When the paradigm effect is so strong that we are prevented from actually seeing what is under our very noses, we are said to be suffering from paradigm paralysis.

This phenomenon describes the bottleneck caused by too narrow a vision of the world. Author Joel Barker adds that it's the mortal disease caused by certainty. Paradigm paralysis pushes an individual or a group to believe that their way is the only way - the one correct and true way - to see an event, a situation, a problem or a circumstance.

When you're only surrounded by people who speak the same vocabulary as you, or share the same set of assumptions as you, you start to think that that's reality.

Facts are interesting, but they're not terribly exciting. Hypotheses help us build theory. Theories are the most important things in science. Theories mean explanation. But laws are broken, both in science as well as in.... euh... the real world. Laws are not as important as theories, because theories explain laws. Theories are most important! Then come laws, hypotheses, and facts. Facts don't explain anything.

Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.

The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.

The role of worldview presents a formidable challenge to science communicators because ideology may override any factual information.

The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game. ... Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

If we selectively "find" or communicate only those data that support a given model of behavior, then our inquiry efforts will hardly be optimally effective. Despite the fact that confirmatory bias in scientists was first noted by Francis Bacon (1621/1960) over three centuries ago, precious little research has been devoted to the topic and the few extant studies have hardly challenged Bacon's observations. One study found that the vast majority of scientists drawn from a national sample showed a strong preference for "confirmatory" experiments (Mahoney & Kimper, 1976). Over half of these scientists did not even recognize disconfirmation (modus tollens) as a valid reasoning form! In another study the logical reasoning skills of 30 scientists were compared to those of 15 relatively uneducated Protestant ministers (Mahoney & DeMonbreun, 1977). Where there were performance differences, they tended to favor the ministers. Confirmatory bias was prevalent in both groups, but the ministers used disconfirmatory logic almost twice as often as the scientists did.