Science is Biased?

enigma1863

I need some help fleshing out an illustration that explains how people can be biased but still reach honest conclusions. I had JWs claim that "evolutionists" are biased towards evolution. If they were biased towards something else they'd reach different conclusions. ok here it is:

Imagine you are a serious baseball fan. You watch every game and cheer them on till the end. You will of corse be biased towards having your team win. So according to that logic does your team ever lose a game? Would you cherry pick the innings they were ahead and ignore the finale score?

Every team wants to win. But when they lose they accept it. They delude themselves into thinking they won. Anyone can interpret why a team won or lost a game but in the end there will be plenty of evidence to conclude the winner.

fresh prince of ohio

Well of course there is such a thing as confirmation bias, which scientists or anybody else could be guilty of. JWs are probably the most guilty of it of all people - virtually EVERYTHING proves that they have da twoof, in one way or another.

It's easy though, to just dismiss evolution as a "wanting to believe" on the part of those who have accepted it as fact. You're pretty much throwing boatloads, truckloads, of people under the bus as being intellectually dishonest.

In the insular minds of JWs, "scientists" are just this vague, faceless crowd of people that don't really matter cuz they don't know jeehooby. I think that those are the sort of barriers that you have to work through with JWs, if you can. Scientists are living, breathing individuals, who eat, sleep, read, marry, have kids, do the same things that a lot of JWs do, but unlike JWs, they rely on observation and evidence to arrive at truth, not an unending stream of propaganda from a central body that tells them what to think and dares them to disobey. And there's boatloads, truckloads of evidence to support evolution.

MrFreeze

JW's accusing others of cherry-picking...

5go

I still can get my head around how the GOP can still deny global warming. It has pretty devolved to a flat earth argument.

"See the earth is flat, look out any window."

"See it's still cold during winter that proves global warming is a hoax."

Never mind most of the US is rapidly turning into a desert and we are hitting record highs and record high lows almost weekly.

snare&racket

Why waste time.... Just highlight their ignorance with 3 questions.

1) can you explain the scientific method to me

t 2) can you explain 95% confidence intervals to me

3) can you explain peer review to me.

if you can't explain these things you have no concept of how how scientific discoveries are absorbed into theories, binding together to increase the probability of a hypothesis being true. People don't realise a theory in science is the top if the pile, thats the highest regard one can have for a collection of evidence hence the theory of gravity... Still a theory, the atomic theory, atoms are still a theory by scientific definition despite us powering our computers via manipulation of them.

we have a tough job as humans, starting from scratch we have to make some assumptions. Is life just a dream or is it real? Philosophy is at the base of all we do. Most people accept that because we can think, we exist. Ok so how do we explore and examine this world we live in? Francis Bacon first suggested the scientific method in 1630. It was based on observation and prediction as a means of ensuring that the assumptions we make on evidence are likely true. For example, if we share genes with apes then we should be able to make predictions. So we noticed that apes had one more chromosome than humans. Infact all ape species do. So the prediction would be that probability dictates that humans have lost a chromosome, been as all related apes have one more. Based on that prediction they examined the region missing in humans but evident in apes, around chromosome one and two. Guess what... They found that there was a fused chromosome in humans. That is science. The reason we know the scientific method works..... Is BECAUSE IT WORKS. You can't be biased, because it would not work, you would embarass yourself and you would contribute nothing to science. When someone gives their life to science it is so they can contribute to human knowledge. Scientific method gives us jets, computers, iPhones, it gives us medicine and .... It gives us answers.

anyone can go to university, get a biology degree and prove the whole field of science a huge lie. It would take them 3 years, they would be the most famous scientist ever and get a Nobel prize. But guess why it doesn't happen, because the people that cant even describe science know nothing about what they are saying. They don't debate the evidence, they don't debate genetic evolution, bacterial and viral evolution that takes place before our eyes, they don't discuss the fossils that now number in the billions proving evolution true.... Instead they very lazily say "its bias." Well... Let them carry on believeing in scrolls from 2000 years ago. Interpreted by 7 uneducated men in a factory in Brooklyn, if that makes more sense to them.

snare x

cantleave

Confirmation bias is certainly an issue when analysing results obtained from experiment / research. That is why peer review is important. Remember scientist are working in a competitive environment and will be critical of each other's work, will ensure results are reproducible and will focus on refining existing models.

Evolution as a process is not disputed, there is an enormous body of evidence supporting it. The detailed processes and mechanisms by which it occurs is obviously very much still under investigation and this is an area where confirmation bias could and does creep in, but such bias is very quickly exposed.

snare&racket

If people even KNEW what evolution was, they would realise how ridiculous it is to deny it.

evolution is not the science of how life began.

evolution has no connection to the Big Bang.

Evolution is simply the science of how an animal, over time can change its genes via breeding. The changes in breeding being dictated by the animals environment. That's it. End of. Nothing to do with god. Nothing todo with the start of life on earth. That's it. This is why they don't believe it, because they don't know what it is. This is why MOST HUMANS DOOOO BELIEVE IT, because this is all it explains and does so with an earth sized pile of evidence.

snare

Vidiot

As long as individuals feel compelled to accept the Genesis creation narrative as literal history, they'll feel compelled to reject evolution.

It's not about evidence; it's about ideology.

Phizzy

There have of course been outright frauds in Science. People have concocted totally false data and evidence to make their hypothesis or "discovery" seem genuine, either for fame or money or both, but such things are soon exposed by peer review etc.

The true scientist is simply not interested in what is not true, hence whan even a much loved hypothesis is proved deficient,(rather than wrong,wrong is too strong a word), the scientist accepts the new evidence, even the great Einstein did that with due humility.

Scientists are aware of the mistakes of the past, starting from a wrong assumption in the first place for example, as in assuming that the Universe had always existed and building hypotheses accordingly.

But JW's do exactly this, "The Bible is true, therefore anything contradictory has to be wrong" is their attitude, and starts of course from the wrong assumption that the bible is "true".

Satanus

Evolution theory and science, both came into existence in a heavily christian biased, politically correct, victorian society. That says a lot about the people who birthed these new sciences, and the sciences, themselves.

S

Science is Biased?

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