Scientists: Often Wrong, Rarely Humble

What other career allows one to be
totally wrong but proud of it?

 

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. —Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate

The famous last words of a scientist are, “Now we know.” Scientists often use the “royal we” to describe their collective ignorance. They rather enjoy admitting changes to prior beliefs, because of a quirk of scientist psychology: it gives them a chance to promote their new theory or explanation and look smarter than the rest of the pack. Press agents love this, too, because it gives them a chance to show off their home team champions in the news for 15 minutes of fame. But when astute readers see so much rethinking going on within so many different scientific fields, it reduces confidence in the so-called ‘scientific method’ to arrive at trustworthy conclusions. The demise of the ‘food pyramid’ and the mess of misinformation about Covid come to mind.

Ignorance certainly does not describe all scientists. Many, if not most, are gifted, intelligent, and decent. They do honorable work on difficult questions using problem-solving skills that took years to develop. Not all fields of study are equally fallible, either. “Science” is a big tent with some brands of “-ology” clamoring to get inside. Granted, too, some questions are extremely difficult to investigate, especially when they involve the unobservable past. But as the following examples show, laypeople need to develop more critical thinking skills about dogmatic statements that scientists make about “what the science says.” The consensus of scientists can be wrong, taking things for granted that are matters of convention more than empiricism. As fallible humans, scientists are subject to biases, groupthink and temptations like everyone else. It takes integrity to avoid unwarranted conclusions and to admit wrong. Integrity must be a goal for every person, but especially for a scientist, because of the presumptive authority our culture bestows on “science.”

Geology and Climate

Greenland Melted Recently, Shows Higher Risk of Sea Level Rise (University of Vermont, 20 July 2023). Climate scientists and old-earth geologists have been saying that Greenland’s ice pack last melted millions of years ago. But now, an old ice core taken in 1966 has been rediscovered in Denmark after it had been repeatedly moved and forgotten. Scientists who re-analyzed it now say that the entire Greenland continent must have melted as recently as 424,000 to 374,000 Darwin Years ago. One doesn’t have to accept the new date estimate to realize that this is a major change to a long-accepted belief. Watch the one-minute video in the article.

The team’s new study in Science, combined with their earlier work, is causing a major and worrisome rethinking of the history of Greenland’s ice sheet. “We had always assumed that the Greenland ice sheet formed about two and a half million years ago—and has just been there this whole time and that it’s very stable,” says Tammy Rittenour, a scientist at Utah State University and co-author on the new study. “Maybe the edges melted, or with more snowfall it got a bit fatter—but it doesn’t go away and it doesn’t dramatically melt back. But this paper shows that it did.”

Under the bottom of the ice, the core shows “leaves and moss, remnants of an ice-free landscape, perhaps a boreal forest.” It implies that Greenland had been ice-free for a longtime, with enough sunlight to make a whole forest ecosystem flourish. The natural warming occurred in a time without coal burning, fossil fuel use or SUVs.

Greenland has greener history than previously thought (University of Utah, 20 July 2023). Another press release from another university tells about the overturning of thought about Greenland. It is similarly alarmed at the implications.

“We’re discovering the ice sheet is much more sensitive to climate change than we previously thought,” says Utah State University geoscientist Tammy Rittenour. “This is a foreboding wake-up call.”

But here is a funny thing about this. The scientists are not embarrassed. They are not humble about how wrong the scientific consensus was. Instead, they boast about their wisdom of the implications. It means, they say, that the Greenland ice sheet is not stable like they thought. And so due to man-caused global warming, it might melt rapidly again and raise sea levels dramatically!

The revision sits right smack-dab in the middle of the Climate Change debate. But instead of shamefacedly admitting they were wrong, and that they don’t know as much about climate change as they led the public to believe, they present a demeanor of confidence. You couldn’t trust what they were saying for over 50 years about Greenland, but you can now, because ‘they now know.’

Below the surface: Researchers uncover reasons to rethink how mountains are built (Colorado State University, 1 June 2023). Haven’t geologists figured out how mountains are built? The textbooks seem to declare such fundamental questions were answered long ago.

“The results suggest that the typical way we view mountain building doesn’t hold for southern Italy,” Gallen said. “It appears to be controlled by things that are much deeper within the Earth system. This behavior has been seen in models but never in nature. This is the first time we think we’ve observed it.”

Biology and Health

E. coli is one of the most widely studied organisms – and that may be a problem for both science and medicine  (The Conversation, 5 July 2023). This article by two microbiologists at Cornell warns that “model organisms” can send scientists astray. E. coli, the bacterium, is the best studied organism in all biology. It’s good to know about it in detail. But when microbiologists assume that what’s true for E. coli is also true for every living thing, they can jump to wrong conclusions. They also neglect learning important things from different species.

However, model organisms have their drawbacks. Some researchers have argued that drawing parallels across species can sometimes fall short, leading to assumptions about more complex species that may not be true.

Additionally, study findings using nonmodel organisms are often less visible in the broader scientific community, since many researchers focus on organisms with known and defined traits. This bias results in a shadow space where progress is not immediately incorporated into broader scientific knowledge, which can slow down research that actually covers a range from bacteria to elephants.

Scientists Build a Healthy Dietary Pattern Using Ultra-Processed Foods (USDA Agricultural Research Service, 11 July 2023). Ultra-processed foods: the phrase is like cussing in nutrition science. Bad! Stay away! But researchers at the US Department of Agriculture ran some experiments and were able to build a healthy diet consisting 91% of ultra-processed foods. We do not recommend going on an ultra-processed food diet, but there’s a lesson here:

“The study is a proof-of-concept that shows a more balanced view of healthy eating patterns, where using ultra-processed foods can be an option,” said ARS Research Nutritionist Julie Hess at the Grand Forks Human Nutrition Research Center. “According to current dietary recommendations, the nutrient content of a food and its place in a food group are more important than the extent to which a food was processed.“

Physics and Cosmology

The end of the particle era? (Springer Link, 2 June 2023). What’s more basic to the Standard Model of Physics than its zoo of particles? That’s hard science. Or maybe it’s not. Talk about a paradigm shift: look at what these three physicists have to say about the “concept” of a particle.

While new physics may still be within reach of the LHC or one of its successor experiments, it is also possible that the mass of particles beyond those of the Standard Model is far beyond the energy reach of any conceivable particle collider. We thus have to face the possibility that the age of “on-shell discoveries” of new particles may belong to the past and that we may soon witness a change in the scientists’ perception of discoveries in fundamental physics. This article discusses the relevance of this questioning and addresses some of its potential far-reaching implications through the development, first, of a historical perspective on the concept of particle. This view is prompt to reveal important specificities of the development of particle physics. In particular, it underlines the close relationship between the evolution of observational methods and the understanding of the very idea of particle. Combining this with an analysis of the current situation of high-energy physics, this leads us to the suggestion that the particle era in science must undergo an important conceptual reconfiguration.

The puzzle of the galaxy with no dark matter (Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands, 19 July 2023). Dark matter is one of the dogmas of modern cosmology. Cosmologists have been searching for it for decades without success (see recent news on Space.com and Phys.org). The experts insist that dark matter and dark energy make up about 95% of reality. Now they are puzzled by a galaxy as big as the Milky Way that doesn’t seem to have any of the mysterious unknown stuff.

A team of scientists, led by the researcher at the IAC and the University of La Laguna (ULL) Sebastién Comerón, has found that the galaxy NGC 1277 does not contain dark matter.This is the first time that a massive galaxy (it has a mass several times that of the Milky Way) does not show evidence for this invisible component of the universe. “This result does not fit in with the currently accepted cosmological models, which include dark matter” explains Comerón.

The astronomers are baffled. Comerón remarked, “the puzzle of how a massive galaxy can form without dark matter remains a puzzle.”

‘A very disturbing picture’: another retraction imminent for controversial physicist (Nature, 25 July 2023). “Ranga Dias will have a second paper revoked,” reports Dan Garisto for Nature. “A journal’s investigation found apparent data fabrication.” Are scientists sometimes capable of making things up? Yes.

Peter Armitage, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who has been monitoring the controversy, says: “I just cannot see how we can trust anything [from Dias and Salamat] at this point.”

The retracted paper was published in 2020, but is only now being caught. This leads one to wonder how many other flawed or fraudulent papers are out there still being cited as scientific factd?

Hiding in plain sight, astronomers find new type of stellar object (International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, 19 July 2023). How can experts missing something in plain sight? Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker was “stumped” by what she observed.

“This remarkable object challenges our understanding of neutron stars and magnetars, which are some of the most exotic and extreme objects in the Universe,” she said.

Cosmological models are built on a simple, century-old idea – but new observations demand a radical rethink (The Conversation, 28 June 2023). Four cosmologists dare to suggest that the famous “cosmological principle” could be wrong. “If matter is much more varied and interesting than expected, then maybe the geometry is too,” they say. Is nothing sacred in science? What’s next to go?

Mind and Brain

After honesty researcher’s retractions, colleagues expand scrutiny of her work (Science Insider, 18 July 2023). Anybody who trusted the research from behavioral scientist Francesca Gino about honesty is in for a surprise: Gino was dishonest. She “manually changed” data in some of her papers. Notice how much misplaced confidence the psychology field and the media invested in her work:

Behavioral science researcher Francesca Gino has spent her accolade-studded career studying dishonesty. Her work, which includes influential studies on how dishonesty can fuel creativity and how people justify immoral behavior, has tens of thousands of citations and is frequently covered by the media.

But over the past month, the Harvard Business School professor has faced allegations that her own research is dishonest. In June, data sleuths published a series of posts on their blog, Data Colada, detailing what they say is evidence of fraud in four of Gino’s papers. The bloggers say they alerted Harvard to the problems in 2021.

This illustrates that trusted views can be wrong due to fraud or misconduct. That’s a different problem than lack of accurate knowledge or measurement. But the history of science elicits examples of frauds that were perpetrated and trusted by the scientific community for decades. Of those, the Piltdown Hoax certainly leads the pack, but Dr Jerry Bergman, a frequent CEH writer, has a whole book of other examples.

No clear evidence that meditation or mindfulness makes you happy (New Scientist, 20 July 2023). “Mindfulness” has been a darling concept for non-theistic psychologists. It sounds like a perfect alternative to religious meditation (even though secularism is just as religious, in an unbiblical way). But in their haste to promote their panacea, psychologists have been fudging the evidence.

Hundreds of studies claim that mindfulness, walking in nature and expressing gratitude make us happier. But a new review found that most of the research papers looking into these strategies are based on small, poorly designed trials, which could make their conclusions unreliable.

This doesn’t mean these interventions don’t work, but we need much more solid scientific research to prove that they do, says Elizabeth Dunn at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

CEH has encouraged gratefulness to God for years, but not the way academic psychologists do. They teach that merely listing things that are appreciated—without specifying a recipient of the gratitude—makes happy feelings flow. That’s not gratitude; it is selfishness in disguise (23 Nov 2017). As New Scientist article points out, it hasn’t been shown to work.

There’s more, but you get the idea. Feynman was right.