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What does it mean to be scientific?

Article Excerpt
For twenty years I taught science in one form or another, at levels ranging from high school to graduate school. My high school assignments included physical science, biology, and chemistry. At the undergraduate level I taught everything from anatomy and botany to zoology, from geology to genetics, from molecular biology and chemistry for nurses to psychobiology. There was even a course in pseudoscience--a laboratory course designed to help students investigate popular claims of the paranormal. Astrology, creationism, pyramid power, ancient astronauts, UFOs, and parapsychology all came under the careful scrutiny of my class. At the graduate level, I taught a course in human ecology for teachers and a seminar in human neuroanatomy for neurophysiologists. Throughout those twenty years, at whatever the level, I tried to make my students grapple with the question, "What does it mean to be scientific?"

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While my students were wrestling with this question, I too was struggling with it. What always seemed so intuitive and obvious to me in my own personal and professional life proved astonishingly elusive and tantalizing when I tried to define or explain it to others. I never succeeded in coming up with a one-sentence or even a one-paragraph definition of what constitutes the scientific attitude or outlook. The best I could do was to formulate a list of component attitudes and practices that, taken all together, might qualify a person to be called "scientific."

In these parlous times of creation 'science' and Intelligent Design 'theory,' alternative medicine, Post-Modernism, Christian Science, therapeutic touch, and near-death experiences it seems desirable to extract some of my lecture notes from the mothballs in which they have slumbered for more than twenty years so that anyone desiring to discern and discriminate genuine science from pseudoscience might get a little help from my experience. What follows are some characteristics that I associate with scientists and the scientific enterprise.

Curiosity

Before all else, to be scientific is to be curious about the world around us. Why does the thunderclap always follow the lightning-flash? What is living under that dead and rotting log? Why are all the bird species on this island so closely related? Why are most American Catholic cardinals and bishops of Irish descent, and what does that have to do with a parasitic fungus? Why do some people with college degrees think the world is only six thousand years old? Curiosity is the prime mover of science and scientists. Without it, there would be no forward movement in science, no motive for discovery, no thrust to propel us from the world of the known into the realm of the unknown. It is curiosity that sends us as hunters into the dark forest of ignorance to discover and capture new facts and understandings that can be brought back as trophies to exhibit in the great heritage halls of the human intellect.

Intellectualism

To be scientific is to be intellectual--that is, to derive pleasure from employing one's intellect, to enjoy contemplating ideas, to feel that ideas in themselves are pleasures apart from any physical or monetary rewards that may accompany them. Conversely, anti-intellectuals often are distrustful of science and hostile to its practitioners. Teachers of science must do all that is possible to help their students share in the thrill of discovery of new ideas or of novel consequences of old ones. Could any student not feel at least a tingle of delight upon learning that there would be no Episcopalians had it not been for syphilis?

Open-Mindedness

To be scientific is to be open-minded and fair, and to eschew bias and prejudice. Prejudice is to have your conclusions before you have your facts. This is the method of 'scientific creationism,' and it is a major reason for concluding that creationism is not scientific. Open-minded means no more than that one is willing to consider new evidence and arguments and weigh them fairly. It does not mean that one is in any way obliged to accept them. Many people forget that there is a big difference between a mind that is open and a mind that is gaping.

Bias--a mental leaning or inclination--is much harder to avoid. Fortunately, in the course of scientific progress, one person's bias is likely to be counterbalanced by the contrary bias of another researcher, and any contradictory results achieved alert the entire scientific community that there may be a bias problem. In the experimental sciences, double-blind experiments are designed to eliminate the bias of the experimenter. In such experiments, often carried out when testing drugs on human subjects, neither the subjects nor the experimenters know who is getting the actual drug and who is...

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