Evidence. Can't go there due to a prior committment

[Fred]

There's 2 concepts that are getting mixed up here.

First is that science doesn't have an agenda, or shouldn't have an agenda. It doesn't start out trying to arrive at a certain position, it takes observations and seeks to explain them. This is an overall goal of science in general.

Good post, Frosty. I agree with you absolutely as science goes. But scientists often have an agenda because science can never be divorced from the larger context and using science to further your agenda is common as sand.

However in order to do that, individual scientists need to make leaps, you propose a hypothesis which makes some kind of assumptions (which COULD be bias one way) and you seek to then provide evidence for that hypothesis.

Right. And that's where the rest of the context comes in.

The difference is that if a hypothesis is bad and doesn't fit observation then the hypothesis has to either be dropped or modified.

Yup, but as the wag put it, this step usually only happens after a bunch of funerals, because that modification isn't immediate nor resistance free, and it is rarely, if ever, just a matter of "oh, look new evidence." Folks don't drop their cherished beliefs just because of a few new facts or evidence. They will fight against that as long as they can. It's the famous notion that first an idea is rejected, then ridiculed, then seen as obvious.

So there can be bias around individual scientist's hypothesis to explain natural behaviour, but it doesn't mean it becomes accepted in the scientific community.

And it doesn't mean that it isn't accepted, either. And the majority of the scientific community has certainly put their chips down on the side of materialism as an a priori conclusion.

I guess you could say the direction of science is influenced by the individuals that contribute, because if lots of people all work on one problem then that problem get solved faster, but it doesn't concern the validity of the results.

It certainly is influenced by the individuals. It's a tool, and the tool is wielded by people however well or however poorly. It doesn't exist in a vacuum and the notion that is often floated as a given, that those individuals merely dispassionately go where the evidence leads is a lofty ideal, but it's sheer fantasy on the ground.