Letter: Science fights back
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Sir: Hilary Rose (letter, 7 July) rebuts a criticism Lewis Wolpert did not make. Wolpert's central objection is that school children are to be taught, essentially, that science is a social construct, that theories owe their acceptance more to fashion than to any objective rationale. They do not.
The central tenet of science is that theories should be testable, and will only replace existing theories when their predictions are demonstrably better, or when they provide the same predictive power with fewer initial assumptions.
New theories (and their proponents) compete: as with evolution, the process of science selects for the fittest. Where selection pressure is low, as when two or more theories make rather similar predictions, competitors may coexist for a while. Sometimes they ultimately turn out to be logically equivalent: more often, new data emerges that contradicts one or other, which is then abandoned.
The evidence that this process works is everywhere, from miracles of modern communication to our ability to manipulate the genome. It only fails when science itself is abandoned or suppressed. The suppression of evolutionary theory, and promotion of creationism, in the US is a prime example, and would be fostered by the proposals for the revised National Curriculum which Wolpert decries.
The history and sociology of science - which theories arise when, and why - are rightly the province of historians and sociologists. It is a pity that some of their wilder ideas about the practice of science - how we distinguish between theories and invent new ones - are taken more seriously than those of practitioners.
RACHAEL PADMAN
Cambridge
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments