text: why is the nature of science? ......that we replace old beliefs with new beliefs based on incoming evidence and facts? science is the mechanism which we use to purify generalizations.   the action of science is exactly the replacement of old beliefs with new ones based on incoming evidence, and human determination, and decision, about what is "fact".  but this is only the hard machinery of science, the method, the facilitation of the nature, and the vehicle of the essence of science. i am no prophet, and do not intend to subjectively interpret the universe in the manner of pronouncing some concrete, end-all, answer, so in the spirit of science, let us consider science, make some observations, and stab at some generalizations.     while observing science, we humans have come to one of the most startlingly obvious, and startlingly powerful, realizations; that of the principle of natural selection. this principle classically refers to biological evolution, and the ever-present consequences which acts on living things and environments when they interact. the principle more recently has embodied a somewhat more anthropocentric form. richad dawkins [1] was one of the early and explicit proponents of visualizing the effort of natural selection as the "selfishness" of genes, and that the driving force of the principle was the expressed selfishness of genes trying to do nothing but replicate themselves, and propagate into the future. the longer that they survive, the more likely it is that they will replicate.  this embodies the cut throat behaviors in nature, as well as the collectivity and cooperativity. this is all very well, and nice, and has been very well recieved in the world of biology  (but not because we are biochauvinists, overly able to relate to something once it is reminicent of human face, but because, the muse of science it the same as the muse of poetry, and imagery enhances scince on a grand scale, so that a better analogies will lead to easier, and better visualization, which will lead to easier and better work). this notion is just precursor to what this question has lead us to. in his book, richard dawkins goes further to introduce the notion of "memes" (mee' ms), which are intended to be the analogue of genes, only in the mental realm. they are ideas, tricks, songs, poems, sloagans... truly, anything which can be abstracted, realized, and passed from one mind to another. so that the idea of memes is a meme itself, and it replicated itself from the mind of an author, to my mind, via language, and if  you have not heard of this already, then it has replicated itself again into your mind. very much like genes, memes continue to exist only through replication, and they may mutate as they pass through different minds. yet, unlike genes, a meme can be very sucessful in replication, and yet be very destructive to its host. take for instance, heroin use. it is a learned trick, which has some concrete subjective effect, and yet ultimately has a negative effect on the life of the host, the replication of their genes. for the most part, memes have no regard for genes. this is dangerous for a society which is driven by memes.  science seems to be the principle of natural selection, but not gene selection in the way of darwin, but a sifting sort of meme selection, acting on a very small class of memes, serving to develop them into the most powerful and planet altering memes that humans have ever seen. because of the power of these things, the careful selection of the memes of scientific principles is very important. the memes which are selected by science are the human interpretations of the principle(s) of the universe. certainly, natural selection existed before it generated the human mind. it was simply left to science to put it into worded interpretation. this did not take very long. not only that, but more than one person came upon the idea, independent of each other. how universal is the action of science then?     in a sense, science is a special case of the principle of natural selection, if you g