Self Certified Genius of the World

   Was reading a Scientific American article on 15  answers to creationist nonsense ( http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=15-answers-to-creationist ). Nice article, but since it was published by reputable publishing house, they could not use words like Bullshit, which are slightly more appropriate for the subject. But, the article got me thinking about creationists and other things. The article goes on to say why doubts raised by creationists are not valid science. For example, macro evolutionary processes are not  understood, but the fact of macro evolution or speciation having occurred is beyond doubt. The article goes into greater details about these things. The final answer is on the "Paley principle". Simply stated it goes as follows : "a watch is a complex thing and tells time by a specific arrangement of a lot of smaller parts. Somebody must have put them into place otherwise it would not work. We work (or...

   Being a scientist, I am always in two-minds about my work. On one hand, given the current knowledge, I feel what I am doing is right. I take good care to have proper controls and etc etc when I do my work. So, it is most probably correct, as far as I know. But, since nobody knows everything, how sure can we really be about what we do ? And more importantly, how do we teach people to be incorrect in the 'correct' measure ?    And this is where the concept of collective accuracy and Individual accuracy comes into the picture. What it means is, Science as a whole is correct, but each fact taken or each scientist's contribution taken individually is almost always slightly incorrect. I dont think I need to give examples, all the revisions that the theory of atomic structure has undergone over the decades is quite well known. I dont remember now if I ever said this in the blog, but "Science is an asymptote to Truth". There you go. Remember that and be ha...