All Science Is Not Equal
Science Types I Through V
Science Types Cheat Sheet
Let’s start with a cheat sheet. Everyone loves to get to the point quicker these days, so below are the different science types and their brief titles (they are described below). If that is enough for you then great, take with you the knowledge that science is more complex than we have been led to believe, but hopefully, these types of science have piqued your interest enough to read more.
Type I Science — The Unsubstantiated Science Theory
The Pondering Stage
Type II Science — Untested Science Theory
The Theory Formulation Stage
Type III Science — Science Theory
The Theory Testing Stage or Evidence Stage
Type IV Science — Experimental Scientific Evidence
Experimental Evidence Stage
Type V Science — Science Fact
A Large Weight of Evidence
Classification of Information for Greater Understanding
Science is a disciplined process of explaining mysteries. We constantly ask “Why?” and then narrow down the possibilities with how, when, what, where, and “which conditions must prevail”, all so we can better understand a situation or event. Unsurprisingly, many people misrepresent science and scientific evidence to make a point, sell a product or win an argument. This creates doubt and confusion, making us ask “What does science really say?”. If people don’t have certainty of “the science”, then it is hard to make the best decisions, and often, in the absence of clarity, we defer to our gut feelings rather than evidence. One frequent degradation of the scientific process is the attribution of correlation to causation.
Great clarity comes from a transparent awareness of all unbiased information relevant to a subject. From that clarity comes informed discoveries, insights, and understandings to help make progress on the subject at hand. When this process fails, which it often does, people, innovation, understanding, and consequently society fails and takes a proverbial step backward. It is well past the time when we should have stepped in to curtail the ongoing corruption of the scientific process. It is time to classify all science shared publicly into categories to help everyone understand that not all science is equal, and some science is much more credible. Science is about supporting a stepwise process that helps incrementally give increased confidence in information about a topic, something that is often missed in the knowledge translation of scientific findings. We are proposing a simple solution: to classify all the science we consume into categories (types) to help everyone understand that not all science is equally sound.
An understanding of science should tell us that some things are just not true by looking at them. Nevertheless, content creators have successfully generated viral videos, marketing material, and information pieces of patently false or misleading conclusions and people uncritically gobble it up, ready to believe these things are real.
The truth is that some science is much more credible and carries more weight. This is not because it is “better” science, but rather because it has been subjected to independent validation, more rigorous review, and/or deeper analysis contributing to further discoveries. We simply know more about it, and thus, the information is more reliable. Something being repeated often or more forcefully certainly does not make it more credible and in fact, often the opposite seems to be true.
Belief vs. Knowledge
People are eager to judge science as good or bad. Not because it is well-founded or poorly executed, but rather that they base decisions on feelings or affiliation with a particular idea, or even political affiliation, not even directly relevant to the discussion. Marketing, religion, or peer pressure guide belief in scientific validity instead of reasoning and logic.
Classification systems, though often never perfect and sometimes controversial, help bring some order to chaos and allow for new discoveries (i.e., the creation of the Periodic Table by Mendelev, or modern taxonomy by Carl Linnaeus). An informative classification system for science could help people be aware that science is apolitical and not black and white as many seem to think it is. Science is a step-by-step, incremental learning process, which builds increased confidence in existing information as new information is discovered.
When uncontaminated by manipulation, the Scientific Method is a reliable process where increasing the weight of evidence over time makes us more certain of our understanding. Unless you believe in things other than scientific evidence, this information is for you, but it is unlikely that you are prepared to accept it. I don’t blame you, scientists have done a poor job at communicating science to the greater public and it is not as compelling as most competing stories to “boring” science. It is more fun to believe in the certainty and passion of competing stories to the slow and complex evidentiary and discovery process behind the scientific method. Boring is usually a good sign in science, but it often does not generate clickbait headlines, controversy, or exciting stories we so often crave. Again, this is not your fault, we have evolved as a storytelling species, through thousands of years the stories our ancestors told us to help us survive had to be sufficiently compelling for us to remember them and retain the lessons they taught us. If they weren’t exciting enough, we didn’t remember the lessons and we died. What helped us in the past is sadly not serving us now. Much like our evolutionary-based appetite for high energy and calorie foods is now killing us in the form of our addiction to junk foods, sensational or controversial information is more compelling than what people see as boring science.
New Classifications — Science Types I Through V
To help, I believe, it is time to classify all the science we consume into categories to help everyone understand that not all science is equal, and some science is much more credible and carries more weight. Ultimately, the scientific process is one of increasing the weight of evidence of a scientific theory over time. An easier way of thinking about it would be that we are taking science fiction (an initially proposed theory like when people said the Earth was round) to science fact (we are now at a point of multiple lines of evidence that the Earth is round but there are still those who are in doubt and base their own rationalizations on dubious claims that they say are scientific but the credibility is weak and unsubstantiated with independently reproducible evidence). Ideally, it would differentiate between what was accepted as having enough evidence to be considered completely reliable compared to material that was still being developed. Describing this spectrum of scientific endeavour could do away with “alternate facts” that have been running amok in the media lately. Let’s consider the six categories.
The New Classifications
How would they work?
Numbered I, II, III, IV, and V, (1 through 5 in roman numerals) each step would increase our confidence about the reliability of the information. Ideally, these types of science will differentiate between what is accepted as having enough evidence to be considered completely reliable compared to material that is still being developed.
Type I Science — The Unsubstantiated Science Theory
The Pondering Stage
These are the sorts of notions that occur to people as they ponder randomly. At this stage, anyone can be a scientist, examining concepts to see if they are worthy of further investigation. Maybe there are other things known which lead you to suspect a new idea might be true. These are often called mind experiments, where you imagine a situation and then try to determine whether a tidbit of knowledge can be teased away from it. At this point, it is a low-reliability idea, but you have the option of moving it to Type II if it has potential.
Example: Sir Isaac Newton was watching ripe apples fall out of a tree one afternoon. In those days many people believed that things moved towards the ground because they contained “Earth” elements that “desired” to be together. Feathers fell more slowly because they had much more “Air” element. Water ran downhill because the water was attracted to the “Water” element and there was more below than there was above…
In retrospect, this is silly. Newton suspected that it was silly, too. Instead, seeing the apple fall, he wondered if literally everything was attracted to everything else. He imagined that our planet, Earth, was attracted to the apple, too, and fell “up” towards the apple (to a much smaller degree of course, due to sheer mass).
The “idea”, in its infancy, would not have been a theory upon which anything else could be reliably built. It was still guesswork. He subsequently designed tests and was eventually proven correct. He gave us the Theory of Gravity, developed from his humble afternoon speculations.
Using a large magnet to represent the attractive force of Earth, and a smaller one to represent the attraction of the cliff face, it can be illustrated that counterweight “A” hangs straight down, but counterweight “B” is pulled towards the cliff face, possessing a measurable deflection, indicated by the blue arrow. Eventually, we came to know that mass itself bends the shape of space-time just by its mere existence. Excellent daydreaming there, Sir Isaac!
Type II Science — Untested Science Theory
The Theory Formulation Stage
Here we enter the realm of idea development and start to envision test design. This type of science describes a theory that someone has deemed worthy of further examination and perhaps subjected to some preliminary substantiation to further narrow the line of investigation. The objective here is to isolate the variables that are directly relevant.
This is where we get down to the essence of the idea. The less specific the test design, the greater the chance that unrelated factors will taint the results.
Science Type I & II are available to everyone and every day we follow these steps in our mind through analysis of sensory information throughout the day. We are all scientists in some way at this point and we do a lot of “experiments of one” on ourselves, we try things out and see what happens. This is testing things out, not to be confused with a scientific test which is about limiting, isolating, and controlling variables to test so that we can try to be certain the test we conduct yields results to either help substantiate or unsubstantiate a theory made.
Example: In 1897, Dutch physician and pathologist Christiaan Eijkman thought “tropical” diseases such as Beriberi might be diet-related upon discovering that it was present in both humans and chickens and that it could be completely cured in chickens when he fed them brown rice instead of polished white rice.
Eijkman, lacking the technology to understand what was happening, could only extrapolate to humans by guessing. Despite being successful, there was no foundation upon which anyone could build more knowledge. This early experiment created a cure, but it didn’t reveal the nature of the mechanism that made it work.
He was unknowingly providing the much-needed thiamine (vitamin B1) to the chickens, which was plentiful in the brown coating of unpolished rice. This “cure” fixed the chickens and led to better health for local people when he convinced them to stop polishing their rice. Intuition, guessing, or inferring has been very useful in solving problems and can lead to important discoveries as shown above. Just because Eijkman solved the problem at hand, understanding the reason or mechanism for the solution is an important part of the scientific process and without that understanding, it is hard to accept a solution as definitive science. Without a further understanding of the reason or mechanisms of a solution, we need to continue to do more research (do more science) to establish sound scientific theory, evidence and hopefully eventually establish some form of scientific fact.
Type III Science — Science Theory
The Theory Testing Stage or Evidence Stage
An idea needs to be tested — through a single experiment — custom-designed to determine if the premise is correct. Having achieved preliminary validation (or failure), the testing can be refined to be more revelatory. If the results are affirmative, you now have a working scientific theory.
Science reporters usually scour places where early results are published, so they can be the first to interview someone with an interesting idea and the first to have a substantive report that a newspaper, magazine, or other media outlet would wish to purchase and publish. This is where the public might first hear of a new development, as a researcher publishes a preliminary result in order to establish precedence. However, too often, preliminary results are extrapolated far beyond what initial experimental results show and as such give misleading information. These articles should be labeled Science Type III.
Example: LEDs originally came in three colours, red, green, and yellow, or Direct Current +/– (red) DC –/+ (green), and Alternating Current (Yellow). Over the years we learned to dope (selectively add impurities) the materials used to get different colours, but a pure blue seemed impossible — despite all the world’s best laboratories working on the problem.
This should not be impossible, thought Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura. Thinking they had a way to solve the problem, they invented the first true blue LED. The solution was a commercially viable process of producing high brightness gallium nitride LEDs using a thermal annealing method of production and consequently, we could finally have full spectrum LED lighting.
They were awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize (Physics) for their efforts because without a blue LED we could not have made a pure white LED light. The invention literally changed the world. Your colour computer monitor (and smartphone, tablet, TV, and smartwatch) all exist because of their efforts.
Type IV Science — Experimental Scientific Evidence
Experimental Evidence Stage
In this stage, now that the theory is validated with a single experiment designed for discovery, the investigator has documentary evidence of the process and results. The theory is now in a state which can be shared with others, detailing the experimental design, allowing for replication, and independent verification.
Other scientists can now replicate the test conditions described by the discoverer, re-run the experiment, and see if the results support the original conclusions. Variations can be reported if they arise, too. Importantly, Type IV investigations can still fail based on poor repeatability, so despite the fact that it is more reliable than Science Type III, it should not be used to support other research.
Once the theory is verified by an independent source, asserting that the original findings of the experiment were replicable, it falls into this category. The independent source provides verification documentation, which is then shared openly to allow wider substantiation of the results.
With repeatability, Type IV science attracts other investigators, in parallel or related fields. If the conclusions might aid their own work, they will join the rush to confirm it, adding academic weight to its reputation.
Example: Gregor Mendel was an Augustinian friar and Silesian scientist of the mid-1800s, with an interest in heredity. He grew thousands of pea plants, carefully tracking their characteristics such as seed & leaf shapes, root & stem length, and flower colour. He learned that some characteristics were dominant (a trait expressed in an offspring that has only one copy of the gene), and some recessive (a trait expressed in an offspring only when it has two copies of the gene). When cross-breeding, big leaves, big seeds, long stems, and long roots trumped smaller versions in the next generation.
He also discovered that white flowers bred white progeny, and purple bred purple, but when you crossed the plants, the next generation was always completely purple. The following generation was the most interesting, however, as revealed by this Punnet diagram. It taught him that each plant donated two possibilities to its offspring. P for purple and p for white colouration. If the offspring got a “PP”, “Pp” or “pP” it was invariably purple, but if the plant got a “pp” it was white. 2nd generation plants were always in the ratio of 3:1, purple and white, respectively.
His experiments taught us about “genetics” before the word had even been invented. Unfortunately, making his information available didn’t help in this case. Scientists argued about his conclusions until well after his death. What we now call Mendelian Genetics was lost to science for decades because of stubbornness. It wasn’t until Canadian researcher Oswald Theodore Avery picked up Mendel’s genetic baton that we regained this knowledge in 1944, almost 100 years later.
This is where Oswald Avery benefitted. By carefully transferring different parts of bacteria cells, to see if they could still produce a disease-causing polysaccharide capsule, he finally found that it was the DNA that held the vital information that could be transferred between bacteria and thereby create a harmful R strain bacteria when the DNA of an R strain bacteria was placed into an S strain bacteria that was harmless before the R strain DNA was added. Others followed his work, including Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase in 1952. When Hershey & Chase confirmed Avery’s results, it led to the additional discovery one year later (1953), by British scientist Francis Crick, of the “double helix” pattern of the DNA strands.
With substantive evidence reported, the scientific community accepts the new observations as fact. It can confidently be used to prove new things. This is the highest level of reliability and the public should be happy to see Type IV attached to any scientific statement, knowing that even if they lack personal expertise, this is something they can rely on.
Type V Science — Science Fact
A Large Weight of Evidence
With strong experimental support for the new theory, certainty arises, and a rush to participate develops. Achieving Type V status means broad acceptance by the scientific community. Now that it is considered as a genuine fact, it can be used to extrapolate further, likely in many disciplines.
The newly accepted fact provides a base upon which to build and a foundation upon which to test new and additional theories. Some researchers might simply be interested or intrigued by the discovery; others, seeking inspiration, could develop new Type I ideas supported by the new fact. In either case, the new fact assumes a life of its own, and more information grows around it. By extrapolating beyond the original conclusion, they expand knowledge even further, one step at a time.
I think it is important to point out that most good scientists do not believe in the term “fact”. While it is generally accepted that there are scientific facts and they are often referred to as such, there really is no such thing as an irrefutable fact. Yes, it is true, what we know typically as facts are just theories with a substantial weight of evidence behind them making them very likely to be true. Sorry, I know it is confusing, but if we are really going to understand the scientific method, it is important to be clear with terms. Let’s agree that a fact is something that the majority agrees to be sufficiently true in order to build new knowledge from, but also always allowing the possibility that any “fact” may be proven to be incorrect. The beauty of scientific discovery is that it is an endless quest to try to understand the world around us, while never knowing anything for certain.
The newly accepted fact provides a base upon which to build and a foundation upon which to test new and additional theories. Some researchers might simply be interested or intrigued by the discovery; others, seeking inspiration, could develop new Type I ideas supported by the new fact. In either case, the new fact assumes a life of its own, and more information grows around it. By extrapolating beyond the original conclusion, they expand knowledge even further, one step at a time.
Example: Arguably the greatest scientific discovery of all time, was the structure of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick. By understanding the three-dimensional structure of DNA we have been able to understand the fundamental basis of the building blocks of life. With that knowledge, we have made many more discoveries and continue to make further scientific discoveries. Without this foundational knowledge of the structure of DNA, it would likely not have been possible to make so many scientific advancements in the field of genetics and other associated fields that acknowledge DNA as the fundamental building block of living things.
How Science Began
We collect “information points” to develop qualitative information about the thing we are examining, and then try to relate these qualities to each other. When we have enough of both quality and quantity data points, we can make predictions and see how well we truly comprehend the information.
It is important, however, to understand that science is not a collection of facts that could be found in a book or database. Instead, it is a technique or a philosophy of understanding.
Early philosophers (read: scientists) studied the physical and natural world, and when they reached a high level of understanding or expertise, they were given the Latin title docere, meaning teacher. Nowadays, an accomplished individual is granted a Philosophy Doctorate or Ph.D. in their field of study. The early philosophers shunned actual experimentation, declaring that it was labour, suitable for the common man, not for a learned scholar.
In those days, they believed that they should be able to understand the world purely by using their intellect. In our contemporary view, we regard this as a rather elitist attitude, and we still make fun of it with television characters like Sheldon Cooper, from the Big Bang Theory, but it did give rise to great minds like Socrates. Observational science allowed us to make great strides in both extrapolation and logic that are still applied today.
Early philosophers, as mentioned, preferred observational science. We pursue this strategy today in many scientific pursuits such as astronomy, paleontology, and geology. Indeed, observational science extends to epidemiology (how disease moves through a population), economics, and even sociology. As a technique, it remains quite ubiquitous.
How We Learn
The Scientific Method requires that we have a specific, well-documented approach to examining something while trying to learn about it. It requires that we record every step of this learning journey so that in the event we learn something useful, it can be replicated, by us, or by someone else with whom we share the information. It also advises us not to bring expectations or bias to an experiment and to record the results in a non-judgmental fashion.
This has served us well for quite a long time in our practical investigations of the world around us. It should be noted that scientists are not a superstitious group! While some ancient people were content to believe that “giants in the sky” made thunder & lightning, we have made strong efforts to understand what we were witnessing rather than playing it up to unknowable forces. In fact, it is quite characteristic that scientists have a love of mysteries. We constantly ask “Why?” and then narrow down the possibilities with how, when, what, where, and “which conditions must prevail”, all so we can understand a situation or event.
Quantitative analysis (basically counting something) tells us how much of something is necessary to cause an effect or the frequency of occurrence of an event, or how much of something exists. Humans have always had a strong desire to count; to know how many of something they see or possess. Wars have started because a neighbour has more of some desirable thing than someone else’s more meager collection. Counting is in our nature.
Quantitative analysis (counting or experimenting) is contrasted with qualitative analysis (describing something we see). This is the form that the average citizen considers “real” science, though it is on equal footing with the observational variety. In this sort, you postulate a theory, figure out how to test it, and then create the test conditions. It has become such a popular method of investigation that the observational sciences have adopted and adapted its methodology to advance their own investigations.
Geologists, for example, now use various forms of electromagnetic radiation to image the deep subsurface at depths humans might never reach. Explosives set off at the surface can help to image the subterranean layers via the returning sound waves. Geology and most traditional observational sciences now incorporate an experimental aspect.
Describing something (qualitative analysis) is at the core of our nature of how we communicate with each other, using language to explain and create word pictures of what we have observed and share it with others. These descriptions, qualitative analysis, are often equally as important to quantitative analysis (counting or experimenting) if the descriptions are done in an unbiased and impartial way such as to avoid a common phenomenon known as observational bias. Observational bias is recording a discrepancy from the truth based on what we expect or want to see versus what we do actually see. Sadly, observational bias is quite common and as such quantitative analysis (counting and experimenting) science typically carries more weight and is regarded as more reliable now given the potential unreliability of qualitative analysis. Nevertheless, quantitative analysis (counting and experimenting) and qualitative analysis are both used in science and, if done well, can be equally as valid.
The Reality of Science
There exists a spectrum of approaches to scientific investigation. Anyone can be a scientist if they have a practical mind, are meticulous, and possess the desire to learn based on the discovery of facts and categorizing results. It is equally important that they feel free to publish their discoveries to a scientific forum so others can follow their methods to confirm their results or show shortcomings.
This is what happened with Cold Fusion, for example, where someone thought they had discovered a process that could generate fusion energy at room temperature instead of thousands (or millions) of degrees. It was an error, but peer review (peer review: the evaluation of work done by people with similar competencies as those who completed the original work) quickly helped to correct the mistake.
The Takeaway
Everybody is a scientist. From our first moments out of the womb and likely even before that, the way we learn about the world around us is by testing thoughts in our head (theories) by taking action (running experiments) and observing the outcome (results). This type of learning is fundamental to our existence, yet scientists are often separated from so-called non-scientists in the public eye. This separation leads to an apparent exclusivity of science fostering distrust by those who don’t feel they are scientists or exclusivity within the scientific community where scientists isolate themselves from others. We are all scientists from birth until we die and the sooner we all learn to be good scientists, respectfully sharing our theories and discoveries, and working to further the scientific method, the sooner we will all benefit.
Scientists may be independent truth-seekers and “discoverers”, but there are few that won’t admit that what we know today, we know because we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors and what they learned and imparted to us. Those that came before swept aside the veils of mysticism and superstition, often at risk to their own lives by challenging contemporary “wisdom”. Challenging knowledge is a healthy process and skepticism is always useful in the field of science. We must also understand that we can’t just be challengers, we must also be creators, contributing to the knowledge base of humanity and helping better understand the world around us. The continuous knowledge contribution will be passed along to the next generation to create a better world that is a little less mysterious than before.
The necessity of a new classification for science “types” is a self-protective measure for science; it might help to do away with the manipulation of scientific concepts by some elements of modern society promulgating the notion that there are “alternative facts”.
By clarifying that Science Types I-V are preliminary information, and are not always suitable for building further theories, we could steer people away from blind acceptance when people band around what they think is a fact. They diminish the value of the word by treating it as a bludgeon to stop people from questioning things that are strictly a social polemic, and not a real fact.
Labeling all scientific articles, papers, research and science news that is shared publicly into the different science types would help everyone to understand at what point in the scientific discovery process the information being shared is at. That knowledge will allow the reader to contextualize the information being shared and understand whether this is something that requires further research and understanding or that it is a certainty with which we can build new science. Ultimately, it reflects badly on science that so many people think that the science they are exposed to is malleable, constantly changing, and seemingly there is no certainty in many subjects. Many people believe that we live in a world where there is a valid and almost equal counterpoint to any scientific fact they are presented with. They think if they do their own “research” (a terrible term many people use when in fact all they did was Google a topic) that they can find “facts” that prove their side, and sadly they are too often proven right when they find information that appears credible to substantiate their beliefs. Without a categorization of the information they are reading, they don’t have an understanding if they are learning about a scientific fact or a scientific theory that has yet to be proven or worse yet has been discredited by the scientific process yet lingers on in people’s desire to believe things they think to be true even though there is no evidence to support their beliefs. This is dangerous and leads to confusion, unreliability, and even many people’s death. Let’s give a system like this a try and see if we can’t remove some of the tarnish on science’s reputation.
Science Types
Type I Science — The Unsubstantiated Science Theory
The Pondering Stage
Type II Science — Untested Science Theory
The Theory Formulation Stage
Type III Science — Science Theory
The Theory Testing Stage or Evidence Stage
Type IV Science — Experimental Scientific Evidence
Experimental Evidence Stage
Type V Science — Science Fact
A Large Weight of Evidence
Addendum
If you have any thoughts that you would like to share on this topic or add to this article in any way you feel appropriate, below is a link to a live working document that you can edit to your heart's content.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SyxzSX54z4ozsZ8AUJqqPU2-1RTJAmCDfG7l3BI6AKU/edit?usp=sharing
If you want to share where you have used science types please add a link to the document for all to see. If you have ideas of where it should be used or how it should be popularized please add those suggestions as well. Thank you for caring about how to share science