The Infinite Monkey Cage - Science's Epic Fails

Episode Date: January 23, 2017

Science's Epic FailsBrian Cox and Robin Ince are joined on stage by actor and comedian Rufus Hound, Professor Alice Roberts and Dr Adam Rutherford to discuss some of the great scientific failures, and mistakes made by some very well known scientists. They look at how some of the greatest scientific thinkers of all time, from Darwin to Einstein, got key elements of their own theories wrong, or in the case of others, followed a path of understanding that would later be completely disproved. They discuss why failure in science is no bad thing, and ask whether getting it wrong, is a fundamental part of the scientific method, and should in fact be applied to many other areas of life.Producer: Alexandra Feachem.

In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcast. Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And in a moment, you're going to be hearing me saying, hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. Because this is the longer version of the Infinite Monkey Cage. This is the podcast version, which is normally somewhere between 12 and 17 minutes

longer than that that is broadcast on Radio 4. It's got all the bits that we couldn't fit in with Brian over explaining ideas of physics. I do object to the use of the word longer though, because that's obviously a frame specific statement. Yeah, we haven't got time to deal with that, because even in the longer version, we can't have a longer

intro. Just let them listen! I've got an idea! Can we just have a podcast version of this intro to the podcast, which can be longer than the intro to the podcast? Yeah, it will be available very soon. Hopefully it's started by now, but if you're still hearing this, I don't know what's going on. And then we can have a podcast version of the podcast.

Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. Today we're going to do something unusual on Monkey Cage and not deliver a fatuous and juvenile introduction that runs the risk of trivialising science. Which is a pity. That's because virtually every politician is performing that service admirably. 2017 looks set to be the year of the people who know they are right, the year in which, with jowly certitude, feelings are elevated beyond evidence. But science is the

enemy of the certain. To paraphrase the Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, the scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty. And this experience is of very great importance. When a scientist doesn't know the answer to a problem, they are ignorant. When they have a hunch as to what the result is, they are uncertain. And when they are pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, they are still in some doubt.

Science, Feynman concludes, is a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, a way of thinking in which doubt is not to be feared, but welcomed and discussed. So, in celebration of the great value of getting things wrong, today we'll explore science's epic fails and how they lead to a deeper understanding of nature. Or, to paraphrase it, it's going to be called, yeah, even Professor Brian Cox is wrong, actually.

And it is true, I saw him say millions when he meant billions the other day and he looked like a right idiot. Anyway, you did, you were mocked mercilessly by that group from the Royal Society. So we are joined... It's very little different. ..and when they mock with a powdered wig... There's no difference in cosmology.

Millions, billions, trillions, many differences. It's a lot. How many stars are in the universe? The universe has existed for a lot of time. That just... You wouldn't be selling the shows abroad with that kind of thing. So we are joined by a panel of experts, or at least people who appear to be experts.

So they are... I'm Dr Adam Rutherford, and I'm a geneticist and writer and broadcaster. And the idea I'd most like to be scientifically verified, I think, is time travel. So maybe we could just rerun 2016. Maybe have Bowie back, you know, just for a bit. That'd be all right?

No, nonsense, it won't work. I'm just pointing out that time travelling to the past is not possible as far as we understand. Well, then I'm going to be wrong about it, but that's the whole point of this show, isn't it? Boom! Thanks, Rufus. I'm Professor Alice Roberts.

I'm an anatomist, author and broadcaster. I'm based at the University of Birmingham and I would like it to be proven that there would be a simple genetic switch that we could somehow change and humans could recover their gills and be able to breathe underwater equally as well as breathing in air. No, that's nonsense as well. Now, let's see if Brian can get the full hat trick

and crush the dreams of our final guest. My name's Rufus Hound. I do all your common or garden flavours of showing off. And the theory I would most like to be true is Everettian infinite kind of possibility the idea that every choice both choices are made and all we are is the end of the current branch but that those realities are permanently fracturing and that those realities are as closer than that to us than our own atoms and that you might be able to prise our reality open and step into a different reality.

Because rather than turning back the clock or breathing underwater, it would just be nice to find somewhere that was going better than this. And that is the only one that has an even tiny, tiny, infinitesimally small chance of being right. In fact, it probably

is right. The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. And this is our panel! Can I say, Rufus, that was very impressive. That delivery there shows why you were on the Just a Minute Christmas special. There was almost no, a little bit of hesitation, but the deviation, not at all. At least not in this particular universe. So we will start off with you, Rufus, which is in some ways what we're looking at tonight, I suppose, is reflecting on this idea, 2016, the new phrase of a post-fact world. Why do you think it is that we seem to have

an increasingly large group of people who are not keen on kind of an evidence-based world? They're very keen on going, this is the idea I wish to choose and it doesn't really matter what the evidence is that's against it. Because we would all rather have the comforting lie than the cold, ugly truth. And that is all it boils down to.

It's easier to appeal to people's feelings than it is to ask people to consider facts. I was watching, in preparation of this, a few TED Talks and things like that, and had the system of ignorance broken down into our perception of other people's

ignorance works in three levels. Initially, we assume people are just ignorant, and that if we give them the data, then they will agree with us. At the point we give them the data and they don't agree with us, we assume idiocy. Oh, God, we showed them the data and they don't agree with us, we assume idiocy. Oh, God, we showed them the evidence and they didn't agree.

Oh, God, look at this idiot. At the point that they still don't agree with us, having been called idiots, we assume they're evil. Oh, I gave them the evidence and the idiot wouldn't understand it. Oh, maybe he did understand it and is deliberately choosing not to understand it for their own evil ends. We would all rather have the comforting

lie because it's easier and so it's far easier to say to people, yes, well done, you're on the right track there than it is to say, I'm really sorry but most of the things you understand are wrong. Adam, if you want to pick up on that. Just after Rufus's brief therapy

session there, I think the real reason is we don't teach it. We don't teach uncertainty. We don't teach how we know and it is inherent to science, as the Feynman quote that Brian was reading at the beginning, that we have doubt and we have the ability to change our minds

and I think the true mark of a good scientist is one that changes his or her mind. Well done. Well, I almost said it's mind. To be honest, sometimes I do see scientists as, yes, it's a scientist. But we don't teach it. We don't teach it at school. It should be the absolute bedrock of what we teach children

about how we know stuff, how we know what is... how we describe reality. And it's not taught at any point during the curriculum at all. It's not only that we don't teach that, it's that we actively teach the exact opposite of that. Exactly, yes. Which is that if you're in a class and you get a bad grade, you have failed.

And how does that make you feel? It makes you feel sad and upset with yourself, and now you know that you feel it makes you feel sad and upset with yourself and now and now you know that you are a failing person so all we are taught about failure is how terrible it is not the one thing that really came to the forefront of my mind when i was asked to be here was is it benjamin franklin's quote of who invented the light bulb I'm very impressed by this. We've done just a minute and now we're on quote-unquote. This is going to be a medley of all of them.

Who was it? Edison. I think it was Edison. He was one of them. He did a lot of lightbulb-making things. Who said, I didn't fail at inventing the lightbulb, I successfully proved 99 ways not to do it, until I eventually found the one...

That underpins absolutely all science. In fact, until Edison, no-one could have ideas because there was nothing to appear above your head. So it was... Do you think it's an unnatural way of being? Because it's certainly, as you said, central to a scientific education, that being wrong is the means by which we learn.

And I think genuinely, I was thinking about this, I know we were talking about it earlier, that I'm delighted when I'm wrong in science because it means that I then know more about nature. And you kind of laugh, it sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? But I think that's a central part of the scientific training, certainly in research. I don't think it's unnatural.

I think it's about retaining a kind of childlike sense of playing with the world and accepting that some of the things you think about the world will turn out to be wrong and that you need to preserve that into adulthood. Well, the quote I read, actually, from Richard Feynman, it's from an essay called The Value of Science they wrote I think it was 1955 and his point was that the most valuable thing that science has given us is that thing that he described as a satisfactory philosophy

of ignorance that rather unnatural idea that in being shown to be wrong is an invaluable part of the process of learning about nature. And he felt that that was unnatural for people to celebrate being wrong. And that's really the most valuable part of a scientific education, is learning how to embrace that. It's also the most important part of the development of a scientific idea. So when you take the laws or the theories that have really stood the test of time, that's why they're the most robust form of an idea, not just in the sciences, but in all domains,

in all intellectual domains. So you take something like evolution by natural selection. Scientists have been spending 160 years trying to prove that wrong. And there have been details within what Darwin initially described which were wrong, which were fantastically wrong or amusingly wrong. But the central idea remains the same despite the fact that people have been trying to prove it wrong for more than one and a half centuries. And that's why it's a bloody good idea and that's what the scientific method delivers. It delivers robust ideas that are testable and subject to being wrong but the good ones survive that. There's an interesting example actually evolution because you have Darwin, you also have the competing ideas at the time, Lamarck, I'm thinking about as well. So perhaps you could talk a little bit about that,

those different views of the way that organisms become complex, if you like, and the tree of life branches, but then also how those ideas can come back into fashion again. So Darwin and Lamarck before him were both operating in a time when people didn't understand how traits were acquired or inherited. So they didn't really understand how particular characteristics of an organism could be passed on to offspring,

and it would be a long time before genetics came to the fore, and we started to understand that. So Lamarck suggested that actually traits that were acquired during a lifetime could be passed on to offspring. So for instance if a giraffe was trying really hard to reach branches higher up to get those leaves and grew a longer neck during its lifetime then that could be passed on to its offspring and the strong arms of a blacksmith, thank you very much, could again be passed on to the blacksmith's offspring, which I think now seems extraordinary to us

because there's a distinction between characteristics that you acquire during your lifetime and characteristics that are there in your genes, and those are the characteristics that you pass on to your offspring. But actually Darwin believed in soft inheritance as well. So, you know, we celebrate him for being right about natural selection, but as Adam said, he was wrong about a lot of things. And he didn't understand inheritance,

and he made room for soft inheritance, the idea that acquired characteristics could be passed from one generation to the next. We should say it's not surprising at the time, though, because the mechanism by which information is passed from generation to generation was 100 years away at that time, 1860s. And Darwin also thought that there would be a blending of characteristics between the parents as well.

He absolutely didn't understand that there were units of inheritance which we now know to be genes. But having said all of that, we have to be careful about dogma because we've got this interesting theory of epigenetics which has arrived in the last few years, which is still very contentious, but it raises the possibility... I don't think it's that contentious. It raises the possibility of at least some level

of acquired characteristics being passed from one generation to the next. I should say, for the radio listeners, I don't know how to describe Adam Rutherford's face when epigenetics was mentioned, but it was kind of a strange, contorted... I'd like a stab at it. Imagine...

LAUGHTER Imagine going for a wee in the woods and accidentally brushing a nettle. And not with your arm. Well, because then you'd have to pass on the slightly swollen arm to your children. So, epigenetics breaks down into two things, actually, and it's basically the fact that around the DNA there are other molecules which become modified,

and that affects whether genes are expressed or not, which makes a lot of difference to a cell. It explains quite fundamentally how an embryo develops in the womb because it explains how every single cell in your body has got the same genome in it. It will take possibly a couple of mutations here and there, but essentially the same genome. And yet some cells end up as spleen cells and some cells end up as bone cells and others end up as skin cells. You've got to be able to switch genes on and off. So epigenetics explains that. The more controversial aspect of it is that some of those modifications around the

genes are possibly heritable which means that things that happen to you during your lifetime could be passed on to your children without a change in the DNA itself so there was an interesting experiment with either rats or mice being exposed to the smell of acetophenone which apparently apparently smells of cherry blossom, and being electrocuted at the same time. It's a nasty experiment. And then the offspring of those rodents apparently expressed fear when they smelled the same cherry

blossom smell. And in fact, the offspring of those offspring as well. That explains something. That explains... My mouse won't go to Chekhov with me. And now, I've always wondered why. I inherited it from my mad scientist uncle. Now everything makes sense.

That's the most Radio 4 joke. Oh, come on, Chekhov, very mainstream, love. But it has to... Traits have to be permanently transmissible from one generation to the next in order for natural selection to act upon them. And there is no evidence for that in mice or humans or almost all eukaryotes no it doesn't matter because it changes the game it changes the game of natural selection it doesn't

if it slightly affects how your genes are being expressed in the next generation then it's changing how those genes are interacting with the environment. Only if that change is permanent and across the whole population. Right, so let's get... In terms of, as we're talking about when science is wrong or becomes wrong, so can we just get a little bit more in terms of the background of epigenetics is a very recent advance, isn't it? No, not really. Not really. And this is one of the reasons I make that face.

It is quite recent. My friend Brian discovered it. Not that Brian. Not that Brian. Not that Brian. Another Brian, Brian Turner at the University of Birmingham, discovered that what I thought when I was at medical school were just packaging proteins around DNA were a lot more than that and could actually be modified to turn genes on or switch genes off.

And that's all quite novel. He's only just been made a fellow in the Royal Society. We used to just call it gene regulation. You're absolutely right in describing this as the way the environment interacts with genetics, with our DNA, which doesn't change during a lifetime. But we just used to call it gene regulation.

And there are loads of different methods of gene regulation of which epigenetics is one. And I'm not saying it's not significant biologically. I am. I'm not confident that it has a significant effect on evolution. However, it does look like an attractive idea if you don't scrutinise it that well. So, I mean, this relates to...

Sorry. Rufus, sing something. That was quite... LAUGHTER Fly me to the moon! But the point is that I think there are ways of being wrong Fly me to the moon! But the point is that I think there are ways of being wrong which are interesting, because they help develop the idea within science,

and you can be wrong in an interesting way because that points you towards being less wrong the next time you do the same experiment or ask the same question. And then there are uninteresting ways of being wrong. Why is that the uninteresting way of being wrong? OK, it's uninteresting at this stage, at this stage in our understanding of genetics and heritability, because the experiments just haven't been done, right?

There isn't enough data to support the idea that epigenetics is a significant part of evolutionary development over time. Now, it may be that that does change over time, but at the moment, I just don't see the evidence for it, and there isn't a mechanism for it. So we're at a stage where we're looking at something which doesn't look right, isn't supported by the evidence,

and we don't have a mechanism for it. So that's the point where I sort of begin to lose interest in this. It's like string theory, isn't it, Brian? Well, it's interesting. I mean, it reminds me more of Fred Hoyle, the cosmologist who many people think should have got the Nobel Prize for

showing or proposing that heavy elements are cooked in the hearts of stars, so nucleosynthesis. He didn't get the Nobel Prize, and some people speculate the reason for that is he supported a different theory of cosmology called the steady state theory of cosmology, which is the idea that as the universe expands new matter is created so that means that you can have an eternal universe that's expanding but there's a key prediction that

the universe will always look the same so if you look out to distant galaxies 10 billion light years away you would see a universe that looks exactly the same as it does today. So you can have an eternal universe. And the reason that's interesting from what Adam said is that I look back in the 1970s, just after we discovered the afterglow of the Big Bang, the so-called cosmic microwave background radiation. A very famous physicist, Stephen Weinberg, said that the steady state theory is a good theory. It is a great theory. It is most likely wrong. We now know it is wrong, as far as we can tell. But in the 1970s, it was looking like it was going to be wrong. But the reason he defined it as a good theory

is because it made very specific predictions which could be tested. In this case, if you look out to the most distant objects you can see, you see a universe, you're looking back in time, you see a universe that looks exactly the same as it does today, and we know that the universe doesn't look exactly the same if you look out to great distances and therefore back to earlier times, 13 billion years ago or so. So in that sense, I suppose, is that what you mean by a good theory?

You described things you're not interested in. Do you mean really theories that don't make predictions? The flip side of that is that you have a theory that can be shown to be wrong, but if it makes specific predictions you can test, it is good even though we find out it is incorrect. Because in that case, epigenetics is a good theory. And I'm sounding like a massive proponent of it,

and I'm quite dubious about it. I am quite dubious about it, but I do think it's interesting. And I think even if it's not massively significant, if it just slightly changes the game and it slightly modifies the game, that's interesting in itself. And I don't think we should throw it out just yet. Again, interesting ways of being wrong in

science are more prosaic examples than the steady state. A couple of years ago, do you remember there was a big hoo-ha about a publication of a paper which suggested that neutrinos travelled faster than light? Now, this was top quality science because what they did, what the researchers in Italy did, is say, we've got two possible outcomes here. Either pretty much everything we know about physics is wrong, or we're wrong. And so they opened it out and they released the data and they said, we can't find out what's wrong with it, you guys go and do it.

And you guys did go and do it and it turned out it was a loose wire at some point. Now, that is the strength of science. That's the strength of science to say, here's a result which we don't understand, we think it's probably wrong, you go and work out what it is. And, you know, they were right, they were wrong. It's a key point, you publish it.

Another very good example is a friend of mine, Brian Schmidt, who discovered, as a key point, you publish it. Another very good example is a friend of mine, Brian Schmidt, who discovered, as a post-doc, he discovered that the universe appeared to be accelerating in its expansion by looking at the light from distant supernova explosions. And at the time, he felt that that was nonsense, that it couldn't have been right. And he tried everything. And he said to me that eventually he thought,

I cannot see what I've done wrong, so I'll'll publish it and i probably will not get a job i will not get hired that's the end of my scientific career but but i'm honest as a scientist i will publish it and let others tell me where i went wrong he got the nobel prize because he was right and that measurement was confirmed by the next group that looked at it but it's that honesty, and that's the key point, isn't it? It's about intellectual honesty. This may well be wrong, but I'm going to publish it because if it's shown to be wrong, we have learnt something as a community about nature.

The very nature of that kind of science, it seems to me, is that you develop models and then those models are refined. So Einstein was refining a model proposed by Newton, even though Newtonian physics and mathematics was all that was required to get man to the moon. So that model is still valid, but then you refine the model and as it holds up, it advances. There are so few certainties

that actually science relishes finding something that's wrong because at least you are certain that that is wrong. Whereas even when you find the thing that is right, you're not entirely certain that that is the full picture of it being right. So failing is itself a certainty which science is so entirely unused to in its success. That's really important, that failure is a certainty, essentially. I mean, gravity, models of gravity, theories of gravity are very good examples.

So Newton's was... There was no data, no experimental evidence beyond a tiny discrepancy with the orbit of Mercury, but nobody really paid attention. There's very little that caused Einstein to build a new theory of gravity. It was kind of an aesthetic judgment in a way, which I think is quite wonderful. I could make this more elegant. Yeah, but Einstein is still a model. We know the theory itself predicts its own downfall, for example, in the center of black holes. So we know there's a better theory of gravity,

or at least Einstein's theory is not complete. I think that idea that there are no absolute truths... I wonder if I can ask you, actually, in biology... In physics, it's clear, apart from possibly something called the second law of thermodynamics, which means that everything gets worse over time. Apart from that... Everything tends to disorder, I should say. Entropy always increases.

Apart from that, I think they're all models. In biology, perhaps not quite... Evolution, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, that's probably right, isn't it? I think we can be confident in saying that's more than a model, it's a description of nature. I would say it's closer to being a law than a model. Yeah, it is a law, really,

and it's a shame that it was described as a theory, because then you get idiots coming up to me every week saying oh but evolution is just a theory well you don't understand what a theory is but there's also you don't understand the whole title of the book which is the theory of evolution by natural selection yeah yeah so it's not that evolution's a theory we have really strong laws or theories or strong ideas in biology, and there are four grand unifying theories in biology, and they're very unlikely to be overturned substantially. They're always going to be refined.

Different from physics, though, all of those four laws, which are cell theory, evolution by natural selection, universal genetics, and chemiosmosis. Love saying chemiosmosis on radio. Did you say them again? So what are the four laws? Cell theory. All life is made of cells and cells can only come from other cells. Viruses is a different discussion and not for now.

And also, theories about the origin of life suggest that... With one exception, and that's the origin of life. Because that's probably predate... The genetic code has to predate the cell, doesn't it? I'm not sure it does. We did the origin of life about seven series

ago. We don't have to go over it again. It was a long time ago. Somebody quickly iPlayer it. Okay, so all life is cellular. Then you've got evolution by natural Selection, 1859 Darwin. You've got Universal Genetics, which is... And Wallace, and actually 1858. If you like.

This is getting like a Doris Day and Rock Hudson film between you two. How's it going to end? That was revenge for that earlier slip of the tongue, wasn't it? Then you've got Universal Genetics, all living things are encoded in DNA, which uses the same code and the same molecules. And then you've got chemiosmosis, which is that all living things are powered by the same mechanism,

which is effectively proton gradients. Now, the establishment of those four principles of biology, which appear to be universal, happened just over 100 years between the middle of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th century. The difference between biology and physics is that what they then revealed is, even though they're indisputably correct, they revealed a picture of complexity that was unpredicted, that it turned out there are so many caveats and there are so many messy bits in biology that we haven't...

Biology didn't end with the description of those four rules. It just began because we established what we didn't really know. So the question was really about models. All models are wrong. This comes from climate science, really, when people say all models are wrong, but some are useful. And I think that's a really, really important principle for science, and definitely including biology. All of the things we do are effectively modelling how the real world works, or how life works. And they're all wrong to some degree, but the good ones are the useful ones. I want to carry on with that thread. I want to

pick you up on one thing with the question, though, because you said they're indisputably wrong, those points, the genetic code. Indisputably correct. Right, right. Good Lord. It's these little steps. But there is speculation, for example. I know Paul Davis and others speculate

that if there were a form of life on Earth which had a different biochemistry, different genetic code, and therefore didn't interact with our life that we see, we wouldn't recognise it. I mean, is that... That's possible, at least. I think that's... I object to it indisputably. I think that's on the border of interesting wrongness and uninteresting wrongness.

And the reason I think it tends towards the uninteresting wrongness and uninteresting wrongness. And the reason I think it tends towards the uninteresting wrongness is it's a nice idea, but there's just no requirement for it and there's no evidence for it. So we don't need that to explain anything about the observed natural world. As soon as we do, as soon as we see something which fits into that category of not looking like the life that we know, then brilliant. You know, everything changes. But we know then brilliant you know that that's that everything changes um but we don't need it it's the basis of pseudoscience isn't it it's kind of

but there is other stuff out there it's like yeah probably but we haven't seen it yet yeah it's so much from russell's teapot isn't it but it could well be a teapot in orbit around venus for all we know but uh yeah if that eye scopes couldn't detect it we mentioned fred holm i don't get too far away from you. Some people I was talking to earlier said, oh, well, he was a bad scientist. But how do we define, you know, as someone who could have won the Nobel Prize,

how do you feel, Rufus, about the idea of someone... Do they become a bad scientist or do they merely have some areas of their knowledge where they're into bad science? There is things that we would consider to be bad science. I'm going to see if I can make Brian's head explode with this sentence. Of course, science is really just a branch of philosophy. Especially physics.

Especially physics, yeah. That's why they sound alike. It's philosophy with fact. Yeah. No, well, I say that to make Brian's head explode. I don't actually mean it. No, but you should mean it. But what I do mean is to test anything like the nature of the universe

or the physical world around us, you have to start with the idea, and therefore there has to be an idea in place, or you have to have read about somebody else's idea or somebody else's theory or somebody else's proof, then have an idea yourself about how that could be tested. So there is a feat of imagination at play throughout everything that science offers. And, you know, as a fan of science fiction,

there will be no short of Star Trek fans who will say, of of course the only reason we even have mobile phones is because they were communicators in star trek a whole generation of kids grew up going wouldn't that be cool and generation upon generation built themselves to closer to the point where they were like i'm gonna make this happen i'm gonna we're gonna have community this is gonna be amazing guys and the reason that i think we will end up with laser guns is, you know, because of Star Wars. You know, it starts as a feat of imagination and then what is known and what is practical is applied to the idea.

He's not a bad scientist because he clung... He was stubborn, but human. That doesn't make you a bad scientist. Doing science badly makes you a bad scientist, I think. A refusal to acknowledge new evidence also makes you a stubborn person, not necessarily a bad scientist. But if your field is science and your stubborn nature

means that you keep proposing a model that is widely by that point disproved it's it is you look bad rather than being bad at science but i would also say centuries before cogito ergo sum augustine proposed fallow ergo sum which is i therefore i am and so really the problem with science as we know it is that it's conducted by humans. If science was done not by humans, then you would remove the human insistence on failing. Science as a process, as a cold logical process, cannot fail.

Test it, look at the evidence, refine, refine retest that's how progress is made the places where science in inverted commas is bad is not because science failed it's because it's human beings who have to do the science and we fail but that is what being human is this really reminds me and the context of it really reminds me, of what happened when Darwin published On the Origin of Species. And Richard Owen, who is a fantastic biologist and the first curator of the Natural History Museum, was up in arms, absolutely up in arms about this new theory.

And this was bizarre because Richard Owen himself had got very, very close, very, very close to working it out for himself as a younger man. And then he'd kind of reverted and gone back to a much more entrenched position. And he could not accept the mutability of species. So it is rather like Hoyle in his steady-state universe. For Richard Owen, this was heresy

to suggest that species could change over time. And he wrote an absolutely damning review on the origin of species and said, you know, Mr Darwin has given us fantastic things with this book. He's told us things that we never knew about pigeons and barnacles before. Well, I wanted to just briefly... Because, again, this seems to be a problem, which is very often when people are arguing against the idea of evolution as a whole, they'll go, oh, Darwin got this wrong,

as if there has not been a constant movement by other scientists to refine, to change. So, again, getting it out into the public in a way that is not damaging science itself, but which is saying there are wrong things. Some of the greatest scientists... I mean, Einstein, that great thing, you know, the last 20 years of his life was arguing against his own ideas. Yeah, you theory. Yeah. That was... I mean, he was obsessed with it. But once quantum turned up, trying to marry that, you know,

and God doesn't play dice and all of that, yeah. And that was in the period where he was most known. It's absolutely essential, though, isn't it? It's absolutely crucial to to trust in in scientists that they are honest and and that we're honest about them so we have to be honest about Darwin and say that he got some things wrong yeah but he was a genius when it came to uncovering the mechanism for evolution and also he didn't come up with the idea of evolution people have been talking about evolution and thinking about evolution for for decades and even centuries and even millennia actually before that so the

idea that species could change over time had been there he didn't come up with that idea but he explained crucially how it could possibly happen and that was his that was his stroke of genius but there were other things that he was wrong about the thing which i find quite interesting is that we we you know we kind of laugh about Lamarck and go, oh, what an idiot to think that, you know, acquired characteristics could be passed down from one generation to another. And we forget all of the rest of his body of work. And he was an absolutely brilliant biologist.

And also, it has a lot to do with the fact that he's French. So, in France, Lamarck is a hero. And they go, oh, never mind about that acquired characteristic thing. No, no, that doesn't... Look at most of what he did. He was a brilliant scientist. But here in England, we go, no, he's French, and he was an idiot because of that.

No, but at the time, though, the idea... Brexit! Brexit! Brexit! Give this a pause, because we won't be able to talk about that. That idea, though, at the time, I mean, the idea that there were very high trees with leaves or whatever at the top of the tree and therefore there'd be some animal that would stretch and stretch and try and get to the top of the tree,

I don't think that's a ridiculous idea. It's not at all. It's a good scientific theory that's testable. It's testable and it's all based on observation and that's one of the things we haven't mentioned so far, that the root of the idea that Rufus was talking about earlier is by observing how things actually are. And Darwin was a genius for many reasons,

but so much of The Origin of Species can, and it pains me to say this, be quite a dull book in some places. There's lots of lovely stuff about pigeons. Yeah, but it's long descriptions of his own descriptions and observations of what pigeons are actually like as part of this huge... His one big argument is what he called it to build up to the mechanism that he describes

in the last paragraph, the good bit. It's not as dull as the Barnacle book. That was Steve Jones, who is a great writer about Darwin. Descent of Man is probably my favourite. But I said, Steve, is there any Darwin I shouldn't read? He said, don't read his books about barnacles. He became overly obsessed. And you kind of read it and you go,

yeah, that is really barnacle obsession. I already know what pigeons are like. They're really cool. Cut that. But again, the problem is that you've got human beings involved. So people want the... Oh, God, my mind goes... Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

Heisenberg's walking around like, Ah, yeah! Heisenberg in the house! They don't just want it called the Uncertainty Principle and some guy suggested it and it turned out to be right. Like, you want to be attached to the thing of like i smashed this i'm dimitri mendeleev and that table is all me what what you know like we're gonna call this thing mendelevium because i'm here you know like the problem is that human beings are involved. And so science, in terms of purity of thought, you know, in that kind of Greek,

let's make statues of people in togas and put them on pedestals and have other people look up at them and their names written in, you know, their Greek nickname. Oh, yeah, that's proper scientists. But they're humans, and they do want to argue, and they do want to be right, and they do want to receive the credit. And moreover,

even if you don't want to go into the pantheon of the greats, you certainly don't want to throw yourself under a bus. I mean that figuratively, but also actually, because they've done the experiment, the results came back, and if you throw yourself under a bus, bad. I don't think you're right.

No, but the problem is that science... I'm with Rufus, I'll back you up on this one. No, no, because I do think, and I'm interested in what you both think as well, but I do think that the process of learning, particularly to be a research scientist, is you understand, and through bitter experience, actually, initially, you find that you're almost always wrong. Very, very, very rarely

are you not even correct, because you also understand philosophically there's no such thing as being correct. It's just you're developing better and better models, and there will be better models that come along, and new knowledge will be generated. That's the job, because the job is to stand on the edge of the known and explore, so you know there's knowledge which is yet to be discovered. But I think that... It's trained out of you.

I think, ultimately, a good scientist is someone whose ego, professional ego, is ultimately removed. I think the best scientist... But that's why you've sat me on this table on my own. It's because you are scientists and you have that understanding and hearing you talk about failure is absolutely part of a healthy philosophical model that enables you and empowers you to do the things that you do.

The whole of the rest of the world, who aren't scientists, which is almost everyone... LAUGHTER ..doesn't think of it that way. And when tenure's being handed out, when funding is being handed out, they are being handed out to the rock stars and the sexy scientists with the sexy theories

and who are viewed and judged to have success. This is a whole other... Because I agree with that. I think our system is entirely wrong and runs against the purity of science. Exactly so. So that's my point. As much as scientists have an understanding that, of course, failure is part of the job and to not fail is not to try and therefore why bother at all

asking somebody who has spent millions of pounds of somebody else's money on a private thing to go no absolutely no idea still we tried a thousand things none of them are right we're we're we are still in the dark we we have lit a tiny area of the of the void what's interesting though is as you said that very few people are scientists which is true professional scientists but feinman that i quoted him at the start that the point of his essay on the value of science was to he pointed out that science is this satisfactory philosophy of ignorance and you develop that and learn and understand what that is then he drew the parallel between that and democracy and said, we know, actually, that that's what a democracy is.

It's the acceptance that you don't know how to run a society, so you build a trial-and-error system, and every four or five years you throw people out and get new people. So, actually, we do know that there aren't absolute answers to complex questions in democracies, because that's why we have a democracy. I'm going to back Rufus up on this a little bit, because this idea that just scientists are going,

hey, yeah, I just failed again. Never mind, Gary's done really well. It's not like that. I've been in the green room of science conferences and they are as catty as any comedy club. Oh, do you see the equation he used? It was so hack. I mean, there is...

No, no, no. I know what you're saying, but equally at the same time, I think this kind of... This beautiful karmic, you know, nature of constant doubt and error is in one way very beautiful, but again, it depends on... The difference, though, is that there is a measure, there's a universally agreed-upon measure against which you're tested, which is nature,

and its evidence and its experimentation and its observation. So everybody knows that there is a framework against which you can be judged. Whereas in politics, for example, what would be very useful would be people to lay out a framework with a policy and say, well, this is the framework against which my policy, the effectiveness of otherwise, will be measured. Then you would have a scientific approach to policy. But there are massive flaws in the way that we carry out science. Correctness, I rather advise, will be measured. Then you would have a scientific approach to policy.

But there are massive flaws in the way that we carry out science. And, you know, we talk about peer review and publication being crucial, but we also know that there's huge publication bias and you're much more likely to get a positive result published than a negative one. And that has, you know, massive real-world implications if you're talking about drugs trials and things where you only ever get the positive results being published. it skews things and it can mean the difference in saving somebody's life i think lots of people's lives so so there are these you know real problems

which are which are to do with human nature and how we reward things and um recognizing that science is collective it's a collective endeavor and that it's not about heroes and it's not about breakthroughs and it's about big teams of people working together so what do you think are the best i mean again in terms of what what can we non-scientists people like ruse and me learn in terms of when we see sometimes a very dogmatic world you know the people hold more and more tightly to their you know social media beliefs whatever it might be, what can we learn to go, right, OK, you are allowed to fail with an idea. You are allowed to be wrong. I watched a talk by one of the people that works at Google, X,

and it's now just called X, I think, who said enthusiastic scepticism is not the enemy of boundless enthusiasm. It unlocks the potential of every idea. Our mission, for those of us who aren't scientists, should probably be to be doing a better PR job on the notion of failure, because that will help scientists and help progress, but will also help all of us.

Because every time we mock failure, what we're doing is mocking trying. And we're creating a society or a way of being with one another where anybody who is prepared to put their head above the parapet anybody who is prepared to try is less likely to do so and less likely to make changes and less likely to improve things because we are essentially chimpanzees in shoes and And we are so governed by fear that the idea of standing up and of trying is already so terrifying

that the more we demonise failure, the less likely we are not just to progress in terms of science, but socially, politically, with one another, in our relationships, in our capacity to evolve as people, as human beings, as a species. So it's one thing to talk about it as a part of science, but maybe, if you're listening to this and you're

not a scientist, maybe spend some time talking with people you love about why failure is noble too, outside of science. Take delight in being wrong, but don't deliberately keep being wrong. Don't overly encourage. Look, I smashed the thing which I knew was wrong.

I delight in it. You know, we've got to work... Look, we've really reached the end now. So we asked the audience a question as well, and that question was, what piece of science do you most wish was wrong? And they include... Scientology.

Thanks very much, Tom. I wasn't expecting you in. The first law of thermodynamics, because my wife's feet and hands are very cold in bed. The laws of thermodynamics, I'd love to meet a ghost, which is a reference to our Christmas programme where I said the laws of thermodynamics rule out the existence of ghosts.

You should have seen Twitter that day. There's a lot of ghosts tweeting me. Are you saying I don't exist? The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Then I would know, just as my wife does, how wrong I always am. Entropy, because then things could only get better.

Yes! It always gets in there in the end. Thank you very much to our panel, who were Alice Roberts, Adam Rutherford and Rusevus Hound. Now, at the end of last week's programme, which was meant to be about puzzles, but turned out mainly to be a very lengthy debate about whether wolves eat cabbages. This is true, when you hear it, you'll find out.

Richard Wiseman set a problem. This was the. When you hear it, you'll find out. Richard Wiseman set a problem. This was the problem Brian and I argued for half an hour about. The problem was, you bump into someone in the street, they have two children. One is a boy. What are the chances that the other is also a boy? Rufus, what do you think? What are the chances

that the other one is also a boy? Yeah. 50-50. Well, Rufus, you're in for a surprise or not, depending on who you believe on this answer. No, it's how the question is posed. Yeah, it is. There'll be a lot of issues on this. We'll allow social media to send

their fury. And the answer is there are four possible combinations when someone has two children. Boy, boy, girl, girl, boy, girl, girl, boy. We know that the girl, girl combination didn't happen because one of the kids is a boy, so we're left with boy, boy, boy, girl, girl, boy. girl, girl, boy. We know that the girl, girl combination didn't happen because one of the kids is a boy, so we're left with boy, boy, boy, girl, girl, boy. These three combinations are equally likely and two of them involve the other kid being a girl,

so the chance of the other one being a boy is one third. Right. No, but it's very similar to that other one, isn't it? No, I'm going to allow them to continue talking about this. Thank you very much for listening. It can be 50%. Goodbye. Goodbye.

continue talking about this. Thank you very much for listening. Goodbye. Podcast, podcast, podcast, podcast version of the podcast, podcast. Brian doesn't even know that you have actually now listened to the whole of the show. And this is all he's been doing for the last 47 minutes. And it's not going to end for a while either. This is my life. pull apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply.

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