Wait a minute, that's not right...Science is a human endeavour. As such, it can be subject to human errors. The wonderful thing about it, though, is that it is usually self-correcting. Scientists are always testing previous knowledge to ensure that it holds up to all available evidence. When something is found to be blatantly wrong, it is dismissed from the collection of scientific knowledge. Sometimes, though, everyone wants something to be true so badly that they ignore rational thought and objective evidence and celebrate the wrong answer. With that in mind, I give you some of the
Most Interesting Scientific Frauds.
The first one was sent in by three people:
The Piltdown Man (1912) was presented as a set of fossilized remains, intended to show that the earliest form of human life began in England, rather than in Africa. It was not discovered as a forgery until forty years later, though its veracity was in doubt from the very beginning. The bones were apparently given to Charles Dawson, though the identity of the forger is still in question. The fossil itself consisted of three distinct parts: the skull of a medieval human, the lower jaw bone of an orang-utan, and fossilized chimpanzee teeth.
"
Archaeoraptor" is the generic name informally assigned in 1999 to a fossil from China in an article published in National Geographic magazine. The magazine claimed that the fossil was a "missing link" between birds and terrestrial theropod dinosaurs. Even prior to this publication there had been severe doubts about the fossil's authenticity. It led to a scandal when evidence demonstrated it to be a forgery through further scientific study. The forgery was constructed from rearranged pieces of real fossils from different species. Zhou et al. found that the head and upper body actually belong to a specimen of the primitive fossil bird Yanornis. A 2002 study found that the tail belongs to a small winged dromaeosaur, Microraptor, named in 2000. The legs and feet belong to an as yet unknown animal. The scandal brought attention to illegal fossil deals conducted in China. It also highlighted the need for close scientific scrutiny of purported "missing links" published in journals which are not peer-reviewed. The fossil scandal has been used by creationists to cast doubt on evolutionary theory. Although "Archaeoraptor" was a forgery, many true examples of feathered dinosaurs have been found and demonstrate the evolutionary connection between birds and other theropods.
was an English surgeon and medical researcher. He led a study that purported to show a link between the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine and autism. Since then, the paper has been shown to be false, and was withdrawn from publication. However, the idea caught on and has led to a decrease in the number of people (children especially) who are vaccinated, causing outbreaks of the diseases worldwide. A very good summary of the story (in comic strip form) is given at:
http://tallguywrites.livejournal.com/148012.htmlThe next three instances all have to do with one thing: press conferences. In these cases, scientists are either too excited by their supposed discovery, or flat out lying.
Cold fusion is the room-temperature nuclear fusion that was supposed to produce vast amounts of energy with very little input energy. It gained attention after reports in 1989 by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, then one of the world's leading electrochemists, that their apparatus had produced anomalous heat ("excess heat"), of a magnitude they asserted would defy explanation except in terms of nuclear processes. Many scientists tried to replicate the experiment with the few details available. Hopes fell with the large number of negative replications, the withdrawal of many positive replications, the discovery of flaws and sources of experimental error in the original experiment, and finally the discovery that Fleischmann and Pons had not actually detected nuclear reaction byproducts. The lead scientist on a study that could
overturn the Big Bang decided to tell the world, through interviews and press release, that the Universe didn't start with a Big Bang, it started with a big chill. The paper discussing the result comes to no such grandiose conclusion, and none of the journalists reporting the story seemed to notice the difference. A good summary of the divergence is given
here. Most recently, a study was produced that found that
GMO crops cause cancer in mice. Again, though, we have a case where the scientists involved went to the press first, without letting others in their field properly examine the results. A nice summary of the dustup is given
here.
This last fraud is more a case of a practical joke that went on too long rather than anything malicious, but the event is still somewhat troubling.
The Sokal affair involves a publishing hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physicist who studies the interplay between statistical mechanics and quantum field theory. In 1996, Sokal published a paper titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" in Social Text, which proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. On its date of publication, Sokal revealed in Lingua Franca (a magazine about intellectual and literary life in academia) that the article was a hoax, identifying it as "a pastiche of Left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense . . . structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist academics] he could find about mathematics and physics". The resultant academic and public quarrels concerned the scholarly merit, or lack thereof, of humanistic commentary about the physical sciences; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; academic ethics, including whether Sokal was right or wrong to deceive the editors and readers of Social Text; and whether the journal had exercised the appropriate intellectual rigor before publishing the pseudoscientific article. In 1996, Social Text did not conduct peer review because its editors believed that an editorial open policy would stimulate more original, less conventional research. The editors argued that, in that context, Sokal's article was a fraudulent betrayal of their trust. Moreover, they further argued that scientific peer review does not necessarily detect intellectual fraud and other instances of published poor science. After the Sokal Hoax, Social Text established an article peer review process.
And now, back to the (hopefully) good scientists, mmm-whai!
Topic: LoC #64: Top 52 Scientists (Read 28160 times)
