46% of Americans believe in Creationism

[Torillian]

AstroGamer said:

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I was thinking more in the case if they had a hypothesis in mind and their numbers didn't quite match the trend in mind. They could shift a number by .1% or something along the lines and account it as error. I didn't really mean all the time, a bit more like often and I did not mean to offend you. Now that I think about it, peer review would probably minimize that fudging. Sorry.

No worries, I understand what you were getting at about trusting things without the evidence right in your hands.  It's true that if you can't trust people at any level then you probably won't trust scientific findings either.  The important thing to know about Science in general is that there are all kinds of labs out there competing to try and discover the truth, and they'll all have different hypotheses on what their data means about the way things work even on the most exacting and detail oriented levels, but that's with the interpretation of what is being seen and not the observation itself.  You can have all kinds of hypotheses that after more evidence is found look completely bonkers, but your data/observations has to be trustworthy.  Otherwise you might as well just go do something else.  

As an example, my first article was on a slight change to an assumption about an intermediate in a certain reaction that Mb does.  Our data is pretty much beyond rebuke but our interpretation of it is not and although our going hypothesis is that the previously undisputed intermediate is not made during the reaction we put in other possibilities that would fit the data because we know that it's not the only interpretation.  This is how science works in general, the data is absolute truth otherwise you're worthless, and then we'll all argue about the interpretation.