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How Science Goes Wrong
dryriver sends this article from the Economist:
"A simple idea underpins science: 'trust, but verify'. Results should always be subject to challenge from experiment. That simple but powerful idea has generated a vast body of knowledge. Since its birth in the 17th century, modern science has changed the world beyond recognition, and overwhelmingly for the better. But success can breed complacency. Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying — to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity. Too many of the findings that fill the academic ether are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis (see article). A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 'landmark' studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are bunk. In 2000-10 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties. Even when flawed research does not put people's lives at risk — and much of it is too far from the market to do so — it squanders money and the efforts of some of the world's best minds. The opportunity costs of stymied progress are hard to quantify, but they are likely to be vast. And they could be rising."
Aaaand this is exactly the kind of thing that young-earth creationists and climate change deniers will jump on to show that science (and scientists) can't be trusted.
All researchers in the sciences have a motivation to be published, in the form of recognition, academic progress, and financial motivation. Not many of them have an incentive stop working on looking great for producing results and check the work of someone else.
Assuming TFA's numbers are correct, I'd bet that much of the problem is that no agency, be it government or commercial (and particularly commercial) wants to spend it's money seeing if published results are reproducible. Additionally, no one ever won a Noble Prize for excellence in reproducing others' results. Verification of results is key to science, but this is one of several aspects of doing science right that the funding agencies either don't want to, or can't (as in Congress looking over the shoulders of managers at the NSF), pay for. Everyone wants "everything, all the time" without paying for it, and this is the sort of thing that happens when decisions are driven by the money people (who may be scientists, to be fair) and not the people who know what the hell is going on.
trust, but verify?
We must be talking about different sorts of science, because from what i know, the simple idea rather is
"be objective, and be sure to keep it falsifiable
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
It's not about being lazy. Feynman famously addressed this in his "Cargo Cult Science" rant in his Caltech commencement address given in 1974. (There's no recording AFAIK, that link is to someone reading the transcript).
He makes very good points: funding is for new results. Attempting to repeat another scientists published work is not a new result (unless you can't), and many places won't even allow you to try, unless it's something very sexy like observing the Higgs boson or something. It's an important structural problem, and it was worth calling attention to forty years ago.
There's no doubt that some unscrupulous researchers have noticed this and are gaming the system. The incentives to do so are particularly high in biochem.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Sorry, but you're just wrong. There are many problems in science where too much money is involved (medicine etc) but evolution is well documented, studied and proven over and over again. There is, as the other AC says, a "colossal wealth" of data, including DNA similarities, fossils and plain old observation. The only "myth" regarding evolution is that there is any controversy at all about it outside of a few religious zealots.
So... you think science used to be better? Really?
Newton spent much of his energy in later years in a brutal smear campaign to smear mathematicians and scientists who in fact invented much of he took credit for, such as portions of Calculus. Edison is known to have mounted an equally brutal attack on his arguably more inventive peer, Tesla. Have you ever read Penis envy? Really? That guy was a world class crack-pot, IMO.
I've read many technical and scientific papers every year since about 1982, and I see zero degradation in professionalism. The truth is there was never much anyway. For ever paper that made me believe something I useful, there were a half dozen total crap papers that weren't even close to the mark. Science is just fine... just the same crap as always, but overall very effective crap. It's the freaking "news" networks that have turned into crap.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
It's resource intensive, but also just plain difficult. For example, publications are never a full description of an experiment, just the highlights. It takes a skilled researcher to fill in the gaps and then a second level of skill to accurately carry it out.
Looking at it from another perspective, ignoring scientific developments which are the result of inspired genius (which I would argue are rare), every new publication is the more novel and difficult work that has been conducted to date. If it weren't, it would have been done already.
So how can you expect someone else (who wasn't able or interested to carry out the work themselves) to immediately duplicate cutting-edge work based on an incomplete description?. It's a bit amazing that up to 50% of publications could be replicated at all.
He makes very good points: funding is for new results. Attempting to repeat another scientists published work is not a new result (unless you can't), and many places won't even allow you to try...
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants"
Even though funding is for new results, to get new results, these days you will almost always need to build on what has gone before. So while scientists generally don't attempt to replicate published results, if the work is important, someone will eventually think of a way to extend the work, and rely on it to build something else. At that point it will become obvious if the original research is flawed.
So good science does eventually win, it just can take a longer time than people would like to spot frauds. Science works, the last century is a testament to that.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Wishful thinking. When Galileo's presentation was found to be at odds with religion by the ultimate arbiter of such things (the then-Pope), they certainly were in conflict. The "apology" took centuries to come around, far too late to help Galileo. It wasn't a misunderstanding. It was stubborn clinging to myth and nonsense with the added salt of the power to enforce the myth over the facts.
When religion gives us social rules, there may be, often is in fact, value to be had. When religion tries to tell us how the world came to be and why we are here, it falls flat on its face, each and every time. It's the purest form of conflict: The intentional and irresponsible promulgation of fictions in the face of repeatable, consensual facts to the contrary. The more we understand, the more visible this is.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Tell me, what type of algorithm produced that human?
I'm glad you used a question rather than a statement, because if you had stated what you're trying to imply, you'd be making a directly untestable and unscientific claim.
I'd prefer to keep the discussion on science, and proposing causal exclusivity to "evolutionary" processes is not science, it's a hopeful non-sequitur and inappropriate generalization. "Evolution occurs", is science. "Only evolution occurs", is not. The fact you only care about the second form, for personal reasons, has nothing to do with science or a scientific usage of "evolution" or "genetic".
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?