Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) by Jerry A. Coyne

explanations for what I found? Is there a flaw in my experimental design? Could anything have gone wrong? The reason we do this is not only to make sure that we have a solid result but also to protect our reputation. There’s no better incentive for honesty thanthe knowledge that you’re competing against other scientists in the same area, some often working on the very same problem. If you screw up, you’ll be found out very quickly.
    That, by the way, gives the lie to the many creationists who claim that we evolutionists conspire to prop up a theory we supposedly know is wrong. They never specify what motivates us to keep promoting something that they consider so obviously false, but creationists often imply that we’re committed to using evolution as a way to buttress the atheism of science. (Never mind that many scientists, including evolutionary biologists, are believers, with no vested interest in promoting atheism.) But the main argument against conspiracy theories in science is that anyone who could disprove an important paradigm like the modern theory of evolution would gain immediate renown. Fame accrues to those who, like Einstein and Darwin, overturn the accepted explanations of their day, not to journeymen who simply provide additional evidence for theories that are already widely accepted.
    A striking example of the importance of doubt was the finding in 2011 that neutrinos appeared to move faster than the speed of light, discovered by timing their journey over a path from Switzerland to Italy. That observation was remarkable, for it violated everything we know about physics, especially the “law” that nothing can exceed the speed of light. Predictably, the first thing that the physicists (and almost every scientist) thought when hearing this report was simply, “What went wrong?” Although if such an observation were correct it would surely garner a Nobel Prize, one would risk a lifetime of embarrassment to publish it without substantial replication and checking. And, sure enough, immediate checks found that the neutrinos had behaved properly, and their anomalous speed was due simply to a loose cable and a faulty clock.
    Replication and Quality Control
    Although unique observations (those reported in a single paper) are common in some areas of science, particularly whole-organism biology like evolution and ecology, in most fields, including chemistry, molecular biology, and physics, results are constantly being replicated by other observers. In those areas results become “true” only when they’re repeated often enoughto gain credibility. The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, for which Peter Higgs and François Englert received a Nobel Prize the next year, was deemed prize-worthy because it was confirmed by two completely independent teams of researchers, each using rigorous statistical analysis.
    A sufficiently novel or startling result will immediately inspire doubtful scientists to repeat it, often bent on disproving it. Other scientists, assuming your results are correct, might try to build on them to find new things, and part of that involves verifying your original results. The whole edifice of modern molecular genetics depends on the accuracy of the double-helix model of DNA, its process of replicating by unzipping and using each strand as a template to build another, and on the notion that the genetic code involved triplets of bases, each triplet coding for one unit (amino acid) of a protein. If any of this had been wrong, it would have been discovered very quickly as the field advanced. Likewise, each advance tested by proxy all the preceding ones.
    Science has additional features that keep us from fooling ourselves by conscious or unconscious finagling with experiments or data. These include statistical analyses that tell us how likely our results might have been due to chance alone rather than to our new theory; blind testing, in which the researcher