Review and reflections

What have you learned in this course about the way science works?

• not always right right away
• science is self-correcting
• science is only effective if you can get the majority of the public to accept it--and many scientific interventions work only if they have broad support (and strong public opinion leads to political action)
  
• you can't prove anything in science, only disprove, and the public has trouble with that
• science is constantly changing
• personal biases can be a good motivation to do science because you care more (so long as you don't cheat)
• science is a social enterprise so personal biases get averaged out and corrected
• you can't see the full picture at one time because it is still developing--you need to move with the science
• science is shaped by the culture of the time: science is influenced by society and society is influenced by science
• science works by trial and error
• scientific progression relies on social progression (lots to think about in that)
• how messy it can be to reach a conclusion--and that is why it works well
  
• how broad science is, and also that there is so much to learn by using the science approach
• people don't always accept science even when it is well supported
• when something is controversial, it's useful to look at is as "this person's argument" rather than trying to get to facts
  
• science can only go as far as the tools scientists have
• it is so different to see how science actually progresses, how messy and influenced by morals and politics
• religion used to be the main opposition to science, now it's politics, but the two mix together in interesting ways
  

from a reading response: "If the public was to think of science as a thought process they would see that incorrect theories is a part of science just as much as correct ones and they are not good reasons for not supporting or trusting science."
The hard part is the time when science really doesn't yet have the answers we want.

What you write in your takehome exam can/should be your own conclusions (use "I") but I am looking for you to support it with examples from the course

This course may feel negative to some of you about science because it focuses on difficult areas, but my goal in this course is actually to encourage a deeper kind of trust in science by getting students to understand that science is self-correcting and always a work in progress