How Government Destroyed Science in Columbia River Dam Decisionmaking
News from the Front #95
Remarks at the First Annual Northwest Water Law Symposium, Lewis & Clark Law School, January 31, 2009 (edited)
By James Buchal, author The Great Salmon Hoax [here]
Before I begin discussing the use of science in Columbia River decisionmaking, I think it is important to have a definition of what science is, and I am going to choose a definition that will make it clear that science is not really used at all any more.
What is science? Since this is a law school, I will cite the Supreme Court’s Daubert case, which determined how federal courts should decide whether to accept scientific expert testimony. In that case, the Court actually managed at one point to stumble right on it:
Scientific methodology today is based on generating hypotheses and testing them to see if they can be falsified; indeed, this methodology is what distinguishes science from other fields of human inquiry.
I will argue that the essence of science is that there are things that are out there that are true, and while we can all speculate about the truth is, we can test our speculation against the truth. This is usually done by taking measurements in an experiment. And when our hypothesis is falsified, that is, contrary to the truth as revealed by the evidence we gather, we have to discard or refine that hypothesis.
I would also argue that measurement or quantification is another very important aspect of science. As a famous physicist, Lord Kelvin once observed,
When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science.
What Lord Kelvin did not say is that if you really have a scientific understanding of something, you can also use that scientific knowledge to predict what will happen under a certain set of initial conditions (at least outside the quantum context).
