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From: gjerawlins@watdaisy.UUCP (Gregory J.E. Rawlins)
Newsgroups: net.origins
Subject: Re: Making the model fit the data?
Message-ID: <7393@watdaisy.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 4-Sep-85 19:03:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: watdaisy.7393
Posted: Wed Sep  4 19:03:29 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 5-Sep-85 06:34:36 EDT
References: <717@mit-vax.UUCP> <1088@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP>
Reply-To: gjerawlins@watdaisy.UUCP (Gregory J.E. Rawlins)
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 42
Summary: 

In article <1088@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP> beth@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP (Beth Christy) writes:
>[.......]
>I don't know how religiously (:-) you believe this statement, but I sort
>of feel called to point out that science, like religion, is carried on by
>people, and people aren't always that willing to toss out their beliefs
>(and especially not their preconceptions) just because they don't match
>the available data.  Even scientists occasionally ignore or fudge data
>that doesn't fit (although it may often be entirely unintentional).  If
>you consider psychology and research into child development to be at all
>scientific, read Carol Gilligan's _In_A_Different_Voice_ for *truly
>shocking* examples of "scientific" researchers FLAT OUT IGNORING over 50%
>of the available data, even during the formative stages of their theories.
>(Even if you don't consider psychology scientific, I highly recommend the
>book.)
>[.....]
>--JB       (Beth Christy, U. of Chicago, ..!ihnp4!gargoyle!sphinx!beth)

    Although i hate giving ammunition to creationists <half smile>
it's important to remember that scientists are in fact human (just
like creationists - draw your own conclusions). Since i don't really
consider psychologists scientists (simply because there are too many
variables in human interactions to control so it makes the concept
of a repeatable experiment vacuous) here is a book that shows
that (hard) scientists sometimes even _fabricate_ results out of 
whole cloth:
    Betrayers of the Truth - William Broad & Nicholas Wade
    Simon & Schuster 1982 ISBN 0-671-447469-6
Most of the cases documented tend to be in medicine then biology
then chemistry then physics and astronomy only a few are actual
fabrications and most of those are in medicine, but it does make
the point that scientists are fallible. It would be easy for a
creationist to use the examples in this book and "extrapolate"
that we may as well discard evolution since it's based on experiments
conducted by people with (on the whole) a vested interest in
seeing the "expected" result. This is a non-trivial problem
to which i have no convincing answer. Help anyone?
	greg.
-- 
Gregory J. E. Rawlins, CS Dept., U. Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario N2L3G1, Canada
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