The Five Parts of Objectivity
Science is different from any other means of studying the world because it’s objective. A lot of progressively minded people say science can’t possibly be objective because it’s studied by people, and people’s perceptions are inherently subjective. It is true that people’s perceptions are subjective, but that doesn’t prove that scientists haven’t figured out a way around that.
Scientific objectivity is made up of five things.
First, observability. If a piece of information can’t be observed by someone else, it isn’t science. This applies to all information presented. If you discover a piece of scientific information and then read meaning into it, the second piece of information isn’t science. The fact that the sky is blue doesn’t prove that Jesus loves you. The fact that rain falls from clouds doesn’t prove that magic exists. And so on. Some evidence, as in the case of electrons, dark matter, and birds that live in South America, isn’t observable to everyone, but all of it is observable to at least some other people.
Second, universality. In order for something to qualify as a scientific discovery, it has to account for all related evidence. If proving something depends on looking at most of the evidence and ignoring some of the evidence, it isn’t science. If 98% of people are religious and 2% of people are Atheists, it doesn’t prove that people are supposed to be religious, it only proves that most people are religious. If you can’t prove why a few people aren’t religious, you haven’t proved why most people are religious.
Third, self-consistency. All the information has to fit together in a way that produces accurate results. There are a number of ways this can be done. The most well known is to use some evidence to make a prediction of something that will happen, and then waiting to see if it does happen. Another is to fit some pieces of evidence together and see if the patterns they indicate are consistent with the rest of the evidence. Another is to extrapolate upon the patterns the evidence indicates and see if they predict things that obviously aren’t possible.
The Theory of Evolution does all of these things. Everything that has ever been observed about any living thing fits together in a pattern that we call evolution. That pattern applies to all organisms living now, and to all fossils that have been discovered of extinct organisms.
That pattern also indicates that the competition between predators and prey will create a lot of animals that run very fast. But it also indicates that each evolutionary step can only modify the existing characteristics of an animal. That means that even though evolution produces a lot of animals that run very fast, there is a physical limit to how much evolution can increase animals’ speeds. Then you can study the chemistry of how animals’ digestive systems extract energy from their food, and the physics of how their muscles expand and contract to make their legs move, to see that there is no way the animals could get enough energy from their food, and there is no way muscle fibers could be made strong enough, to let the animals run fast enough to break the sound barrier. Then you can see that the pattern of evolution has produced a lot of predators and prey that run very fast, but hasn’t produced any that can break the sound barrier. If there were no animals that could run very fast, or there were animals that could break the sound barrier, that would mean there must be more to evolution than the pattern we had discovered. The pattern we had discovered could be incomplete, or it could be wrong.
Fourth, reproducibility. Once you discover a pattern that produces accurate results, other people have to be able to use your patterns to produce accurate results also. This depends on people having the abilities and skills necessary to understand how your patterns work, which not everyone can do, but all of science consists of patterns that can be reproduced by some other people completely independently of the people who discovered those patterns.
Fifth, debate. All of science begins with directly observable evidence and patterns the evidence indicates, and builds upon them step by step to produce continuously universal, self-consistent, reproducible patterns. As the saying among progressive activists goes, the truth fears no questions. Science fears no questions. Some people who are opposed to science fear the answers, and refuse to accept them, but a person’s unwillingness to accept the answers doesn’t prove they’re wrong. Anyone who can look at the observable evidence and show why the patterns someone else discovered aren’t universal, self-consistent, and reproducible, or can find universal, self-consistent, reproducible patterns that prove something else, can disprove a scientific discovery. Lots of scientists who studied the observable evidence of plants and animals found patterns of how all the evidence fit together to cause evolution, but all of the patterns except Charles Darwin’s turned out to be wrong, because at some point they proved not to be universal, self-consistent, and reproducible.
To this day, the Theory of Evolution, like most scientific discoveries, isn’t accepted as absolute, because the possibility still exists that someone could disprove it. To say that the Theory of Evolution was absolute would be dogma, not science, because it would require a person to claim absolute knowledge of everything in the universe, which no one can do. (At least, not scientifically, anyway…)
The possibility that the Theory of Evolution can be disproven still exists, but almost 150 years of debate has produced absolutely no observable evidence that contradicts it, and millions of pieces of observable evidence that support it. The only reason the Theory of Evolution isn’t called the Fact of Evolution is because of academic technicalities that are only relevant to scientists. I have a friend who’s an evolutionary biologist, and he makes evolution happen in fruit flies in his laboratory. The only reason that doesn’t make it the Fact of Evolution is because no one watched the entire history of the world happen and took samples and photographs and kept written records. But as far as it relates to anyone else, millions of pieces of evidence plus real-time observation versus zero pieces of evidence constitutes a scientific fact.
As you can see, science depends on democracy. Science depends on people having access to information and education, and on people being allowed to talk, ask questions, find answers, debate, and disagree with each other. A revolution for democracy is a revolution for science.