Since it’s become manifestly obvious that this is needed, it’s time to deal with the canards being brought here about the operation of science. I’ll start by making the following observation, namely that “scientific consensus” is shorthand for “postulates that have been determined to be robustly supported by DATA after extensive analysis”. It’s as far removed from the sort of rubber stamping that occurs in the world of mythology fanboy apologetics as it’s possible to be.
Before a postulate is accepted by scientists, it has to be tested, and where possible, tested to destruction. Indeed, a major part of the effort of scientists, is devoted to finding means of falsifying postulates. Those that survive the requisite discoursive artillery barrage, then move on to the next part … the business of peer review.
Again, let’s kill off once and for all, the mendacious canard erected in particular by creationists, that peer review is some sort of “rubber stamping” exercise. It isn’t, and there are two important reasons for this. The first centres upon the fact that scientific journals have reputations to protect, reputations that will be seriously damaged if the editors allow bad science to be published therein. This is multiply so in the case of prestigious world class journals, that gained their reputations by publishing landmark scientific findings that transformed our understanding of the world. Journals in this class will not risk their reputations by letting shoddy work through the gate.
As a corollary, the editors of scientific journals are strongly motivated to select as peer reviewers, properly trained scientists who will be ruthless in the dissection of submissions. Those trained scientists will mark for rejection any paper containing errors of deduction, errors involving incorrect statistical analysis of data, and and failure to establish robust connection between the presented data and the conclusions.
The second reason centres upon the fact that journals have limited space in their print issues, and have to reserve space therein for the best submissions provided. As a corollary, many good papers end up being rejected, particularly by the top-tier journals. Those papers usually have to be submitted either to a second-tier journal, or a journal with a narrow specialist remit, in order to see the light of day. Succeeding in the task of having Nature or Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, for example, publish your work, is a sign that you have done your job properly as a scientist, because your research is considered to be first class. Equivalent American journals are PNAS and Science, and once again, persuading these to look at your paper and deem it worthy of publication means you’ve achieved something special.
But it doesn’t end there.
Even after this process has been completed, there is still scope for someone to discover that you’ve made a mistake, at which point you have to go through all your lab notebooks, and try to find out where you went wrong, in order to supply a correction. Worse still, someone could find a mistake in your paper that leads to the journal retracting the paper. Which means you’ve spent several years thinking you’ve achieved something, only for it to come crashing down about your head.
Scientific publishing is a ruthless business, because ensuring that genuine scientific fact makes it to the fore is nowadays a matter of life and death, particularly in medical science, but sometimes in other disciplines too. For example, in materials chemistry, if you find a new material suitable for use in a high capacity battery, but your experiments fail to detect a critical failure mode of that material resulting in fire or explosion, that’s going to result in catastrophe if your material finds its way into a commercial airliner and launches into its death spiral at 35,000 feet.
While we’re on the subject of scientific integrity and the need to be careful and diligent with ideas, let’s nail on the head once and for all, the tiresome trope that’s doing the rounds of Farcebook and other “social media” platforms, whose governing bodies really should be doing more to stamp out. This is the “scientists only produce what they’re paid to” garbage that’s polluting discourse to a corrosive event.
Quite simply, scientists can’t magic results into existence, if the scientists themselves don’t know how their experiments are going to behave beforehand. Likewise, any fraud in this vein will be caught pretty quicky by other scientists whose suspicions are aroused by results that are just a bit too good or too convenient to be true. That’s before institutional ethics committees start weighing in on the matter. Indeed, scientists who perpetrated actual fraud not only had their careers totally destroyed in the past, but some ended up serving prison sentences. I’m also reminded of at least one scientist whose disgrace in this matter led to him committing suicide. This is not a place the sensible wish to visit.
So, let’s dump the mendacious apologetic fabrications on this matter into the bin once and for all, shall we?
