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Scientist Says Most Scientific Papers Are Wrong
An anonymous reader writes "According to epidemiologist John Ioannidis, the majority of published scientific papers are wrong. If Ioannidis's own paper is right, a randomly chosen scientific paper has less than a 50% chance of being true. He also says that many papers may only be accurate measures of the prevailing bias among scientists. However, a senior editor of a scientific journal says that scientists are already aware of this: 'When I read the literature, I'm not reading it to find proof like a textbook. I'm reading to get ideas. So even if something is wrong with the paper, if they have the kernel of a novel idea, that's something to think about.'"
Great... watch the Creationist/Intelligent Design kooks run with this.
Trolling is a art,
Wow! Science can be wrong.
That is how the system works.
But just because these two scientists were wrong about the precise mechanics of evolution doesn't mean that they were wrong about how the data should be interpreted. The data shows that life has progressed to meet the demands of its environment. Survival of the fittest is correct, but there is no straight-line progression of lifeforms leading one from another as was supposed when these authors first penned their ideas.
Scientific ideas may come and go, but the data set just gets larger. That is why this guy can claim the others are wrong: he has a better data set.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Their is a 50% chance that that's not true.
Scientist Says Most Scientific Papers Are Wrong
I can't believe it!
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
"Science" is NOT the same as "fact" or "truth". It is a METHOD -- a PROCEDURE one follows in an attempt explain some event or phenomenon. It should hardly be surprising that "Scientific" papers are mostly wrong. There may be only one "right" or "correct" theory for a given phenomenon -- but there are countless wrong ones.
Not too surprising.
I wish people would be a little more weary of automatically believing everything they read in a scientific paper, or worse a crap article from a journalist who doesn't even understand the paper in the first place.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Wow, I thought Study Shows One Third of All Studies Are Nonsense is bad enough, who knows scientific papers are worse!
I patiently await the next article: "Research Shows Three-Quarters of All Researches Are Bullshit".
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Gee, i didn't know most of "IEEE transactions on Image Processing", "Journal of Algorithms" or "IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence" were probably wrong.
Please be more specific next time. Thank you.
I thought 33% of the papers were wrong.... Then or this has 33% chance of being wrong, or the other has 50% chance of being wrong....
:-)
Can someone calculate, based on above, a better estimate on the chance of some paper being wrong?
note: don't publish this calculation on a paper, otherwise it will be subject to these probabilities and we'll have to recalculate all over again....
So Long and Thanks for All the Fish!
I have found this to be sadly true. My coworkers are college professors who often publish papers on social trends using large datasets obtained from government records. I am frequently pointing out errors in their analysis (mainly that they simply don't look at their data, such as just because Jane Doe and John Doe have the SSN they are assumed to be the same person) but I'm generally ignored or told to fix it myself though that isn't my job. They are more interested in getting something published and don't want to have to retract something.
What I do see as harmful is the attitude towards bad papers. To many academics try to accumulate more and more published papers the same way that slash-dotters try to build up karma. I understand that having papers published can reflect well on someone, but we need more accountability. Journals need to create a more strict system for reviewing papers that are to be published to weed out more of the crap plain and simple. If the evidence does not reflect the claims throw it away. If the research was conducted on a population that was too small or specific for a grand generalized claim about the topic as a whole, throw it out.
I understand that you will always have people just trying to throw their names around, but this needs to be looked at from the grander perspective.
"When I read the literature, I'm not reading it to find proof like a textbook.
Sure there are probably many scientists that think of it this way. But the problem is that bad research (or a bad paper) rarely dies after being published. They are often cited as evidence for years to come in other papers until enough evidence to the contrary comes out to raise questions. Plus, you have crazy professors giving this bad research for their classes to read, and often they don't explain to their classes where research is possibly flawed--so we find ourselves training generations of new scientific minds that run around spouting out bad research. I understand that we all need to take research with a grain of salt when we read it, however bad scientists trying to become famous with their bad ideas or bad papers can be very detrimental to any field.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
But seriously, reviewers are biased and sloppy, as are the editors. The fact that reviews are blind means that they are also unaccountable, which fosters even more bias.
Journals take months or years to respond to a submision, and often as not they respond with a rejection so the submitter has to give up or start the whole process over with another journal. There are so many scandals that one could quote. The whole process seems more designed to support the status quo than to promote knowledge.
I have discussed this with many people in academia and they react not with logic, but with horror that I would dare to question a system that they view almost mystical reverence.
Test 1 2 3 4
If a submitted paper is scientifically unsound, it should be rejected.
If a scientific paper is useless to the readership, that publication should reject it and recommend a different journal.
If a paper is wrong and the reviewers KNOW IT then they should send it back for corrections.
If it's WRONG but the reviewers don't or more typically can't know it because it is novel, then publish it. The rightness or wrongness will be sorted out soon enough.
Ever heard of Isaac Newton? Turns out his theories were incomplete in some very fundamental ways, but his theories regarding the motion of objects were the best approximations we had for hundreds of years and are still very useful for macroscopic objects traveling way below c.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Newton's original papers on physics are all wrong. So what?
They've been replaced by something else. Sure, they're generally true, enough to be taught in physics classes, but all the specifics on gravitation etc. are incorrect.
They're being replaced with: (pick your theory) quantum gravity, string theory, quantum mechanics and more things I don't know.
But so what? Science, by its nature, is always being improved upon. Any time you correct someone else's theory, you could say their theory is now wrong.
Well, maybe this description is even wrong or inapplicable, considering I didn't read TFA =)
I know of a whole company based on a bad paper. Some type of "fast blood analyzer". After a number of bad pre-production starts, yelling matches between software and hardware people, firings, suings, quitings, it was finally determined that whole premmis (from a founder's scientific paper) was false.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be research"
That's what my supervisor used to say to me when I got depressed about lack of progress.
Whether anything anyone says is right or wrong, it's a matter of opinion first and foremost.
No, it's not.
Our biology does not provide us
Our biology provides us with excellent truth detectors: throughout most of primate evolution, if you were wrong about whether your food was poisonous or whether there was a lion hiding in the bushes, you didn't get to pass on your genes. You didn't get to debate social relativism with the lion before he made a tasty meal out of you.
Most of science is still ultimately about matters like that, matters that have good answers, at least in principle.
Some science has veered off course, however. Every major scientific discipline (physics, biology, chemistry, etc.) has subareas where people start conflating experimental facts with opinion, aesthetics, and prejudice.
So, scientific truth is not a matter of opinion, but a lot of what is published in science is not about scientific truth.
According to epidemiologist John Ioannidis, the majority of published articles on Slashdot are dupes. If Ioannidis's own paper is right, a randomly chosen story has less than a 50% chance of being original.
A lecturer at my old university told me that around 90% of papers get written, then put into a drawer somewhere. And nobody reads them again. I wonder what proportion of papers that are read are 'wrong'?
> Does this mean that peer review fails as a method to filter out time-wasting, tree-killing dreck?
Peer review isn't a certification of correctness. It's just supposed to filter out the papers where the authors didn't do their homework. It can spot bad logic, use of outdated data, failure to consult important papers in the field, etc. But it can't tell us whether string theory is correct or not.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Therefore anything that anyone says is simply an opinion.
That's just your opinion.
Who ordered that?
John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece, says that small sample sizes, poor study design, researcher bias, and selective reporting and other problems combine to make most research findings false. But even large, well-designed studies are not always right, meaning that scientists and the public have to be wary of reported findings.
... you have to be careful.
OK, I'm going to go through these one by one.
First, small sample size is a problem. That's why you have error bars on your graphs - in fact, if you don't see the error bars, check the tables to see if the t size is big enough - many studies start with thousands of inputs to get only a handful of outputs - in biochemistry, you can have more than 10,000 PCRs of something made, only to result in 10-40 final structures in crystallography at the other end of the pipeline.
The study we're on is unusual in that it actually has sufficient numbers that the t sizes are big enough to ask many questions - but most have such small numbers that they could easily be wrong.
2. Poor study design - again, how you ask the question is important, as well as the conditions - so this may be true. I always check the holes in the logic as well as the basic logic - because those holes can lead to incorrect conclusions - and many popularized science articles don't bother checking for the holes in the logic. They do a quick summary saying "breast cancer is caused by too much salt in the diet" when the study really said "there is a high correlation among middle-aged women having first onset breast cancer if their diets are in the top range of salt intake" - but that could also mean they live in conditions where the high salt intake could be due to the other things in their environment that caused the breast cancer in the first place.
For example, you could say Romans got lead poisoning because they lived in cities, when it was actually the use of lead in their pipes, not the living in cities - although we don't know, as perhaps cities had lead particulates in food from airborne fallout from factories or burning certain things in their candles
3. Researcher bias - ok. Not going to argue that.
4. Selective reporting - see 2 for how this occurs.
But that doesn't mean a good high-quality peer reviewed scientific paper in a respected and well-juried paper is "inaccurate". There are a lot of journals out there, and different standards and quality levels.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Scientific papers often include a great deal of data and analysis. Some of this data can be somewhat inaccurate, much of the analysis can also easily be incorrect. How far off does something have to be before it is "wrong"? How much of a paper has to be "wrong" for the paper itself to be declared "wrong"? I think a better way to look at it is that in most papers, there is some wrong and some right.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
I didn't read the article but I don't believe the conclusions of the summary. Maybe in epidemiology it is true but not in physics where usually the results are reproducible and I very rarely find papers that are just wrong. I might agree that most of the papers are not 100% right (small mistakes in formulas happen quite frequently) but it does not impair the usability of a paper.
However, peer review does not solve all the problems. Most of the research takes a lot of time and effort and referees just read the papers. They do not reproduce the experiments or calculations. So peer review can weed out only obviously bad papers but not papers that looks OK but are wrong.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
"All models are wrong; some are useful" -George Box
I'd say it's more like 100% of scientific papers are wrong, it's merely a question of the limitations of the model.
If 50% are wrong, then 50% are right. So if I write a scientific paper, the chance of it being right is 1/2. And if I write the same paper, say, 8 times, the chance of it being right at least once is 255/256.
I think I'll write that paper on statistics.
Indiana Jones:
Archaeology is the search for fact, not truth. If it's truth you're looking for, Dr. Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
It took them 100 years but they spinned creationism into ID, in 100 years they'll come around. Evolution has always been evolution, their side twists and spins. The truth will always be right.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
The article is about "Published Research Findings". It doesn't specify that all the papers analyzed were from peer reviewed journals. There are a lot of non peer reviewed journals out there. Usually you only publish in those if you have a short paper, or one that's not extremely novel, or just not of great general interest. Many times researchers will publish in those journals when they can't get the paper published in a peer reviewed journal. I'm sure the percentage of false findings in those journals is much higher, and may have altered the ratio of found false papers significantly.
What you say is very true. I am working towards my Ph.D. right now in Physics, and I encounter this every day.
I think both you and the poster hit on something very important here. First is that we (as people who are reading the research papers) are not looking for proof, etc. of something. When I grab the latest paper on a topic I work on, I am not going to read it and say, "Oh. They found x which contradicts with what I am seeing. They must be right." Instead, I am looking at their models, results, and the like to see what HAS been done, what the outcome was, and if they have any problems. That way, I can address these issues in papers I write and talks I give. It also gives me something to compare my results to.
Your cousin is facing what I am facing, as well. I think people in the community understand perfectly well where she is -- that she has found interesting results thus far and needs to work more on it to get deeper understanding/whatever. To the outside world though... "it's just a theory" or "it's just preliminary" (phrases people love to throw around) drowns out the important stuff she's doing.
The second thing, that you specifically hit on, is that we need to eliminate options when we're working in an area. The pressure to produce sexy, nightly-news-ready results keeps us from doing that. Of course, I'm biased. Hah.
This doesn't mean all of this work has been pointless. People do studies, report their results (which are sometimes wrong)... but we know what we're doing, and we know what to take with a grain of salt and what not do.
Mike.
Mmmm......sacrelicious.
The paper stating that ~50% of scientific papers are false is published in the Public Library of Science (PLOS) Medicine. The paper only examined medical studies and not scientific papers on physics, chemistry, engineering science, (and mathematics).
While molecular biology papers can be prone to statistically insignicant, but factually stated conclusions, the biggest culprits are clinical studies and 'large-scale' analyses of data.
Good experiments are constructed to give a 'yes' or 'no' answer based on the presence or absence of evidence. The zeal of high-throughput studies and analysis have put more pressure on good statistical analysis. Unfortunately, statistical analysis requires math...which sometimes eludes doctors and biologists. Hence, the problem of missuing statistics and stating inadequately supported conclusions.
-Howard
Favorite
Science progresses when well thought out hypothothies based on a good data are replaced by more inciteful reasoning based on more complete data. Lamarck wasn't guilty of faulty reasoning. He just didn't have a complete enough data set.
But the article at hand, isn't talking about that kind of "wrong". He is talking about conclusions that can not be supported by the data presented. Either the reasoning is faulty or the data collection methods are so faulty that no meaningful conclusions can be drawn.
When a theory is proven wrong in the scientific sense, it is a good thing. We learn something new and that be the basis for further developments. But if a theory is proven "wrong" in the mechanical sense, we have no new insights, just a relief from further time wasting.
Science is not about finding the truth. It has nothing to do with the truth; people who look to it for truth misunderstand it. Science, and the scientific method, are based on one thing: reproducible effect. I do X, Y, and Z, and T results. If this can be confirmed, reproduced independently, you might have something scientifically useful.
Notice what this does not say: X, Y, and Z are "true"; Z is "true"; X, Y, and Z cause T. Nor does it state the meaning of X, Y, Z, or T. Nor does it say why, in the presence of X, Y, and Z, T occurs. These are irrelevant. The only thing science does, the only thing it is capable of, is one thing: testing if, in the presence of X, Y, and Z, we repeatedly get T. For most things, that's all that matters. This is the scientific method.
Thus it is that science is, quite literally, magic. Look over most fictional magic systems. We have things like "if we say this spell, this thing happens." "If we write these symbols, this thing happens." "If I visualize this thing in my mind, this thing happens." "If a mix a pinch of this and a hair of that, this thing happens." Because it's reproducible, it's useful. The mechanic does not matter: only reproducible effect matters. If waving ones hands and saying a phrase were to be followed consistently by a minor explosion, it would be just as scientific as mixing two chemicals to produce the same effect.
It doesn't matter why. Theories get revised consistently to fit the facts, to document reproducible effects. If phlostigen and ether were accurate and useful models, the fact they have been discarded for more useful models does not matter: science isn't about truth. It is about reproducible effects.
This is why not clinging to pet theories (yes, this includes everyone's favorite: natural evolution) is important: the theories do not matter. One should never fit facts to a theory. One should create a theory to fit the facts.
This is what makes science useful.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Our biology provides us with excellent truth detectors: throughout most of primate evolution, if you were wrong about whether your food was poisonous or whether there was a lion hiding in the bushes, you didn't get to pass on your genes. You didn't get to debate social relativism with the lion before he made a tasty meal out of you.
Actually, no. As Alvin Plantinga has pointed out, any number of false beliefs would accomplish the same thing. For example, if the early primates wanted to be friends with lions, but a few believed that the best way to accomplish this was running away, those with that false belief would be far more likely to pass on their genes. What's required for survival is not truth-detection, but behavior consistent with survival, which can be prompted by belief in utter and complete falsehood.
He goes on to argue that belief in evolution is self-defeating because on the supposition that evolution is responsible for our reasoning ability, we have no confidence that the deliverances of reason (i.e. the theory of evolution) correspond to reality.
But Intelligent design did spark a great open letter - check out the dogma of the Flying Spaghetti Monster at www.venganza.org
Stop intellectual property from infringing on me
Hate to get into metaphysics, but a scientific hypothesis or theory is only going to be able to predict a very restricted set of things.
People often quote Newton's physics as being "proved wrong" by Einstein's relativity (and those same people often barely understand the limits of relativity with respect to the quantum mechanical world). However Newtonian physics is good enough for most (though not all) space mission planning since it's still quite accurate so long as you don't get near a large gravity well like the sun or travel too fast. So Newtonian physics isn't "wrong" it's just accurate to within a certain margin and useful under less general conditions than previously thought.
That's what these non scientifically trained creationalist types miss. There is no right or wrong theory, even though that's how the popular scientific press reports it. There is only the ability of a theory to predict what can happen (or has happened) based on a set of conditions, and an accuracy under a given set of conditions. Newtonian physics is no more "wrong" than eating salad is. You just can't misuse it by applying it to the wrong set of conditions (don't eat that salad if you're allergic to the ingredients).
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Did anyone actually RTFP? It's one of the most spurious pieces of "research" I've ever read. And with a biophysics degree, I have read quite a few. The author actually didn't investigate any actual papers, but he builds a mathematical model out of his own biases, statistical projections, and some back of the envelope computation. Even then, his conclusions are much less stringent than the submitter makes them out to be. He "proves" that under all his assumptions, half the research papers *might* be wrong, but shows not even statistical evidence that they are.
I think PLoS is peer reviewed, but that paper should never have survived peer review. Occasionally, bad papers slip through, even in the so called hard sciences. This one seems to be one of them. Since PLoS Medicine is pretty well respected for an open access publication, lets assume that this was a lark and more on.
But it makes me curious what the fraction of bad papers looks like in an open access publication like PloS versus a traditional journal like, say, Nature, The Lancet, or New England Journal of Medicine. One reservation people have about open access (or author pays) models was that since PLoS gets paid about $1500 from they authors, they might be accepting vanity papers, or don't triage as well as traditional journals. I don't think they are, but if this paper is any indication, PLoS might take a second look at their peer review process.
The real point is, in the eyes of the common man, science is a brand of information, just like Walmart is a brand for stores or Nike is a brand for shoes, and the brand is taking a beating.
Here's the attitude.
"you want someone to believe human origins from a set of people that told me I would die if I smoked and ate a cheeseburger and I'm still living."
"well now basically you are just making up evolution to fit your story together. Well I can do that too. Can't test it either way, can we..."
This is my sig.
This obviously depends completely on the field of science that you are in. Epidemiology? Please, that hardly even counts as science. You're basing this on a field that you can't even do experiments in! You just wait for an outbreak to occur (fairly rare) and then see what happens and base all of your conclusions on a few isolated incidents. My advice to Dr. Ioannidis is to pick another field where you can do some concrete science.
When you think about it, that's positively astounding. There are vastly more ways to be wrong than to be right. We've managed to get 50% right answers out of the myriad wrong answers. Pretty impressive!
It would be better still if it was more than 50%, but we can just apply the process repeatedly to push up our confidence (50%, 75%, 87.5%, etc.). A little more attention to statistics would help us raise the base rate above 50%.
that in a paper where the author complains about generalizations from small data samples, he himself generalizes his observations on epidemiology papers to all sciences?
the level of religous dogma in some camps.
The only question is, who decides which science is wrong? I doubt very seriously any big money areas will have a published high rate of error. After the high money science the next protected type would be whatever is en vogue for the time.
Scientific integrity took a big dive in the late 80s as special interest groups suddenly realized that marketing, confusion, and intimidation were far better at advancing agenda than honest science.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Skeptic had their take on it in the last issue. In a nutshell
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
If science can be wrong, then why trust it?
It is the only objective process for assessing facts from fiction.
In other words, if the best a scientist can tell you today is that, he might be wrong tomorrow, why even bother listening to him?
No one is forcing you to listen. You ignore the information provided by science at your peril.
So you can use science for real things, like physics and design of military weapons and consumer goods, but the rest of it is so much speculative nonsense.
Quantum physics is speculative, but you don't seem to be throwing your computer out the window.
The consequences of guessing wrong about the origin of humanity are completely immaterial to most people's lives.
Dead wrong.
Stalin believed that Darwinian evolution was just a bouguoise concept. He believed in Lamarckian evolution and directed his agricultural ministry to ignore studies that supported Darwinain evolution. Their agricultural industry suffered and people went hungry in the process.
You can't show people evolving any more than someone else can show God making something.
I can show a progression of hominid fossils leading to homo sapien sapien. The Bible is silent about these fossils.
It's immaterial, unprovable, and so why fight over it?
It may be immaterial to you, but the theory is consistent with the evidence we possess. You may not choose to believe it, but that the only thing immaterial about this discussion.
Yeah you can roll out the eliptical argument that evolution is somehow necessary for medicine but most doctors are concerned with the human species, here and now, and now plants and people are related.
Why bother? You obviously believe that the scientific method works differently for investigations related to the origin of humanity than it does when applied to chemistry.
To wit, you can get a Chem E degree and still get into Med School.
You are correct.
Just don't whine to me when you have difficulty making sense of the data you gather without using evolutionary theory.
You will never amount to anything more than a glorified technician.
I can live with that.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Its possible to use logic to prove things about a mathematical model but its not possible to prove that a model is an accurate description of the physical world.
... In the end its about being able to build things that do things that we want done.
A theory about the world might be proven wrong by the very next measurement/experiment. To prove a theory it would be necessary to perform all of the experiments that test every implication of a theory at all times. New measurements can support or disprove a theory but they can never prove it. In going about our day-to-day affairs its convenient to confuse the positive feelings that derive from repeated successful use of a well supported theory with the sense that the theory has been logically proven.
In addition to the unprovability of scientific theories there are additional issues that don't make it into the Jack and Jill stories about science. At any given time there is usally more than one theory that describes/organizes the facts about equally well. When new data comes in some of these theories die, others are generalized, and new ones come onto the stage.
Furthermore, it is both a practical and a cultural issue as to which theory is the dominant or textbook theory at any given time. Any theory that organizes, describes, and predicts enough of the facts with only a few assumptions and simple rules/patterns will be a useful theory. Theories that have to deal with most situations as a special case are the least useful from a scientific and engineering perspective but they can sometimes serve political and other purposes.
Good scientific theories don't explain all the data. They don't have to in order to be useful and some of the measurements are unrepeatable. Good theories explain most of the data with some margin of error that is small enough to make the theory useful.
Often times the implications of the theory are extremely complex when applied to large systems or to systems over long periods of time. Attempting to simulate a living cell starting from string theory with no approximations will take a bigger Beowulf cluster than you can afford.
Scientific theories about the world are just working models that give scientists guidance in making better measurements to form better theories to give better guidance
Misunderstandings about the notion of proof are common and costly. Galileo wanted to prove to everyone that the planets went around the sun. As I understand it the pope at the time didn't object to Galileo's teaching the solar centric model. What he objected to was that Galileo kept going on and on about proof. The modern debate about Intelligent design has its origins in this same issue. The theory that satisfies religious needs is not the one that satisfies scientific and engineering needs. Maybe if scientists and engineers shut up about proof and started teaching the real process of science then the people who think that their religion has something to do with logical proof of something or other will stop trying to subvert the beneficial scientific process.
If science can be wrong, then why trust it?
And to think you posted that with a device that is arguably high technology. Gee. It's a good thing those practical thinkers at Signetics and Intel didn't listen to those shifty eyed physicists.....
So you can use science for real things, like physics and design of military weapons and consumer goods, but the rest of it is so much speculative nonsense.
Newsflash. The same people that don't like evolution only like physics when it can be used to attack evolution. The rest of the time it gives rise to uncomfortable facts like the Earth being round and the Universe being billions of years old. They'll get around to rest of the so-called "useful" sciences once those pesky life sciences have been properly re-aligned. I'm also glad people like you don't decide what is "useful" in science. After a demonstration of electrical phenomena, the Queen of England asked Micheal Faraday what of what possible use was all this nattering about electricity. He replied, "Of what use is a newborn babe." Sheesh.
Science is all about being wrong. 99% of it is long painful slogging through mucky fields of sheer wrong and trivialities to find the occaisional nugget of right. I'm mildly amazed that Scientists Can Be Wrong is a subject of discussion. This is only a problem when people who don't have any idea how science works expect scientists to be some sort of infallible priesthood. It also doesn't help when the press seizes on new research that hasn't endured years of attacks and splashes it all over the place. It is as though Firebird 0.3 is headlined as the New Killer App. The press is the worst offender in this regard.
You can't show people evolving any more than someone else can show God making something. It's immaterial, unprovable, and so why fight over it?
You can show things that reproduce really fast evolving. It is quite easy with microorganisms and it isn't too awful bad with insects like fruit flies. It's a bit harder with some fast reproducing plants and an absolute pisser with anything that takes more than a week or two to reproduce. One can still do things like genome tracing and compare and contrast with currently living things that haven't changed in a long time. It is hard to show people evolving. It isn't all that hard to show the effects of evolution on people. Unless of course you live in the US.......
There's a famous quote by Box: "All models are wrong; some models are useful". That's what science is all about -- making models, which are useful until a better model comes along. So by definition, 100% of *all* scientific papers are wrong. But some are wrong in useful ways that inspire new generations of scientists to improve upon them.
...there is a good chance he is wrong
Indeed it is. Which is precisely why our senses are so easily fooled: given stimuli that do not correspond to those seen in survival tasks in the EEA (Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, i.e. hunting and gathering on the African plains or whatever), our brains do not necessarily respond correctly.
Now explain why a creator would have built brains that are so subject to misdirection, geometric optical illusions, etc. Why would he/she/it have done so?
belief in evolution is self-defeating because on the supposition that evolution is responsible for our reasoning ability, we have no confidence that the deliverances of reason (i.e. the theory of evolution) correspond to reality.
And if a creator built our reasoning capabilities, how do you know that he/she/it programmed it to accurately reflect reality? We'd be seeing whatever he/she/it wanted us to see, for whatever reasons. You'll get less mileage out of this argument for creation than for evolution, even.
Pointing out that evolutionary theory itself can't guarantee the accuracy of our reasoning faculties (which is true) gets you absolutely nowhere because Creation mythology is significantly worse. Consider:
Prove the above statement wrong. You certainly can't invoke anything it says in the bible, because that -- or rather your memory of it -- was created six seconds ago as well. It says exactly what the creator wanted it to say, for reasons of his/her/its own.
As soon as you invoke a creator, falsifiability is utterly gone, your conclusions can be ANYTHING, and future argumentation is pretty much futile. Thus creation mythology serves primarily as a tool for a person to project their own emotional needs and desires into their own understanding of reality.
Fortunately, there are other ways to evaluate the accuracy of our reasoning capabilities than evolutionary theory or creation mythology. Sparing a couple thousand years of philosophy, I'll stick to the pragmatic argument: Reason seems to work. It gives us effective tools for functioning, ergo we're best off assuming that our intellect and reason is what it seems to be, and make use of it.
End note: Your sig links to a story about Antony Flew "converting to religion". You'll notice he's a self-described Deist: a philosophy that is in no way contradictory to any contemporary understanding of evolution, physics, or any other branch of the sciences. He explicitly states he doesn't believe any sort of revealed religion. How does this bolster any point in favor of creationism or any other branch of post-Enlightenment fundamentalist thought? The point is lost, because Flew explicitly still rejects all that.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Universities have failed a lot of scientists in that a) those papers are the result of stupid tenure policies and b) universities often do little to promote their researchers.
Engineers often read papers to solve problems. When they know about them! (Google Scholar might fix this)
A worse problem than them often being wrong is that:
a) there is frequently no way to determine if a given paper is accurate, has mistakes, is partially accurate, is laughable, was accurate at one point but is outdated, etc etc. At least from an outsider's perspective.
b) there is no good way to stay abreast of current interesting developments - hell, there's no way to see interesting things from 20 years ago easily! Again, this is from an interested outsider's perspective.
Once or twice a year I have the luxury of spending a week or two in an engineering library for the express purpose of finding out new and interesting things in my field. I'm SHOCKED at the amount of material that is being duplicated (often badly) in industry, material that is inaccurate or poor quality, and VERY GOOD material that never sees the light of day again.
..don't panic
Stalin believed that Darwinian evolution was just a bouguoise concept. He believed in Lamarckian evolution and directed his agricultural ministry to ignore studies that supported Darwinain evolution. Their agricultural industry suffered and people went hungry in the process.
Ah yes, Lysenkoism. Science and ideology do not mix well. Although, to be fair to Stalin, the people went hungry more because of forced collectivization than because of Lysenko, although the pseudo-science didn't help matters any. Ideology shouldn't trump science, social or agricultural.
Ask them. To most kids, science is a class they take, where they have to regurgitate "facts" like why the sky is blue, or how hydrogen and oxygen combine to create water. It's a boring class, unless you happen to sit next to an attractive member of the opposite sex, but then, it's still not the class that's interesting...
Science is not 'fact' - Science is the best-known process by which truth can be reliably found.
Science is somewhat like the mathematical function x=1/y. Forever approaching truth, never (exactly) reaching it, forever leaving curious minds with new things to explore. Science is the magical combination of "what if" combined with the "feet on the ground" of experimentation, independent scrutiny, and validation of theories.
The "Scientific method" that is regurgitated by most Jr. High schoolers (in California, anyway) is never really *experienced* except in the case of the rare instructor who goes above and beyond the textbook curriculum. EG:What drudgery! If that really was science, I wouldn't be interested, either!
It's sad. Entire generations of people who never get to experience the awe, wonder, and magic of science, who then seek out that awe and wonder by (best case scenario) watching magicians and listening to Art Bell, or (worst case scenario) performing criminal acts and doing drugs.
How much of the interest in the pseudo-sciences (aliens, conspiracy theories, perpetual motion machines, telepathy, Scientology) comes from the fact that they have never really been exposed to the real thing?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
The problem is not that many scientific theories are wrong, we all knew that. The problem is that a majority of published scientific papers are provably wrong at the time of publication, and the author should've known that it was wrong, but is too stupid and/or busy to publish a correct one.
Scientific papers are usually written by grad-students trying to earn a degree, and that is usually the only real purpose they will ever serve. The project I am working on now is a continuation of the work that was carried out by someone who now has a PhD. Nearest I can tell, one of the important equations he used was not appropriate for our equipment. It's just a +/- error, but it's a pretty big deal in terms of the data you get. He also made some rather inappropriate assumptions. A paper was published from his work.
People need to realize that "scientific journals" are simply catalogues of the work that has been done by various grad-students and do not necessary reflect reality. I'm not saying they're not useful, I'm just saying that they aren't often correct.
Wolfgang Pauli's comment on one scientific paper shows that there are worse things in science than just being incorrect. Science is always falsifiable.
Ok, as from someone who is in thie "business" of research, and papers "creation", you have to know, that there is no perfect idea, there is no perfect solution, there is no perfect paper. But this is not the goal, either. Conferences and conference papers are there to provide a ground for scientists to make their latest stuff public and let it be chewed and digested by others. It's after many iterations and discussions and quarrels sometimes, when one either gets to a point when the re- and re-corrected idea seems to work ok, or it turns out to be useless junk although it seemed like being good at first.
:P
I read many papers, I don't know numbers, but many dozens in a month. Usually I don't care if they seem good or bad, if they are correct or not. The ideas therein are what matter. Sometimes you get ideas on how to improve an old idea, sometimes you get new ideas from older papers. sometimes it's just nice to know what others are doing.
The matter is very much different when you have to review papers, but the seriousness of that review also depends very much on how much time you have, possible IRL problems, etc., but that's why there are >=3 reviewers+associate editor assigned to the paper at most of the serious journals.
Stating such things as a certain percent of all papers are crap is just crazy sh*t. It happens very seldom that I read a published (conference or journal) paper and I think it was useless. Anyway, if it would be true that would mean that this guy's paper is also half useless. You are free to choose which half
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Well, this guy is an epidemiologist, not an epistemologist. So I cannot understand how he write a paper on a problem on which he is not competent. Maybe epidemiologist publications are all false, but not scientific publications. When I see how long it takes for a scientist to write its article, to check it for errors, I cannot understand that such a man says that they are all wrong ! Ok, some can be, that's science. But not 50% of scientific publications. And what does he call scientific publications ? Publications in "Nature" or in the "Scientific American" or in "Science for the n00bs" ?
Bonjour !
"That statement makes no sense whatsoever. So a nation has to believe in evolution to feed its people? For lack of better terminology at the time, that's stupid."
Except the grandparent didn't say that. He said that that Stalin couldn't feed his people because he directed his ministry to ignore studies that supported Darwinain evolution, which meant his country used inferior methods. The grandparent did not in any way conclude that a nation has to believe in evolution to feed its people. He merely pointed out that researching the origins of humans has valuable and real benefits beyond knowing the truth, and that to ignore such information can be detrimental to society.
This guy are sick.
Even in the journals that I regularly read (every issue, every year), I only read a relative handful of papers, germaine to my research. When my research topics evolve, I might go back and read different papers in the same issue. Maybe there are some scientists out there who read every paper in every issue of journal in their field, but they must read a hell of a lot faster than I do. I rely on Current Contents, automated lit searches, and other computer-based tools to sift through the flood of info. I also rely on my colleagues - they know what research I do, and I know what research they do. If I see something that might interest them, I forward it to them, and vice versa.
there is no good way to stay abreast of current interesting developments
I would respectfully point out that that's why the annual scientific conferences are useful. The research presented in the talks and the posters precedes that presented in the papers and book chapters, giving you a feel for what the latest interesting problems are. If all of a sudden there are three times as many posters on Probelm X at the 2005 conference than there were at the 2004, then that should tip you off that something is up. If they are all coming out of one institution, that should tell you something, too. I know IEEE and other engineering societies hold annual meetings; are they not as useful as, say, ASM?
Once or twice a year I have the luxury of spending a week or two in an engineering library for the express purpose of finding out new and interesting things in my field.
This means that you are necessarily reading the journals at least a month, perhaps as much as a year after they come out. I don't mean to flame, but I suggest that this is not a very good strategy for staying current. By the time something is published in a journal, a lot of people will have known about it for a year or more, right down to the experimental details.
As to how to tell good work from bad work, that's what collective and individual professional judgement is for. If the profession is divided, and your individual level of expertise in that particular area is inadequate to make a good judgement, that's when you ask a few of your colleagues, "So, did you see that presentation on Problem X from Dr. Smith at Big State University? It looks like he was directly contradicting Dr. Jones from Small Private University. What do you think?" If none of you can tell who's probably right, then you either wait for more data or go generate the data to decide the issue.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
Did anyone see the recent NOVA program about Rosalin Franklin. She was doing DNA research at the same time as Watson and Crick, but in a different lab in England.
It turns out that Watson used her data without her permission and without attribution. And he went on to seriously misrepresent her in the book that he later wrote on the discovery of DNA. In fact, Harvard, the original publisher, ended up not publishing the book because of the complaints about the way she was portrayed by many of the other people who were there and mentioned in the book.
Watson basically created a fictional account about the way that DNA was discovered. And the public at large drank it up.
Watson got the Nobel prize. Rosalin Franklin is hardly remembered.
The scientific community is as full of intrigue and back-stabing as any other human community. Well, maybe except for Slashdot.
Evolution is a fact. Darwinism is a joke.
Everything in the Universe is caused by something else, requiring a cause to exist.
One imperfect thing may be caused by another, but the causer needed to have been caused by something else (since it is imperfect and requires a cause).
If imperfect things exist, there must be a being who can cause them, but having the characteristic of not needing to be caused himself (and this being we call God).
If there were no God, nothing imperfect, requiring a cause, could exist.
But imperfect things exist, therefore God exists.