topics: |  science | history | skepticism

The pressures of careerism and big money and what it is doing to academic
honesty - the "shameful side of science".

Broad and Wade claim that practitioners, as well as historians, philosophers,
and sociologists of science, subscribe to the "conventional ideology" of
science, a self-verifying system of error detection relying on peer review,
refereeing, and replication. But this presents a false picture of science,
prevents recognition of widespread corruption and deceit in research, and
inhibits construction of a more realistic model of science and its practice.

They base their arguments on
a powerful recounting of a long list of frauds in
science, and some generalizations about the scientific process which permits
this sort of phenomenon in the late 20th c.

Along the lines of Kuhn, they attempt a re-positioning of the science as a
whole: they consider fraud not as an anomaly but as an alternative
perspective on highly professionalized modern science.  Indeed such science
is organized in a way that ranges from self-deception to major fraud
(inventing experiments).  Although most
100,000 cases of fraud of varying severity, for every case of major fraud
that is ever detected.  This may be contradictory, unless most of these are
in the category of self-deception.

Starting with deceit in history, they note some "remarkably fishy numbers" in
Ptolemy's Amlmagest, suggesting that he chose to publish data that best
supported his theories.  Similarly, of Galileo's work, they quote I.B. Cohen
as saying that it "only shows how firmly he had made up his mind beforehand,
for the rough conditions of the experiment would never have yielded an exact
law."  Few spare the wrath of their inquisition - Darwin is accused of
failing to mention predecessors, Mendel of reporting selectively, also
Millikan, whose diaries sorts data based on its utility "beauty, publish this
surely, beautiful!"  etc.  Indeed, most of the book constitutes a vast litany
of fraud in modern science, mainly in medicine.  Related practices include
failure to give credit, resistance to acknowledging other work, etc.  In
particular, they make the case that the scientific method is not a logical
process of going from assumptions to conlusions, but many prejudices run
through much science.

However, some critics feel that they are railing against an argument that is
already dead.  In a review in the  J. History of Medicine (Jan 1984),
Donald Deb. Beaver states:

    In the past twenty years, studies in the history, philosophy, and
    sociology of science have substantially revised the conventional
    ideology; its older version serves as a straw man for the authors,
    against which they can easily use bits and pieces of its subsequent
    reformulation, in support of their effort to discredit what has long
    since been left behind. Consequently, the informed reader ends up
    simultaneously agreeing and disagreeing with their representations;
    because although founded on established scholarship, they arc distorted
    versions of it....  The most important part of their work is the
    convincing demonstration that fraud is much more prevalent than one might
    expect. Their analysis of why one might not have expected it, why it is
    downplayed, and what should be done about it is not quite convincing.

They also point out that the underlying research is flawed, e.g. Galileo's
data could also be interepreted more favourably.