This may very well be my favorite thread on BR so far! Passionate exchanges full of years of knowledge and experience......questions worthy of a philosopher (ie "How can we know?").......clashes between age and youth! Not to mention the overall effort of everyone to remain open-minded and civil even when there's fire in the eye!
My 2 cents has to with what Science is and why I love it. I think that each of us has an interior "mental model" of the world around us. As we grow and learn, this model comes more and more to approximate our "reality," if you think of reality as the great machine of the universe with all it's laws and consequences. We each have different "models" and each of them is inadequate alone. Each person survives more or less according to his and how accurate it is......everyone's "model" includes information about gravity. If not life can be hard.
Science is the "mental model" of the entire human race created over centuries to help us negotiate our world. To continually refine what we know! We conquered our planet because Science, through our shared bank of experience, has modeled "reality" ever more adequately, even past the limits of our senses. It's not perfect! But it is the best model we have, and it's as good as it is only because real scientists labor to hold tightly to the scientific method, which has been, happily, well described here. Science is called a discipline for a reason. To "do" it properly requires enormous discipline, not only by one, but by groups of people together. By people who love it, know what it means to humanity, and for whom forsaking the scientific method is unthinkable and unethical.
Science gives us a less adequate model of bass behavior than we'd like partly because, as Tom said, the funding isn't there. And I think Brian said some important things implying (to me anyway) that the science hasn't kept pace with what an experienced angler knows and intuits after many years on the water. But that doesn't mean Science itself is less a method of knowing and predicting bass behavior. All it means is that the big gun of Science hasn't been pointed in that direction. IMO
Second to last thing: I think it's good to remember that amazing things have been done and said by people under 25. Most of major advancements in many fields come from young people about that age. But it's also true that us old folks often have wisdom difficult for youngsters to grasp. My son Brian tells me now that he's in his mid-thirties that I'm getting smarter every year
Lastly, I love this thread because it's really given me such a great idea about everybody's personality! What interesting and cool people! Would be neat to get a topic like this going at the roadtrip after a few beers!
