A bit more on fraud in science and peer-reviewed scientific publications

I’m a great believer in peer review.

I think that, although it’s not indispensable — a great piece of work remains a great piece of work whether it’s been approved by two or three peer-reviewers or not  (as in the cases, for example, of Newton’s Principia, Mendel’s papers on genetics, Darwin’s Origin of Species, and Einstein’s initial article on special relativity) — it’s extremely useful, and particularly helpful to editors.

But it’s not all-powerful.  It wields no messianic powers.  Errors and falsehoods often pass muster quite easily, as an increasing number of observers are noting:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/science/retractions-coming-out-from-under-science-rug.html?_r=1

I’m also a big fan of science.  Had my eyesight been better (who knows?), I might have become an astronomer.  But science is a fallible human enterprise, subject to the limitations — intellectual, physical, and, yes, moral — of the particular class of humans called scientists.

The 1912 “Piltdown Man” hoax, which wasn’t definitively exposed as a hoax until more than four decades later, in 1953, is far and away not the only instance of flat-out fraud in the sciences.

That’s not an attack on science.  History, literary studies, philosophy, archaeology, sociology, anthropology, psychology — these fields, too, are subject to those same intellectual, physical, and moral limitations, as is every other area of human endeavor.  We’re a flawed and bumbling lot.

We simply need to remember this.  Humility has its place.