The Scientist Fallacy

I wanted to become a scientist since I can remember. I know, it’s a cliché and probably now you would be expecting me to start telling you about those paper rockets I’ve made, or how I’ve powered a watch with a potato. However, being in the form of wanting to become an astronaut, astrophysicist or a neurobiologist, I grew up with idols such as Feynman, Cousteau, Sagan or Hawking. I would read their books and imagine the things I could do if I would study, or this universe’s problems I could solve by using science.

For the past 10 years, I’ve been a scientist. On and off, and in different fields of science, but I’ve been doing my best to solve this world’s problems even those that probably won’t change much.

However, I’ve been impatiently watching something unraveling in science I never expected to see. Ego driven science. I’m not talking just about bad or “not so good” science, or even about fake results or “creative” statistics like we have been seeing even in journals such as Nature and Science. I’m talking about scientists who keep themselves inside a bubble incapable of looking at the big picture. We see that often in Biomedical Sciences, where scientists rely exclusively on cell cultures ignoring the complexity of the systems they are included in. It’s common to see perfect studies, with perfect results based on scenarios which would never happen in nature. We shape nature to match our needs of publishing a “breakthrough” instead of explaining what is really happening on a micro or macro scale. We don’t need to stick to the latter field as we see a similar pattern in the field of Network Analysis. We assume that the systems we are studying are static, so we model them based on a year or a month. And we replicate that model 10 years or 20 years later, without even questioning if that system ever changed or adapted.

But this fallacy doesn’t stop here. It goes further and it expands to those scientists who are against something but who do not seek an answer to the problem they criticise. Some claim that the problem is too difficult to solve, others simply ignore the question. Nevertheless, instead of questioning for the sake of stopping it, why aren’t we like our predecessors who questioned the world for the sake of making it better and for the sake of bringing solutions to those problems they were facing.

I don’t want this post to sound like a rant, or a list of complaints I have about science, but rather like a “shoutout” for those who still believe that science can have an impact. For example, I do believe we can stop global warming, but I know it is impossible to ask people to stop flying. Instead we can find ways of having more efficient airplanes, or improving railway networks. We can’t stop developing countries such as India from using coal energy, unless we give them a viable alternative. Same way we can’t stop excessive fishing of endangered species when those people have no other way of self-sustaining.

Criticising is easy, saying that something is bad, is even easier. We can get the numbers, make pretty graphs, and write appealing articles about it. But I do doubt of the scientific value of such. Instead we can all work together and search for the answers the world needs.