Arete

In the post of mine that Anilkumar replied to I listed the various ways that scientists do consider new ideas - e.g. reviewing papers, conferences, workshops, student mentorship, etc etc, etc. In my experience, considering new ideas is such a big part of being in science that you have to make relatively quick decisions as to what is worth perusing and what isn't. If you hit a fundamental flaw in an idea, or find a glaring lack of recognition for existing data, you move on pretty quickly. The specific objection Anilkumar had was that I brought up that I generally disregard unsolicited emails from people I don't know. It's a big red flag, as generally research ideas are valuable - so broadcasting them widely to people you don't know is kind of like having someone give you free money - you're skeptical from the outset. If I open said email and the first sentence makes little or no sense, it gets deleted without further evaluation. Anilkumar seemed to think that was unjust and unscientific. I disagree - you are not being unjust by picking and choosing which hypothesis is worth evaluation, and it's not a scientist's job to carefully evaluate every nutbag garbled email claiming to revolutionize relativity, or evolution, etc. If their ideas were worthy, the author would/should have evaluated them carefully and presented them in a more formal format than a poorly structured, un-proofread email. If you can't be bothered to make more effort with your revolutionary idea's presentation, why does a given scientist "owe" you careful consideration? If it contains fundamental conceptual flaws, why does the scientist owe you careful explanation when basic research of available data would contradict your hypothesis? Whilst serendipity undoubtedly plays a role in all human endeavors, I disagree - you don't make a scientific discovery through dumb luck. Our lab doesn't have a bunch of scientists randomly pipetting reagents into tubes in the hope that something will eventually happen that we can publish. You start with an idea, you formulate a hypothesis, determine an experimental approach, design an experiment/sampling regime which minimizes bias, you carry it out and evaluate your results. Successfully conducting such a procedure is a deliberate action requiring planning, determination, experience, intelligence and a sprinkling of good fortune. Characterizing such endeavors as "sheer plain stumbling, feeling around, trial-and-error rewarded by plain accident in most cases" is like saying an Olympic athlete won because they simply got lucky. Sure, the weather being to your advantage and the other guy getting over a cold are hypothetical serendipitous occurrences which contribute to success, but dedicated training, determination, nutrition, natural ability are critical to success.

Many insects navigate by the light of the moon. By keeping the moon's reflected light at a constant angle, the insects can maintain a steady flight path and a straight course. A point source of light like a candle or a light bulb radiates light on all sides, so if an insect confuses the light from the point source for moonlight, the insect can't keep the light at a constant angle, as it does with the moon. As it attempts to navigate a straight path, it ends up caught in an endless spiral dance around the point light source. http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-ento-120709-144852 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/zoology/2012/238591/

I have a bottle of Lincoln County Lightning in my stock - it's not that bad If you're a beginner homebrewer I'll assume you used an can of extract, rather than a full mash? These kits are hopped, so I imagine trying to distill an extract beer wort would make a pretty nasty tasting whiskey.

Some reptiles are vivparous, and have allantoplacentae - primitive placental organs. These are interesting from an evo-devo perspective in how vertebrates evolved from an egg laying state to a live bearing state. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jez.1402660508/abstract http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16850472 An oviparous egg does not have a placenta in the traditional sense however, so what you saw would not have been aligator placentas: i.e.

Dependent on which country you live in, distilling spirits without a licence whether for commercial or personal use is illegal (e.g. the US, UK, Australia Canda...http://homedistiller.org/intro/legal) and therefore against board rules to discuss. It's also dangerous without the proper knowledge/equipment and you could end up killing yourself and anyone who drinks your product. If you're new at home brewing, I'd work up to partial/full mashes and forget about distillation. What sort of brew setup are you using at the moment?

http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PAR-12-156.html#_Section_III._Eligibility "By the time of award, the individual must be a citizen or a non-citizen national of the United States or have been lawfully admitted for permanent residence (i.e., possess a currently valid Permanent Resident Card USCIS Form I-551, or other legal verification of such status)" H1B visas do not count as permanent residency, nor do J1 visas, so foreign national postdocs are ineligible, unless you independently qualify for a green card. You could apply for a green card after 5 years of holding an H1B, but by that stage you'd have been out of your degree too long to qualify for the postdoc.

Totally. A major issue I have with the current system is the impossibility of getting your ideas funded as a postdoc, especially a foreign postdoc. There no NIH or NSF platforms which would fund a proposal I wrote with me as the PI. This means that if I have an idea I really want to persue, I have to hand it over to a tenured professor to act as PI, even if I write the grant. This gives them curatorial control over both the project and the funding, leaving the postdoc who thought of the idea extremely vulnerable. In an absolute worst case scenario, a PI could let the postdoc write a grant, then choose to not hire that postdoc for the project and leave them out in the cold. I've been lightly scorched on a grant I wrote, and I know many postdocs who have been burned by PI's on grants that were the postdoc's idea - ranging from funding being spent on other projects, to core components being farmed out to other lab members as the PI sees fit as the demands of running the PI's lab and facilitating the postdoc's project collide. It's a system which actively discourages young scientists from persuing independent lines of research in academic settings which I find extremely frustrating.

There is a supposed shortage of scientists in the US too: http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/11209/title/Ominous-Statistics-Foretell-Drastic-Shortage-Of-Scientists-----/ http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2074024,00.html This is based largely on the fact that many postdocs in the US - like myself are foriegn nationals on H1B "specialty occupation" visas, and subsequently "taking jerbs from 'muricans" to paraphrase South Park. That, coupled with rapid advances in STEM research in China, means that, for similar reasons a lot of developed nations are saying that on paper there is a shortage of scientists in their countries. Of course the simle solution for politicians is to teach more science in schools and pump out more science graduates: "“When students excel in math and science, they help America compete for the jobs and industries of the future,” said President Obama. “That’s why I’m proud to celebrate outstanding students at the White House Science Fair, and to announce new steps my Administration and its partners are taking to help more young people succeed in these critical subjects." - Obama 2012 http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/02/07/president-obama-host-white-house-science-fair The issue, of course runs much deeper and the need for more STEM graduates is largely a fallacy: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/06/scientist_shortage_is_a_myth_.html The way the system is set up, large sucessful research groups are reliant on cheap labor in the form of postdocs to suceed in research - and this is true across the developed world. This has lead to a rapid incease in the number of newly minted PhD degrees to fuel the demand for cheap, qualified staff. While in theory there should be a swathe of jobs opening up as baby boomer professors retire, they are inadequate to accomodate the increased number of graduates. Industry is also not absorbing them, as outsourcing to developing nations like China, India, etc is more cost effective (see above articles) This is happening in the UK: http://tomhartley.posterous.com/r-e-s-p-e-c-t http://www.fiercepharma.com/story/glaxos-uk-plant-keeps-inhaler-production-country/2012-06-26 Switzerland http://www.fiercepharma.com/story/astrazeneca-cuts-1150-us-jobs-adds-china/2011-12-08 and Germany http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-18/takeda-plans-to-reduce-europe-u-s-workforce-by-2-800-jobs-in-three-years.html

Nope. Many EU countries are doing considerably worse than the US in terms of scientific funding rates and cut backs. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/23/us-eu-budget-science-idUSBRE8AM0N420121123 http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2012/11/eu-scientists-research-fight-budget-cuts I'm pretty sure CharonY and I am definitely not trying to dicourage you from something you really want to do - but it is important to know the landscape for post PhD employment before you decide to go into it. I've seen a lot of very disillusioned graduates who were expecting a job to be waiting on the other side of their PhD only to find themselves amongst swarms of other postdocs in a competitive, sometimes soul sucking culture of being used as cheap labor in academia, and without easily obtainable empolyment in other sectors unless they retrain - so it's important to know why you want a PhD and not see it as an "end of the rainbow - pot of gold waiting for me" scenario.

The use of "theory" in science reflects scientific thinking - no answer is definitive, and all conclusions are subject to change based on new evidence or better interpretation of existing evidence. As Phi states, what you're encountering is a basic misunderstanding of how science works. It won't be fixed with a replacement as the replacement would still have to reflect the underlying lack of unchanging confirmation a scientific concept entails. Some people are just uninformed, some people can't find a seemingly ephemeral answer to a question satisfying ("I don't want a theory, I want an answer!"), and some will exploit a percieved weakness regardless of its actual validity (Your "It's just a theory" creationists). You are never going to satisfy persons 2 or 3, so concentrate on educating person 1, and ignore the others

Nope. Here's a sobering read on the current STEM PhD job market: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-pushes-for-more-scientists-but-the-jobs-arent-there/2012/07/07/gJQAZJpQUW_story.html "The pharmaceutical industry once was a haven for biologists and chemists who did not go into academia. Well-paying, stable research jobs were plentiful in the Northeast, the San Francisco Bay area and other hubs. But a decade of slash-and-burn mergers; stagnating profit; exporting of jobs to India, China and Europe; and declining investment in research and development have dramatically shrunk the U.S. drug industry, with research positions taking heavy hits. Since 2000, U.S. drug firms have slashed 300,000 jobs, according to an analysis by consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. In the latest closure, Roche last month announced it is shuttering its storied Nutley, N.J., campus — where Valium was invented — and shedding another 1,000 research jobs. “It’s been a bloodbath, it’s been awful,” said Kim Haas, who spent 20 years designing pharmaceuticals for drug giants Wyeth and Sanofi-Aventis and is in her early 50s. Haas lost her six-figure job at Sanofi-Aventis in New Jersey last year. She now works one or two days a week on contract at a Philadelphia university. She dips into savings to make ends meet."

As a recent PhD graduate, I would suggest strongly against it, unless it is a requirement for a new career goal. a) Unless you are fully immersed in the project you undertake and willing to put in long hours for little financial reward for 4-7 years, you'll probably drop out. The drop out rate for US PhD programs is 57% http://edudemic.com/2012/01/phd-job/ b) There's no guaranteed job at the end. This a sobering take on the STEM PhD job market: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-pushes-for-more-scientists-but-the-jobs-arent-there/2012/07/07/gJQAZJpQUW_story.html So what's you end game?

Here's a paper which models a the ecological niche of sasquatch and finds it to match with that of the black bear: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2699.2009.02152.x/full "Specifically, we use a large database of georeferenced putative sightings and footprints for Sasquatch in western North America, demonstrating how convincing environmentally predicted distributions of a taxon’s potential range can be generated from questionable site-occurrence data. We compare the distribution of Bigfoot with an ENM for the black bear, Ursus americanus, and suggest that many sightings of this cryptozoid may be cases of mistaken identity."

"We're only suggesting black people people ride at the back of the bus and drink from a different fountain, not lynching them, so there's no ethical concern" The course of action you take once you've arbitrarily defined your undesirable human group is only one component of the ethical dilemma: there is also severe ethical concern in defining a group of humans as sub standard based on subjective criteria. Think about all the cases where this has been done in the past and try and find an example which not been abhorrent. That, and as described at length in that other thread, it would violate basic principles of population genetics, and probably not result in appreciable phenotypic benefits, due to the complex nature of the trait and simplistic nature of the approach.

Why, is anatomy one of the seven deadly sins now? As a kid I had a "nature" collection... with interesting rocks, seed pods, shells, skulls, turtle shells, shark eggs, etc ,etc, etc. It graduated into a butterfly collection for a while, a fossil collection, then when I got a microscope a "slides of interesting things" collection, and for a while was an "interesting bones" collection. Many of our greatest scientific minds started out simply collecting interesting specimens, and many of them never stopped doing that. There's entire wings of museum collections devoted to skeletal specimens, because they hold considerable scientific value. If anything, having an animal skull, amongst other things is extremely healthy, productive and satisfying way of exploring a natural curiously with the natural world around us. If it leads him into palaeontology, medicine, veterinary medicine, or like myself - organismal biology, that would be fantastic. What exactly do you associate with bones that would make them unsuitable for a child, and why would you project those prejudices onto a curious child?

What you're proposing is eugenics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics Which we have an extensive thread on: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/62058-eugenics/ Apart from the ethical quagmire that eugenics poses, in a complex, multigenic, environmentally linked trait like "intelligence", there's a multitude of issues: a) Defining intelligence - IQ is a poor measure, with inherent flaws. If intelligence is undefined or poorly defined, how do you decide who can breed and who can't? b) Intellect is highly environmentally dependent. Your nutrition as a child, learning environment, etc etc etc all influence your intellect. How will you control for environmental factors when deciding who can breed and who can't? c) The heritability of intellect itself is environmentally linked - that is, the environment you grow up in influences how much of your intellect is inherited. How will you control for that? d) Because it's a multigenic trait, selective breeding is unlikely to produce reliable outcomes. etc.

I had a master's project in which we needed to skeletilize the lower jaw from a bunch of deer heads (to use tooth wear as an indicator of age). The method we used was to place the head in a slow cooker, fill it up with water and leave it cooking all day. It worked excellently for our purposes, though it probably wouldn't clean the insides of a brain case if that's what you wanted. It also makes a hell of a smell, so might be best done out in the shed or garage.

The proposal is still too vague to offer any real advice an example of a helpful proposal would be along the lines of: "I have observed frogs thriving in a habitat contaminated with a high level of mutagens, and thus believe they may be secreting a chemical which inhibits tumor growth on their skin. I also believe, should it exist, that the secretion may be an effective anti cancer treatment. I have thought of an experimental design to test my hypotheses and am interested in collaborating with frog specialists and cell biologists on a project." at the moment we can't tell between a solid foundational concept such as the above, or whether you are convinced that Jesus has come back as a fairytale frog prince healer, and that getting all the frogs stoned will transform him into human form and allow him to distribute magical homeopathic cancer therapy - which would obviously not be a solid, scientific starting point. So if you could give a general outline what your hypotheses are and a basic experimental design concept - not necessarily in detail such that your idea might be appropriated, we could offer advice about its feasibility and suggest potential collaborators and advisers on the project.

The information provided is too vague to really offer any advice - 1) Can you describe the mechanism which your treatment will act upon to cure cancer: as in what component of a cancerous cell or growth does the treatment act on to reduce/eliminate the cells and/or tumors? 2) Can you describe in detail your hypothesis? 3) Can you outline your experimental design to test the hypothesis?

Congratulations on your college entry. One piece of advice I'd offer is don't have gaining a PhD as your ultimate goal. A PhD is a starting place, rather than an end goal - think of it like you would an apprenticeship: it would be unusual for say, a person embarking on an electrical apprenticeship to have finishing their apprenticeship as their ultimate goal - getting the apprenticeship is a milestone along the way to becoming an electrician. So I'd consider your end goal - is the PhD because you want to become a research scientist, or so you can hang the certificate on your wall, etc. Once you've determined what your end goal is, ask yourself if you really need a PhD to get there. E.g. it sounds like medical research is you r end goal. Do you want to be a decision maker and spend most of your time dealing with administrative tasks, personnel, management and overall project direction (So a PhD would be required), or do you prefer being on the coalface with a pipette in your hand (So a BSc/MSc and bench experience might be better) ? Or do you not know at this stage? The reason I ask is because simply having a PhD is not a guaranteed ticket to an academic career path anymore. Only 20.5% of UK PhD gradates in science end up with a job in science, and less than 1% end up as tenured professors. http://tomhartley.po...m/r-e-s-p-e-c-t . In the US, 57% of PhD candidates drop out of their programs and there are 6.25 PhD graduates for every professorship offered http://edudemic.com/2012/01/phd-job/ The consequence is that if you want in to academia, you're looking at a minimum of a couple of postdocs after your PhD, with little security and so-so renumeration, after 4-8 years of being a grad student, before you're even looking like getting a tenure-track job (If you're highly competitive) which isn't certain until you've locked down some good grant funding (and NIH is funding to the tune of 18% of applications http://news.sciencem...-its-grant.html) before you've actually got a secure position. I'm not saying this to be discouraging, simply to point out that if you're aim is to get into the University research community, the end of your PhD is the beginning of a long and tough road, with little financial reward and a lot of uncertainty, and probably a number of big geographically speaking moves. Have a clear idea of why you want a PhD and what you want to achieve with it, and make sure you reassess as you go. Enjoy your studies and good luck.

Fixed it for you. Is it possible to stop misrepresenting everything I've said yet? The point is you're arguing against a caricature of evolution not widely held in the field. A horde of evolutionary biologists have been chipping away at the extent of our knowledge of evolutionary processes since Darwin. The advances have been incremental, with each piece of new evidence and each new concept adding a building block to our knowledge - each new piece of evidence calls for an "extension" of our concept of evolution. The theory has been constantly changing ever since its inception. The synthesis itself is in a state of constant evolution. Deciding we now need to sit around a table and decide on a new name now seems eye rollingly self important and spurious. There's no evidence that obsolete versions of the theory of evolution are holding up continued advances in our state of knowledge on it. The fact you need to call me a "militant Darwinist" and pretend I don't believe in horizontal gene transfer when I've said maybe 6 or 7 times now it's a major component of my research goes a long way to showing exactly how spurious and eye rolling it is. Now, I notice you've subtly moved away from your original "new synthesis/paradigm change" position to an "extended synthesis" position. There is an important distinction between an extension of an existing theory due to the incremental addition of new evidence, and a paradigm shift due to new evidence overturning old evidence. You can't confound/equate the two. Again it would be extremely helpful if you'd answer these questions: tell us how your paradigm shift will aid scientific progress and accelerate scientific discovery beyond the current regime: how will the "new synthesis" bring about understanding and investigation which isn't currently being investigated? As (assumedly) a research student, how will your thesis add to scientific understanding? What hypotheses are to be tested? At the moment, it doesn't really seem like you've identified an actual impediment to current research, and the argument you're posing is largely semantic and directed towards an unrepresentative position. This is the reason I don't see the need for a "new synthesis" I believe the existing so called "paradigm" of evolutionary theory is constantly updating in step with current research, and the semantics over what it's called are unrepresentative of a "paradigm shift".

Jerry Coyne - who holds the view that allopatry is required for speciation - which is not representative of the majority of evolutionary biologists. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-a-shapiro/jerry-coyne-fails-to-unde_b_1411144.html http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/23704/title/Evidence-for-sympatric-speciation/

I linked you to the contents pages of four of the top journals in the field of evolutionary biology: Evolution (IF: 5.2), Journal of Evolutionary Biology (IF: 3.2) , Systematic Biology (IF: 8.8), Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution (IF: 3.9). They are not links to book reviews, that is another out and out lie. Do you think other people are incapable of clicking the links? The reason you were linked to these journal contents pages was explained multiple times: a cursory glance over any of these contents pages will show you that people are happily publishing away on ALL of the mechanisms you have brought up. Again, my point is that people are working on all of these mechanisms in the absence of your new synthesis. What exactly is it you want "backed up?" It is unclear which exact point you want evidenced. This is because you are not arguing with an actual representation of what has been said, but a caricature of what has been said which suits the argument you are making: i.e. This is not what anyone in this thread has said or argued. IT IS A STRAWMAN ARGUMENT. ARGUING AGAINST THIS MISREPRESENTATION DOES NOT PROVE YOUR POINT IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM. I can't prove a point with scientific evidence if it's a point I never argued in the first place. If you're going to accuse people of being dishonest and lazy you might want to start by not misrepresenting people and actually reading other people's responses to you, instead of strawmanning them and slinging insults around. I'm tired of being told that I don't believe in evolutionary mechanisms I actively study and am currently conducting experiments on. At best, it means you simply aren't reading my posts. At worst, you're persistently misrepresenting me and deliberately presenting a dishonest argument.

Now that the treads have been merged - see post #52. I provided you with the contents page of a respected evolutionary journal, which showed, conclusively, that scientists in the field are happily publishing away on the topics you've listed in the profound absence of this new paradigm of evolution. This goes a considerable way in conclusively demonstrating that conceptual and empirical progress is being made, without the need to generate a magical new fantastic paradigm of evolutionary theory. Your response was to inform me of the rather obvious fact that biological journals are in fact, written by multiple authors and a single, superhuman scientist doesn't conduct dozens of multiple lengthy and involved studies every month to produce an entire edition of a journal. This didn't substantiate the need for your new paradigm, nor counter the progress being made in its absence. Next you told me that a "revolution" would be evident if I went to an evolutionary biology conference. I demonstrated that the issue was not discussed at the largest meeting of evolutionary biologists in the world - the fact that with over 1000 presenters and over 3000 attendees there was no session on a new paradigm - demonstrating, again conclusively, that any discussion of a new paradigm could hardly be described as a "revolution". You then criticized the entertainment choice of the meeting and presented me a small list of 16 scientists who attended a meeting about an extended - note not new; evolutionary synthesis almost 5 years ago. 16 people is not a field-wide consensus, nor does an extension of existing theory really support your case, nor is 5 years ago particularly current. So, you neither addressed the fact that the "revolutuion" you claimed was not happening at this conference, nor really supported your assertion that it was at other meetings. That's an out and out lie. 1) See post #21 for a comment by me on Koonin et al. 2) I don't reject the role of ANY of the processes described in evolution. To give you a short run down: I cut my teeth as a research scientist in landscape genetics - which inherently examines the role of population genetic dynamics in adaptation. I then moved to PhD studies in the role of discordance generated by horizontal gene transfer in gene tree estimation, and the role of phenotypic plasticity and adaptation in sympatric diversification. I currently work on gene flow and trait liability in parasites and adaptation to environmental fluctuation in RNA viruses. I actually work on the process you seem to be insisting that I don't accept - though I've mentioned that I accept and work on these aspects of evolution multiple times. 3) Given I've never, apart from a single outlier, encountered a biologist who doesn't acknowledge these mechanisms, I simply don't accept that there is widespread non-acknowledgement of them. The fact that we, as scientists in the field have been working on, publishing on, getting grants on and focusing our research on these topics for as long as I've been in research clearly demonstrates that the current, widely accepted way evolution works incorporates these processes. Given 2) and 3), in order to argue for your paradigm shift, you need to present a view of evolution which is outdated by around 40-50 years and argue against it - this is a textbook example of a strawman argument. As was thoroughly demonstrated to you, this view is no longer held by the bulk of the scientific community. At the moment it's like an argument that we need a new medical paradigm which explicitly states that MRI is a better detection tool for some things than ultrasound. If we can demonstrate that doctors regularly use MRI, doctors are taught MRI in med school, and that the majority of doctors are using MRI where appropriate, there would be a strong case AGAINST the need for a new paradigm. Here, we've shown that biologists widely accept the role of HGT etc, that these processes are taught to biologists as part of their training and that they apply the role of these processes to contemporary study of evolution - providing a strong case AGAINST the need for a new evolutionary paradigm. Ergo, the contemporary validity of the review article by Koonin et al is questionable by the lack of scientific literature upholding a purely allopatric, gradualist evolution. If you could present current literature which upholds this viewpoint on evolution, you would have a case.The evidence opposing the need for a new paradigm is the scientific literature incorporating all of the "new" processes you mentioned which are evident with even a cursory glance at a current evolutionary journal contents page. Rather than condescendingly and ignorantly telling me my research impedes scientific progress and telling me I am no different to a creationist; how about you tell us how your paradigm shift will aid scientific progress and accelerate scientific discovery beyond the current regime: how will the "new synthesis" bring about understanding and investigation which isn't currently being investigated? As (assumedly) a research student, how will your thesis add to scientific understanding? What hypotheses are to be tested? Because, and I'm again repeating myself, it appears from the current publications coming from the field of evolutionary biology: http://onlinelibrary...sue-11/issuetoc http://www.sciencedi...ournal/10557903 http://onlinelibrary...sue-12/issuetoc http://sysbio.oxford...content/current etc. That the study of all of the mechanisms you've listed is ubiquitous and unimpeded in its absence - and that the "new synthesis" is a self inflationary overstatement to try and sell one's review paper, or a strawman attack of a viewpoint which faded from mainstream science several decades ago.

This is false. Science is amoral. That is, the application of the scientific method to an investigation is independent of morality. Applying moral conditions like "compassion" and denying moral conditions like "derision" from science is nonsensical. The only thing that makes science what it is, is adherence to a particular method of investigation. Reluctance, derision, arrogance, condemnation, etc etc etc on the part of an investigator doesn't make their work unscientific. Complementarily, kindness, understanding, acceptance, compassion etc etc etc on the part of an investigator won't make investigation which does not adhere to the scientific method, scientific. As an example the Nazi experiments on Jewish prisoners were scientific. They weren't very just, compassionate or understanding. They were in fact pretty unjust, cruel and deserving of widespread condemnation. On the other hand, Reiki is a method of compassionate healing which is fundamentally not scientific.