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That leads me down a new path, bare with me I haven’t thought this through. Unless you actually did the DNA test you would be relying on someone else’s verification. You could read their results but they could make up results, so unless you actually performed the test you would not have true knowledge of the results. But here’s the catch, why should I trust your analysis, unless I do the analysis I will not have true knowledge and so on and so on.
Hi jasonb,
It is a good point but it requires that there is an implicit agreement between the various labs to falsify the results. And this is unlikely as science is hyper competitive. Thus far, scientific fraud has been confined to those who wish to further their own individual careers at the expense of others. I have a few friends in molecular forensics labs. The people doing the work usually have no idea what the samples are that they are testing. It is really almost impossible that even if they wanted to independently falsify results so that results would match from different labs, that it would be possible. The other reason this is unlikely to occur broadly is that science is a building process. I myself often have to repeat techniques or re-generate materials reported in other studies for my own work. If what has been reported is wrong, and artifact, fraud..I cannot continue my own work. This is why such things get flushed out relatively rapidly.
If a group of people testify that they saw a spaceship land in a corn field, it is still not confirmed as you and I could not reproduce that observation independently. If I say that person X was at the scence of a crime based on DNA evidence from blood at the crime scene, you or I, or anyone else could verify (or falsify) that finding. I am not saying that all testimony is crap. If a group of people can independently verify that they were all at a place at the same time and all saw an event, this is usually held as evidence in a court of law. However, such evidence is not entirely objective and cannot be reproduced and would be difficult to falsify. Thus, it is not as useful as other forms of evidence. It could supplement say ballistic evidence i.e. somebody claims to have seen a guy shoot a specific type of gun at a crime scene and ballistics shows that the weapon carried by the accused matches the type of gun described etc.
cheers,
M
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