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Studies Suggest Massive Increase In Scientific Fraud
Titus Andronicus writes "Scientific fraud has always been with us. But as stated or suggested by some scientists, journal editors, and a few studies, the amount of scientific 'cheating' has far outpaced the expansion of science itself. According to some, the financial incentives to 'cut corners' have never been greater, resulting in record numbers of retractions from prestigious journals. From the article: 'For example, the journal Nature reported that published retractions had increased tenfold over the past decade, while the number of published papers had increased by just 44 percent.'"
The problem is that science is a patronage system. And there isn't a patron in the world that funds research for it's own sake. No not the government either.
People have their pet peeves, and make sure they advance. Ever notice the complete dearth of anti-global-warming papers ? No matter how right the theory, there should be a few indications that it's wrong. I'm told the number of papers still coming out saying relativity theory is a load of bull is more than one per month. Or perhaps something more concrete : there are a lot of papers that claim DNA is a whole lot more complex than it seems. Very little DNA encodes actual proteins and tons of proteins cannot be found in DNA. Now there's one explanation for this : the first thing our DNA does after conception is set up a compiler, transforming "highlevel" dna into lower level dna. There are lots of indications that this is happening, but it isn't getting funding. Why not ? It is seen as easy ammunition for creationists. There's a certain logic there right ? Why would a natural selection process set up a compiler ? And if we research that compiler, what if we find it looks very logical indeed, say translating from "symbolic" names to addresses (it almost certainly does that), like a computer linker ? Researching this requires intervening in in-operation cell nuclei, which is really expensive, so it gets nowhere without funding. Of course, research here may also mean that we can make very high-level corrections in living beings, having much bigger and more permanent effects than currently possible (maybe ridiculously high level changes like changing someone's skin color in a few weeks are possible if we understand the program directing that color. Such an invention would be a medical means to end racism). And there are other indications that some parts of the human genome didn't evolve, in the sense that they weren't inherited from primates, and they are way too complex to have evolved in the very short term hominids have evolved. Likewise, hardly any funding, though. Of course if we find that something is influencing our genome, we'll understand ourselves better, and maybe we get a good new method for changing genes out of it, making future research so much easier. But you can't tell non-scientists that humans don't really evolve ...
(when you think about it, this is quite logical. Evolution makes less than one change per generation per individual. So the rate of evolution of our natural enemies, the bacteria, is trillions of times faster than our rate of evolution. So why don't the bacteria win ? We cannot possibly hope to adapt fast enough. Please keep in mind that effective antibacterial medicine exists for maybe 100 years now, and some would say that it was penicillin that kicked it off, started getting in use about 60 years ago, so this is not due to human interference with natural selection)
There's also "this has been debunked" type of problems. ESP is a dumb problem, because psychologists have pretty thoroughly debunked it, and it's generally got a bad reputation due to loads of idiots pushing it. There's just one problem, on the medical side : the brain is a transmitter, and it's a receiver. It can transmit and receive radio frequency transmissions (at about 4 different frequencies, at very short range, so no you can't sense radio with this). But : brains in proximity will sync the phase of their transmissions. Now that's a big problem : brains of different persons in the same room create a carrier wave between them. Wtf ? Why would brains create a carrier wave between themselves, if not to transmit information ? (You don't need ESP as an explanation of course : maybe it's just a quick way to "spread the mood" between all neurons in the brain, or some other global process like sleep states, and they merely sync up to one another. Then the sync up to other persons is merely an accident, just guessing here). But just try to get this funded. Meanwhile, we're getting nowhere. (the other issue is that the kind of researcher taking this sort of thing on is generally a bit "more open to ESP" shall we say, than average. Resulting in nonsensical papers)