On Talks
Last sunday I presented my very first research paper in a scientific conference. That's an intimidating experience but I survived and I was able to expose our work properly, if I can trust the comments on my performance.
This is an aspect of scientific research that is completely skipped from science classes: how peer review works and why is it effective at separating science and religion? One first point to clear up is that there is absolutely no consensus. You often read non sense like "scientists believe foo and blah". Scientists don't believe anything and what explanation they use for natural facts is not the same for everyone. As an example, since it was a conference on comparative genomic, probably everyone in the room would agree that saying that a super being created all life as we know it around 10k years ago isn't a useful model to explain what we see. Even though the general idea that there is some evolution going on is considered reasonable, we had a presentation on how a tree of life don't make sense and the speaker wasn't torched as an heretic. He revised the model of the tree of life to include lateral gene transfer: something that we observe. This is exactly how science differ from religion. A dogma must be accepted or you are anathema. A scientific theory is exactly that: a theory. Everyone know that it is likely to miss some details and it's part of its goal to be revised.