Science is a human pursuit based on asking intelligent questions, making educated guesses, trying different things, and then seeking to understand what it all means. The scientific method applied over past centuries has greatly improved life for humans all around the globe and has increased our understanding and control of nature enormously. I love science and have studied it all my life, but in recent times, the practice of science seems to be going off the rails in some ways. Science should not be influenced, much less directed by personal power, fame or greed. It should not be swayed by political or ideological biases. Yet scientists too are human, and the institutions, research centres and funding agencies are also all too human, so those unwanted influences have been creeping into many aspects of scientific work.
The most well known examples of this are in the so-called soft sciences - sociology, psychology, anthropology - as well as in health sciences such as psychiatry, nutrition, medicine and related specialities. There have been recent attempts to verify or reproduce published findings in some of these areas, and in many cases - even most in some reports - the published results were found to be wrong or not supported by the evidence. Then there are the human studies that tend to confirm politically correct assumptions and biases, regardless of the evidence, or where the experiments are skewed to yield preferred results irrespective of the truth. There has been much soul searching in some quarters, and the number of retracted papers continues to mount.
We all make fun of the nutritional flip-flops from experts on things like the health dangers (or benefits) of wine, salt, animal fats, eggs, coffee, and so on - to the point that few people take such pronouncements seriously now. Even the gold standard of randomized, double-blind drug studies can come to unwarranted conclusions based on selection bias, corporate pressures, statistical legerdemain and other human foibles, conscious or otherwise. Doubtful therapies, unnecessary procedures, questionable medication regimes abound, all at great cost. Such concerns are now a regular component of science publishing.
In the area of psychology and mental health, discounted Freudian theories and social Darwinist influences can still be found. Then there is the over-medication for any "condition" considered outside some assumption of "normalcy". Hence we get huge numbers of people on anti-depressants, anti-anxiety drugs, ADHD medications, and so on. Over-medication has led to the problems of antibiotic resistant diseases, and much of the opiate crisis that is currently devastating many in our society. Yet the pharmacology industry continues to promote new and often unproven drugs.
Under the spell of political correctness, many scientists and related professions pretend not to know when human life begins - a simple scientific fact understood for more than a century. More recently, under the fad of transgenderism, we allow doctors to experiment on children with hormones, to mutilate their otherwise healthy bodies, and to leave them infertile and on drugs for life, all supported by pseudo-scientific pronouncements from "gender theory experts". Meanwhile, we make certain types of counselling illegal because powerful interest groups don't like them and dredge up "studies" to support their agenda, despite evidence that other people want and benefit from them. The ever-progressive media lap this up, and the confused public is left wondering or silenced by self-censorship on social media. Yes, some of what passes for science these days can be autocratic, obsessive and quite ugly.
The hard sciences are no longer immune to such improper influences and the need to follow certain ideas and approaches in order to chase further research dollars. Climatology is unduly enamoured to the "settled science" of climate change, notwithstanding the lack of hard evidence and the mounting strikes against the theories, models and over-hyped alarmist pronouncements. Regardless of what you think about climate change, it is not good science to overstate selective or uncertain findings while shutting down or denouncing research results from the other side of the issue. False projections, fear mongering and demonizing your doubters do not promote public respect for the authority of science. Scientists are supposed to try to disprove their theories, not shore up their preferred hypotheses with filtered data, while ignoring results they don't like. "Science is faith in doubt", as some have said, but this does not seem to apply to certain favoured theories these days.
Biology in general has been wedded to Darwin's theory of evolution far too long, ignoring or denying counter evidence that continues to pile up. This faith in an unproven theory-by-extrapolation has led to factual errors such as the myth of "junk DNA" for instance, and epicycle-like attempts to account for all the myriad complexities of life forms. The Darwinian paradigm is crumbling, but most biologists still fail to recognize the fact, and many go out of their way to censor, dismiss and shut down alternative viewpoints and their findings.
Some branches of chemistry are likewise swayed or even blinded by their deeply held, but unscientific preconceptions. The obvious example is origin of life (OOL) research. Not a year goes by without some scientist publishing yet a new "breakthrough" in OOL research, which is then published as if it is just a matter of connecting a few dots to explain how life arose on Earth. Meanwhile, the truth is quite the opposite: the more we learn about biochemistry and related areas, the harder it becomes to find credible natural pathways from non-life to life.
Even the king of hard sciences, physics, is not without its defects. At the limit of the very small, theoreticians are looking for ever more esoteric "particles" which they hypothesise existing (such as WIMPS, MACHOs and AXIONs), but for which there is little or no experimental evidence. There are now pleas for many billions more dollars to build ever larger accelerators to look for such imagined particles. Meanwhile, whimsical and esoteric "grand unified theories" (or theories of everything) attempt to account for all the known forces, while postulating various new unknowables. Yet our two most successful theories in physics - quantum mechanics and relativity - are mutually incompatible.
At the other end of the scale range, cosmology is tripping over various murky hypotheses about what makes up 95% of the universe, while pretentiously explaining in great detail what must have happened in the first attoseconds of the big bang, using ungainly theories of "inflation". Meanwhile "dark matter" and "dark energy" continue to elude capture and even consistent definition. And recently, to avoid the need to acknowledge that the universe had a definite beginning and the obvious precision fine tuning that goes along with that, some posit an increasing menagerie of unobservable and complicated multiverses, setting aside Occham's razor in favour of elegant mathematics.
Again, don't get me wrong, I love science, and especially physics, but in general, much of the scientific enterprise seems to be wandering beyond reality. Retractions are on the rise, more and more time is spent publishing the latest marginal findings, and chasing continued funding or the all-important citations in the literature. Reputation and the reigning paradigm seem to trump actual content, valid conclusions, and credible advances. Overstatement, emotive appeals and even unfounded hype leak into publications and get blown out of proportion by the eager science media. Interpretations go beyond the evidence, especially in controversial areas, while unpopular implications of research are denied, ignored or suppressed.
Meanwhile, there is now a whole breed of publicity-seeking scientists making pronouncements way outside their areas of expertise, and the public toss about unfounded statements of what "science says" or "studies show", without even being able to cite their sources. Much of science has become politicized with favoured viewpoints skewing or sometimes even dictating how experimental results shall be interpreted and reported, even if the conclusions are not supported by the data.
All of this serves science poorly. Instead of neutrally investigating hypotheses and welcoming alternative perspectives and theories, much of science is now stuck in favoured paradigms and looking mostly to shore up reputation, funding, esteem and legacies. Thus, science has shifted from the idealized view of Karl Popper, that only falsifiable hypotheses are science, to the more cynical views of Thomas Kuhn, where paradigms of belief are held firm until the old guard dies off. As Max Planck famously said, "Science advances one funeral at a time".
A lengthy look at the trends in modern scientific studies led one non-scientist observer to write:
"Both natural and social science investigators have exhibited many of the pathologies of modern science, i.e. failing to report negative findings, ignoring counter evidence, relying on correlation rather than on more rigorous test for causation, failing to pursue replication studies that would confirm - or refute - earlier results, misusing data, attributing higher levels of accuracy to their data than warranted, and torturing statistics in order to produce more useful outcomes. Much of this abuse is driven by competition for funding and prestige that characterizes modern academic research, but some of it is driven by ideological preferences."
Michael Hart, Hubris: the Troubling Science, Economics and Politics of Climate Change, pg 565.
Even at Scientific American, blogger John Horgan has unkind things to say about the declining state of science today: the replication crisis, questionable motives in the healthcare industry, the overhyping of incremental research findings, untestable hypotheses touted as science, and so on. Here is another blog saying much the same thing, but in better words than mine above.
I am not a scientist myself, and do not have firm suggestions to improve how science is done. Fortunately, however, many people are beginning to take note of the problems outlined above and wiser heads have made suggestions on how science can be made fairer, more open and transparent, and less connected to financial and societal success. Science is important to future human and environmental well-being, and the better scientific establishments are at doing true science, the better the public will accept their results and appreciate the work they do.
By all means everyone should study science, but it is best to do so with a sceptical mind, looking for weasle words, hidden biases, unstated assumptions, and unsubstantiated conclusions. Consider alternative interpretations and look for critical analyses of published findings. The deeper you delve into science, the more interesting it gets, even as it remains a messy, all too human pursuit.
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