Turn The Crank

The excerpt below basically says what I said about science and certainty a few days ago, but much more eloquently. Read the whole post, though, because it's very good and has more to say about cranks, specifically the similarities between Intelligent Design advocates and Holocaust revisionists.

Cranks tend to crave certainty, and, usually unintentionally, they often misinterpret weaknesses in current theory as fatal flaws that completely negate the theory. To them, if every hole isn't filled in, if every doubt isn't addressed, if every detail isn't understood, then theory must be invalidated, and, by implication, theirs must be a reasonable alternative. Science doesn't work that way, though, nor does history. For such disciplines, there will always be areas we do not understand in as much detail as we would like, and there will always be areas that current understanding doesn't adequately explain. However, these areas must be examined in light of what we do understand. For example, for evolution we understand a lot. There is an enormous amount of observational and experimental evidence from many disciplines that support current theory.

Unfortunately, science will always be susceptible to this sort of attack, at least in the eyes of nonscientists, because it is the very nature of science that no theory is ever final. Although to become elevated to the level of a "theory," a set of scientific postulates must have an enormouse amount of evidence supporting them, making them the best current understanding of a natural phenomenon that we have, no theory is ever considered to be the final word; every theory is subject to revision (most common) or replacement with a better theory (much less common) when new evidence and experimental results warrant it. To me and most scientists, science would be a boring and unrewarding field indeed if it were otherwise, because we would have very little to study. Much of the excitement of doing science comes from the possibility of discovering something new and unexpected that adds to our understanding of nature. Indeed, contrary to what cranks seem to think, the greatest glory in science is not confirming current theory but modifying it or even overturning it for something new. Unlike scientists, however, cranks don't understand that only pointing out and exaggerating the flaws in current theory is enough. They conveniently forget the part about having to produce strong evidence that supports their ideas, evidence strong enough to convince the vast majority of scientists.

(Via The Tangled Bank # 37)