Fake News Is Polluting Science

To reduce the plethora of
doubtful claims made in the
name of science, don’t feed the flies

If you were taught the simple Baconian scientific method in school, get real. This is 2026. Clicks and marketing have become priorities now, not truth. Science news is now like a tabloid: the more sensational the claim under the sacred banner of science, the better. That’s why science news articles are typically filled with ads for everything from Chinese vendors of women’s underwear to Somali products to treat your dog’s toenail fungus.

Quiz: Which of the following headlines posted today did not come from a widely-respected source of science news?

• Ancient Greek mystery cult priestesses may have chemically tweaked fungus to induce psychedelic hallucinations
• Jupiter’s moons may have formed with the ingredients for life
• For every known vertebrate species, two more may be hiding in plain sight
• The Human Flatus Atlas plans to measure the explosivity of farts
• Giant string of organic molecules on Mars may be one of the best signs of life yet
• Elvis arrives on spaceship with the ultimate diet

Hedging Bets

If that quiz was too easy, notice something in common with the supposedly “legit” headlines: they hedge their bets. They can respond to criticisms, “We didn’t say that Jupiter’s moons formed with the ingredients for life; we only said they may have.” This opens the door to fiction being marketed as science. A huge number of “science” headlines get away with this trick by raising the perhapsimaybecouldness index: it may have, it might have, perhaps this happened, a study suggests.

• For every known vertebrate species, two more may be hiding in plain sight (Science Daily)
• Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs (Phys.org)
• Natural anti-inflammatory protein could save lives of sepsis patients, mouse study suggests (Medical Xpress)

Don’t click that ad for a cure for your dog’s toe fungus yet. There are other strategies the clickbait marketers have at their disposal.

Prove Me Wrong

Making claims in the name of science are often so broad as to be impossible to disprove. These headlines tease and titillate the reader with ‘possibility thinking,’ motivating her to succumb, click, and read below the title where ads like Las Vegas neon signs await. How could anyone establish the truth or falsity of headlines like these?

• Selfish Y chromosome may explain why some families mostly have sons (New Scientist)
• Hairdressers could be a secret weapon in tackling climate change, new research finds (Phys.org)
• Could these weird stars just be overgrown planets? (Space.com)
• Crocuses are blooming early – here’s what this means for nature (The Conversation)
• Stone Age woman was buried like a man, revealing flexible gender roles 7,000 years ago in Hungary (Live Science)
• Saturn’s Moon Titan Could Have Formed in a Merger of Two Old Moons (SETI Institute)

Journals Are Guilty, Too

It’s not just the clickbait-heavy popular science sites that pollute science. Journals want sales, too, and they attract subscribers with glitzy titles as well. In addition to the original research, they have their own teams of reporters who ingest the tough fiber of jargon in the cover story and digest it for laymen. Meanwhile, popular science reporters, like guppies congregating at the base of a waterfall, eagerly await the latest droppings coming over from higher-ups. Sometimes journal titles are just as fluffy.

• Neanderthal males paired with modern human females (Science)
• Pokémon turns 30 — how the fictional pocket monsters shaped science (Nature)
• Earth’s oldest crystals suggest an early start for plate tectonics (Nature)

But What Do They Know?

Science is hard. It takes detailed observations sometimes over long timeframes and vast areas to substantiate a hypothesis – assuming the researchers are not plagued by fraud or ulterior motives. Even in the best cases, association is not causation; a hypothesized connection might lead academia on a wild goose chase for years. That appears to be happening now in cosmology after decades of talk about dark matter and dark energy.

Establishing a cause for disease is especially difficult, since so many factors are involved. I’ve been reading about “possible” medical treatments for cancer for decades; relatively few of them show any real effect on some (not all) patients. Even then, the best are measured with a statistic of “five-year survival” that is hard to predict for a given patient.

Add to this the constant flow of retractions and corrections. Science is tentative at best. Should the public have trusted what the scientific “consensus” was saying five or ten years ago?

• A rethink is needed on zero‑tolerance school behaviour policies (The Conversation) [Question: is this a proper subject for science?]
• Inherited diseases don’t work like we thought they did (Live Science)
• Crisis in cosmology: If we’ve got dark energy wrong, what could it be? (New Scientist)
• This strange little dinosaur is forcing a rethink of evolution (Science Daily)

The headlines listed above are a very small sample of what goes on daily: fact-free speculations, things nobody can know for sure, and claims likely to be abandoned in the future. New worries plaguing science in recent years come from AI hallucinations, predatory journals, and growing incentives to commit fraud.

Why would anyone be interested in science articles, anyway, if they are not true? Are people looking for just entertainment? They can get better entertainment at the movies. Truth is science’s claim to respect. It’s not a game of seeing who can come up with the best Just-So Story to explain why something evolved. Scientists and reporters who receive government largess must respect the honest search for truth. Otherwise, what are they doing? They’re violating the public trust.

Political Science

Remember, too, who is making popular scientific claims. It’s often the leftists, globalists, Marxists and Darwinists embedded in Big Science that are pushing the narrative, as we have illustrated many times (example from 2025). Many kinds of research can be conducted irrespective of one’s political views, but one would have to be naive to think it has no effect, especially with the Darwinian worldview of an evolving universe of unguided physical processes operating over millions and billions of unobserved Darwin Years.

At CEH, our reporters respect science done with integrity and diligence. We love reporting on the inner workings of the cell, the design features of the human body, and verifiable research in all legitimate domains of science. But there is a lot of rubbish being touted in the “big tent” of science, where hucksters mingle with the presenters. Chances are a vagrant (or a crow) could find some nutritious food in the dumpster behind a carnival if he knew what to look for.

We need to get our clean, nutritious spiritual food from Christ, the exact image of the invisible Creator (Colossians 1:15-17). Jesus prayed for his disciples the night of his suffering, “Sanctify them with your truth. Your word is truth” (John 17:17). Truth doesn’t evolve, and cannot evolve; else it wouldn’t be true. Hegel’s dialectic defeats itself (see John Wise’s 8 May 2025 explanation of the self-contradictory nature of Hegelian thinking exercised by Darwinists).

Armed with the discernment God’s Word provides from its immutable, omniscient Author, we who value true science can oppose the deceptions of mere men who don’t know everything, and weren’t there. We can also promote righteous and clear-thinking scientific policies that maximize integrity, reducing the number of flies that would otherwise be attracted to its popularity.