Who Cares About Evidence?

A close contact of mine who studies the sociology of science recently commented that, when the data do not support the researcher's hypothesis, all too often it is the data that are rejected. In the political realm, logic and evidence are routinely subordinated to belief and ideology or, in the more elegant words of Mary Wollstonecraft: "But what a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis!" Science, by the usual definitions, does not appear to come naturally to human beings and most of us struggle with it in school. While we've put men on the moon, it took us tens of thousands of years to accomplish this. Moreover, we want the world to be like…the way we want it to be. This is understandable, especially when science is shrouded in mumbo-jumbo and math, which most of us also hate.