Science and the Scleroderma Girl: The Nature of Science

Logic clearly dictates…

Spock, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn

Science. Everyone knows what science is, right? I mean, we have all been exposed to courses in science that involved learning lots of stuff about rocks, atoms, moving objects, plants, furry animals and stars. There are all of those books and all those facts, equations, and laws to learn. The vocabulary is ridiculous!

Science is also a way of thinking that allows us to learn new information about the world around us. It is a system of reason and logic that helps us understand what we know, and why we know it. Every year I started the biology course with a little unit called “The Nature of Science”, and this is what it covered:

• Science is used to explore the natural, physical world around us. The magical and supernatural spheres are definitely off limits. The reason why is…
• Science requires that we be able to collect data about a phenomenon we are studying: it must be observable with our senses or instruments. Something may be real, but if we can’t observe it we can’t study it using the rules of science.

• 

• The data that is collected should be consistent over time. Think about ghost research; instruments that show the presence of ghosts work on some occasions and not on others. That data isn’t reliable because it isn’t consistent. If I drop a glass it will fall to the floor every time, and it will accelerate towards the floor at the same rate every time I drop it. That data is reliable.
• It should be possible to make predictions based on observations and prior understandings. We generally call these predictions hypothesis, and they get tested all the time in…
• Experiments! The way we expand our understanding of the natural world is through experimentation that tests these predictive hypotheses. Observable data is collected during the experiment that allows us to draw some conclusions about whether the hypothesis was correct or false. Either way is fine. The point here is, we should be able to test the hypothesis to see if the prediction was accurate.
• Here is the best part of science: based on what new understandings are generated our predictive models should be able to be adjusted. NOTHING is forever in science when you are dealing with the big predictive models that we call theories. For example, when I was a child I was told that mountains were formed as the earth cooled and wrinkles formed on the planet “like a raisin”. Ugh! Can you believe I was taught that?! Our current understanding of mountain formation involves the movement of large plates in the earth’s crust (plate tectonics), which actually makes more sense as it also explains earthquakes and volcanoes. Is my heart set on plate tectonics? Nope. If some new information emerges that supports an expanded or new model of mountain formation, I have to follow the data. That’s why theories are said to be “supported” by evidence, but never proven.

Science is about using logic and reason to learn new things about the world. Logical safeguards are in place to help make sure conclusions are valid (you know about some of these… I’m talking about controlled experiments, reproducible results, and peer review of published experimental results). Science is actually a form of applied philosophy; early scientists were called “natural philosophers” and today the degree is still called a Doctor of Philosophy. Yep. That’s what Ph.D. stands for.

Why is this stuff important to me and anyone else with an autoimmune disease? Unhappily, we are out there on the edge of the envelope, falling off the map, and beyond solid scientific understandings. We have diseases that developed via unknown pathways and causes, and they are not completely understood. There is no definitive treatment that will “cure” the disease. We are part of a continuing effort to expand scientific and medical knowledge as we progress through our illnesses using drugs and interventions that are the best predictions for good outcomes. We are all walking hypotheses, and what happens to us helps build the body of evidence on how effective our treatments were. As knowledge expands in labs about the biological pathways and the disease mechanisms, new treatments will be developed, they will also be subjected to this scientific process, and the total body of scientific understandings will grow. Someday it will all be “old stuff” and written in a dusty book.

But today, I’m rocking the edge of the envelope as a walking experiment of one.

I even keep a science notebook on myself.

That’s tomorrow’s post.

Author: Midnight Knitter

I weave, knit and read in Aurora, Colorado where my garden lives. I have 2 sons, a knitting daughter-in-law, a grandson and two exceptionally spoiled kittens. In 2014 I was diagnosed with a serious rare autoimmune disease called systemic sclerosis along with Sjogren's Disease and fibromyalgia. View all posts by Midnight Knitter