User:Oiyarbepsy/No evidence of
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No evidence of is a phrase that should never be used by anyone trying to teach about science. While, on the surface, it seems clear what it means, in practice, no one really knows.
No evidence of can mean:
- The topic hasn't been studied. Research so far has found no evidence of harm to the fetus.
- The assertion has been entirely disproven. There is no evidence of a link between vaccines and autism.
The second meaning is wrong and flat out dangerous, as it supports quackery and pseudoscience. In the example above, there is actually tons of evidence about a link between vaccines and autism - tons of evidence that there isn't one. In this case, saying that there's no evidence is misrepresenting the science behind it. Quacks cling to scientists using this phrase to argue that their quackery has real scientific doubt when it doesn't. While the first sense of the phrase is fine in theory, in practice the use of the second makes the first one unusable.