Posted on 04/20/2012 12:02:39 PM PDT by CHRISTIAN DIARIST
The scientific community is atwitter about recent reports documenting the sharp rise in retractions of articles published in scientific journals.
To wit, The New York Times published a chart this week showing that such retractions have increased from a mere three instances in 2000 to a whopping 180 in 2009.
The chart indicated that 235 of the articles retracted over that ten-year span were attributable to “scientific mistake.” Another 196 were attributable to “fraud or fabrication.” And the remaining 311 to “other.”
That brings to mind what arguably is history’s most glaring example of scientific mistake, fraud and fabrication all rolled into one:
Evolution.
Indeed, in a new study, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers suggest they have found fresh evidence of the purported evolutionary link between apes and humans in nests built by orangutans inIndonesia.
“They are almost as complex as a man-made shelter you might make,” A. Roland Ennos, a researcher atBritain’sUniversityofManchester, told LiveScience, the science news website.
I’m not insinuating that Ennos and his colleagues fabricated their findings. I’m not accusing them of secretly tricking out the orangutans’ nest to make it look like a man-made crib.
I’m saying that they are so invested in the doctrine of evolution, they have twisted their putative “scientific” findings to fit that dubious doctrine.
Such pro-evolution scientific bias is not new. It’s been going on since Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species more than 150 years ago.
As it happens, this year marks the 100th anniversary of what many consider the greatest scientific hoax in history – the unveiling of the so-called “Piltdown Man,” the reputed fossilized skull of the “missing link” between apes and humans.
In 1953, four decades after its discovery, Piltdown Man was finally exposed as a forgery. The supposed fossil had been created by combining the lower jawbone of an orangutan with the skull of a modern, fully-developed human being.
Darwin’s disciples continue today to play fast and loose with science to make the case that God did not create man; that man evolved from ape.
The may not be as brazen as the Darwinist who manufactured Piltdown Man. But they are no less dishonest.
Companion Article - Nature
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483509a.html
Science: Branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged. So says the dictionary. But, as most scientists appreciate, the fruits of what is called science are occasionally anything but. Most of the time, when attention focuses on divergence from this gold (and linguistic) standard of science, it is fraud and fabrication — the facts and truth — that are in the spotlight. These remain important problems, but this week Nature highlights another, more endemic, failure — the increasing number of cases in which, although the facts and truth have been established, scientists fail to make sure that they are systematically arranged. Put simply, there are too many careless mistakes creeping into scientific papers — in our pages and elsewhere.
A Comment article on page 531 exposes one possible impact of such carelessness. Glenn Begley and Lee Ellis analyse the low number of cancer-research studies that have been converted into clinical success, and conclude that a major factor is the overall poor quality of published preclinical data. A warning sign, they say, should be the “shocking” number of research papers in the field for which the main findings could not be reproduced. To be clear, this is not fraud — and there can be legitimate technical reasons why basic research findings do not stand up in clinical work. But the overall impression the article leaves is of insufficient thoroughness in the way that too many researchers present their data.
The finding resonates with a growing sense of unease among specialist editors on this journal, and not just in the field of oncology. Across the life sciences, handling corrections that have arisen from avoidable errors in manuscripts has become an uncomfortable part of the publishing process.
Lots of the “evidence” is just speculation. It starts with speculation that cells form from green slime and they further speculate cells developing into more advanced life into Human beings.
ANNALS OF SCIENCE
THE TRUTH WEARS OFF
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer
SNIP
But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.
There’s SCIENTIFIC PROOF and then there’s the LEFT’S SCIENTIFIC PROOF. I read today more of the LEFT’S SCIENTIFIC PROOF on the AGW/IPCC CO2 scam. “IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN AGW WE WILL BURN YOUR HOUSE DOWN”. Now that’s what I call real scientific proof you can believe in.
I’m waiting for those promoting embryonic stem cell research to acknowledge that it has not yielded the promised treatments and cures for more such diseases and conditions as diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, cancer, multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s Disease (ALS), spinal cord injuries, blindness, and HIV/AIDS.
This is unalloyed good news!
This site estimates there are about 50 million scientific articles ever published, but gives no real estimate for the total per year.
It must be many tens of thousands, depending on your definitions of terms.
So, of all those millions of articles, virtually none were reviewed carefully enough to find their mistakes in the year 2000.
Today a couple of hundred get retracted each year.
Scientifically speaking, that's a .0004% error rate, overall -- not too bad, a step in the right direction.
But I doubt if scientists as a group are really anywhere near that good, most likely there should be a lot more rejections, but at least these days more serious efforts are made to find them.
That's good news.
"Results.
We estimate that in 2006 the total number of articles published was approximately 1,350,000."Of this number 4.6% became immediately openly available and an additional 3.5% after an embargo period of, typically, one year.
Furthermore, usable copies of 11.3% could be found in subject-specific or institutional repositories or on the home pages of the authors."
So, if 1.3 million articles published in 2006, then it must be nearly 2 million today, meaning retractions of 180 articles gives science an error rate of .001% = 99.9% accuracy.
I still think it's far too few retractions.
The true error rate is likely ten times that, but nobody's really checking them close enough.
With that large of a volume, the peer reviews are most likely only getting a cursory glance at best. Besides how many of the research studies are for anything truly worthwhile?
Furthermore ‘publish or perish’ is a very bad paradigm for true science to operate under. In fact science was a much more highly esteemed field prior to government grants run amuck amuck amuck...
Of course I have no idea what all those 1.3 million scientific articles published in 2006 were about, or how many were even in English versus Chinese or some other language, how many were funded by universities, or private enterprises, government agencies, national defense, etc, how many involved studies of exotic flora and fauna, planets around stars in distant galaxies, or even obesity in children eating McDonalds Happy Meals. ;-)
Regardless, I highly doubt if the accuracy rate implied by these numbers -- 99.9% -- is anywhere close to the truth, since doubtless many of those 1.3 million articles involved taking a fresh look at previous studies, and finding they were flawed.
So how many of those 1.3 million articles from 2006 will truly stand the tests of time and further scientific scrutiny?
Whatever the number, that's how science is supposed to work, and we should hope that it is working.
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