A ciência precisa amar a incerteza e o fracasso: verdade ou apenas retórica???

We must learn to love uncertainty and failure, say leading thinkers

Planet's biggest brains answer this year's Edge question: 'What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?'

Edge of reason: Doubt and uncertainty are essential elements of the scientific process. 

Photograph: Getty Images

Being comfortable with uncertainty, knowing the limits of what science can tell us, and understanding the worth of failure are all valuable tools that would improve people's lives, according to some of the world's leading thinkers.

The ideas were submitted as part of an annual exercise by the web magazine Edge, which invites scientists, philosophers and artists to opine on a major question of the moment. This year it was, "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?"

The magazine called for "shorthand abstractions" – a way of encapsulating an idea or scientific concept into a short description that could be used as a component of bigger questions. The responses were published online today.

Many responses pointed out that the public often misunderstands the scientific process and the nature of scientific doubt. This can fuel public rows over the significance of disagreements between scientists about controversial issues such as climate change and vaccine safety.

Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of Aix-Marseille, emphasisedthe uselessness of certainty. He said that the idea of something being "scientifically proven" was practically an oxymoron and that the very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt.

"A good scientist is never 'certain'. Lack of certainty is precisely what makes conclusions more reliable than the conclusions of those who are certain: because the good scientist will be ready to shift to a different point of view if better elements of evidence, or novel arguments emerge. Therefore certainty is not only something of no use, but is in fact damaging, if we value reliability."

The physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University agreed. "In the public parlance, uncertainty is a bad thing, implying a lack of rigour and predictability. The fact that global warming estimates are uncertain, for example, has been used by many to argue against any action at the present time," he said.

"In fact, however, uncertainty is a central component of what makes science successful. Being able to quantify uncertainty, and incorporate it into models, is what makes science quantitative, rather than qualitative. Indeed, no number, no measurement, no observable in science is exact. Quoting numbers without attaching an uncertainty to them implies they have, in essence, no meaning."

Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Centre for Bits and Atoms wants everyone to know that "truth" is just a model. "The most common misunderstanding about science is that scientists seek and find truth. They don't – they make and test models," he said.

"Building models is very different from proclaiming truths. It's a never-ending process of discovery and refinement, not a war to win or destination to reach. Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you don't know, not a weakness to avoid. Bugs are features – violations of expectations are opportunities to refine them. And decisions are made by evaluating what works better, not by invoking received wisdom."

The writer and web commentator Clay Shirky suggested that people should think more carefully about how they see the world. His suggestion was the Pareto principle, a pattern whereby the top 1% of the population control 35% of the wealth or, on Twitter, the top 2% of users send 60% of the messages. Sometimes known as the "80/20 rule", the Pareto principle means that the average is far from the middle.

It is applicable to many complex systems, "And yet, despite a century of scientific familiarity, samples drawn from Pareto distributions are routinely presented to the public as anomalies, which prevents us from thinking clearly about the world," said Shirky.

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Read more here/Leia mais aqui: The Guardian

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Vide, finalmente, o artigo de Thiago Camelo, O benefício da dúvida, publicado no CiênciaHoje, que não nos deu direito de resposta ao artigo Evolução e religião [misteriosamente não se encontra mais arquivado] de Sérgio Danilo Junho Pena em que a teoria do Design Inteligente foi descaracterizada, e tivemos que mostrar o outro lado e denunciar esta falta de objetividade editorial científica do CiênciaHoje com a nossa réplica Orientação editorial do Ciência Hoje On-Line não aceita réplicas de artigos científicos. 

O discurso da Nomenklatura científica, quando a questão é Darwin, não ama a incerteza e nem o fracasso de uma teoria científica na explicação da origem e evolução das espécies.

A teoria da evolução de Darwin através da seleção natural e/ou n mecanismos evolucionários não é corroborada no contexto de justificação teórica desde 1859, já foi recauchutada nos anos 1930-1940 do século 20, declarada morta em 1980 (Stephen Jay Gould, obrigado pela sua honestidade e coragem científicas) e está sendo remendada pela nova teoria -- a SÍNTESE EVOLUTIVA AMPLIADA, que não pode ser selecionista justamente pela montanha de fracassos em fornecer evidências corroborativas, e que devemos esperar até o ano 2020.

Pasme, e fique revoltado, mas os livros de Biologia do ensino médio aprovados pelo MEC/SEMTEC/PNLEM aborda esta questão fundamental da robustez de uma teoria científica, e quando faz é somente para demonstrar as teorias contrárias como inadequadas. Darwin locuta, evolutio finita!!!

Quando a questão é Darwin, na Nomenklatura científica é tutti cosa nostra, capice???

Fui, nem sei por que, pensando e convencido de que o artigo do The Guardian e do Edge é mais retórica para blindar a resistência da Akademia em reconsiderar as incertezas e os fracassos de Darwin. Posso estar errado, e se estiver, mordo a língua!!!