Jonah Lehrer—“journalist who writes on the topics of psychology, neuroscience, and the relationship between science and the humanities. He served as a research assistant at Columbia University in Eric Kandel’s lab”:
It’s as if our facts were losing their truth…claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable…it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology.1
Dominic Statham notes “the ‘human aspects’ of the problem”:
According to Lehrer, these include selective reporting of results, publication bias by journal editors, fashions and illusions nurtured by a priori beliefs.2
John Ioannidis—Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and author of Why most published research findings are false (Plos Medicine, 2(8):e124, 30 August 2005):
It feels good to validate a hypothesis…it feels even better when you’ve got a financial interest in the idea or your career depends upon it. And that’s why, even after a claim has been systematically disproven, you still see some stubborn researchers citing the first few studies that show a strong effect. They really want to believe that it’s true.3
Richard Palmer—Professor of biology at the University of Alberta—referencing, selective reporting of results4:
We cannot escape the troubling conclusion that some—perhaps many—cherished generalities are at best exaggerated in their biological significance and at worst a collective illusion nurtured by strong a priori beliefs often repeated… scientists find ways to confirm their preferred hypothesis, disregarding what they don’t want to see.5
Dominic Statham provides the following example:
In the early 1990s, the Danish ornithologist Anders Møller proposed a correlation between the genetic quality of a bird and the symmetry and length of its feathers. He concluded that this confirmed the view that feather ornaments in birds arose through an evolutionary process and that birds chose eachother for mating based on such symmetries.
Based on this theory, “a number of scientists published data supporting his findings. Not only did some confirm the role of symmetry in sexual selection in barn swallows, but others demonstrated the principle with fruit flies and even humans.”
As an example of someone who supported the “symmetry theory” is evolutionary biologist Professor Leigh Simmons of the University of Western Australia. Yet, whilst enthusiastic, he eventually came to oppose it based on his own research and found that “when he submitted his results to the scientific journals, he had difficulty getting them published”:
[They] only wanted confirming data…It was too exciting an idea to disprove.
Jonah Lehrer notes:
For Simmons, the steep rise and slow fall [of the symmetry theory] is a clear example of a scientific paradigm, one of those intellectual fads that both guide and constrain research; after a new paradigm is proposed, the peer review process is tilted towards positive results.
Dominic Statham notes:
One study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that, of thirty-four tests that had been subjected to replication, the results of forty-one per cent of them had either been directly contradicted or had been shown to be significantly exaggerated.6
This was in reference to “controlled experiments—where tests can be carefully replicated by others” yet, “how much more will it be true of evolutionary speculations about what happened many years outside of living memory, and for which there is no possibility of replication?
‹ Scientific Cenobites, part 1 of 9 up Scientific Cenobites, part 2 of 9 ›