excerpts from "Promises, Promises" By Stuart Blackman http://www.the-scientist.com/
Ill-judged predictions and projections can be embarrassing at best
and, at worst, damaging to the authority of science and science policy.
Scientific authorities have predicted the end of the world and
civilization as we know them at the hand of pandemics or environmental
catastrophe. And yet we are still here, in defiance of Thomas
Malthus’s eighteenth-century warnings about overpopulation and
ecologist Paul Ehrlich’s prophesy in his 1968 book The Population Bomb
that “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will
starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
Of course, scientists have a strong incentive to make bold predictions
- namely, to obtain funding, influence, and high-profile publications.
But while few will be disappointed when worst-case forecasts fail to
materialize, unfulfilled predictions - of which we’re seeing more and
more - can be a blow for patients, policy makers, and for the
reputation of science itself.
This is not only a waste of financial and legal resources, she says,
but it serves to narrow social and scientific possibilities. Indeed,
she says, a promissory culture of science and technology can detract
from the essence of scientific investigation: “If we already know what
scientists must produce, then it’s not science—it’s called engineering.”
LEARN FROM HISTORY
According to Nik Brown, just heeding the lessons of past predictions
and promises - both the successes and the failures - can help
scientists avoid what he calls “institutional amnesia,” in which they
deliver serial disappointments.
Some famous (and infamous) predictions
YEAR
PREDICTION
RIGHT OR WRONG?
1869
Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table left spaces for elements that he
predicted would be discovered. Three of these (gallium, scandium, and
germanium) were subsequently discovered within his lifetime.
RIGHT
1964
Physicists predict the existence of the Higgs Boson. If CERN’s Large
Hadron Collider finds no evidence for the existence of this massive
fundamental particle, working models of the material universe might
require a fundamental rethink.
PENDING
1965
Intel cofounder Gordon E. Moore predicts that the number of
transistors on a computer chip would double every two years. The
industry has so far managed to keep up (despite many predictions over
the years about the law’s imminent demise).
RIGHT
1968
Entomologist Paul Ehrlich predicts that hundreds of millions of people
will starve to death in the next two decades.
WRONG
2002
At the website longbets.org, astronomer Sir Martin Rees, president of
the Royal Society, predicts that “By 2020, bioterror or bioerror will
lead to one million casualties in a single event.” Also at Long Bets,
entrepreneurial engineer Ray Kurzweil bets $10,000 that by 2029 a
computer will have passed the Turing Test for machine intelligence.
PENDING
2003
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory sponsored GeneSweep, a sweepstakes on
the number of human genes. While bids averaged around 60,000 genes, it
was eventually won by a bid of 25,947—the lowest of the hundreds
received.
WRONG
2007
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 4th Assessment Report
projects that global surface air temperatures will increase by between
1.1 and 6.4°C over preindustrial levels by the end of the century.
PENDING
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