I think you’re right that the OP’s characterization of science is naive (though I think the everything-is-open idea is always there as an ideal, and I think that really matters), but all your examples here seem really dubious.
At 300 BCE they were not centrally concerned with proving via experiment that the earths is round. They instead cared about things making sense intuitively. The idea that it’s important to prove claims via experiment came with Descartes into the scientific mosaic which happened much later.
Then how did it come about that Eratosthenes proved via experiment that the earth is round and estimated its radius? (A little later than 300 BCE, I think, but in the right ballpark.)
“How does action at a distance work?” [...] became again an open question when Newton was shown to be right by the expedition that measured the shape of the earth.
Newton’s work was recognized as first-rank science from the beginning, so the idea of action at a distance was taken seriously (at least) from the publication of the Principia. I don’t know what expedition you are thinking of, but I am pretty sure it’s nowhere near the truth to say that action at a distance was thought to be rubbish until an expedition measured the shape of the earth and thereby proved that Newton was right after all.
[EDITED to add: OK, so I guess you mean the French Geodesic Mission of 1735, which found that the earth is bulgy in the middle (as Newton said it should be) rather than elongated towards the poles (as Descartes claimed, on the basis of what we would now regard as a crackpot theory of vortices). That’s hardly conclusive evidence for action at a distance, nor would the opposite result have been anything like conclusive the other way. But, anyway, a large part of the point of that expedition was that “Newton or Descartes?” was an open question. It would be nearer the truth to say that the expedition closed the question. But not much nearer, because as I say the question the survey resolved was not the question of action at a distance.]
the central dogma of molecular biology was considered a close question for a long time
The central dogma, at least as Crick stated it, says that the transcription from nucleotide sequence to amino acid sequence never goes the other way, with proteins getting decoded back into nucleic acids. So far as I know, this is still a closed question. Was it ever thought absolutely certain that there’s no mechanism by which proteins can affect the information in nucleic acids?
Biologists were confident about the fact that a lot of the DNA is junk DNA that doesn’t do anything.
They still are, and so far as I know they never claimed that all non-coding DNA is completely functionless. The “biologists thought most DNA was pure junk but now they’ve been stunned to find that some of it is useful” narrative is, I think, mostly hype.
though I think the everything-is-open idea is always there as an ideal, and I think that really matters),
If you have Einstein saying: “God doesn’t play dice” Einstein wasn’t following the ideal to be open about him playing dice.
Newton’s work was recognized as first-rank science from the beginning, so the idea of action at a distance was taken seriously (at least) from the publication of the Principia.
Newton was accepted much sooner in the UK than on the continent. On the continent the expedition was important.
The idea that Newton was simply accepted everywhere when he published his book is popular science mythology. The field of History and Philosophy of Science interprets things differently and that’s why it’s worthwhile to read people like Kuhn.
Then how did it come about that Eratosthenes proved via experiment that the earth is round and estimated its radius? (A little later than 300 BCE, I think, but in the right ballpark.)
The point of his action wasn’t to prove that it’s round but to estimate the radius.
Aristoteles already had a firm idea of the earth being round and most of the people afterwards believed that the earth was round because of the arguments of Aristoteles and not because of Eratosthenes.
The central dogma, at least as Crick stated it, says that the transcription from nucleotide sequence to amino acid sequence never goes the other way, with proteins getting decoded back into nucleic acids.
The dogma is that DNA get’s transcripted into RNA and that RNA get’s translated into proteins.
So far as I know, this is still a closed question. Was it ever thought absolutely certain that there’s no mechanism by which proteins can affect the information in nucleic acids?
Proteins aren’t the point. The issue are retroviruses who transcribe RNA into DNA and thus violate the dogma. Historically that makes the term “dogma” quite silly as a dogma is by definition closed.
They still are, and so far as I know they never claimed that all non-coding DNA is completely functionless.
Not all but most non-coding DNA. The argument for that was that bacteria with are subject to strong evolutionary pressures and have had a lot more generations to kick out junk have less DNA. If I remember right there’s also a fish who has significantly less DNA than it’s close relatives.
You have biologists making the public think that all human DNA got sequenced on the basis that the 8% that they haven’t sequenced doesn’t really count and is likely unimportant.
Today it’s much more an open question than it was 20 years ago.
Einstein wasn’t following the ideal to be open about him playing dice
We may be at cross purposes. I am not claiming that all scientists, always, have had functionally-open minds about everything they should have had open minds about; I am claiming that science has always espoused in principle the ideal that minds should be open, and that its espousal of this principle leads scientists to have more-open minds than they would have if that principle weren’t around. (I will also claim that this is part of why science works as well as, in practice, it appears to work.)
However: I’m not sure Einstein’s mind was so closed on this point. For sure, he had a strong opinion, but there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t think the evidence available to Einstein was strong and clear enough that he should have decided that God plays dice after all. And he certainly engaged with the ideas of QM closely enough, e.g., to be one of the originators of the EPR “paradox”, which depends on a careful analysis of what QM predicts in some situations.
It’s not even clear that QM requires that God play dice. For instance, the Everett (“many worlds”) interpretation, popular both here on LW and among physicists, is entirely deterministic. Observers see every possible series of outcomes, and it just turns out that “most” (in the relevant sense) series of outcomes look random.
On the continent the expedition was important.
Yup. In England, Newton was more or less just assumed to be right, whereas in continental Europe it was controversial how right he was. What (so far as I can see) there wasn’t, anywhere, was a consensus that Newton was wrong, and that’s what you appeared to be claiming there was.
The idea that Newton was simply accepted everywhere when he published his book is [...]
… Is one that I never stated nor implied. What I said is that it was very quickly recognized as first-rank science and as something that shouldn’t simply be dismissed; are you claiming otherwise?
Aristoteles already had a firm idea of the earth being round
On the basis of well known repeated observations, which are in fact almost as good a source of information as controlled experiments (you need the experiments when the observations are misleading or insufficient). If Eratosthenes had done his measurement and found “r=infinity”, do you think no one among the ancient Greeks would have considered the possibility that the earth is flat after all and the observations that suggest otherwise are illusions?
The dogma is that DNA gets transcribed into RNA and that RNA gets translated into proteins.
Here is what Francis Crick actually wrote:
The central dogma of molecular biology deals with the detailed residue-by-residue transfer of sequential information. It states that such information cannot be transferred back from protein to either protein or nucleic acid.
This doesn’t say anything about reverse transcription from RNA to DNA being impossible.
It’s true that sometimes the term “central dogma” was applied to something broader (claiming that DNA->RNA is also one-way) but I question whether that was ever treated as a closed question.
Take a look at this draft of Crick’s paper from 1956 in which the Central Dogma is first named. Its very first diagram shows a dotted arrow from RNA back to DNA and says it’s a possibility.
that makes the term “dogma” quite silly as a dogma is by definition closed.
Yeah, Crick said, more than once and in so many words, that “dogma” was a bad choice of term and that when he came up with the name he didn’t really know quite what “dogma” means. (See, e.g., the last two quotations on the Wikipedia page about the Central Dogma.)
Today it’s much more an open question than it was 20 years ago.
That may well be true; that is, current estimates for the probability distribution of what fraction of DNA is how useful are more “optimistic” than the estimates of 20 years ago. But you seem to be suggesting that that’s indicative of some kind of problematic closed-mindedness among scientists, but to me all it suggests is that scientists aren’t always immediately correct about how likely various possibilities are. Which is hardly a surprise and hardly indicates anything very bad.
I think you’re right that the OP’s characterization of science is naive (though I think the everything-is-open idea is always there as an ideal, and I think that really matters), but all your examples here seem really dubious.
Then how did it come about that Eratosthenes proved via experiment that the earth is round and estimated its radius? (A little later than 300 BCE, I think, but in the right ballpark.)
The idea that observation trumps theory was not unknown to the ancient Greeks.
Newton’s work was recognized as first-rank science from the beginning, so the idea of action at a distance was taken seriously (at least) from the publication of the Principia. I don’t know what expedition you are thinking of, but I am pretty sure it’s nowhere near the truth to say that action at a distance was thought to be rubbish until an expedition measured the shape of the earth and thereby proved that Newton was right after all.
[EDITED to add: OK, so I guess you mean the French Geodesic Mission of 1735, which found that the earth is bulgy in the middle (as Newton said it should be) rather than elongated towards the poles (as Descartes claimed, on the basis of what we would now regard as a crackpot theory of vortices). That’s hardly conclusive evidence for action at a distance, nor would the opposite result have been anything like conclusive the other way. But, anyway, a large part of the point of that expedition was that “Newton or Descartes?” was an open question. It would be nearer the truth to say that the expedition closed the question. But not much nearer, because as I say the question the survey resolved was not the question of action at a distance.]
The central dogma, at least as Crick stated it, says that the transcription from nucleotide sequence to amino acid sequence never goes the other way, with proteins getting decoded back into nucleic acids. So far as I know, this is still a closed question. Was it ever thought absolutely certain that there’s no mechanism by which proteins can affect the information in nucleic acids?
They still are, and so far as I know they never claimed that all non-coding DNA is completely functionless. The “biologists thought most DNA was pure junk but now they’ve been stunned to find that some of it is useful” narrative is, I think, mostly hype.
If you have Einstein saying: “God doesn’t play dice” Einstein wasn’t following the ideal to be open about him playing dice.
Newton was accepted much sooner in the UK than on the continent. On the continent the expedition was important.
The idea that Newton was simply accepted everywhere when he published his book is popular science mythology. The field of History and Philosophy of Science interprets things differently and that’s why it’s worthwhile to read people like Kuhn.
The French Geodesic Mission.
The point of his action wasn’t to prove that it’s round but to estimate the radius. Aristoteles already had a firm idea of the earth being round and most of the people afterwards believed that the earth was round because of the arguments of Aristoteles and not because of Eratosthenes.
The dogma is that DNA get’s transcripted into RNA and that RNA get’s translated into proteins.
Proteins aren’t the point. The issue are retroviruses who transcribe RNA into DNA and thus violate the dogma. Historically that makes the term “dogma” quite silly as a dogma is by definition closed.
Not all but most non-coding DNA. The argument for that was that bacteria with are subject to strong evolutionary pressures and have had a lot more generations to kick out junk have less DNA. If I remember right there’s also a fish who has significantly less DNA than it’s close relatives.
You have biologists making the public think that all human DNA got sequenced on the basis that the 8% that they haven’t sequenced doesn’t really count and is likely unimportant.
Today it’s much more an open question than it was 20 years ago.
We may be at cross purposes. I am not claiming that all scientists, always, have had functionally-open minds about everything they should have had open minds about; I am claiming that science has always espoused in principle the ideal that minds should be open, and that its espousal of this principle leads scientists to have more-open minds than they would have if that principle weren’t around. (I will also claim that this is part of why science works as well as, in practice, it appears to work.)
However: I’m not sure Einstein’s mind was so closed on this point. For sure, he had a strong opinion, but there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t think the evidence available to Einstein was strong and clear enough that he should have decided that God plays dice after all. And he certainly engaged with the ideas of QM closely enough, e.g., to be one of the originators of the EPR “paradox”, which depends on a careful analysis of what QM predicts in some situations.
It’s not even clear that QM requires that God play dice. For instance, the Everett (“many worlds”) interpretation, popular both here on LW and among physicists, is entirely deterministic. Observers see every possible series of outcomes, and it just turns out that “most” (in the relevant sense) series of outcomes look random.
Yup. In England, Newton was more or less just assumed to be right, whereas in continental Europe it was controversial how right he was. What (so far as I can see) there wasn’t, anywhere, was a consensus that Newton was wrong, and that’s what you appeared to be claiming there was.
… Is one that I never stated nor implied. What I said is that it was very quickly recognized as first-rank science and as something that shouldn’t simply be dismissed; are you claiming otherwise?
On the basis of well known repeated observations, which are in fact almost as good a source of information as controlled experiments (you need the experiments when the observations are misleading or insufficient). If Eratosthenes had done his measurement and found “r=infinity”, do you think no one among the ancient Greeks would have considered the possibility that the earth is flat after all and the observations that suggest otherwise are illusions?
Here is what Francis Crick actually wrote:
This doesn’t say anything about reverse transcription from RNA to DNA being impossible.
It’s true that sometimes the term “central dogma” was applied to something broader (claiming that DNA->RNA is also one-way) but I question whether that was ever treated as a closed question.
Take a look at this draft of Crick’s paper from 1956 in which the Central Dogma is first named. Its very first diagram shows a dotted arrow from RNA back to DNA and says it’s a possibility.
Yeah, Crick said, more than once and in so many words, that “dogma” was a bad choice of term and that when he came up with the name he didn’t really know quite what “dogma” means. (See, e.g., the last two quotations on the Wikipedia page about the Central Dogma.)
That may well be true; that is, current estimates for the probability distribution of what fraction of DNA is how useful are more “optimistic” than the estimates of 20 years ago. But you seem to be suggesting that that’s indicative of some kind of problematic closed-mindedness among scientists, but to me all it suggests is that scientists aren’t always immediately correct about how likely various possibilities are. Which is hardly a surprise and hardly indicates anything very bad.