Scientific Frauds or Errors?
Threads - Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome, Scientific Fraud/Error
On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Peter Macinnis
wrote:
We all had it wrong.
GE-Free NZ campaigner Claire Bleakley believes that there may be a
link between food derived from GE products and the Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome (SARS)!
Ray replied:
Peter, hmm GE-Free NZ's Claire Bleakley huh?
(I gather you're joking)
Why am I reminded of Piltdown Man, Margaret Mead and Sir Cyril Burt?
If GE food is linked at all, 500 people is a bit of a small sample population
from the population of several millions who have eaten GE food.
Peter replied:
No, Ray, this is no joke -- I had it form a NZ GM advocacy group that was
spitting chips about it.
> Why am I reminded of Piltdown Man, Margaret Mead and Sir Cyril Burt?
Because they were frauds, like the anti-GM people? You may very well
think that, I could not possibly say that.
peter
who once met Margaret Mead at Mascot -- she asked me the local time and swept
on, at which somebody told me who she was; who has handled the Piltdown
skull and the Piltdown cricket bat (again no joke); but who had nothing to
do with Cyril Burt.
Damn! Missed the trifecta again.
Paul Williams added:
I don't know that Margaret Mead was a fraud.
I think that she was gullible in the extreme though. An anthropologist should
understand story telling.
Cyril Burt was without question a fraud regarding his 'twin studies'.
Umm... I must take the Piltdown cricket bat as a joke. Were there Piltdown
stumps and bails?
Piltdown sledging chronicles perhaps...
The origin of language: "You're useless"; "Can't bowl, can't field" etc.
'Piltdown man had two short legs, a fine slip and a silly mid on' perhaps.
In any case, a yorker was bowled in 'is blockhole.
Peter replied:
> I don't know that
Margaret Mead was a fraud.
> I think that she was gullible in the extreme though. An anthropologist
> should understand story telling.
Agreed -- sloppy thinking on my
part
> Umm... I must
take the Piltdown cricket bat as a joke. Were there
> Piltdown stumps and bails?
NO, IT IS NOT A JOKE! It
was a bone "artefact" which I believe was created by Teilhard de Chardin,
to let the Piltdown frauds know they were rumbled, like the tooth he "found".
It was very crude, but rather like a cricket bat, and clearly cut with metal
tools.
It was such a poor copy of a cricket bat, it had to be made by an American
or a Frenchman, and the French kept dropping hints that it needed to be looked
at. The tooth that Teilhard "found" was coloured in a different way,
proving, to my way of thinking, that he was not the original fraud -- there
are almost as many suspects for that role as there are for Jack the Ripper,
and I advise you not to get me started on that if you are buying the beers
:-)
Ray
added:
As a part of our training to write a scientific work report over the year,
research skills include a study of ethics.
We were given a few examples of historic fraud/error, some of which will
be familiar to many, some not so.
- Piltdown
Man -a hoax hidden further by British Museum''s refusal to allow specimen
examination for over 40 years
- Thalidomide
-McBride & Newlinds vs Distillers Co Biochemicals ltd.
- Sydney's
Ocean Sewage Outfalls -which chose to ignore analogous Californian results,
until NSW finally opted to pledge $6B toward improvement
- AUSSAT
-a $230M lemon/white elephant. The danger of mixing politics with science.
- AAHL -Australian
Animal Health Laboratory research into viruses not present in Australia.
(stopped fortunately)
- Gregor
Mendel -he apparently stopped counting his peas when they reached the desired
number to prove his hypothesis
- John Dalton
-work with oxides of nitrogen to resusitate the atomic theory of matter is
apparently impossible to duplicate
- Robert
Millikan -might have been a wee bit selective with data published for his
oil drop electron experiments
- Margaret
Mead -cultural determinism and guilt free sex in Samoa found contrary to
statistical evidence for rape and homicide by Derek Freeman's works of the
1940's published after her ddeath in '78
- Cyril Burt
-concluding the 75% inheritence of intelligence by tests on separated twins,
setting a prejudiced scenario for selection processes for education which
handicapped against race, and 30 years later his supposed collaborators were
found to be fictional. Old Sir Cyril Burt's
methods of from 1913 to 1932 were never fully published and neither were
his original notebooks of raw data, but held against any debate by strength
of his position -knighthood?- for 30 years. Iit was not until
1976 that his collaborators, Howard and Conway, were found
to be totally untraceable, and inferred to be fictional.
Bit dodgy.
No doubt there
are lots more.
Chris Lawson remonstrated:
Come now, Peter. There have been confirmed reports that some of the victims
of SARS may have had some contact with GE food, or GE refrigerators, or something.
Ian
Musgrave wrote:
>We
were given a few examples of historic fraud/error, some of which will be
>familiar to many, some not so.
[snip]
>AAHL
-Australian Animal Health Laboratory research into viruses not present
>in Australia. (stopped fortunately)
So when those
viruses inevitably reach Australia (like fire ants, small hive beetle,the
killer seaweed that we have here in SA), we will have no research with which
to combat them. This is the use of the word "fortunately" with which I was
previously unaccustomed.
>
>Gregor Mendel -he apparently stopped counting his peas when they reached
>the desired number to prove his hypothesis
Fischer thought
Mendels ratios were too close to the desired values (for the number of samples)
to be collected properly, but it turns out that the biology of these plants
means that they do more closely approximate the ideal ratio than one would
expect. (Now I'm going to have to dig up the obscure papers that show this).
Of course, the boring reality is not so newsworthy as the idea that the pious
monk fudged his figures, and so the later revelation is not included in most
books.
Chris Lawson, replying to a post
by Kevin Phyland:
> >Gregor Mendel
-he apparently stopped counting his peas when
> >they reached the desired number to prove his hypothesis
>I need a bit of
clarification here...I still teach Year 10
>students about the theory of Mendelian dominant/recessive
>inheritance...
>
>Does this mean that Mendelian genetic theory is a fraud/error
>or that he got lucky and went with a correct theory and
>doctored his results ( which I will have to admit is very poor
>science)?
I don't know the ins and outs, but my guess is this:
Mendel was not a formally trained scientists, and even if he was, his research
took place well before the advent of modern statistical analysis, so I suspect
that he thought there was nothing wrong with what he did. Was he a fraud?
Definitely not. Did he perpetrate a scientific error? Clearly not, since
we now have oodles of research that shows Mendelian inheritance is a real
phenomenon, and indeed the most common form of genetic inheritance in sexual
species.
Was he lucky? Well that depends on how you look at it. You *could* say that
he was lucky because his figures only just achieved what we would nowadays
call statistical significance, and by modern standards his research would
be considered to be preliminary and in need of confirmation by better studies.
On the other hand, since he was just collecting data for his own interest,
and since he was obviously only interested in going until he had convinced
himself, this means that *whatever* the strength of the association he was
looking at, he would end his research just over the cusp of significance.
And more to the point, Mendelian inheritance is obvious -- in hindsight.
When you know about it, you see it everywhere. In animals, in people's eye
colour, in the inheritance patterns of genetic diseases. You don't even need
modern scientific apparatus. Unlike quantum theory, Mendelian inheritance
*could* have been worked out millennia ago, and it is especially surprising
that it wasn't worked out by breeders earlier. So in that since it is clearly
one of those intellectual insights that should have been obvious, but nobody
thought of it. Like steam power. Even the ancient Greeks had toys that spun
under steam, but nobody thought of using it in an industrial sense until
the 18th century. So in this sense, the *insight* was all Mendel's, even
if his experimental technique left a lot to be desired. And in modern times,
if Mendel had published his paper, and it had been confirmed by other researchers,
it would still be considered *his* idea. So was he lucky? I don't think so.
(Please note that I have only a passing knowledge of the details of Mendel's
findings and all of the above may be a complete crock.)
Peter
Macinnis added:
No, there is a bit more to it -- Mendel had run tests and knew what the results
ought to be when he repeated them. I can only recall one case where
he could be said to have fudged: he got 2:1 instead of 3:1, said so,
and repeated the experiment, accepting the next set which were 3:1 -- he
assumed that the seeds were not what they were supposed to be.
Analysis (by R. A. Fisher, whose photo sits on my desk) showed that Mendel's
figures are a bit TOO close to 3:1, given the sample size, suggesting that
he or somebody may have fudged. More importantly, Mendel looked at
independent segregation in just seven traits, the same as the number of chromosome
pairs in the pea. The traits are all on separate chromosomes, except for
two that were on opposite ends, and so more or less assorted randomly.
Values and standards were different then. This was at a time when William
Crookes owned a journal and could publish his results without peer review
-- let's not jump to contusions!
You can find a bit more on this at
http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/macinnis/story.htm
Paul Williams answered:
Chris or Ian would know much more on this.
My limited understanding leads me to accept the following quote:
"As he [Fisher] points out, Mendel clearly had his hypothesis in mind before
completing all his work and therefore rejected certain numerical ratios.
It is also clear, as Fisher deduces, that Mendel did not classify all the
pea plants and seeds he grew. Presumably he classified enough to convince
himself that the result was as expected. It is perfectly natural under these
circumstances to keep running totals as counts are made. If, then, one stops
when the ratio "looks good", statistically the result will be biased in favor
of the hypothesis. A seemingly "bad" fit may be perfectly plausible statistically,
but one may not think so and add more data to see if it improves, thereby
raising interesting questions, some mathematical and some psychological."
[Beadle (1967: 338)]
http://www.mendelweb.org/MWsapp.html
Ray
wrote:
No Kevin, nothing like that.
Mendel just committed the 'no no' of suggesting a bigger sample of data was
used. Not so much by fact of actual suggestion but by inferance.
Probably best to give you the full quote and reference.
From: A.Kohn, "False Prophets" Basic Blackwood Ltd., Oxford 1986 p60.
quote: "Often recognised as the father of modern genetics. His 1865
paper on inheritance in the garden pea was rediscovered in 1900. Mendel's
tabulations demonstrated statistical obedience to the laws of chance. Traits
such as roundness or colour were transmitted from generation to generation;
combinations being reshuffled in each generation. In 1936, Sir Ronald
Fisher, replicating Mendel's work, concluded that the ratios suggested by
Mendel indicated he stopped counting when he arrived at the expected and
desired number."
end quote
Not a fraud, more of a tiny wiggle than a warp.
Though I suppose it depends upon how sharp the focus on ethics need be.
In the 19th century and early 20th, no big deal, but today it could definitely
get you canned. In any case, I see no record of Fisher's claims being
tested in this extract from Kohn's book.
