"Scientists claims about the natural world have been right about 17% of the time."?

By not understanding science. Science is usually right given the evidence available at the time. Newton was right about gravity as far as he went. Einstein peeled away another layer of our understanding of gravity. He did not prove Newton wrong, merely that Newton did not reveal the whole story. Now we know there is another layer beneath Einstein's understanding which we have yet to fully reveal.

This is a typical progression in science - our understanding deepens with increased knowledge but it is built on the foundations laid by our predecessors.

I saw that when it was first posted. There's a few things behind that. Firstly, it's an exaggeration.

Then there is the eternal fundamentalist whine that science always changes and the Bible never does. I might point out that Confucius is older than much of the Bible and his words never change either. What he got right is still right, what he got wrong is still wrong. If the Bible were as clear and unambiguous as scientific results there would not be a dozen main sects of Christianity and hundreds of sub-sects. The melting point of aluminium metal is 660.32 centigrade plus or minus some small error and that's it. No amount of mental gymnastics is going to change that

All scientific results are limited by the technology available at the time they are found. It is not "true" that the volumes, temperatures and pressures of gases are strictly proportional, but at the time this "law" was formulated the technologies to produce very low temperatures and very high pressures did not exist. However the "law" is still true for most practical purposes.

Moving into biology, Darwin could not have known about genes in the detail we do because the chemistry needed to investigate them did not exist until almost a century after his death. He concluded that units of inheritance existed. He was correct.

Original poster claims that mutations are not random. I'd like to see a citation for that, not from apologetic material either. However the technology to determine exactly where mutations occur did not exist until 1977 - 78. But beforehand, it was clear that there were a vast number of mutations and vast number of possible mutations, so anyone might be forgiven if they saw mutations as essentially random on the evidence that they had.

Original poster is complaining because Galileo did not discover all the satellites of Jupiter and only saw four with his primitive, home made telescope. Therefore, Galileo was "wrong" about the satellites of Jupiter and so he cannot be trusted. That's his argument.

Lets look at just one theory..

Evolution..

1809 - Lamarck - Inheritance of acquired traits

Published by Darwin in November 1859..

Inheritance of traits

Added Natural selection

score 50% right

Mendel's Law accepted by scientific community in 1890;'

Darwin Reformulated:

Drop inheritance of acquired traits

Add - individual traits limited to patter of selection - new traits have unlimited possibilities to be added as old traits selected out of population (basically sleight of hand to get around Mendel's Law.

Vicemen Barrier.

Published 1901 - Status Right 33% of the time

1953 Watson & Crick discover DNA..

Unlimited possibility assertion crashed and burned. Reformulation 2.

Drop Unlimited possibilities

Add Helpful Mutations

Reformulation synthesized - The Selfish Gene - 1978 (Not very good seller, Second Edition 1989 sold better on heels of Hawkins A Brief History of Time. Score Correct 25% of the time..

2012.. All four base claims of Selfish Gene disproved

1. Mutations are not really random

2. Acquired traits can be inherited

3. Gene Centered View

4. Impossibility of inheritance of acquired characteristics

No current hypothetical mechanism for the process... Assuming a new formulation Evolutionary theory would have been right only 20% of the time. That means from 1859 to 2012 the theory was wrong!

Without addressing the veracity of the actual claim, it would be very easy to explain without suggesting that science is bad. Simply put, science is a process. Scientific conclusions are based on available evidence and experiments. As scientists have developed better tools and spent more time investigating the natural world, it's very rational to assume that ideas once considered correct, would become obsolete and be replaced with more refined conclusions.

Well, you'd have to first define what constitutes a claim.

This person is probably saying that every scientific hypothesis that fails once it is tested constitutes a "claim made by scientists." I wouldn't agree with that.

Suppose you told me: "Your sweater is in either the washer or the dryer."

And, then it turns out that it was in the washer....it wouldn't be fair to say you were wrong 50% of the time. You just made two hypothesis based on the data you had....they had to be tested before you could determine which was correct.

Ummm, because as our knowledge increases, we learn that past ideas were incorrect. *Learn* being the key word there. Past religions have been replaced and are now called "mythology." What's your point?

I think we can see science has some validity if you compare how we live now to how we lived thousands of years ago. We're doing something right.

Oh, good -- then we're 17% ahead of religions :)

Clearly, though, that person doesn't understand the scientific method -- and how it relies on modifying views based on new evidence *constantly.* Science doesn't seek to be "absolutely right" -- it seeks as much factual evidence as possible so we can *always* be as right as we possibly can, given what we know. Put in that context, science is "right" about 99% of the time. :)

It wasn't the Pope who flew to the moon, it was scientists. It wasn't the Dalai Lama who developed a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer. It was scientists. Jesus didn't build the Hoover Dam. Mohammed never knew why the sky was blue. Use your noggin for crying out loud.

When you pull statistics out of your butt you can say anything you want.

Those liars even claim that "scientists said the world was flat" when it was the common people who believed that, and "scientists said the earth was the center of the solar system" when it was the religious who said that. Creationism is one blatant lie after another.

I guess that the only way to justify that claim would be to list the instances and to define science in a way that it didn't start until the 16th century.