"Facts". *pffft*

As I mentioned over on Little Elijah, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has revised its Child Growth Standards to replace standards that have been in use since the 1970s. These old standards were apparently based on a small number of children from the USA and provided a measure of growth for formula-fed babies, who apparently grow much faster than babies who have been breastfed.

So, for over 30 years, parents around the world have been pressured to fatten up their babies to meet this standard that in the end seems to me to have been unreliable and unrepresentative. Who knows how many babies over this period of time have been over fed to meet this "ideal", setting them up for any number of health problems in the future? I wonder if there any plans to see if the level of obesity in the Western world can be linked in anyway to things like this...

The WHO report has once again got me thinking about "scientific fact". Ultimately in my opinion, science and scientific fact is just as much a social construct as any other field of human endeavour. I understand the concept that scientific thought is supposed to be developed as part of a trial and error process, building upon the work of predecessors. Good science should be not so much an assertion of truth but a demonstration of what is likely and what has been proven to not be true at a set point in time.

So much research is built upon "black boxes". By black boxes I mean something that has been accepted as true and therefore no longer needs to be explained or justified. For example, you might argue that 4x4 = 16 without having to previously prove that 2x2 = 4 because this is already readily accepted. I don't really have a problem with the concept of black boxes. It's an efficient way of expanding upon previous thought without having to do it over.

However, just how is something black boxed in the first place? Generally, it would appear that for something to be considered credible, it needs to be published in peered journals as well as be accepted by a broader component of the scientific community. I am usually uncomfortable at the thought of something being left up peer assessment as I feel that its a process that is vulnerable to self-reinforcing behaviour. I think it's just human nature that you will agree with something that you already believe and will be more critical of something that you don't believe. I fail to see why scientists who do peer review are considered to be immune from this. They're still human after all. If something isn't acceptable or palatable, it's less likely to become a black box in the future.

Anything radical or new is likely to be met with great skepticism at first, and while it might eventually become accepted canon, for a period of time it would not be considered to be "fact" or "true". I can only imagine how theories like Chaos Theory or String Theory were greeted.

Of course, the key concept here is theory. Science is meant to be about theory - hypotheses and either disproving the hypotheses or proving that for now, they hold up. Too many times these theories are dressed up as facts and treated as the truth by the wider population.

The other thing that bugs me about science is that you can't take research on face value. Further judgments need to be made about who has conducted the research, who has overtly funded the research and who has covertly funded research. Is the researcher dependent on funding grants from a particularly body or organisation? Could a fear of offending the funding body (whether it be a government, corporation, NGO or some other source) and losing a source of funding influence the outcome, consciously or unconsciously? Research supporting global warming funded by an environmental NGO is just as suspect as research against global warming funded by a consortium of energy utilities or oil companies.

Maybe I'm just rambling but fact and truth aren't all they are cracked up to be...

-s