| R. Lewontin |
| in reply to letter regarding his review of a Sagan book. |
| "...gloss on my lament that we do not know how to provide people with the power to discover truth is off the mark. It has nothing to do with dividing all claims into rational and irrational, into mathematically proven and just plain silly. Only the most simple-minded and philosophically naive scientist, of whom there are many, thinks that science is characterized entirely by hard inference and mathematically proofs based on idisputable data. I put a great deal of weight, as did Aristotle, on arguments about what is probable (in everyday sense) and on arguments by example. Indeed the entire science of statistics is designed to cope with the ambiguity of most scientific evidence, and my professor, Theodosius Dobzhansky, the most eminent experimental evoluntionist of his day, used to say that `statistics is a way of making bad data look good.' The problem of the power to discern truth lies precisely in knowing how to evaluate, even roughly, the ambiguous knowledge of the world that is produced by so much science. It is a problem because that evaluation requires an acquaintaance with an immense penumbra of fact and theory that surrounds any particular observation and which provides its conext. Unfortunately, there is not world enough, or time." (pp. 51-52). |