By Bill Storage, Jan. 18, 2024

I’ve been collecting examples of bad science. Many came from friends and scientists I’ve talked to. Bad science can cover several aspects of science depending on what one means by science. At least three very different things are called science now:

1. An approach or set of rules and methods used to understand and predict nature
   
2. A body of knowledge about nature and natural processes
   
3. An institution, culture or community of people, including academic, government and corporate professionals, who are involved, or are said to be involved, in 1. or 2. above

Many of my examples of bad science fall under the 3rd category and involve, or are dominated by, the academicians, government offices, and corporations. Below are a few of my favorites from the past century or so. I think many people tend to think that bad science happened in medieval times and that the modern western world is immune to that sort of thing. On the contrary, bad science may be on the rise. For the record, I don’t judge a theory bad merely because it was shown to be wrong, even if spectacularly wrong. Geocentricity was a good theory. Phlogiston (17th century theoretical substance believed to escape from matter during combustion), caloric theory (18th century theory of a weightless fluid that flows from hot matter to cold), and the luminiferous ether (17-19th century postulated medium for the propagation of light waves) were all good theories, though we now have robust evidence against them. All had substantial predictive power. All posited unobservable entities to explain phenomena. But predictive success alone cannot justify belief in unobservable entities. Creation science and astrology were always bad science.

To clarify the distinction between bad science and wrong theories, consider Trofim Lysenko. He was nominally a scientist. Some of his theories appear to be right. He wore the uniform, held the office, and published sciencey papers. But he did not behave scientifically (consistent with definition 1 above) when he ignored the boundless evidence and prior art about heredity. Wikipedia dubs him a pseudoscientist, despite his having some successful theories and making testable hypotheses. Pseudoscience, says Wikipedia, makes unfalsifiable claims. Lysenko’s bold claims were falsifiable, and they were falsified. Wikipedia talks as if the demarcation problem – knowing science from pseudoscience – is a closed case. Nah. Rather than tackle that matter of metaphysics and philosophy, I’ll offer that Lysenkoism, like creation science, and astrology, are all sciences but they are bad science. While they all make some testable predictions, they also make a lot of vague ones, their interest in causation is puny, and their research agendas are scant.

Good science entails testable, falsifiable theories and bold predictions. Most philosophers of science, notably excluding Karl Popper, who thought that only withstanding falsification mattered, have held that making succinct, correct prediction makes a theory good, and that successful theories make for good science. Larry Laudan gave, in my view, a fine definition of a successful theory in his 1984 Philosophy of Science: A theory is successful provided it makes substantially more correct predictions, that it leads to efficacious interventions in the natural order, or that it passes a suitable battery of tests.

Concerns over positing unobservables opens a debate on the question of just how observable are electrons, quarks, and the Higgs Field. Not here though. I am more interested in bad science (in the larger senses of science) than I am with wrong theories. Badness often stems not from seeking to explain and predict nature and failing out of refusal to read the evidence fairly, but from cloaking a non-scientific agenda in the trappings of science. I’m interested in what Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Lakatos dealt with – the non-scientific interests of academicians, government offices, and corporations and their impact on what gets studied and how it gets studied, how confirming evidence is sought and processed, how disconfirming evidence is processed, avoided, or dismissed, and whether Popperian falsifiability was ever on the table.

Recap of Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Lakatos

Thomas Kuhn claimed that normal (day-to-day lab-coat) science consisted of showing how nature can be fit into the existing theory. That is, normal science is decidedly unscientific. It is bad science, aimed at protecting the reigning paradigm from disconfirming evidence. On Kuhn’s view, your scientific education teaches you how to see things as your field requires them to be seen. He noted that medieval and renaissance astronomers never saw the supernovae that were seen in China. Europeans “knew” that the heavens were unchanging. Kuhn used the terms dogma and indoctrination to piss off scientists of his day. He thought that during scientific crises (Newton vs. Einstein being the exemplar) scientists clutched at new theories, often irrationally, and then vicious competition ended when scientific methods determined the winner of a new paradigm. Kuhn was, unknown to most of his social-science groupies, a firm believer that the scientific enterprise ultimately worked. Kuhn says normal science is bad science. He thought this was okay because crisis science reverted to good science, and in crisis, the paradigm was overthrown when the scientists got interested in philosophy of science. When Kuhn was all the rage in the early 1960s, radical sociologists of science, all at the time very left leaning, had their doubts that science could stay good under the influence of government and business. Recall worries about the military industrial complex. They thought that interest, whether economic or political, could keep science bad. I think history has sided with those sociologists; though today’s professional sociologists, now overwhelmingly employed by the the US and state governments, are astonishingly silent on the matter. Granting, for sake of argument, that social science is science, its practitioners seem to be living proof that interest can dominate not only research agendas but what counts as evidence, along with the handling of evidence toward what becomes dogma in the paradigm.

Paul Feyerabend, though also no enemy of science, thought Kuhn stopped short of exposing the biggest problems with science. Feyerabend called science, referring to science as an institution, a threat to democracy. He called for “a separation of state and science just as there is a separation between state and religious institutions.” He thought that 1960s institutional science resembled more the church of Galileo’s day than it resembled Galileo. Feyerabend thought theories should be tested against each other, not merely against the world. He called institutional science a threat because it increasingly held complete control over what is deemed scientifically important for society. Historically, he observed, individuals, by voting with their attention and their dollars, have chosen what counts as being socially valuable. Feyerabend leaned rather far left. In my History of Science appointment at UC Berkeley I was often challenged for invoking him against bad-science environmentalism because Feyerabend wouldn’t have supported a right-winger. Such is the state of H of S at Berkeley, now subsumed by Science and Technology Studies, i.e., same social studies bullshit (it all ends in “Studies”), different pile. John Heilbronn rest in peace.

Imre Lakatos had been imprisoned by the Nazis for revisionism. Through that experience he saw Kuhn’s assent of the relevant community as a valid criterion for establishing a new post-crisis paradigm as not much of a virtue. It sounded a bit too much like Nazis and risked becoming “mob psychology.” If the relevant community has excessive organizational or political power, it can put overpowering demands on individual scientists and force them to subordinate their ideas to the community (see String Theory’s attack on Lee Smolin below). Lakatos saw the quality of a science’s research agenda as a strong indicator of quality. Thin research agendas, like those of astrology and creation science, revealed bad science.

Selected Bad Science

Race Science and Eugenics
Eugenics is an all time favorite, not just of mine. It is a poster child for evil-agenda science driven by a fascist. That seems enough knowledge of the matter for the average student of political science. But eugenics did not emerge from fascism and support for it was overwhelming in progressive circles, particularly in American universities and the liberal elite. Alfred Binet of IQ-test fame, H. G. Wells, Margaret Sanger, John Harvey Kellogg, George Bernard Shaw, Theodore Roosevelt, and apparently Oliver Wendell Holmes, based on his decision that compulsory sterilization was within a state’s rights, found eugenics attractive. Financial support for the eugenics movement included the Carnegie Foundation, Rockefeller Institute, and the State Department. Harvard endorsed it, as did Stanford’s first president, David S Jordan. Yale’s famed economist and social reformer Irving Fisher was a supporter. Most aspects of eugenics in the United States ended abruptly when we discovered that Hitler had embraced it and was using it to defend the extermination of Jews. Hitler borrowed from our 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Defective Offspring drawn up by Harry Laughlin. Eugenics was a class case of advocates and activists, clueless of any sense of science, broadcasting that the science (the term “race science” exploded onto the scene as if if had always been a thing) had been settled. In an era where many Americans enjoy blaming the living – and some of the living enjoy accepting that blame – for the sins of our fathers, one wonders why these noble academic institutions have not come forth to offer recompense for their eugenics transgressions.

The War on Fat

In 1977 a Senate committee led by George McGovern published “Dietary Goals for the United States,” imploring us to eat less red meat, eggs, and dairy products. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) then issued its first dietary guidelines, which focused on cutting cholesterol and not only meat fat but fat from any source. The National Institutes of Health recommended that all Americans, including young kids, cut fat consumption. In 1980 the US government broadcast that eating less fat and cholesterol would reduce your risk of heart attack. Evidence then and ever since has not supported this edict. A low-fat diet was alleged to mitigate many metabolic risk factors and to be essential for achieving a healthy body weight. However, over the past 45 years, obesity in the US climbed dramatically while dietary fat levels fell. Europeans with higher fat diets, having the same genetic makeup, are far thinner. The science of low-fat diets and the tenets of related institutions like insurance, healthcare, and school lunches have seemed utterly immune to evidence. Word is finally trickling out. The NIH has not begged pardon.

The DDT Ban

Rachel Carson appeared before the Department of Commerce in 1963, asking for a “Pesticide Commission” to regulate the DDT. Ten years later, Carson’s “Pesticide Commission” became the Environmental Protection Agency, which banned DDT in the US. The rest of the world followed, including Africa, which was bullied by European environmentalists and aid agencies to do so.

By 1960, DDT use had eliminated malaria from eleven countries. Crop production, land values, and personal wealth rose. In eight years of DDT use, Nepal’s malaria rate dropped from over two million to 2,500. Life expectancy rose from 28 to 42 years.

Malaria reemerged when DDT was banned. Since the ban, tens of millions of people have died from malaria. Following Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring narrative, environmentalists claimed that, with DDT, cancer deaths would have negated the malaria survival rates. No evidence supported this. It was fiction invented by Carson. The only type of cancer that increased during DDT use in the US was lung cancer, which correlated cigarette use. But Carson instructed citizens and governments that DDT caused leukemia, liver disease, birth defects, premature births, and other chronic illnesses. If you “know” that DDT altered the structure of eggs, causing bird populations to dwindle, it is Carson’s doing.

Banning DDT didn’t save the birds, because DDT wasn’t the cause of US bird death as Carson reported. While bird populations had plunged prior to DDT’s first use, the bird death at the center of her impassioned plea never happened. We know this from bird count data and many subsequent studies. Carson, in her work at Fish and Wildlife Service and through her participation in Audubon bird counts, certainly knew that during US DDT use, the eagle population doubled, and robin, dove, and catbird counts increased by 500%. Carson lied like hell and we showered her with praise and money. Africans paid with their lives.

In 1969 the Environmental Defense Fund demanded a hearing on DDT. The 8-month investigation concluded DDT was not mutagenic or teratogenic. No cancer, no birth defects. In found no “deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife.” Yet William Ruckleshaus, first director of the EPA, who never read the transcript, chose to ban DDT anyway. Joni Mitchell was thrilled. DDT was replaced by more harmful pesticides. NPR, the NY Times, and the Puget Sound Institute still report a “preponderance of evidence” of DDT’s dangers.

When challenged with the claim that DDT never killed kids, the Rachel Carson Landmark Alliance responded in 2017 that indeed it had. A two-year old drank and ounce of 5% DDT in a solution of kerosene and died. Now there’s scientific integrity.

Vilification of Cannabis

I got this one from my dentist; I had never considered it before. White-collar, or rather, work-from-home, California potheads think this problem has been overcome. Far from it. Cannabis use violates federal law. Republicans are too stupid to repeal it, and Democrats are too afraid of looking like hippies. According to Quest Diagnostics, in 2020, 4.4% of workers failed their employers’ drug tests. Blue-collar Americans, particularly those who might be a sub-sub-subcontractor on a government project, are subject to drug tests. Testing positive for weed can cost you your job. So instead of partying on pot, the shop floor consumes immense amounts of alcohol, increasing its risk of accidents at work and in the car, harming its health, and raising its risk of hard drug use. To the admittedly small sense in which the concept of a gateway drug is valid, marijuana is probably not one and alcohol almost certainly is. Racism, big pharma lobbyists, and social-control are typically blamed for keeping cannabis illegal. Governments may also have concluded that tolerating weed at the state level while maintaining federal prohibition is an optimal tax revenue strategy. Cannabis tolerance at state level appears to have reduced opioid use and opioid related ER admissions.

Stoners who scoff at anti-cannabis propaganda like Reefer Madness might be unaware that a strong correlation between psychosis and cannabis use has been known for decades. But inferring causation from that correlation was always either highly insincere (huh huh) or very bad science. Recent analysis of study participants’ genomes showed that those with the strongest genetic profile for schizophrenia were also more likely to use cannabis in large amounts. So unless you follow Lysenko, who thought acquired traits were passed to offspring, pot is unlikely to cause psychosis. When A and B correlate, either A causes B, B causes A, or C causes both, as appears to be the case with schizophrenic potheads.

To be continued.