Uncertainty in Science: It’s a Feature, Not a Bug

People tend to think of scientific progress as always advancing in a straight line, with new facts being added permanently to our body of knowledge as they are discovered. “They do not understand that, instead, research is an ungainly mechanism that moves in fits and starts and that its ever-expanding path of knowledge is complicated by blind alleys and fruitless detours,” writes New York Times science reporter Cordelia Dean in her book, Am I Making Myself Clear? A Scientist’s Guide to Talking to the Public (2009). As a result, Dean says, revisions to a scientific consensus make people think that scientists don’t know what they’re talking about. NECSS panelist Dr. Massimo Pigliucci, chair of the philosophy department at City University of New York-Lehman College, has a favorite example of this mindset. In response to an editorial he penned on the science of evolution, a letter to the editor replied, “I don’t understand why people want to believe in science—science changes all the time.” Yet this, of course, is its strength; science adjusts its claims in response to new information.