xenog123

Hmm you don't think there's some factor that could make people/systems better at connecting the dots? That's what the g-factor is supposed to represent. I've actually thought about this a bit in some of my amateur research on AI - does scientific discovery or induction basically just boil down to brute-forcing over the space of potential explanatory models when something unexplainable is observed or is there some underlying structure that could be exploited for faster learning? (Straying from the point now). In terms of "accordance with consensus" you do still have paradigm shifts occasionally.

I still don't really agree. Rosalind's data only suggested a helical structure, there were still many other parameters to fill, and Watson and Crick based their hypothesis on quite a bit more data apart from hers. The basic loop of scientific work is data -> hypothesis -> prediction -> (dis)/confirmation, which is what they followed. You have some observed phenomena, propose a more general model based on that, and then test the theory based on the predictions it makes for unobserved phenomena. Strictly speaking there's no such thing as "complete" data for any hypothesis because of the problem of induction, so there's always a bit of a leap of faith involved in conjecturing. And haven't you seen those Einstein quotes in dentist's office waiting rooms? Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Well, just to nitpick Haber (a Christianized Jew) was actually opposed to Nazism. He was initially an ardent German nationalist and chemical warfare enthusiast, however.

Oh well that was supposed to be a joke, poking fun at the public/media's tendency to hyperbolize or simplify. Of course the reality is more complicated. Well the reference is a page from the official Nobel prize website that states Watson said that in an interview.

Is that actually what happened? Biology is my weakest scientific subject but just reading a few articles about the incident it doesn't seem like it was anywhere near that bad. From what I gather Franklin contributed some useful piece of data that was indirectly/accidentally passed to Watson and Crick through a middleman, who then used it in conjunction with other findings to formulate the double helix theory proper. Watson himself much later admitted that she should have been (posthumously) awarded a Nobel prize if that were possible. Franklin herself didn't actually explicitly advance the double helix model in any of her published work as far as I know - she just made the weaker claim that the DNA strands were anti-parallel and that a helical model was one possibility. As for Watson and Crick "just postulating [the double helix theory] and happening to be right" that's actually the more interesting and challenging part of science imo, not just gathering and analyzing data but making imaginative conjectures about what may explain the data. You make it sound like this was only justified as an appeal to authority or something but that's basically how science has always worked.

Oh well that was supposed to be a joke, poking fun at the public/media's tendency to hyperbolize or simplify. Of course the reality is more complicated.

This giant of biology has recently passed at the age of 97, leaving behind a coloured legacy. What's the verdict? Gifted pioneer of scientific inquiry or scheming, bigoted plagiarist? There is no middle ground. https://www.irishtimes.com/science/2025/11/19/an-irish-perspective-james-watson-1928-2025-the-dna-titan-with-a-downside/