Corrupted Science: Fraud, Ideology and Politics in Science (Revised & Expanded)
448
Corrupted Science: Fraud, Ideology and Politics in Science (Revised & Expanded)
448Paperback(Revised)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781947071001 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | See Sharp Press |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2018 |
| Edition description: | Revised |
| Pages: | 448 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Fraudulent Scientists
The prominent UK surgeon Paul Vickers remarked in a 1978 lecture:
What the public and we [doctors] are inclined to forget is that doctors are different. We establish standards of professional conduct. This is where we differ from the rag, tag and bobtail crew who like to think of themselves as professionals in the health field.
High words, and arrogant ones, but colored in hindsight by the fact that just a few years later, in 1983, Vickers, in association with his mistress, was charged with — and later convicted of — murdering his wife Margaret, using "professional conduct" to do so: he poisoned her with an anti-cancer drug so that her death was initially attributed to natural causes.
Arrogance and hypocrisy are recurrent themes, although far from the only ones, in considering fraudulent scientists: it is as if some get so engaged in their own world that the external one becomes a sort of secondary reality, one in which events have an almost fictional status and where consequences need not be considered.
But there are plenty of other motivations for fraudulence in science.
In 1993 the physicist John Hagelin — three times US presidential candidate for the Natural Law Party — gathered together in Washington, DC, some 4,000 transcendental meditators with the aim of reducing the violent-crime rate in that city by 25 percent. Unfortunately, the police records showed that Washington's murder rate for that year actually rose. Or did it? In 1994 Hagelin announced he'd done a proper analysis of the figures and, sure enough, they showed a 25 percent decline.
On the face of it, this might seem like an instance of the fraudulent abuse of statistics, but was that really the case? It seems unlikely. Far more probable is that Hagelin, unable to believe the results of his experiment, quite unconsciously read into the statistics what he wanted to see there.
The borderlines between fraud, self-deception, gullible acceptance of the fake, and the ideological corruption of science can be very blurred. In theory none of them should happen; in practice, all too often, they all do, sometimes in combination. Where does one draw the line between, say, self-deception and ideological corruption? The latter may be deliberate and self-serving, but it can equally well be a product of the same desire to have reality obey one's wishes that seems to have driven Hagelin to derive an "alternative" message from those crime statistics.
All of the categories of scientific falsification are dangerous: people can die of them — either directly, as with fraudulent cancer cures, or indirectly, as when distortion of science about supposed racial differences reinforces irrational prejudices and leads to violence between peoples. The Nazis had their scientific "proof" that the Jews were subhuman, and so murdered them by the million. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North America the white man had "proof" of the subhuman nature of black and red races, so enslaved one and waged a campaign of near-genocide on the other. The pseudoscience of eugenics not only helped fuel the Nazis' murderous spree but also, before that spree shocked sense into people, looked well set to initiate a culling in North America of the mentally ill, the socially inadequate, and, of course, those of "lesser" races.
We live in an age when the falsification of science, in particular the ideological corruption of science, has reached a new level of importance — the very survival of our species may be threatened by it.
Not all falsifications seem of such significance — although one could make the case that false belief in itself does considerable damage by way of a sort of intellectual pollution, a brain rot that hampers all our other efforts at progress, or by generating enough "noise" that genuine knowledge becomes obscured. What may start as a relatively harmless hoax or fraud can be compounded through human gullibility or self-deception to the point where it assumes an importance far beyond anything the original perpetrator could have conceived.
On a small scale, this is what happened in the late sixteenth century in one of the oddest spats in the history of science, the infamous case of the Silesian Boy. This child was born on December 22, 1585, and was discovered, when his teeth grew in, to be possessed of a golden molar. How could science explain this?
The best-regarded hypothesis of the time was produced by Professor Jacob Horstius of Helmstädt University, author of the definitive De Aureo Dente Maxillari Pueri Silessii (1595). Horstius's hypothesis managed to conflate astrology with a medical belief widely current at the time: the notion that, if a pregnant woman became covetous of something she saw, the next time she touched herself on her body she would generate an appropriate birthmark on the corresponding bodily part of her as-yet-unborn infant. Horstius claimed the astrological conditions at the time of the Silesian Boy's birth (under the sign of Aries with the planet Saturn in conjunction) were so favorable that the boy's body began to produce not bone (as teeth were thought to be) but gold. The gold had manifested as a tooth because the boy's mother, while carrying him, must have coveted something golden she'd seen and not long afterward stuck her finger in her mouth. Horstius went on to theorize, obscurely, that the tooth was a sign from Heaven that the Turks would be kicked out of Europe.
Another book, this time by Regensburg physician and alchemist Martin Ruland, emphatically seconded Horstius's hypothesis. Others felt driven to write volumes in rebuttal, among them Duncan Liddel, who pointed out an elementary flaw in the astrology of Horstius's proposal: the sign of Aries falls in spring, not in December. The Coburg chemist Andreas Libavius produced a book about not the phenomenon or the theory but the controversy itself.
It finally occurred to someone that it might be a good idea to examine the boy and his tooth. It was at this point that it was discovered the whole affair was a hoax: the parents had jammed gold leaf over the child's molar.
Not many years later, precisely in order to avoid such embarrassments, Francis Bacon set forth his version of the scientific method, advocating the collection of empirical evidence before you advance hypotheses. For centuries people accepted the principle ... but carried on much as before, believing what they wanted to believe and finding the "proof" where they could. It's something we still do.
The idea that at least some blind people can distinguish different colors by touch dates back at least to the eighteenth century; there's mention of it in Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791). At that time it was believed minuscule differences in surface texture were responsible for the appearance of different colors; although these variations were too fine to be detected by most people, the nonvisual senses of the blind were known to be often more astute than those of the unimpaired. In different form, the idea reemerged in the nineteenth century, this time the underpinning being the notion that the different colors generated slightly different temperatures. One practitioner of the art in England was teenager Margaret M'Avoy, who was all the rage in 1816. A peculiarity of her uncanny ability which puzzled people was that it would function only in the light; in darkness her fingers were just as blind as anyone else's. Her devotees helpfully explained that this was because everything looks equally black in darkness.
We wouldn't be so easily fooled today, would we?
In the 1960s, when the fad for parapsychology was at a peak in the west, reports emerged from the USSR of various women who could "see" with their fingertips or other extremities. Several of the practitioners were soon exposed as frauds, and the credulous reports in western media tapered off rather abruptly when something very obvious was pointed out: stage magicians had been performing precisely similar feats for generations. Yet, where those reports were retracted at all, it was with relatively little fanfare, and so it's still widely believed the women's abilities were genuine.
The notion of "the emotional life of plants" can be traced to the polygraph expert Cleve Backster, the founder in New York, after a career with the CIA, of the Cleve Backster School of Lie Detection. In 1968 Backster published a paper in the International Journal of Parapsychology, "Evidence of a Primary Perception in Plant Life," which claimed that, by in essence hooking up a polygraph to them, he'd been able to show plants possessed a primitive form of ESP: they displayed a reaction to the destruction nearby of living cells. Money poured in to help him establish the Backster Research Foundation, whose express purpose was to investigate further the ESP abilities of plants. The initial results from these researches were very positive, and it seemed Backster and his team had made a great breakthrough. However, other researchers couldn't replicate the experimental results, and soon the claims were debunked. This did not stop the publication of several bestselling books on the subject of plant psychology — notably The Secret Life of Plants (1989) by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. It seems Backster's claims may have been the product of the fairly common phenomenon whereby perfectly rational researchers can unwittingly, and despite all self-imposed safeguards against bias, skew their results to favor their preconceptions. Yet some of the relevant books are still in print.
The two latter examples lead to another important tile in the falsification-of-science mosaic: the role of the print and broadcast media, which are almost always eager to trumpet sensational claims of the extraordinary and then, when the claims are shown to be bunkum, are near-criminally negligent in acknowledging the fact. This is frequently compounded in the modern era by the perversion that has grown up of the old idea of journalistic balance: the new faux-balance seeks to find a midway point not between two reality-based viewpoints but between a reality-based viewpoint (right or wrong) and one that is demonstrably false. The result in the minds of the audience — and, who knows, perhaps in the minds of the journalists too — is a fallacious perception that facts are somehow subject to debate. The attitude that everyone's opinion is equally valid, no matter their level of ignorance or expertise — and certainly no matter what the reality actually is — is lethally dangerous in some areas of science.
Babbage's Reflections
In 1830 Charles Babbage, best remembered today for his early work on the computer, published Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and On Some of Its Causes. In this little book's Chapter V there's a subsection on the genesis of fraudulent science that's as valid now as it was then — it's almost a textbook-in-miniature of how fraud, deliberate or unconscious, can arise within the sciences.
There are several species of impositions that have been practiced in science, which are but little known, except to the initiated, and which it may perhaps be possible to render quite intelligible to ordinary understandings. These may be classed under the heads of hoaxing, forging, trimming, and cooking.
Of Hoaxing. This, perhaps, will be better explained by an example. In the year 1788, M. Gioeni, a knight of Malta, published at Naples an account of a new family of Testacea, of which he described, with great minuteness, one species, the specific name of which has been taken from its habitat, and the generic he took from his own family, calling it Gioenia Sicula. ... He gave figures of the animal, and of its parts; described its structure, its mode of advancing along the sand ...
The editors of the Encyclopedie Methodique, have copied this description, and have given figures of the Gioenia Sicula. The fact, however, is, that no such animal exists, but that the knight of Malta, finding on the Sicilian shores the three internal bones of one of the species of Bulla [Bulla lignia] ... described and figured these bones most accurately, and drew the whole of the rest of the description from the stores of his own imagination.
Such frauds are far from justifiable; the only excuse which has been made for them is, when they have been practiced on scientific academies which had reached the period of dotage. ...
Forging differs from hoaxing, inasmuch as in the latter the deceit is intended to last for a time, and then be discovered, to the ridicule of those who have credited it; whereas the forger is one who, wishing to acquire a reputation for science, records observations which he has never made. This is sometimes accomplished in astronomical observations by calculating the time and circumstances of the phenomenon from tables. The observations of the second comet of 1784, which was only seen by the Chevalier D'Angos, were long suspected to be a forgery, and were at length proved to be so by the calculations and reasonings of Encke. The pretended observations did not accord amongst each other in giving any possible orbit. ...
Fortunately instances of the occurrence of forging are rare.
Trimming consists in clipping off little bits here and there from those observations which differ most in excess from the mean, and in sticking them on to those which are too small; a species of "equitable adjustment," as a radical would term it, which cannot be admitted in science.
This fraud is not perhaps so injurious (except to the character of the trimmer) as cooking, which the next paragraph will teach. The reason of this is, that the average given by the observations of the trimmer is the same, whether they are trimmed or untrimmed. His object is to gain a reputation for extreme accuracy in making observations; but from respect for truth, or from a prudent foresight, he does not distort the position of the fact he gets from nature, and it is usually difficult to detect him. He has more sense or less adventure than the Cook.
Of Cooking. This is an art of various forms, the object of which is to give to ordinary observations the appearance and character of those of the highest degree of accuracy.
One of its numerous processes is to make multitudes of observations, and out of these to select those only which agree, or very nearly agree. If a hundred observations are made, the cook must be very unlucky if he cannot pick out fifteen or twenty which will do for serving up.
Another approved [recipe], when the observations to be used will not come within the limit of accuracy, which it has been resolved they shall possess, is to calculate them by two different formulae. The difference in the constants employed in those formulae has sometimes a most happy effect in promoting unanimity amongst discordant measures. If still greater accuracy is required, three or more formulae can be used. ...
In all these, and in numerous other cases, it would most probably happen that the cook would procure a temporary reputation for unrivalled accuracy at the expense of his permanent fame. It might also have the effect of rendering even all his crude observations of no value; for that part of the scientific world whose opinion is of most weight, is generally so unreasonable, as to neglect altogether the observations of those in whom they have, on any occasion, discovered traces of the artist. In fact, the character of an observer, as of a woman, if doubted is destroyed. ...
That last observation is pretty ripe. Babbage's long-term colleague in his unsuccessful attempts to create a computer was Ada Lovelace. She wrote what can be regarded as the first computer program, and is thus generally accepted as a more significant figure in the history of computing than Babbage himself. There were plenty who doubted her character.
Cheating
Even very distinguished scientists are not immune to the temptations of fraud. For some 1,500 years the western world regarded the geocentric cosmology of Ptolemy as the last word on the subject, and he was greatly admired for the way in which he had confirmed his theories by experiment. Even long after the Copernican Revolution made his cosmology outmoded, Ptolemy was still held in high regard as a scientist. It was only in the twentieth century that astronomers began to become more skeptical about some of his results: they seemed almost too good to be true ... and in fact, on closer examination, they were. Further, it seemed improbable that he could have made some of the claimed observations at all. Once his stated results were fully analyzed, it was evident that a lot of his observations would make better sense had they been performed from about the latitude of the island of Rhodes. Ptolemy worked in Alexandria, but the great observational astronomer Hipparchus had worked in Rhodes a few centuries before him. Rather than make observations of his own, it seems Ptolemy spent his time in Alexandria's great Library cribbing many of Hipparchus's results and claiming them as his own.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Corrupted Science"
by .
Copyright © 2018 John Grant.
Excerpted by permission of See Sharp Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction i
Regarding this New Edition v
Part 1 The Falsification of Science
1 Fraudulent Scientists 1
Babbage's reflections
Cheating
Taking credit
Of dubious heredity
Piltdown Man
Archaeoraptor
The IQ frauds
Little Albert
Subliminal advertising
Cures for cancer
The Vinland Map
A new era of fraud
Cold fusion
Andrew Wakefield and the autism-vaccination fiasco
The cloning of a human being
The gay canvassers
The plastics and the perch
2 Seeing what they wanted to see 67
The replicability crisis
Predators and fake journals
Stings
Woo-woo science
Letters from distinguished persons
N-rays
Astronomy dominoes
Gravitational waves from the early universe
Polywater
Mitogenetic rays and Kirlian photography
Menstrual rays
A microbial muddle
Recovered memories
Prayer power
Corrupt science in the courtroom
3 Military Madness 112
Edward Teller and the Strategic Defense Initiative
Hafnium no, Bananas yes
Red mercury under the bed
Osmium-187
Psychotronic warfare
4 The One True Book 129
An inevitable conflict?
The crusade to miseducate the young
Intelligent Design
Creationist bills
No jobs for the boys?
Other worlds, other creations?
5 Ideology Overrules Science 165
Racist pseudoscience
Eugenics
The moral compass
Corruption of science by the ideology of science
Media muffins
6 The Corporate Corruption of Science 205
Tobacco and the climate
The hole in the ozone layer
The lead wars
The vilification of Rachel Carson
The beatification of sugar
"We repudiate the term asbestos poisoning"
Big bad pharma
Anticipating the post-antibiotic era
The diesel emissions fraud
Part 2 The Political Corruption of Science
7 Nazi Germany 321
Geopolitics
Die Deutsche Physik
The Aryan dream
The medical nightmare
8 Stalinist Russia 342
Heredity cast down
Dialectical materialism defines physics
The lunatics conquer the asylum
9 America in the 21stCentury 358
Nasty! dirty! horrid!
Matters of war
The air we breathe, the water we drink
Appointments and Dis-appointments
Scott Pruitt and the dismantling of the EPA
The inconvenient truth
Our responsibility
Endnotes 419
Bibliography 427
Index 437