Before you say no, at least read this:
My experiences at four research universities and as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) research fellow taught me that the relentless pursuit of taxpayer funding has eliminated curiosity, basic competence, and scientific integrity in many fields.
Yet, more importantly, training in “science” is now tantamount to grant-writing and learning how to obtain funding. Organized skepticism, critical thinking, and methodological rigor, if present at all, are afterthoughts. Thus, our nation’s institutions no longer perform their role as Eisenhower’s fountainhead of free ideas and discovery. Instead, American universities often produce corrupt, incompetent, or scientifically meaningless research that endangers the public, confounds public policy, and diminishes our nation’s preparedness to meet future challenges.
Nowhere is the intellectual and moral decline more evident than in public health research. From 1970 to 2010, as taxpayer funding for public health research increased 700 percent, the number of retractions of biomedical research articles increased more than 900 percent, with most due to misconduct. Fraud and retractions increased so precipitously from 2010 to 2015 that private foundations created the Center for Scientific Integrity and “Retraction Watch” to alert the public.
Edward Archer, “The Intellectual and Moral Decline in Academic Research” at James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
One cringes to think of the public policy that is based on much of this “research.”
One senses that the massive increase in research misconduct masks a deeper issue. Why don’t scientists want to be more honest? In most systems whose practitioners are distinguished for a high standard of integrity, integrity is actually a value. Can science thrive without it?
See also: End of science prediction from 2014: Are we there yet? Daniel Greenfield on the Saganization of science: This form of science measures itself not against the universe, but against the intellectual bubble inhabited by those who share the same worldview or those who live under their control.
Scientists are human too? Tell me it ain’t so! 🙂
Scientismists *believe* that labcoats give humans superpowers. Once you wear one, you become all-knowledgeable and all-powerful.
Like Superman.
It is part of their childish mentality. They rely on magic and have not grown-up.
According to atheists:
1. Universes appear from nothing, for no reason whatsoever.
2. "Life" appears from non-life (bye bye Redi, Spallanzani, Pasteur).
3. darwin's finches are different "species" (they are probably not).
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/are-darwins-finches-one-species-or-many. But "daddy" (darwin) can not be wrong! (They pout).
4. Humans are "illusions" (dennett, coyne, dawkins). Phantasmagoric beliefs.
5. Things “just” happen, randomness and chaos beget order.
They have their own collection of fables/ fairy tales to amuse themselves (Stephen Jay Gould had to correct them). Enter just-so stories:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://scienceoveracuppa.com/2016/05/22/the-absurdity-of-just-so-stories-in-explaining-evolution/amp/&ved=2ahUKEwiO0p6_lbPnAhURuRoKHZReB2gQFjADegQIBhAB&usg=AOvVaw2zHRy_gvbAn7aiTzh1IPKt&cf=1&cshid=1580657129407
It is very sad.
I would caution against the relationship between causation and correlation. In that same time period there was also a large increase in patents filed for university discoveries (eg, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, etc), a newly realized revenue source for universities. Is the increase in fraudulent claims due to increased public funding, increased pressure to discover something that is patentable, or just an increase in the amount of research? Personally, I don’t know enough to offer an informed opinion, but it would be interesting to look deeper.
That concluded the sentence Ed George quoted.
Integrity in an academic field should improve over time, not decline.
Why do scientists lie about their work?
Maybe most of them are totally corrupt and evil.
It could be.
Atheism is an entirely evil belief system. Most scientists are atheists. So, it does line up.
It works for me, anyway.
SA
But given that the vast majority of discovered by other scientists (mostly atheist), I would doubt that assertion.
Ed George,
Any comments on this:
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/suzan-mazur-on-how-the-college-board-skews-students-toward-darwinism/#comment-691996
?
Thanks.
Apparently many of the Nobel prize winners were not atheists:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_Nobel_laureates
https://www.johnlennox.org/resources/145/how-many-nobel-prize-winners
EG
The motive for discovery and exposing frauds may be professional competition, jealousy or desire for fame. In other cases, scientists rely on the success of some experiements in order to test others, so to explain the failure of their own work, they have to look for the reasons – and therefore they’ll be happy to blame the poor work done by others.
But we don’t know the motives. There is ‘misconduct’, for whatever reason.
It leads me to consider also, how much fraudulent science has not yet been discovered and retracted? It’s not reasonable to think that 100% of it has been found.
SA, I don’t disagree with this. There is bad behaviour in all walks of life, even by Christians.
I suspect that the number of outright fraudulent acts in science publications is not that high. However, I think that the unintentional influence of personal bias exists in all research, to one extent or another.
With regard to retractions for fraud or misconduct, is there any indication that the relative, rather than absolute, numbers are higher?
EG – I don’t have any recent data on the relative numbers whether trending up or down or flat. Retraction Watch cites a 2008 paper saying that the absolute numbers are “low but increasing”.
I’m not the best one to ask on this because I believe that almost all papers on evolutionary biology are fraudulent and are never retracted.
We highlight some of those here at times.
But from within the scientific community, I mean asking them, the report will probably be that there is little or no increase and there is no problem to be concerned about.
This particular OP is just focused on biomedical research and as you mentioned previously, the drive for profitability especially for pharmaceuticals will cause some dishonest reporting.
SA, the only reason I asked is because I am sure that the number of journals and published papers has increased significantly since the days I was at University publishing papers.
Silver Asiatic @4:
“Most scientists are atheists.”
Where did you get this information from?
Lol, OK. What basis do you have to make this claim?
There are 3 open acess papers in the January issue of Evolution ( a good society journal in our field)
Ashby simulates co-evolution between hosts and STIs https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.13883
Holand et al looks at the strengh and direction of selection in reindeer https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.13894
Cerca et al investigate morphological statis in a group of worms https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.13884
reading these papers, do you really have reason to believe they are fraudulent?
Mimus
Yes, I do.
I have a superbowl party to attend in a few minutes, so I can barely be expected to read and analyze three research papers, test the findings and then report, however …
I’ll start with a few things on the one about morphological statis (sic) in a group of worms.
First, all of the statistical analysis in that paper is based on the idea that correlations in DNA sequences indicate various degrees of relatedness. That’s a false assumption right at the beginning and it cannot be directly tested.
It assumes the species are related. But they could have similar DNA features and have independent ancestries.
I’d say that this entire paper is a tissue of lies, ambiguities, cover-ups and deliberate attempts to deceive people.
Here’s the first lie. If this is controversial, what does it say about THE THEORY upon which all of biology rests and within which there “are no weaknesses” as we’ve heard it claimed. Where’s the controversy and what does it mean?
The term “morphological stasis” is deceptive in itself. It means “evolution did not occur”.
So, I didn’t even get started and we have a fraudulent paper to deal with.
So, the evolutionists are lying to themselves, the public, their sponsors – anybody at all, it doesn’t matter. It’s just a lot of B. S. (bad stuff).
Again, more lies and cover-ups. “Desired” by who? They’re saying that evolutionists “desire certain outcomes” and are not merely interested in what the observations show? Who does this? Why is this happening? How often do scientists “desire” something to fit their theory?
Here’s evidence of a motive for fraudulent work. They “desire” one thing, but see another. Then they have to explain their disappointment, so they make up notions about why there’s “morphological stasis” (no evolution), the opposite of what evolution claims. They want variation, and it’s not present. So, we’re given a paper that tells us that one species didn’t evolve. Nothing tells us why.
This is completely useless, a waste of money and yes, a scientific fraud.
Let me put it this way, if I – a relatively uneducated layman – had a half-million dollars to contribute to scientific research, do you think I’d give it for more of this nonsense? Maybe the work in finding an antidote to the coronavirus would give a more beneficial payback?
That’s odd. THE THEORY “expects” something. We usually call that “predicts”, but in the case of lying evolutionists, we let them say “no, not predict, we just ‘expected'”. Ok, you “expected”. The theory gave you that expectation. Stasis is exceptionally uncommon. The liars interpret that to mean, “it only happens 50% of the time?”.
Oh, that's too bad. I feel so bad for you all. It was "expected" to be uncommon, but actually it's "common". Don't worry, the evolutionary frauds can tell us that we now expect it to be common, so everything is ok.
Normally, honest scientists will say "the theory predicted something that didn't happen, therefore the theory has been falsified".
But we know that evolutionists never work that way.
Punctuated Equilibrium — they’re still trotting that one out from the 1970s. Another of The Greatest Theories Known to Mankind. And precision? Oh certainly …
Great theory. We looked at the fossils. No gradualism. “Therefore, they must have evolved rapidly”.
Wow, good work. And predictive? “Sometimes it works this way, other times not”.
Again, this is completely useless. As mindless as the supposed forces that created all of it.
Two competing, contradictory views and a “conciliation” “was never thoroughly achieved”.
The Theory doesn’t work. They know it.
Now this paper, supposedly, is going to solve it?
Again, more lies and coverups. They’ll admit the problems in the theory just to give themselves a reason for working on it, and in the hopes that they’ll become famous for solving these intractable problems in the Theory Which has No Weaknesses Within it.
I think that’s a good enough start for me.
Of course, a die-hard evolutionist has no problem with contradictory claims and “unresolved” problems in the theory. None of this is a big deal.
For me, that’s merely additional evidence that they cannot present honest papers and almost everything evolutionists do is fraudulent in its very first principles.
It’s bogus science.
Silver Asiatic,
Enjoy the superbowl party!
Please, someday after the party, can you look at my question @12 and relate it to my post @7? 🙂
Also, there are examples like Dr Francis Collins who is not atheist but has no problem with Darwinian evolution.
Thanks.
Deceleration of morphological evolution in a cryptic species complex and its link to paleontological stasis
Evolutionary science
“We’re supposed to explain how and why something evolved based on our theory.
But in this evolutionary study, we explain that these worms did not evolve and we don’t know why”.
SA
From a friend:
The reason why I don’t believe in evolution is because of the evidence.
I consider myself a strict empiricist, so I go only by evidence.
If you think only in terms of scientific evidence evolution would be viewed as a very weak fringe idea, like a science fiction idea, not really true or close to true.
I really used to believe in evolution before when I didn’t go by evidence, but then I started to think about things in terms of only evidence and empirical observations so I stopped believing in evolution.
The reason why most people believe in evolution is because of authority, incredulity, or really wanting to believe in evolution, not because of evidence.
I just don’t know how anyone who goes strictly by evidence can believe in evolution, something that ordinarily would be viewed as like a crackpot theory, not even real science.
Usually since evolutionists realize how weak the evidence supporting evolution is they resort to avoiding discussing evidence and just discuss:
Authority: Authority figures believing something or agreeing that something is true isn’t equivalent to scientific evidence that it’s true. What matters to me is what the scientific evidence shows us not what authority figures believe. You can’t determine what’s true or false by what authority figures personally believe.
Incredulity: Usually the evolutionist will say something like “what alternative is there?”, which is just an argument from personal incredulity. You can’t determine what’s true or false by using incredulity.
It’s just foolish people looking at fossils and imagining things, they are backed by authority figures rather than actual scientific evidence…what a joke.
The only reason most people believe in evolution is because they were raised and taught to just like someone raised and taught to believe in the tooth fairy…it has absolutely nothing to do with scientific evidence.
It’s just in their imagination.
If your evidence of fraud is that the introduction of a scientific paper identifies a gap in our current understanding of a topic then we are going to have to retract a lot of papers.
As far as I can see the only real claim you make above that you can’t test DNA based phylogenetic methods as a way of reconstructing evolutionary relationships. But that’s just wrong, Hillis developed an experiment 30 years ago
Mimus
To say that we have a gap in our current understanding is certainly one way to look at it. I see the problems as being more significant than that. I wouldn’t expect all of those papers to be retracted, at the same time. I think most of them would just be ignored over time.
I was not familiar with the Hillis paper – thank you. I’d have to look into it more carefully to understand.
I don’t know what they’re referring to as evolved “ancestors” here, but I’m guessing they’re looking at adaptations within a species. If such, then we could wonder if that species is truly representative of all life forms on earth.
Jawa
Here’s one source:
https://www.pewforum.org/2009/11/05/scientists-and-belief/
Regarding your post #7, yes true.
Evolutionist’s imaginations kind of reminds me of the imaginations of many nutritionists or fad diet supporters or perpetual motion machine supporters or alternative medicine supporters.
Evolution has an impact factor (roughly the average number of citations of a paper in 2 yers) of around 4, so articles appearing there are certainly picked up and built upon. That being said, it’s a mid-tier journal in our field, and the most important and exciting results are published in higher-profile journals.
No experiment can do that, so there is always wiggle room to keep selective scepticism going. But there really is emprical proof that molecular phylogenetics works to recover relationships. If youw ant to claim they will fail in some scenario you need to make an argument, not just say “THIS IS AN ASSUMPTION” and think you are making a meaninful contribution.
It really shows you the type and kind of people that evolutionists are, how they don’t value evidence or care about scientific evidence they just care about forcing their way and their beliefs onto society.
TF
Which evolutionist are you referring to? And can one person have more than one imagination? 🙂
mimus:
Only if the relationship is that of a common design.
Mimus at 22 claims,
Really??? I been asking Darwinists for ANY experimental evidence that unguided material processes are capable creating just a single gene or protein for years. Perhaps you care be the first one, by reference to your “higher-profile journals” of course, to supply us with that critical piece of missing empirical evidence for evolution?
Mimus goes on to claim that
Actually severe problems with phylogenetics have been known about for years now,
And the final nail in the coffin for phylogenetics was this,
Thus, as amply demonstrated in the preceding post, Mimus’s claim that “there really is empirical proof that molecular phylogenetics works to recover relationships.” is just a big fat lie. The fact of the matter is that phylogenetics have falsified Darwinian claims. Too bad empirical evidence just does not really matter to Darwinists. They will continue to believe in Darwinism no matter what the evidence says to the contrary. They have a utterly blind faith in Darwinism that would make the most ardent Islamic fundamentalist cringe!
@24 EG
According to philosophical materialism anything is possible. Magic rules.
You going to provide some.. ah… evidence… for this claim?
How cute, Mimus wants to pretend that he cares about the actual evidence! 🙂
Silver Asiatic @20:
RE: question @12
“A survey of scientists who are members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science”
But how many scientists are members of the AAAS?
What proportion of the total number of scientists are members of the AAAs?
Do you believe in free-will, Mimus?