Story re Sabine Hosenfelder’s comments here. In response, Kirk Durston from P2C kindly writes to say,
If anyone is interested in a list of references with links, backing up the serious problem that science is facing right now, I wrote a blog post a while back that has a “Further Reading” section at the bottom of it. It currently stands at 47 links, counting Sabine Hossenfelder’s latest blog post.
Here is an example,
From Should we have faith in science? Part II:
peer-reviewed science papers
Austin Hughes, in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focusing on the origin of adaptive phenotypes laments, ‘Thousands of papers are published every year claiming evidence of adaptive evolution on the basis of computational analyses alone, with no evidence whatsoever regarding the phenotypic effects of allegedly adaptive mutations.’ He concludes that ‘This vast outpouring of pseudo-Darwinian hype has been genuinely harmful to the credibility of evolutionary biology as a science.’ Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini write in New Scientist,
“Much of the vast neo-Darwinian literature is distressingly uncritical. The possibility that anything is seriously amiss with Darwin’s account of evolution is hardly considered. … The methodological skepticism that characterizes most areas of scientific discourse seems strikingly absent when Darwinism is the topic.”
How can we distinguish the good papers from the poor? This can be very difficult without actually attempting to reproduce their findings. Short of that, apply the same critical thinking skills and healthy skepticism to scientific papers that you do for political, historical or religious claims. 21st century science can often be heavily influenced by poor experimental practices, questionable statistical sampling and analyses, unproven computational models, political agendas, competition for funding, and scientism (atheism dressed up as science). More.
Reader’s will find Durston’s page on science corruption a handy reference for sure.
See also: Particle physicist: Science is suffering from “baked in” bias The challenge is simpler than sometimes supposed. People must be willing to accept a truth they don’t like. If the universe is not as we would like it to be, imagining a different one is fun and maybe profitable, maybe aesthetically pleasing. But it is not science.
and
Kirk Durston: What progress have we made over six decades in understanding the origin of life?