Science says it, so it must be so, right? Well, here we have one of the most famous studies of all time coming under fire for presenting false data and conclusions. Shocking (pun intended).
Sixty-plus years ago, Yale University professor Stanley Milgram used a fake shock-torture setup to show that people are frighteningly easy to manipulate into doing as they’re told. One researcher described the setup as designed discover whether “ordinary Americans would obey immoral orders, as many Germans had done during the Nazi period.”
The answer Milgram gave that question was a disturbing yes.
I recall this study well. One of my jobs in grad school was taking films from the library to show in various classes on the old 16mm projectors. One of the films I showed several times was the film of this famous Stanley Milgram study. Like everyone else at the time, and since, I thought it was true. Guess not. There were important bits of data that were conveniently left out of the conclusions…data that give a completely opposite view of the result.
Those of us who have closely followed the ID/Evolution debate over the years are no strangers to extravagant claims made on sparse to non-existent data. When will the day come when a widely followed science journal admits to data that counters the accepted narrative, as we’re seeing happen with the Milgram study. There’s so many possibilities to present, one would hardly know where to begin.