Fraud in Science Marches On

Scientists are not the dispassionate, objective paragons of virtue on pedestals that people imagine. They are human, and subject to the same selfish desires that other people have. (They may even appreciate it if they were not expected to live up to unrealistic ideals. Just a thought.) Some are greedy, some are noble.

When it comes to origins science, however, I am convinced that the most important goal for many is to get people to believe in evolutionism. (But avarice is not limited to evolutionists by any means.) There is fraud in scientific papers, peer review is becoming pointless, fraud in evolutionary education, data manipulation, retractions and more. And it is growing. It would be bad enough if the epidemic was confined to evolutionism, but it also affects health care and life sciences. It's not all fraud. There is a generous amount of carelessness and incompetence, but never mind about that now.

The Piltdown hoax is one of the most famous cases of fraud in science. Many Darwinists, though, claim that this case is an anomaly, and that fraud is no longer a problem today. However, the cases of fraud or deception in the field of evolution include not only the Piltdown Man, but Archaeoraptor, the peppered moth, the Midwife Toad, Haeckel’s embryos, Ancon sheep, the Tasaday Indians, Bathybius haeckelii and Hesperopithecus (Nebraska Man)—the missing link that turned out to be a pig. Actually, fraud as a whole is now ‘a serious, deeply rooted problem’ that affects no small number of contemporary scientific research studies, especially in the field of evolution. Scientists have recently been forced by several events to recognize this problem and try to deal with it.

Most of the known cases of modern-day fraud are in the life sciences. In the biomedical field alone, fully 127 new misconduct cases were lodged with the Office of Research Integrity (US Department of Heatlh & Human Services) in the year 2001. This was the third consecutive rise in the number of cases since 1998. This concern is not of mere academic interest, but also profoundly affects human health and life. Much more than money and prestige are at stake—the fact is, fraud is ‘potentially deadly’, and in the area of medicine, researchers are ‘playing with lives’. The problem is worldwide. In Australia misconduct allegations have created such a problem that the issue has even been raised in the Australian Parliament, and researchers have called for an ‘office of research integrity’.

All human observers, however well trained, have a strong tendency to see what they expect to see.

You can finish reading "Why the epidemic of fraud exists in science today", here.