{"id":32105,"date":"2015-07-24T02:00:08","date_gmt":"2015-07-24T06:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=32105"},"modified":"2015-11-20T14:41:35","modified_gmt":"2015-11-20T19:41:35","slug":"the-long-term-damage-to-scientific-credibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/07\/24\/the-long-term-damage-to-scientific-credibility\/","title":{"rendered":"The long-term damage to scientific credibility"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matt Ridley<\/a> on the danger to all scientific fields when one field is willing to subordinate fact to political expediency:<\/p>\n

For much of my life I have been a science writer. That means I eavesdrop on what\u2019s going on in laboratories so I can tell interesting stories. It\u2019s analogous to the way art critics write about art, but with a difference: we \u201cscience critics\u201d rarely criticise. If we think a scientific paper is dumb, we just ignore it. There\u2019s too much good stuff coming out of science to waste time knocking the bad stuff.<\/p>\n

Sure, we occasionally take a swipe at pseudoscience \u2014 homeopathy, astrology, claims that genetically modified food causes cancer, and so on. But the great thing about science is that it\u2019s self-correcting. The good drives out the bad, because experiments get replicated and hypotheses put to the test. So a really bad idea cannot survive long in science.<\/p>\n

Or so I used to think. Now, thanks largely to climate science, I have changed my mind. It turns out bad ideas can persist in science for decades, and surrounded by myrmidons of furious defenders they can turn into intolerant dogmas.<\/p>\n

This should have been obvious to me. Lysenkoism, a pseudo-biological theory that plants (and people) could be trained to change their heritable natures, helped starve millions and yet persisted for decades in the Soviet Union, reaching its zenith under Nikita Khrushchev. The theory that dietary fat causes obesity and heart disease, based on a couple of terrible studies in the 1950s, became unchallenged orthodoxy and is only now fading slowly.<\/p>\n

What these two ideas have in common is that they had political support, which enabled them to monopolise debate. Scientists are just as prone as anybody else to \u201cconfirmation bias\u201d, the tendency we all have to seek evidence that supports our favoured hypothesis and dismiss evidence that contradicts it\u2014as if we were counsel for the defence. It\u2019s tosh that scientists always try to disprove their own theories, as they sometimes claim, and nor should they. But they do try to disprove each other\u2019s. Science has always been decentralised, so Professor Smith challenges Professor Jones\u2019s claims, and that\u2019s what keeps science honest.<\/p>\n

What went wrong with Lysenko and dietary fat was that in each case a monopoly was established. Lysenko\u2019s opponents were imprisoned or killed. Nina Teicholz\u2019s book The Big Fat Surprise<\/em> shows in devastating detail how opponents of Ancel Keys\u2019s dietary fat hypothesis were starved of grants and frozen out of the debate by an intolerant consensus backed by vested interests, echoed and amplified by a docile press.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matt Ridley on the danger to all scientific fields when one field is willing to subordinate fact to political expediency: For much of my life I have been a science writer. That means I eavesdrop on what\u2019s going on in laboratories so I can tell interesting stories. It\u2019s analogous to the way art critics write […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,28,53,16],"tags":[245,1045,39,213,269,101],"class_list":["post-32105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-science","category-media","category-politics","category-science","tag-climatechange","tag-confirmationbias","tag-junkscience","tag-newspapers","tag-propaganda","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8lP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32105"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32106,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32105\/revisions\/32106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}