Self-destructive STEM: how scientists can devalue science

Following on from last month's exploration of external factors inhibiting the scientific enterprise, I thought it would be equally interesting to examine issues within the sector that can negatively influence STEM research. There is a range of factors that vary from the sublime to the ridiculous, showing that science and its practitioners are as prey to the whims of humanity as any other discipline. 

1) Conservatism

The German physicist Max Planck once said that a "new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." With peer review of submitted articles, it's theoretically possible that a new hypothesis could be prevented from seeing the light of day due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time; or more precisely, because the reviewers personally object to the ideas presented.

Another description of this view is that there are three stages before the old guard accept the theories of the young turks, with an avant garde idea eventually being taken as orthodoxy. One key challenge is the dislike shown by established researchers to outsiders who promote a new hypothesis in a specialisation they have no formal training in. 

A prominent example of this is the short shrift given to meteorologist Alfred Wegener when he described continental drift to the geological establishment; it took over thirty years and a plethora of evidence before plate tectonics was found to correlate with Wegener's seemingly madcap ideas. More recently, some prominent palaeontologists wrote vitriolic reviews of the geologist-led account of the Chicxulub impact as the main cause of the K-T extinction event. 

This also shows the effect impatience may have; if progress in a field is slow or seemingly negative, it may be prematurely abandoned by most if not all researchers as a dead end.

2) Putting personal preferences before evidence 

Although science is frequently sold to the public as having a purely objective attitude towards natural phenomena, disagreements at the cutting edge are common enough to become cheap ammunition for opponents of STEM research. When senior figures within a field disagree with younger colleagues, it's easy to see why there might be a catch-22 situation in which public funding is only available when there is consensus and yet consensus can only be reached when sufficient research has as placed an hypothesis on a fairly firm footing.

It is well known that Einstein wasted the last thirty or so years of his life trying to find a unified field theory without including quantum mechanics. To his tidy mind, the uncertainty principle and entanglement didn't seem to be suitable as foundation-level elements of creation, hence his famous quote usually truncated as "God doesn't play dice". In other words, just about the most important scientific theory ever didn't fit into his world picture - and yet the public's perception of Einstein during this period was that he was the world's greatest physicist.

Well-known scientists in other fields have negatively impacted their reputation late in their career. Two well-known examples are the astronomer Fred Hoyle and microbiologist Lynn Margulis. Hoyle appears to have initiated increasingly fruity ideas as he got older, including the claim that the archaeopteryx fossil at London's Natural History Museum was a fake. Margulis for her part stayed within her area of expertise, endosymbiotic theory for eukaryotic cells, to claim her discoveries could account for an extremely wide range of biological functions, including the cause of AIDS. It doesn't take much to realise that if two such highly esteemed scientists can publish nonsense, then uninformed sections of the public might want to question the validity of a much wider variety of established scientific truths.

3) Cronyism and the academic establishment

While nepotism might not appear often in the annals of science history, there have still been plenty of instances in which favoured individuals gain a position at the expense of others. This is of course a phenomenon as old as natural philosophy, although thankfully the rigid social hierarchy that affected the careers of nineteenth century luminaries such as physicist Michael Faraday and dinosaur pioneer Gideon Mantell is no longer much of an issue. 

Today, competition for a limited number of places in university research faculties can lead to results as unfair as in any humanities department.  A congenial personality and an ability to self-publicise may tip the balance on gaining tenure as a faculty junior; scientists with poor interpersonal skills can fare badly. As a result, their reputation can be denigrated even after their death, as happened with DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin in James Watson's memoirs. 

As opponents of string theory are keen to point out, graduates are often forced to get on bandwagons in order to gain vital grants or academic tenure. This suggests that playing safe by studying contemporary ‘hot' areas of research is preferred to investigating a wider range of new ones. Nobel Laureate and former Stephen Hawking collaborator Roger Penrose describes this as being particularly common in theoretical physics, whereby the new kids on the block have to join the entourage of an establishment figure rather than strike out with their own ideas.

Even once a graduate student has gained a research grant, it doesn't mean that their work will be fairly recognised. Perhaps the most infamous example of this occurred with the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics. One of the two recipients was Antony Hewish, who gained the prize for his "decisive role in the discovery of pulsars”. Yet it was his student Jocelyn Bell who promoted the hypothesis while Hewish was claiming the signal to be man-made interference. 

4) Jealousy and competitiveness

Although being personable and a team player can be important, anyone deemed to be too keen on self-aggrandising may attract the contempt of the scientific establishment. Carl Sagan was perhaps the most prominent science communicator of his generation but was blackballed from the US National Academy of Sciences due to being seen as too popular! This is despite some serious planetary astronomy in his earlier career, including work on various Jet Propulsion Laboratory probes. 

Thankfully, attitudes towards sci-comm have started to improve. The Royal Society has advocated the notion that prominent scientists should become involved in promoting their field, as public engagement has been commonly judged by STEM practitioners as the remit of those at the lower end of scientific ability. Even so, there remains the perception that those engaged in communicating science to the general public are not proficient enough for a career in research. Conversely, research scientists should be able to concentrate on their work rather than having to spend large amounts of their time of seeking grants or undertaking administration - but such ideals are not likely to come to in the near future!

5) Frauds, hoaxes and general misdemeanours 

Scientists are as human as everyone else and given the temptation have been known to resort to underhand behaviour in order to obtain positions, grants and renown. Such behaviour has been occurring since the Enlightenment and varies from deliberate use of selective evidence through to full-blown fraud that has major repercussions for a field of research. 

One well-known example is the Piltdown Man hoax, which wasn't uncovered for forty years. This is rather more due to the material fitting in with contemporary social attitudes rather than the quality - or lack thereof - of the finds. However, other than generating public attention of how scientists can be fooled, it didn't damage science in the long run. 

A far more insidious instance is that of Cyril Burt's research into the heritability of intelligence. After his death, others tried to track down Burt's assistants, only to find they didn't exist. This of course placed serious doubt on the reliability of both his data and conclusions, but even worse his work was used by several governments in the late twentieth century as the basis for social engineering. 

Scandals are not unknown in recent years, providing ammunition for those wanting to deny recognition of fundamental scientific theories (rarely the practical application). In this age of social media, it can take only one person's mistake - deliberate or otherwise - to set in motion a global campaign that rejects the findings of science, regardless of the evidence in its favour. As the anti-vaccination lobby have proven, science communication still has long way to go if we are to combine the best of both worlds: a healthy scepticism with an acceptance of how the weird and wonderful universe really works, and not how we would like it to.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Or who validates popular science books?)

Gandhi once said "learn as if you were to live forever", but for the non-scientist interested in gaining accurate scientific knowledge this can prove rather tricky. Several options are available in the UK, most with drawbacks: there are few 'casual' part-time adult science courses (including the Open University); the World Wide Web is useful but inhibits organised, cohesive learning and there's always the danger of being taken in by some complete twaddle; whilst television documentaries and periodicals rarely delve into enough detail. This only leaves the ever-expanding genre of popular science books, with the best examples often including the false starts and failed hypotheses that make science so interesting.

However, there is a problem: if the book includes mistakes then the general reader is unlikely to know any better. I'm not talking about the usual spelling typos but more serious flaws concerning incorrect facts or worse still, errors of emphasis and misleading information. Admittedly the first category can be quite fun in a 'spot the mistake' sort of way: to have the particle physicists Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw inform you that there were Muslims in the second century AD, as they do in Why does E=mc2? (and why should we care?) helps to make the authors a bit more human. After all, why should a physicist also have good historical knowledge? Then again, this is the sort of fact that is extremely easy to verify, so why wasn't this checked in the editing process? You expect Dan Brown's novels to be riddled with scientific errors, but are popular science book editors blind to non-science topics?

Since the above is an historical error many readers may be aware of the mistake, but the general public will often not be aware of inaccuracies relating to scientific facts and theories. Good examples of the latter can be found in Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, the bestselling popular science book in the UK in 2005. As a non-scientist Bryson admits that it's likely to be full of "inky embarrassments" and he's not wrong. For instance, he makes several references to the DNA base Thymine but at one point calls it Thiamine, which is actually Vitamin B1. However, since Bryson is presenting themed chapters of facts (his vision of science rather than any explanation of methods) these are fairly minor issues and don't markedly detract from the substance of the book.

So far that might seem a bit nitpicky but there are other works containing more fundamental flaws that give a wholly inaccurate description of a scientific technique. My favourite error of this sort can be found in the late Stephen Jay Gould's Questioning the Millennium and is howler that continues to astonish me more than a decade after first reading. Gould correctly states that raw radiocarbon dates are expressed as years BP (Before Present) but then posits that this 'present' relates directly to the year of publication of the work containing that date. In other words, if you read a book published in AD 2010 that refers to the date 1010 BP, the latter year is equivalent to AD 1000; whereas for a book published in AD 2000, 1010 BP would equate to AD 990. It's astounding that Gould, who as a palaeontologist presumably had some understanding of other radiometric dating methods, could believe such a system would be workable. The 'present' in the term BP was fixed at AD 1950 decades before Gould's book was published, so it doubly astonishes that no-one questioned his definition. You have to ask were his editors so in awe that they were afraid to query his text, or did his prominence give him copy-editing control of his own material? A mistake of this sort in a discipline so close to Gould's area of expertise can only engender doubt as to the veracity of his other information.

A more dangerous type of error is when the author misleads his readership through personal bias presented as fact. This is particularly important in books dealing with recent scientific developments as there will be few alternative sources for the public to glean the information from. In turn, this highlights the difference between professionals and their peer-reviewed papers and the popularisations available to the rest of us. There is an ever-increasing library of popular books discussing superstrings and M-theory but most make the same mistake of promoting this highly speculative branch of physics not just as the leading contender in the search for a unified field theory, but as the only option. Of course a hypothesis that cannot be experimentally verified is not exactly following a central tenet of science anyway. There has been discussion in recent years of a string theory Mafia so perhaps this is only a natural extension into print; nonetheless it is worrying to see a largely mathematical framework given so much premature attention. I suppose only time will tell...

It also appears that some publishers will accept material from senior but non-mainstream scientists on the basis of the scientist's stature, even if their hypotheses border on pseudoscience. The late Fred Hoyle was a good example of a prominent scientist with a penchant for quirky (some might say bizarre) ideas such as panspermia, who although unfairly ignored by the Nobel Committee seems to have had few problems getting his theories into print. Another example is Elaine Morgan, who over nearly four decades has written a string of volumes promoting the aquatic ape hypothesis despite lack of evidence in the ever-increasing fossil record.

But whereas Hoyle and Morgan's ideas have long been viewed as off the beaten track, there are more conventional figures whose popular accounts can be extremely misleading, particularly if they promote the writer's pet ideas over the accepted norm. Stephen Jay Gould himself frequently came in for criticism for overemphasising various evolutionary methods at the expense of natural selection, yet his peers' viewpoint is never discussed in his popular writings. Another problem can be seen in Bryan Sykes's The Seven Daughters of Eve, which received enormous publicity on publication as it gratifies our desire to understand human origins. However, the book includes a jumbled combination of extreme speculation and pure fiction, tailored in such a way as to maximise interest at the expense of clarification. Some critics have argued the reason behind Sykes's approach is to promote his laboratory's mitochondrial DNA test, capable of revealing which 'daughter' the customer is descended from. Scientists have to make a living like everyone else, but this commercially-driven example perhaps sums up the old adage that you should never believe everything you read. The Catch-22 of course is that unless you understand enough of the subject beforehand, how will you know if a popular science book contains errors?

A final example does indeed suggest that some science books aimed at a general audience prove to be just too complex for comprehensive editing by anyone other than the author. I am talking about Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. At over one thousand pages this great tome is marketed with the sentence "No particular mathematical knowledge on the part of the reader is assumed", yet I wonder whether the cover blurb writer had their tongue firmly in their cheek? It is supposed to have taken Penrose eight years to write and from my occasional flick-throughs in bookshops I can see it might take me that long to read, never mind understand. I must confess all those equations haven't really tempted me yet, at least not until I have taken a couple of Maths degrees...