Doubting the Experts

In most areas of science, people wouldn't think to seriously doubt the scientific consensus and think that they personally know better than the experts. For example, people don't go around claiming that they know the mass of an electron more accurately than scientists. People don't seriously proclaim to know the rate of nuclear fusion in the sun, or how the whole process works, better than scientists or claim that there is some big conspiracy to get the answer wrong.

Yet, in scientific areas like evolution, global warming and vaccinations, ordinary people with only modest science backgrounds will publicly claim to know more than the scientists about these issues. They accuse scientists of being incompetent or of forming a grand conspiracy to fool people about these issues.

But, even more than simply doubting the scientists, they make the claim that they know the real truth. And, they know the truth despite not having done any real research or any of their own scientific investigation. They just KNOW. They will go on and on about how wrong the scientists are, publishing thousands of websites, blogging endlessly and writing nasty letters to scientists.

Yet, all these science deniers have no real science background and have no basis for denying the results of science. They may not like the truths that science has revealed, but not liking a truth doesn't make it any less true.

The only way to legitimately deny a scientific truth is to do better research that shows the scientists were wrong. But to do that, you have to become a scientist and be really good at doing research. And, in fact, this is what scientists do all the time - they do better research than previous scientists, and they reveal what they got wrong. This is why science keeps getting better, and it is also why scientists are the only ones we can really trust to find the truth. Everyone else is just guessing or making it up.