Republicans: Please Look At The Whole Picture

"Imagine an episode of 'CSI: Miami' in which the investigators have a suspect and are beginning their forensic work. As they gather the evidence, they dis­cover that the suspect has no serious alibi for the night of the crime. It also doesn’t take them long to figure out what could have motivated their suspect to kill his victim. Using more sophisticated equipment, they uncover physical evidence that links the suspect to the victim and to the crime scene—blood stains on the suspect’s clothes that match the victim’s blood type, DNA evi­dence that positively identifies the blood as that of the victim, soil on the suspect’s shoes whose chemical composition matches that of the soil at the crime scene. Our investigators are also able to get their hands on a recording of the crime scene taken by a surveillance camera at a critical time right before the crime, and using digital video-enhancing techniques, they manage to retrieve meaningful evidence. Aided by powerful face-recognition soft­ware, they are able to place the suspect at the crime scene at the right time.

"When taken in isolation, few, if any, of the clues uncovered by our team of forensic experts, are really incriminating. The soil on the suspect’s shoes could have come from a walk he took at the scene of the crime the night before the victim was killed. If the victim and the suspect knew each other, perhaps they spent some time together before the murder took place, and the victim, who was subject to frequent nose bleeds, ended up accidentally soiling the suspect’s jacket. Since the jacket was dark, the suspect didn’t notice the blood stains until after the police apprehended him the following day. As for the other pieces of evidence, I am sure that you can easily concoct a plausible story as well. It is when taken together, however, that all these disconnected pieces of evidence acquire their collective power, and as they accumulate, we soon reach a point where it is no longer reasonable to con­clude that our hypothetical suspect is innocent."

(https://www.salon.com/2015/01/25/you_dont_have_a_soul_the_real_science_that_debunks_superstitious_charlatans/)

Don't look at the pieces, Republicans, look at the pattern and the entire evidential picture.