The other day my friend calls me up and starts reading to me a book on anthropology. (my university education). the guy’s name i never heard of before, but i instantly recognized a emotional directive as he declares bonobo culture to a female and rational side of humanity. the more i listened to the stuff the more sicker i got. (things like using captive animals behavior as a basis for describing even wild animal). i eventually told her that nothing he says is true. it is not being reported in a responsible way.she says but he is an anthropologist like you and he is saying things like you. when i tried to explain to her the real science and facts. as they are,without subjective interpretation she says: well that is your opinion. i go no! it is the science.there is no opinion.
it has sadly dawned on me that somehow, science, real science is now considered an opinion. i have no real idea how, but i feel this is a true liability in our future as a race. this is an open debate, of course, i am not focusing on anthropology. i am more focusing on the irony that the one thing we humans created to try and make as true as we can.some facts being wholly undeniable , are being resorted to nothing but an opinion.
Please re-do this OP. I feel the topic is worthy of proper punctuation and capitalization. As is, it is virtually unreadable.
I had no issue.
Perhaps I’ve just grown picky.
The minute a scientific fact did not agree with someone’s opinion. All snark aside, I often think the battle over teaching biological evolution in the United States which evolution-deniers successfully got stickers put into textbooks evolution was only one explanation for the development of life was a major starting point to the science is an opinion mentality.
I don’t think science is an opinion.
Maybe i should put an example to demonstrate what i am leading on about. Yesterday i read that NASA finally admits to the viking lander finding life and the problem is we may have killed it in the process of the test.
http://news.discovery.com/space/did-we-encounter-martians-36-years-ago-120720.html
Well, aside from the fact that as those of you familiar should remember the guy who created the experiment has sworn for years and released competent papers demonstrating beyond reproach that it was life that was found. An example paper is here http://ijass.org/PublishedPaper/year_abstract.asp?idx=132
Where it is stated with no uncertainty that the viking lander did find life. One is left wondering a simple question. why isn’t this front page news? Why is this fact so obscure and underneath it the covers? One can only surmise that somehow the public is made to believe that it is only opinion. See what i mean?
Like one of the most profound discoveries on earth is only an opinion, even know it has been constantly proven to have no other possible answer. This is just an example of what i am talking about.that somehow science has become an opinion.I have no idea why.
oh most definitely, it is the omission of facts by science rather then the religious aggression that seems to be the main problem there.i think anyways.
That’s your opinion. 
Bad grammer bothers me. Bad grammar from someone that should know better bothers me a lot. Or maybe wiredbadger has some peon do all that for him?
To the ops question. Pretty sure most scientists that are sure of their facts can always find someone that will argue those facts with them.
RationalWiki is a very good source here. See denialism.
:mad: Bad speling bothurs me!
oh , interesting site. the 4th item on the purpose list , where they declare " Analysis and criticism of how these subjects are handled in the media. " , is highly relevant. thanks.
The major problem is that even with scientific evidence, people will argue that it’s “evidence of something else.”
It’s like when people look at complexity in nature and assume there must be a designer behind it, instead of looking at the scientific frameworks that explain that complexity through natural means. It creates this sort of false dialectic where you say, “Well, it’s just two ways to look at the same set of evidence.”
It’s become a problem because American society has evolved to the point where belief is seen as something virtuous. “I’m in the land of the free and I can believe whatever I want,” even though reality is completely indifferent to it. Gravity’s not going to stop just because you don’t want to believe it exists.
Even if you want to argue that there are two ways to look at the same evidence, that’s not where explanations should stop. Your theory must also be consistent on a much broader scale and yield predictive results. If your theory doesn’t actually add any new information or has to ignore evidence to make its point, it’s not a strong theory. I could argue all day that blue peanut fairies are involved in thermal expansion, but it’s not going to make a lick of difference or help anyone’s understanding or yield predictive results. That’s where Occam’s Razor comes in (which many people misunderstand).
All in all, I wish the American school system would make it a point to educate people more on the nature of the scientific method itself. Not enough effort is spent on explaining what a theory is and how the process works and how/why Occam’s Razor is applied and so forth.
The scientific community has never been able to completely be objective when the subject being explored is emotional and controversial.
My Psychology 101 book, when discussing race, actually said this, “The motives of anyone seeking to determine what, if any, behavioral differences are caused by racial characteristics should be questioned.”
Whoa. While that’s not a can of worms I think many people are eager to open, in terms of trying to chill scientific inquiry it’s right up there with, “The motives of anyone seeking to determine if man was created by God or evolved from lower life forms should be questioned.”
Another BIG problem is the science coverage from mainstream news.
What you typically see is a constant reporting on single studies that might show a statistical inclination toward a particular conclusion, being reported as: “Scientist confirm cancer is cause by kissing frogs! News at 11!!!”.
Often times the studies are misrepresented, conclusions that would require a number of follow up studies to determine are brandied about, and occasionally even studies that haven’t been rigorously examined are being put up as news, and then discussed by journalists with an English degree but without an iota of actual scientific training.
The very next day they find some other study saying that kissing frogs is likely safe, and the people start to think that Science is all guess work without any validity.
It’s not hard to find examples of this on these very boards. Not too long ago ona thread about global warming one guy proclaimed it bunk because he clearly recalls scientists talking about global cooling a few decades ago. These damned flip-flopping scientists don’t know jack!
EXACTLY!!
however, would one deny that it was this forced opinion upon science that got that killer whale killed ? the one that was released against the biologists judgement because a petition declared that any science that would be supportive of keeping it there and thereby obviously keeping the animal safe was merely speculation?
you know the irony of that? the biologists eventually had to create an experiment to make the whole thing valid, knowing fully well in science that the animal was totally dependent on humans as its provider and that the behavior of the killer whale dictates that it never strays far from what it sees as its mother figure both in food and companionship.
that when they tried to reintroduce the whale to its own kind , it swam right back to the boat and clung to it like an infant would to it’s mother.
sad tale really, the whale died a few years after in Norway, where it found kids and people who would hand feed it.Norway had to declare the whale protected and shortly it died from a kind of pneumonia.
my point is , this is all because kids saw a movie about a whale being freed. because the public forced years of study , all of which is totally known by the marine biologists involved into nothing but a opinion. where ,science should have been respected unquestionably in that case for sure.
wow, that just stuns me. to think that this is in your psyche 101. the water is dirtied before you even enter the pool! all i remember in my psychology 101 is skinner and the cats.
Considering that race isn’t even biologically real and the long history of people trying to use bad science to promote and defend racism, that’s not an unreasonable default position.
I think science has always been an opinion to some degree. There is a truism that new scientific revelations don’t get accepted by current scientists; the ones who oppose the science end up dying off and the revelation becomes mainstream.