Below is the text of a comment placed by the blog author on this YouTube video
https://youtu.be/sv7Z6OSF6Tg which may have a far wider relevance.
The video is embedded at the bottom of this article.
There are two underlying problems [with scientific evidence] which have led justice into error, not just in the Lucy Letby case but many others from the murders of Leslie Moleseed to Jill Dando and beyond:
The first is that we've had sufficient generations of lawyers without any training in scientific thinking (if they had this, they would not need [much] specific scientific knowledge to cross-examine effectively) for a total absence of scientific thinking to have become respectable for lawyers. If you challenged me to name lawyers who excelled at scientific thinking I would nominate Reginald Hine and Jan Christian Smutts, both of whom published books and papers in natural history at a time when that included what are now seen as six or seven different disciplines, all of which have featured in forensic evidence since the 1950s. Robert Hitchens had a good grasp of engineering and navigation, too, and navigation really does require disciplined thinking! Even after Smutts became a field marshal (he never really wanted to be a soldier and for most of his career he wasn't) he was active in the field of international law to the point of helping to draft the UN Charter whilst still authoring papers on natural history. These men seem extraordinary today, but they were not at all untypical of their generations (Hitchens really was the generation after the other two).
The second is that Science itself has been willfully transformed from a community where even the great men listened to lesser known colleagues, into a hierarchy where the strength of one's position and reputation counts for much more than the strength of one's arguments and evidence is selected rather than tested. The dangers this state of affairs extend far beyond the courtroom, but it is in the courtroom that we can see the hierarchy in operation and study it in detail: the nature of modern scientific publishing is such that it's very hard for us to do it elsewhere, especially in the field of medicine and public health policy.
It is no longer the done thing to challenge assertions by any "scientific expert" even though the challenging and testing of assertions and the supporting evidence (on those occasions when that is actually offered) is the true basis of scientific progress! The number of genuine scientific breakthroughs has declined since about 1950 and it's been in freefall since 1972-ish, but the number of "scientific ideas" being reported in the press has grown enormous and bewildering. And that's because we're not allowed to question ANY of it. If the idea comes from someone in authority or someone the authorities endorse as an expert, it must be true, and if it comes from anywhere else it must be misinformation or a conspiracy theory. A forest of ideas, none of which we may test, prevents any new growth in human knowledge because there is no light at all on the forest floor where the seedlings are.
