Is the Field of Science Broken?

Posted by Tina

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry of The Week, National Review, has opened a can of worms, long past it’s shelf life, in his article, “Big Science is Broken.” Gobry makes his case citing William A. Wilson who has accumulated a body of evidence that suggests the “self-correcting mechanisms” in the scientific community are broken. Gobry lists many examples across scientific fields from medicine and psychology to Physics. Problems include everything from human error, even basic math errors, to a “replication crisis” where studies cannot be replicated, a basic self-correcting mechanism of the scientific method. One example given was described as a “hoodwinking” of a prestigious British Medical Journal:

Not a single one of the 221 scientists who reviewed the paper caught all the errors in it, and only 30 percent of reviewers recommended that the paper be rejected. Amazingly, the reviewers who were warned that they were in a study and that the paper might have problems with it found no more flaws than the ones who were in the dark.

This is serious. In the preclinical cancer study mentioned above, the authors note that “some non-reproducible preclinical papers had spawned an entire field, with hundreds of secondary publications that expanded on elements of the original observation, but did not actually seek to confirm or falsify its fundamental basis.”

This revelation follows years of discovery regarding the flawed science behind “global warming” or “climate change.” It should cause another earthquake in the field of science and lead to a return to high standards and ethical behavior. But that will depend on the people. If we don’t demand high standards we will empower the incompetent and lazy, the charlatans and opportunists, and the always present political dogs that use people and science to line their own pockets and further their own interests and power.