ, I must confess, rode the wave, attracting lots of attention and money.

Listen to Richard Smith discuss the meaning of medical evidence with Larry Green and Peter Frishauf
(11 min; credit and full podcast: Journal of Participatory Medicine)

The discomfort of many clinicians comes from the fact that the data are derived mainly from clinical trials, which exclude the elderly and people with multiple problems. Yet in the “real world” of medicine, particularly general practice, most patients are elderly and most have multiple problems. So can the “evidence” be applied to these patients? Unthinking application of multiple evidence-based guidelines may cause serious problems, says Mike Rawlins, chairman of NICE.

There has always been anxiety that the zealots would insist evidence was all that was needed to make a decision, and in its early days NICE seemed to take this line. Critics quickly pointed out, however, that patients had things called values, as did clinicians, and that clinicians and patients needed to blend their values with the evidence in a way that was often a compromise.

Social scientists have tended to be wary of the reductionist approach of evidence-based medicine and have wanted a much broader range of information to be admissible. Evidence-based medicine has been at its most confident when evaluating drug treatments, but many interventions in health care are far more complex than simply prescribing a drug. Insisting on randomized trials to evaluate these interventions may not only be inappropriate, but also misleading. Interventions may be stamped “ineffective” by the hardliners when they actually might offer substantial benefits. Then there is the constant confusion between “evidence of absence of effectiveness” with “absence of evidence of effectiveness”—two very different things.

Finally, even some of the strongest proponents of evidence-based medicine have become uneasy, as we have increasing evidence that drug companies have managed to manipulate data. In the heartland of evidence-based medicine—drug trials—the “evidence” may be unreliable and misleading.

All this doesn’t mean that evidence-based medicine should be abandoned. It means, rather, that we must never forget the complex relationship between evidence and truth.

Richard Smith is a member of the board of the Public Library of Science and a former editor of the BMJ and chief executive of the BMJ Publishing Group.