The Quality of Lies

Propaganda and Prejudice in the Public Representation of Science

 

A report presented to the Royal Society Committee investigating "Best practice in communicating the results of new scientific research to the public."

September 2003

by

John A. Hewitt MA PhD

This report contains seven sections:-

Introduction
A summary of the purposes and motives behind this submission.
Science and the Press
Concerning the ways in which science and scientists interact with the press, both the scientific press, and the circumstances in which they approach, or are approached by, the wider media.
Scientific Quality Control
A discussion of peer review and citation analysis.
    The way these systems operate in practice.
    Their impact on the work of ordinary members of the scientific community is discussed.
The Author and his Work
A discussion of the author's own work and history and his experience of scientific deception.
     The term "lie" is defined.
     Senior scientists, major institutes and major journals are named and discussed.
Scientific Deception as a Problem in Epistemology
How that problem leads to a generalized form of evolutionary theory - bioepistemic evolution.
Bioepistemic Evolution and Humans
The implications of bioepistemic evolution for -
    Human sexual traits including homosexuality, sado-masochism and paedophilia.
    The origins and nature of humour.
Conclusions and Recommendations
A summary of the problems the structure of science creates for relations between science and the press and recommendations for alleviating those problems.
References
Epilogue

Click on an uparrow to return to top of page

The opinions expressed here are those of the author and are his reponsibility; they do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person.

John A. Hewitt MA PhD (Cantab.)
33 Hillyfields, Dunstable, Beds. LU6 3NS
Great Britain

Tel. 01582 603702

© John Alexander Hewitt 2003

The right of John Hewitt to be identified as the author of this work is asserted under the terms of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. All rights reserved. No reproduction, copying or transmission is allowed except with written permission from the author. Permission is granted for copying for any purpose associated with the commission to whom the report is directed or for non-commercial private study. Any persons engaged in any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be subject to criminal prosecution or civil action for damages.

 

Report prepared by Dr. John Hewitt for the Royal Society committee investigating, "Best practice in communicating the results of new scientific research to the public."

Regardless of the opinions of peer reviewers and regardless of citation counts or impact ratings, there is one simple, plain, clear truth that needs to be recognized by all scientific administrators and organizations. That plain truth is this - If it's a lie, it's low quality science -

Recommendation 6 Nobody is infallible; science is not infallible. It is contrary to the interests of science to stifle all dissent merely in the hope that, by doing so, science will appear infallible and that no error will ever reach the public domain.

Introduction

Scientists, so it is said, are convergent thinkers who seek order in natural laws and supposedly do experiments to ask questions of the world, hoping that it will answer with clear, calm demonstrations of its underlying order.

In fact, scientists and experiments do not necessarily get on well together. Experiments frequently do not speak clearly, do not sing out in one harmonious melody. Rather, experiments are mute and uninterpretable or bawl out many discordant tunes, leaving the scientist unable to hear any unifying melody.

The convergent, scientific mind is more comfortable when reading the scientific press, a medium which is, indeed, an expression of itself. As Medawar remarked, all scientific articles present a sanitized, cleaned up summary of the investigator's original observations and he noted that, in this sense, scientific papers are "lies." He did not suggest that most scientific papers are deliberately misleading and this author would not suggest otherwise. The cleaning up of scientific reports is necessary because it allows scientists to select and highlight the information they find most informative and present it clearly. If performed correctly, this cleaning up provides the convergent mind with a focus, a central theme on which to build.

Nonetheless, such sanitization does create problems. It produces a very uniform scientific literature that, like some great choir leader, demands that every contributor sings the same tune. In reality, this harmony can become a mass illusion - and a destructive one at that.

In the end, science should not demand that every scientist sings along because all scientific advances begin with dissenting voices. In terms of theories and Popper's logic, the scientific literature should not deny space to new theories or opportunity to dissent from existing ones but, in fact, science does deny that access. In the end, the scientific literature even publishes real lies in order to keep its dissenters silent.

This scientific fondness for harmony also creates problems in the way science deals with the media because, while uniformity may characterize the scientific literature, it is not an evident feature of the general press. Any professional field has difficulty controlling the way its activities are presented in public and science's desire for uniformity might be expected to create problems here. Nonetheless, in the past, science has been quite successful in controlling its own media presentation but recent years have seen this control begin to break down.

In some areas, science has faced hostile reporting of its activities. Still, the press tends to treat science more respectfully than other professional fields and science journalism seems mostly to involve converting press releases from scientific institutions into media articles. Investigative science journalism is a rarity and few "bad news" stories about science are published compared to professions such as law, medicine or education.

The problems seem to arise in certain situations, these being :-

• Areas of active public interest. Examples are, AIDS, BSE, animal testing and vivisection, GM crops etc.
• Pseudoscience This is an ill-defined, offensive word not clearly distinguishable from science. It refers to work that claims scientific status but which, in the speaker's view, can be dismissed as not scientific at all. Creation science, homeopathy and the paranormal are usually so viewed.

• Loose cannons, individual scientists reporting headline-grabbing results in the press before scientific "colleagues" get the chance to criticize them. Cold fusion and possible hazards from genetically modified crops are examples.

Whether such reporting comes from loose cannons or pseudoscience, mainstream science has difficulty responding to their claims.

• Fraud and other professional malpractices. Despite claims to the contrary, recent years have shown that fraud is very common in science. Some estimates on the SCIFRAUD listserver suggest that as many as 10% of all papers published contain some element of intentional deception intended to benefit the deceivers. Any fraud in a publicly funded activity is a matter of general interest but, actually, few instances of scientific fraud reach the national press. Those few cases do not reflect the scale of the problem. Scientific whistleblowers are usually cold-shouldered by the scientific community and general press who offer them no platform for their "response to lies." Scientific whistleblowers normally find no platform from which to describe their experiences and often lose their livelihoods.

In convening the present committee, the Royal Society seems to want to focus attention on issues of active public concern, such as GM crops (where special interest groups are active in pressing their concerns in the media) or hope to reduce the incidence of pseudoscience or loose cannon reporting. The implication is that the Royal Society, or what might loosely be called the scientific establishment, would like greater control over the way science is reported in the national press.

Whatever their motives, conferring that greater control would have a downside. This author is concerned that if scientists are denied what little independent press access they presently enjoy, the problem of combating scientific fraud would become even more difficult than it is at present.

This report will review the inadequacy of science's quality control procedures as a means of combating fraud. It will suggest that fraud will become worse if individual scientists are prevented from becoming whistleblowers by gagging clauses in their employment contracts or by unworkable procedures which allow them access to the press only at the cost of their careers.

This report will also consider the field of concern to this author and the deceptions perpetrated within it.

Finally the report will introduce author's analysis of fraud as a problem in epistemology and evolutionary theory. Quite unexpectedly, this analysis produces nothing less than a generalized form of evolutionary theory with a relevance for our understanding of human nature that is far wider than would be expected. For example, this form of evolutionary theory offers an interpretation of human sexuality, which incorporates not just heterosexuality but homosexuality and other sexual deviations in a single framework, and also offers an interpretation of humour.

 

How and why Scientists deal with the Press

Scientific Press

Most scientists have to deal with the scientific press, if only to make their work known. Some industrial scientists or those working in the health care environments may never publish their work, but for academic scientists and those working in scientific institutes, output and productivity are equated with publications. For such scientists, publication is a career imperative and a list of publications is a necessary adjunct to a CV if promotion or research grants are sought. This pressure to publish has a downside; it can mean that many scientific papers report data of little or no significance, are mere exercises in "me tooism," cut corners or are actually fraudulent.

However, even if they do not want immediate promotion or extra funding, scientists may still want to publish to establish intellectual property rights and priority in their work. Some scientific studies are significant - important in offering new insights or making new products possible. If a scientist feels his or her work is "important," it becomes imperative to be recognized as its innovator. Such intellectual property can confer status far beyond one promotion or grant funding. Recognition, or an unjust denial of it, can make or break a person's career and the scientific community will normally attribute a new result to the person whose publication first appears in print. Therefore, it is essential to individual scientists that the quality control processes determining scientific publication work fairly, efficiently and transparently - this being specially vital for the small minority of papers that are "important."

A corollary is that scientific priority disputes are extremely common, with mutual recriminations, accusations of plagiarism and, in the US at least, some highly publicized court battles.

Such battles are the public face of a large problem because actual plagiarism is very common in science. Carolyn Phinney, is an American scientist who won a court case about the plagiarism of her work; she has subsequently become a conduit for the protests of other victims, though her work is little publicized. She argues that virtually every academic department has at least one parasite on its senior staff. "Parasite" is her word and she means a scientist whose academic career is founded on publishing work that, properly, should be attributed to other people.

Parasites may simply appropriate and pursue ideas conceived by, and already being worked on, by colleagues or may steal ideas advanced by juniors; they may repeat experiments whose results have been reported in house or even copy entire papers. Parasites may recruit large teams of research students and postdoctoral fellows, offer them no help, advice or cooperation and show no interest in their work, but still insist on being recognized as senior author on any reports of it.

Phinney notes that the people who are most likely to be the victims of plagiarism are the most vulnerable in the system; juniors, students, postdoctoral fellows, working on low salaries and temporary contracts, women, foreign visitors, older people at the ends of their careers. The perpetrators are senior, full professors and bureaucrats.

Science is easy for parasites. They need only a superficial understanding of their field, need no original ideas and do not face the discipline of doing experiments. They can build large and apparently impressive publications records and, superficially, can seem far more productive than their honest contemporaries. They frequently become recognized as experts in their field or even as its leader.

We will return to the subject of plagiarism later but it, and Phinney's parasites, need to be considered as we discuss the reasons scientists sometimes seek access to the general press rather than scientific journals. The influence of parasites should also be considered when we discuss scientific quality control through peer review or citation analysis.

General press

If science is reported in the general press either scientists have approached the press or the press has approached scientists.

Scientists Approaching the Press

Most scientific institutes have public relations (PR) departments charged with channeling a steady flow of "good news" stories to the local and national press. Such things as new discoveries made in the institute, new research programmes initiated, new theories about subjects of general interest, prizes or honours won by members of the staff etc. Science journals also issue press releases about newsworthy articles appearing in their current issues and the Royal Society has a PR department concerned with the portrayal of science in general. These PR departments are the primary channel through which science initiates contacts with the general press. and much science journalism involves converting their press releases to stories. Probably 99% or more of the science-related press releases arriving in newspaper offices originate in such departments and they present an "official" view of scientific developments.

Occasionally, different PR departments release against one another. This might occur, for example, when an institute is facing cuts in its funding, in which circumstance it is quite common for the institute and the funding agency to be presenting quite different slants on the same story. This report is not concerned with such issues.

Approaches to the general press by individual scientists are quite rare but we are concerned with the reasons they occur, especially as most scientists would not know how to write press releases or where to send them. Most scientists have no press contacts and, as individuals, tend to be reserved, private people who do not relish the publicity associated with press interest. Nonetheless, scientists do sometimes actively seek direct contacts with the press. These individual contacts are only a tiny minority of the contacts science journalists receive from the scientific community but, nonetheless, this small minority of contacts seems a significant aspect of this committee's remit. Accordingly, we need to consider why individual scientists initiate contact with the press.

Individual Contacts initiated by Scientists with the Press

There are several reasons why individuals might want to contact the press. Here are just a few as they occur to this author.

Intellectual property rights

Many scientists have a low opinion of the ethical standards of their own institutes and of their profession generally. Scientists with original and interesting work to report often fear plagiarism by anonymous peer reviewers or senior, parasitic figures in their own institutes. This threat is much more serious than is generally acknowledged and any form of publicity will effectively protect their intellectual property as science goes through its own, anonymous, pre-publication "quality control."

Funding

Scientists may seek press support when funding for their research programme is curtailed. Their purpose is to gain publicity, either to put pressure on the funding agency to alter its decision or help in attracting alternative funding.

Minority Opinion

Some scientists hold minority scientific opinions and, as a result, are treated extremely badly by their contemporaries. They are labeled as "nuts" and are unable to publish their work or obtain funding to continue it. Often they lose their jobs and find themselves unable to obtain other scientific employment.

Al Higgins, an American sociologist who runs the SCIFRAUD (Science Fraud), listserver feels that scientific ideas function like political ideologies. Protagonists of established opinion do not see critics, or advocates of other opinions, as colleagues whose arguments should be engaged with and refuted. Rather, scientific minorities are seen as enemies who should be suppressed or attacked and destroyed. Hence, rational argument will be the scientific community's last resort in dealing with dissent.

The present author is in this category. He advocates a minority scientific view and was excluded from science for doing so. He argues that minority scientific opinions are systematically under-represented in or suppressed by science. In other words that scientists who hold unpopular opinions are denied an outlet in the scientific press. It is natural for such people to look elsewhere, to the general press, for an alternative platform for their views. They will do so for three reasons. First, they believe, possibly rightly, the scientific press is misleading its readership and suppressing the truth - as does the present author. Second, they may need alternative funding for a research programme that is unlikely to find favour with mainstream funding agencies. Publicity will help them to find it. Third, if publication of their controversial or innovative work has been blocked through peer review, they will still lack proof of intellectual property and originator status. Nonetheless their work is known, in detail, by their competitors and they urgently need an outlet for work that is at risk of plagiarism.

Whistleblowing

Few scientists pass their careers without seeing or being the victims of scientific fraud. Some become so incensed they write about their experiences and, since the scientific press does not publish such reports, they seek an outlet in the national press.

Famous Figures

Some scientists achieve fame in their own right and can obtain ready access to the press. They may be famed for their scientific work, perhaps having won a Nobel prize, or they may have become media figures in other ways. Such people might maintain regular press contacts for purely financial reasons, media appearances offering a well-paid sideline to their scientific career. They may also find such activities a useful way of getting attention to their current work.

Fame, and the media access it offers, can be used to distort scientific debates. A recent example occurred in the US, with the meteorite collision theory for mass extinction events. That theory's principal advocate was Luis Alvarez, a retired, Nobel prize-winning physicist, known for his work on nuclear weapons He advertised the meteorite collision idea with a mixture of journalism and virulent ad hominem. attacks on advocates of the alternative theory of vulcanism, notably his fellow American, Dewey Maclean. The result is that the meteorite collision theory is now widely accepted, despite substantial evidence to the contrary. (For a review, see Officer and Page (1996)).

Smaller scale episodes seem quite common as senior scientists adopt the easy line of vilifying the junior opponents they are unable to best in debate.

Contacts Initiated by the Press

If a media outlet plans to write a science article, they may obtain it by simply rewriting the institute's press release, they may contact the PR department of the institute in question or they may approach individual scientists.

If the press contacts the institutional PR department, they are likely to be given an officially approved line or directed to a scientist who can explain the official line. To this end, the Royal Society maintains a list of senior scientists to whom the press are directed and these individuals are often seen in the media explaining the latest developments.

The press will always approach individual scientists whose work is of public interest - almost any topic can figure but certain subjects recur - health, human nature and psychology, evolution and human origins, the environment, space, computers etc. Science's own activities can, themselves, become "the story" - animal experimentation being a case in point.

Regulation of Press Contacts

Scientists working in industry or defense work under employment contracts that prohibit them discussing their work with the press. If "pure" science also wants to regulate press contact, it too would need such employment contracts. However, academic scientists have a legally protected "academic freedom" and it seems likely that such clauses would breach that law.

Scientific Quality Control

Science has two major systems for quality control - peer review and citation analysis. Their workings will now be summarized.

Peer Review

Peer review seems to have been started in the eighteenth century by the Royal Societies of London, Edinburgh and Paris. It has changed little since. Scientists who want to publish in the science press will write a paper about their work and send three (usually) copies to the editor of a journal. The editor then selects two (usually) "referees" who write reports about the paper's quality and suitability for publication. The referees are described as "experts" in the field but they are anonymous, and their identities are not disclosed to the author. Their reports are passed to the author and determine whether or not the paper will be published unchanged, held back until modified in some way or rejected as not fit for publication.

Peer review is also used to determine whether a scientist should be funded to pursue a particular research project.. Scientists who need funding for a project write a grant application and send it to a funding agency, a government body or a charity. The agency sends the grant application to peer reviewers who, again, are anonymous. Their reports are passed to the author and the grant application funded or not according to their content.

Immunity from Peer Review

Although most senior scientists approve of peer review, they nonetheless contrive to spare themselves from it. Most national science organizations, such as the Royal Society or the US National Academy of Sciences, run in-house journals in which elite scientists can publish free from oversight by peer review.

Comments of the Workings of Peer Review

Carried out properly, peer review can produce valuable reports that help an author to improve his or her work. Scientists often express sincere thanks to anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful and constructive criticisms. In other words, peer review can be quality control with meaning and content. It can genuinely improve the quality of science but, unfortunately, constructive, meaningful reports giving useful feedback and real criticism from leaders in a field are the exception, not the rule.

Most peer review reports are cursory and shallow, evidencing no real attempt to engage with the content of the document under review. Often they merely "disagree" with the author, seem written by people who do not understand the field or who are really rather busy and find this additional, unpaid burden bothersome. At its worst, peer review reporting descends into mindless ranting by reviewers pursuing agendas very contrary to the supposed aims of peer review. Many such reports might, if signed, lead to libel actions. (See, for example, Mitroff's The Subjective Side of Science (1974).) However, journal editors and grant-giving agencies seem unable to distinguish one type of report from another, passing them all on to authors.

Examples of Peer Review in Practice

Some examples might give an idea of the level to which peer review can actually descends. A famous and widely reported example came about in reporting the discovery of the HIV virus, the agent thought to cause AIDS. (see e.g. Dominique Lapierre's book Beyond Love) This virus was discovered by Montagnier in Paris. (A separate discovery was due to Karpas in Cambridge but he does not enter into this story.) The discovery of this virus was a major advance and Montagnier sent a paper describing it to the journal Nature who rejected it on the grounds, as I recall, that the authors should take care to avoid cross contamination during their work. This is an extraordinary criticism; there was nothing to suggest that such cross contamination might have taken place and nobody could run a virology laboratory without taking care to avoid it. To point this out to an internationally renowned institute of virology is rather like telling a cordon bleu chef to use the right amount of salt - like many referee's reports, it is just a shallow, meaningless comment that helps nobody. Nature has not disclosed the referee's identity.

At that time, the recognized leader in the field was Robert Gallo of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) at Bethesda, Maryland but there was friction between his group and their French competitors.

Still, friction or not, the Paris isolate was sent to Bethesda for further characterization where it was treated in a way that made cross-contamination not just possible but absolutely certain. In trying to grow the virus in culture, Gallo's laboratory routinely pooled isolates from many sources before attempting to culture them. That is what they did with the French isolate, they pooled it with others and grew it in culture. From that pool they succeeded in growing a virus and they then reported this virus as their own, original discovery.

Let us repeat. The NIH laboratory received a sample from a world-renowned, French institute who believed it to contain the causative agent of AIDS. The French asked for help to improve the characterization of their sample but, in fact, their sample was mixed with five others and a virus grown from the pool was claimed as a new discovery and the causative agent of AIDS.

A Nobel prize might have followed had not a combination of chance, the press, politics and money intervened. The chance is that HIV is an unusual virus that mutates rapidly. As a result, different isolates can be distinguished from one another. As more isolates came along, it became clear that "Gallo's" first virus was actually that isolated by the French group. The press took the form of investigative journalist John Crewdson, who published a very lengthy newspaper article describing the serological evidence proving Montagnier's priority. Politics intervened in the shape of the French government (the issue was almost an international incident) and the whole pot was boiled by the money that could be made from the AIDS tests that would use the isolate's properties.

The outcome deserves careful thought. Subsequent investigators had no professional standards by which to judge the actions of the NIH group. Therefore, their conduct was investigated and judged under criteria applicable to the law on criminal fraud, criteria that lifted the burden of evidence from the NIH group. The investigation determined that their actions did not prove an intention to steal the French isolate. Therefore the NIH group were not guilty of malpractice, only of uncollegiality and Gallo retained his senior post at the NIH. (Montagnier's laboratory seems to have disintegrated due the stresses.)

Wachslicht-Rodbard and Soman

This episode occurred in the late 1970s. Helena Wachslicht-Rodbard was on the staff at NIH and Vijay Soman was an assistant Professor at Yale; it is an unusual case in that the identity of a referee is known. Rodbard performed a study on insulin responses during anorexia and wrote them into a paper for the New England Journal of Medicine. It was sent to Soman's boss, Philip Felig, for peer review and he passed it to Soman who, he believed, was performing a virtually identical study. The importance attached to priority, meant that Felig and Soman had a vested interest in not publishing Rodbard's paper. Felig rejected the paper and Soman began writing up his own "work." Actually, Soman had done virtually no work, he just invented data to fit with Rodbard's results and sent the resulting article to the American Journal of Medicine. That journal sent it to Rodbard's boss, Jesse Roth for review, who passed it to her. Soman was an Indian scientist whose English was somewhat limited and he had copied not just the substance of Rodbard's results but also some of her exact phrases. Rodbard recognized this plagiarism and she began to complain and demand an enquiry.

The plagiarism was a self-evident fact but, even so, it took 18 months for Yale to begin an enquiry which concluded that Soman's entire paper was a plagiarism and an invention; he had simply never done the work he wanted to publish. (This episode is reviewed in Broad and Wade (1982)).

Had he not used Rodbard's exact English, Soman would not have been exposed as a plagiarist and his fabrications would have gone unrecognized. Peer review is an anonymous process but anecdotal evidence suggests that many, cleverer plagiarists routinely copy the work in submissions they have reviewed and rejected. (For example read Macilwain (1993)) Moreover, Soman's invention of data is by no means unprecedented. In Britain, Sir Cyril Burt is widely thought to have invented data on the intelligence testing of identical twins. Also in Britain, Prof. Heslop Harrison fabricated data concerning the flora of the Hebrides and the British scientific authorities eventually came to know of his behaviour. Nonetheless, they took no action; they did not correct the scientific record and his papers continued to be published. (Sabbagh (1999)). Recently, the South African scientist Bezwoda seems to have built a career on invented data while the German team led by Mueller built a considerable reputation from papers achieved by inventing and publishing results that matched honest work presented by other workers at scientific conferences. I will not give references here, but all these cases have been publicly documented..

Dishonesty and peer review are not a comfortable fit. Peer review is not capable of stopping dishonesty but it gives honest scientists a serious problem. If honest scientists have important results they need to report to the scientific community, peer review demands that they place complete trust in the moral rectitude of peer reviewers. They must do so knowing that, if problems arise, the journals and institutions involved will do everything in their power to cover up and sweep the problems under the carpet, even to the extent of protecting scientific cheats and destroying the careers of honest scientists.

Effectiveness of Peer Review

Peer review does not prevent fraud - and it was never designed to do so. However, peer review also does not do what it is claimed to do, establish standards of quality. Peter and Ceci (1980) tested peer review by slightly modifying articles recently published in major psychology journals (within 18-32 months) and resubmitting them to the same journal. Of the 30 papers resubmitted this way, 3 were recognized as copies by editors and 5 by reviewers. Of the remaining 22, only 4 were recommended for publication, although all had already been accepted as of publishable standard. The remaining 18 were rejected for various, apparently sound professional reasons. It seems either that such reasons are easy to contrive, or that professional standards are very elastic.

The fact is that this kind of study shows peer review to be simply a lottery. Similar studies have a similar import for peer review in the awarding of research grants.

Where peer reviews displays a selective bias, it is not in favour of quality but of large, prestigious institutes or well known investigators at the expense of small institutes or little known workers. For example, see Blank (1991) who compared single blind and double blind studies, the latter being where the identity of the applicants for grants are not known to the reviewers. Those circumstances reduce the relative success of large rich institutes and improve that of small poorer ones, implying that peer reviewers normally favour large institutes. This may explain why distinguished, well-known scientists tend to extol the virtues of peer review as a system.

Summary of Criticisms of Peer Review

1. Peer review is not applied as it is claimed to be applied.

2. It does not work in practice. It creates a lottery as to which papers will be published or which projects funded.

3. Its anonymity renders reviewers unaccountable for the way they do their work and enables them to commit plagiarism.

4. Peer reviewers usually have a vested interest in the work they are reviewing, often an interest in blocking it.

5. Peer review is heavily biased in favour of elite scientists and institutions who receive the great bulk of the funds peer review allocates. It is even capable of validating elite lying.

6. Even when peer review does not favour elite scientists, they grant themselves freedom to opt out of it by running "in house" journals to which they have unreviewed access..

7. Peer review militates against publishing innovative, challenging or original work, especially that from small laboratories or from individuals.

Peer review is an elitist, ideologically slanted, biased, pro-establishment assessment methodology that invites corruption and plagiarism. Telling individual scientists to submit their work to anonymous peer review is like telling children subject to playground bullying that they should give their pocket money to the bully in the hope that the bully might return part of it.

Citation Analysis

Citation analysis is a much more recent form of scientific quality assessment. Citation analysis emerges from the Science Citations Index (SCI) a publication produced by the US Institute for Science Information (ISI), a private company.

At the back of all scientific papers is a list of citations, much as there is at the end of this report. These lists enable other researchers to track backwards through the literature of their field. The ISI takes these lists, assembles them into a computer database and publishes periodic reports listing those authors and papers subsequently cited by other papers. Researchers find this database a very useful tool that makes tracking forward through the literature easy. Institutes everywhere bought copies of SCI but soon other, less constructive uses for it began to emerge.

Some papers are cited very frequently, others are not cited by any subsequent article. Surely, highly cited papers are high quality articles? ISI is careful not to claim any linkage between the citation rate of a paper and its "quality," preferring the word "impact." Still, the SCI can be used to give impact ratings to every paper published; even authors, institutions and journals can be given an impact rating and today's bureaucrats do make the connection between impact rating and quality. In today's climate, the impact rating of a paper can influence promotion prospects, departmental funding or even the sales of the journal in which a paper is published.

Scientific management has become obsessed with impact ratings, though the weaknesses in this methodology are well known. Here are some of them.

• Papers can have a high impact rating because they are wrong and many workers have seen fit to correct them.
• People cite their own work, or their friend's work. Members of "old boy" networks have high impact ratings, as does work from large institutes.
• Plagiarists and parasites can have very high impact ratings.
• It is a trait of science, or at least of the scientific elite, that they often ignore original, important, innovative work and such work can have a low impact rating.
• When minor figures criticize work published by elites, the elite can label the criticism as "poor quality" by merely ignoring it. Even if the criticisms are entirely valid, the consequence of such disregard may be a withdrawal of funding from the critic's work. Citation analysis actually encourages and rewards this sort of behaviour by elites.
• Citation analysis automatically defines small fields, with few workers, as less important than large, fashionable fields with many workers.

Main Criticisms of Citation Analysis

1. Citation analysis is basically contentless and provides workers with no meaningful feedback or indication of how to improve their work..

• Citation analysis counts trivial papers equally with important, breakthrough achievements.
• Citation analysis counts fraudulent papers equally with truthful ones.
• Citation analysis rewards elite scientists for multiple citing of their own work and for ignoring criticism of it.
• Citation analysis measures, "what people are doing" and it measures "who is in control." It is, therefore, structurally biased in favour of established groups and large laboratories and against individuals or small laboratories.
• For the same reason citation analysis is structurally biased against innovative and original work. Note that it shares these last two traits with peer review.

Citation analysis is a bizarre piece of numerology and not a procedure for measuring quality. It has, in fact, no input of the variable, quality, that it is claimed to measure. As a measure of scientific quality, citation analysis is like measuring the output of a car factory by the number of cars it produces, regardless of inputs into the factory, the number of workers employed or whether the cars produced are driveable.

Used as a measure of quality, citation analysis is tantamount to a declaration that good quality science has no need of rational debate, originality, truth or even honesty. Actually, no meaningful definition of scientific quality could ever exclude such things.

In fact good quality science does depend on intangibles like truth and relevance. Regardless of the opinions of peer reviewers and regardless of citation counts or impact ratings, there is one simple, plain, clear truth that needs to be recognized by all scientific administrators and organizations. That plain truth is this

-- If it's a lie, it's low quality science --

The Author and His Work

These sections will summarize the author's own scientific history and the reasons for his present concern. They will, if you like, explain the axe I am, myself, grinding.

I was born in Bradford in 1947 and attended Cambridge University to study Natural Science, specializing in physical chemistry, following which I obtained a doctorate at the MRC's Laboratory for Molecular Biology. I also studied in the US, in Cornell and Stanford, worked at the MRC's National Institute for Medical Research and taught biochemistry in Cambridge.

I am a highly qualified scientist and I would not have chosen to devote time to scientific fraud but my experiences have left me with no doubt that fraud is one of science's most prevalent traits.

I have seen the system protect incompetence to the clear detriment of the students involved. I have seen and experienced plagiarism and I support Carolyn Phinney's view that science's main plagiarists are senior, tenured figures stealing original work from juniors they are, supposedly, helping and advising. I agree with her that these are the most prevalent frauds of science. I am struck by the failure of the scientific community to address such matters and by the way the victims of such frauds are, effectively, held responsible for the crimes perpetrated against them.

However, I will not detail these matters here. The axe I grind arose while I was on the staff of Cambridge University. It is an issue of personal concern and one of scientific import. It also illustrates well the way science acts to protect senior figures even when their behaviour seems to fly into the teeth of reason.

To tell this story, I must begin by describing the subject that forms its context. I will do so in the simplest possible terms. Much greater documentation is available on my web site.

Particle Movement on Cells

If one examines an amoeba-like cell under a microscope "small," visible objects will occasionally become attached to its surface. Such visible objects are actually "large" when compared to the molecules from which the cell is made and the observation to be explained is that any such large, visible object on the cell surface will move, normally toward the rear of the cell. When adherent to a cell surface, microscopic particles of all kinds move. It is generally agreed that the mechanism of particle movement is linked to the mechanism of cell motility, a problem of great importance. Particle movement thus provides a simple model for cell movement and understanding its mechanism is of considerable interest. Therefore this is a significant topic and its conceptual implications bear on 5% or even 10% of cell biology.

As readers may know, science is held to work by advancing hypotheses and testing their predictions against experimental results. Three hypotheses have been advanced to explain particle movement. We will describe them.

The Membrane Flow Model

The idea of the membrane flow model is that almost the entire outer membrane of the cell is continuously recirculating. Particles on the cell surface move because they are caught up in this general membrane circulation.

This theory has been most actively advocated by Dr. Mark Bretscher FRS. Membrane flow has been taken seriously and systematically tested. There is no doubt that, if the membrane circulates at all, it does not do so at rates even approaching those needed for the flow hypothesis to be correct. I feel the energy consumption such flow would require also makes the idea unworkable. The theory seems wrong and is recognized as such, though I understand Dr. Bretscher still professes to support it.

The Cytoskeletal Model

The word "cytoskeleton" means "cell skeleton" but, in fact, amoeboid cells have no skeleton - the cytoskeleton is not a cell skeleton. It is actually made from proteins very similar to those found in muscle so, really, the word cytoskeleton is a misnomer, this structure is the cell's muscle or its "cytosinew."

At its most basic, the cytosekeletal model for particle movement simply says that the cell's muscle causes these movements and therefore causes cells to move. To that extent, it is undoubtedly correct but that is a very limited extent indeed becasue the cytoskeletal model is actually vacuous.

The question, "How do a animals move?" would not be answered by, "using muscles" - that would be a shallow reply. In the word used by philosophers of science, such "theories" are vacuous. Another example of a vacuous hypothesis might come in throwing dice. You may, with meaning hypothesize that a dice will fall with a six uppermost, or with an odd number uppermost but it is vacuous to say that a dice will fall with a number uppermost - all possible outcomes are numbers. Saying that cells move and move particles using their cytoskeleton, their muscle, is an essentially vacuous and meaningless statement. Nobody disputes that muscles are used in movement, though that is as much as some workers in this field seem willing to say.

The question is, "How does the cytoskeleton function to do these things?" Many answers are offered to that question, all from workers who claim to support the "cytoskeletal model." For some the cytoskeleton is a "Darwinian machine" something much like a brain. (No, the cytoskeleton is a muscle not a brain.) For others, the cytoskeleton flows just under the cell membrane. (No, again, I don't think so.) Then, the cytoskeleton may form railway tracks along which molecular motors will travel pulling their loads and, for each movement, there will be a motor. (Again, no!) Then the cytoskeleton might grow at the leading edge and shrink at the other. (Yes, it must grow like this, but such growth seems a necessary reponse to movement not the means whereby force is generated.) One cannot give a full list of these variations on the cytoskeletal model but these serve to give an idea of the kind of thought going into this theorizing. Readers should understand that, while these variations on the cytoskeletal model are mentioned, they are not treated as spearate theories, their advocates are not generally willing to be pinned down to one or develop it to the point of deriving experimentally testable implications. Rather, they shift from one to another, depending upon the criticism they might be hearing at the time.

They also insist that the evidence for the cytoskeletal model is so overwhelming that the entire burden of proof rests with their critics. Actually, scientific logic does not give a burden of proof, it gives a burden of disproof and it is not hard to refute any of these specific ideas. However, scientific logic does impose a burden of engaging with and refuting alternatives, something these workers obstinately refuse to do and they do ignore a much better theory.

The Wave Model

The wave model was advanced by this author (Hewitt (1979)). It says, simply, that particles on the surface of cells move by effectively, "surf riding" on waves and that the waves are present because that is how cells move. The cell's muscle, its cytoskeleton creates waves that cause the cell to move much as do the musculatures of many invertebrate animals.

I cannot, here, give a full review of the evidence about this model but, later, I will give some evidence for the existence of waves. A priori arguments in favour of this model are very good, as is the experimental evidence. A priori arguments are that wave driving is an efficient mode of motion generation and is used by many invertebrate organisms; that the cytoskeleton is made of contractile proteins that produce wave patterns in many other situations, for example in the heart. The experimental evidence consists of waves being known on virtually all eukaryotic cells; that particles are known to be moved by cell waves in the lung and fallopian tubes; that particles are sometimes seen to reverse direction - easy to understand for wave driving but near incomprehensible by most other mechanisms; that waves are seen and reported as moving "in concert" with particles. These arguments are discussed in more detail on my web site, www.ahabitoflies.co.uk, chapter 7.

The arguments and evidence for the wave model are clear, direct, published in the literature and far better that for the alternatives. However, for some reason, when those arguments and evidence are pointed out, workers in this field posture as if completely unable to grasp their import or perceive that the evidence has any significance. In any substance, they do not reply to criticism but rather seem to bend their every effort to ensure that criticism finds no place in the scientific literature and that critics cease to be members of the scientific community.

Lies and Scientific Debate in the Motility Field

Before going further, it will be useful to define one of the terms I will use, specifically the term lie.

For these purposes a scientific lie is, "a false statement in the scientific literature or elsewhere with scientific impact." Such statements are deemed lies if

(a) If the authors knew it to be false when they wrote it.

(b) If it is significant. That is, the falsehood is such as to materially alter the conclusions a dispassionate reader would draw from the publication.

(c) The authors decline to meaningfully clarify or correct the false statement when it is drawn to their attention.

Parallel definitions of lie might apply to institutions from which lies are published or journals in which they are published.

Taking such definitions of the term lie, this section will name eminent scientists on the staff of named major scientific institutions who have lied. It will name major journals in which those lies have been published. It will also name senior scientific and academic figures with formal responsibility for the ethical standards of their institutes, who seem to have made their institutes complicit in lies by declining to intervene and ask liars to clarify or correct their publications.

We will focus on the leading and most influential figures in this field. All this is discussed at greater length on the web site.

Dr. Mark Bretscher FRS. MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology.

Dr. Bretscher is the leading advocate of the flow model and this seems to have been the centrepiece of his career. He is an FRS for his contributions but never seems to have acknowledged the existence of the wave model and, in reviewing the field, simply reports it as a debate between two models, ignoring the third, the wave model. Such reporting is a lie, because it reports three as two and such lies are normal practice in this field. Dr. Bretscher clearly rejects the wave model but refuses to explain how he comes to do so or even acknowledge the fact of that rejection.

Drs. J. C. Metcalfe and T. R. Hesketh Dept. of Biochemsitry, Univ. of Cambridge.

I worked in this department and published the wave model from there. These two workers taught the subject and published scientific articles as if the wave model, published from their own institute, did not exist. They insist that this behaviour does not imply a rejection of the wave model and refuse further dialogue.

Prof. Dennis Bray

Now of the University of Cambridge Prof. Bray studied particle movement on nerve cells. Again, he simply does not acknowledge the alternative and will not explain his reasons.

Prof. M. P Sheetz Duke University, North Carolina.

Prof. Sheetz published in Nature some very well known papers that do refute the membrane flow model and were, therefore hailed as support for the cytoskeletal model. It ignored the wave model. The journal gave Bretscher space for a reply.

Actually Sheetz's data is some of the best evidence yet published in support of the wave model. It shows the occasional reverse movements to be expected under wave driving. In a parallel paper he describes "dramatic waves" moving "in concert" with particles but, in a letter to me, he reports that he cannot see waves, only "other undulations." He refuses to communicate further.

Prof. Ken Jacobsen Univ.of Connecticut

His behaviour is quite similar to that of Prof. Sheetz but in the journal Science. Again the paper gives a good refutation of flow, which is interpreted as support for the cytoskeletal model - again Bretscher gives a reply and, again, the journal would not intervene in this reporting.

It is provable that all these workers know of all three models in this field. Their publications are false. By ignoring the theory best supported by the evidence, they are changing the judgment a dispassionate observer would draw. They refuse to explain themselves when asked to do so. By the definition given previously, their reporting of three as two makes them seem liars.

Institutes

I have communicated with some of the institutes involved and will give here the tenor of their comments.

University of Cambridge

I asked the University of Cambridge to intervene and seek a meaningful reply from their staff. Sir David Williams, its then vice-chancellor, stated that he was responsible for its ethical standards but declined to intervene, asserting that this is, at bottom, a difference of opinion on an academic matter on which he cannot intervene. Actually, it is no such thing. The difference between three and two is not a matter of opinion, academic or otherwise. The issue is one of lying by members of Cambridge's academic staff. Nonetheless, he refuses to intervene.

Medical Research Council (MRC)

I have also raised this issue with the MRC, who also refuse to intervene. Sir Aaron Klug FRS, Nobel prize winner and later president of the Royal Society, was then the chairman of the MRC in Cambridge. He knows this field and seems happy with reporting in it. He refuses to intervene or to discuss the matter.

Sir Dai Rees was then chairman of the MRC committee. He has, himself, published pictures of cell waves but, again, he just refuses to intervene. The fact is that the MRC seems to know its staff have published lies but still sees no need even to ask these staff to explain their positions.

I asked for the MRC's code of practice on false reporting by its staff but got no reply. It took the intervention of my MP to extract any form of documentation and very vague that turned out to be. It seems that the MRC feels that any intervention should be at the discretion of senior staff. In fact I know of no instance where any scientific institution has ever willingly intervened to correct falsehoods perpetrated by their staff. The institutional response is always one of cover up.

Journals

Nature, under Dr. (now Sir) John Maddox, published major, false papers in this field but refused to allow me space for a reply or correction. Science was no better. Both seem complicit in lies but, since Nature is British, it will be worth elaborating that comment.

Dr. Maddox accepts that the wave model is a discrete theory but plainly regards it as a nonsense and closes his letter with the sentence "If by chance you do find evidence of traveling waves on the surface of cap forming cells, by all means think of Nature as an outlet." His overall tone was not polite and this is no invitation to write an article for Nature but let us quickly review some of the evidence available.

Here is a picture of waves in the cilia of a paramecium - it is copied from a first year undergraduate textbook (Dyson's Cell Biology, as used in Cambridge twenty five years ago, but most cell biology texts have such pictures.) Some human cells have similar waves (e.g. the lining of the lung, the so-called mucociliary escalator) and these are genetically identical with all other human cells. The biological function of lung waves is particle movement.

Cilial waves are associated with waves of calcium ion permeability. Those waves are present not just on ciliated cells but on "all or almost all eukaryotic cells." (The quote is from a review on calcium waves, Jaffe (1994).) Pictures of calcium waves have appeared in Nature, both in the journal and even on its front cover (October, 5^th 1995).

There exist published photo-graphs of waves on non-ciliated cells. Here is one, it was published by Dr. Dai Rees - later Sir Dai Rees of the MRC . (Couchman, Lenn and Rees (1985)).

One can even go to the very author who wrote those misleading papers in Nature - Prof. M. Sheetz. Here is a verbatim quote taken from a paper written by him at almost the same time, from the same team, in the same laboratory, on the same cell type and using, presumably, the same equipment. (Kucik, Elson and Sheetz (1990))

"dramatic centripetal cytoplasmic waves (were) visible within the lamellipodium. We observed centripetal transport of some surface bound particles in concert with these waves on all parts of the lamellipodium, particularly with large (0.3 µm) latex beads and with large aggregates of gold particles but only rarely with individual gold particles. This centripetal transport was easily distinguished from diffusion by the steady rearward migration and relative lack of Brownian motion as compared to diffusing particles in the same region of the lamella ..... The diffusing particles were not influenced by the underlying cytoplasmic waves even in the lateral regions of the cell, where the motion of the waves is at right angles to the direction of cell migration."

Later, in the same paper they remark that

"the centripetally moving waves ... seem to be correlated with the systematic transport of surface particles.

We teach undergraduates about cell waves; photographs of them can be extracted from the literature; they are known on all eukaryotic cells; Nature has published on them as have his own authors on their own systems and yet Dr. Maddox defies me, challenging me to come up with "evidence" for traveling waves. Well, excuse me, but in what ways, exactly, is this not evidence of traveling waves?

I will not comment on the journal Science other than to say that it is no better.

I, personally, find the behaviour of these institutes extraordinary. Terms such as bizarre, incompetent and downright corrupt come to mind. I feel I am talking to people who do not care whether their words are true or even have any meaning.

I have discussed Nature's behaviour on the SCIFRAUD listserver. During those discussions, it has emerged that most scientific journals seem to have a policy of never correcting false papers unless the authors themselves ask for that correction. In other words, scientific journals correct published lies only if the liars themselves ask for the correction. It seems grotesque, but that really does seem the way things are.

Scientific Deception as a Problem in Epistemology

It is common for scientists and scientific philosophers to hail scientific knowledge as the closest approach possible to rational knowledge. "Popper's logic," they say, "is the logic of science and the basis for valid knowledge." Yes, I agree about Popper's logic but my experiences make me question whether real scientific knowledge arises from such logic. I feel that, twenty years ago, my career was destroyed by debating tactics, approved at the highest levels of science, that were not only irrational but seem an outright defiance of rationality. Quite aside from my personal feelings, I cannot accept that the "knowledge" produced by this kind of debate approximates to rational knowledge.

However, knowing what scientific knowledge is not is different from knowing what it is. I had time on my hands and a problem I had never really wanted, namely, "Recognizing the dishonesty within science as a fact, what is scientific knowledge?" That is a question in philosophy - to be precise a question in epistemology, the theory of knowledge - but, as a scientist, I wanted a scientific answer. I wanted, in effect, to derive Popper's logic, as an epistemology of valid knowledge, from evolutionary theory. If such a derivation were achieved it would unify science with its own methodology. It would close the loop of scientific method and scientific results, manifesting them as a single field of knowledge.

Looking at this problem I was struck by indications that progress toward such a derivation might be possible. Of course, as everyone knows, evolutionary theory is applied to biology but it is also applied to epistemology and Popper's logic has a selective structure quite analogous to Darwinian evolution. These facts have led to previous efforts to merge these subjects, notably Plotkin (1994) The Nature of Knowledge. Such things made my problem seem more soluble than one might have thought and I began to work on it systematically.

The results are available in two books, the first describes my experiences of scientific deception in the cell capping and motility field. Though unpublished, this book is largely accessible through the internet (www.ahabitoflies.co.uk). More detailed discussion of those topics is available by consulting it. My time is now occupied by my second work.

Generalized forms of Evolutionary Theory

To merge the forms of evolutionary theory applied to biology and epistemology I needed to decide which application was the most basic. Like Plotkin, I soon decided that the basis must be knowledge, not genes, but I also needed to decide how many forms of knowledge I was dealing with. (Plotkin used three but that didn't seem enough, I needed four.)

This is not the appropriate place to elaborate the details of my reconstruction (they are given in my book, The Architecure of Thought) but some of the conclusions are as follows.

• •Genes are not fundamental to evolution per se, only to its biological manifestation. Genes can be seen as holders for the data and knowledge involved in biological evolution.
• •Data, information and knowledge are fundamental to evolution.
• •Information is obtained from data by interpretation and knowledge is obtained from information by selection.
• •Describing human evolution, starting at biology and ending with logic (an ethic), needs at least four ranks of evolution, each interpreting its own data and selecting its own information. These ranks produce four levels of knowledge.
• •Those four levels of knowledge are genetic knowledge, sensory knowledge, social knowledge and ethical or professional knowledge.

Do not worry if this is unclear. This framework will be unfamiliar to everyone but it is compatible with conventional evolutionary theory. In fact, many forms of evolutionary theory could be built this way, all consistent with conventional biological theory.

The Architecture of Thought is concerned to identify the form of evolutionary theory that is simultaneously most consistent with the evolutionary theories used in biology and epistemology, with our knowledge of human evolutionary history and with our understanding of social structure, the milieu of social evolution. I call the "bioepistemic evolution."

It is then concerned with elaborating the implications of bioepistemic evolution. As indicated, the original aim was to find the place of scientific logic within that evolutionary framework but my view of my work underwent a sharp change.

Bioepistemic Evolution and Human Nature

In fact, I soon began to realize that I could do things with this form of evolutionary theory that were impossible with more conventional approaches.

Sexuality

My work on sexuality emerges from reading the work of Michel Foucault, a French philosopher who was both a major figure in modern epistemology and, himself, a homosexual. The ongoing threads that run through his work are knowledge, power and sexuality, along with strong implications that these three topics are linked to one another. As a non-scientist, Foucault was not equipped to examine the biological roots of those links but I, myself, had already heard of the studies indicating that homosexuality was genetically controlled, a result strongly suggesting a biological origin. While reading Foucault, I was suddenly struck by the thought that, in combination with Darwin's sexual selection mechanism, the new evolutionary framework I had been building to understand logic was also able to interpret homosexuality. Hence, my work moved toward understanding sexuality in general.

"Normal" human sexuality, heterosexuality, is actually rather odd by animal standards and quite different from other mammals. Conventional theorists have looked into the reasons for these differences and I had no need to dissent from their views.

On the other hand, current interpretations of homosexuality seemed unconvincing and homosexuality is just one of a group of sexual "deviations," or paraphilias - other examples being sadomasochism, fetishism and paedophilia which seem almost uninterpreted. These are socially and medically important phenomena which, although not understood, are too common to be dismissed as illnesses. Bioepistemic evolution proved able to interpret our unusual heterosexuality and, within the same interpretative modality, encompass those sexual deviations and, I believe, many other besides.

At this point, I was rather pleased with myself. I had tried to do one thing, interpret the nature of logic, and had chanced upon something else that actually seemed to be of much greater immediate significance. That is why I took to writing full time and my web site, www.sexandphilosophy.co.uk is about the results.

Oddly, although these results were of great interest, they also gave me a problem. The work was clearly important - I had to make it known - but I do not trust the British scientific community. I do believe my work would be plagiarized if I tried to publish it through peer review, so I chose to publish it myself, disclosing it to nobody until I had done so.

Hence, I wrote The Architecture of Thought intent on publishing through my own company. However, while writing it, I found that my use of Darwin's sexual selection mechanism to understand sexuality was not enough to obtain culture - human beings were simply not "sexy" enough. To describe human evolution I needed to find at least one more way of encouraging people to get together. That requirement led me to investigate the topic of humour and it, too, proved compatible with bioepistemic evolution.

The Origins and Nature of Humour

Humour is a remarkable phenomenon. Though some higher primates show traces of it, humour is almost confined to humans but it is ubiquitous in our species and plays a very important role in our lives. Though there is some discussion, until now there has been little real understanding of its evolutionary origins or function. Neither of Darwin's selective mechanisms (natural selection and sexual selection) lead obviously to the kind of incongruity selection that seems to be at the base of humour.

However, bioepistemic evolution offers new possibilities because it allows further ranks of evolution, so creating the space needed to accommodate other selective regimens. Incongruity selection is used in the second rank of evolution, when sensory knowledge is being generated. A very well known example is in the movement detectors associated with visual processing. If an object in our visual field moves, we immediately focus our attention upon it. Here there is an incongruity selector at work that focuses attention on incongruities between successive frames of the moving images of our visual field.

Moving objects are more likely to be relevant than still objects and, in general, a focus upon incongruity helps to identify points of relevance in an input, sensory data stream. Such incongruity selection is the basis upon which one can build a theory for the evolutionary origins of humour.

This report is not the place to elaborate the details of that development. Suffice it to say that the argument, which seems entirely original, suggests that incongruity selection has become developed as a learning mechanism in most animal species. It is further suggested that, in humans, a very social animal, incongruity selection, in combination with laughter, has also been elaborated to perform the social role of being an IFF system - an "Identification Friend or Foe" system - whose activities arise from group selection and which delimits the social boundaries of, that is the membership of, a culture.

At this point, I was doubly pleased with myself. I now had not one but two unexpected and clearly significant applications of my new form of evolutionary theory. I became more determined than ever to publish it away from conventional scientific fora. I duly added a chapter on humour, even though the addition slowed my writing.

So, The Architecture of Thought emerged and was published, with some typing errors, on the last day of the year 2002. The current version has less typing errors and I, rather immodestly, feel it is an obviously significant piece of work.

Nonetheless, its origins lie in the analysis of scientific deception and the British scientific establishment may not share my interest and enthusiasm. So far, they have indeed been quite uninterested - at least those parts of it I have contacted.

For example, when I have ask agencies, such as the Royal Society, "How I can present my work in such a way that it is secure from plagiarism and is not simply ignored?" I do not get a reply. That lack of reply rather brings us back to where we started.

It brings us back to a scientific community whose senior echelons talk the highest of moral standards but ignore them except where convenient or necessary. For such people, quality control seems to have nothing to do with quality, it is simply an excuse to censor, rather than answer, their critics.

Conclusions and Recommendations

General Establishment Behaviour

The scientific community have a long history of ignoring work that does not originate within their own, inner circles. In this regard the modern era is no different from earlier times and, whatever else I may be, I am certainly not part of the British scientific establishment.

The fact is that anyone who is not part of that establishment can expect only to be ignored unless doing otherwise serves elite purposes. The substance of their arguments will make no difference, neither will it matter how well-qualified they are, how theoretically well-founded their work may be, or how copious is the evidence supporting their arguments and refuting alternatives. The basic fact is that the scientific establishment will never, willingly, give any engaged, rational reply to arguments presented by their critics.

What the scientific establishment do is

• Ignore their critics.
• Resist the publication of critical views.
• Give irrelevant, meaningless replies to inquiries.
• Abusively insinuate that the critic is stupid or ignorant.
• Tell third parties that the critic's work is of "poor quality," that it is pseudoscience or junk science.
• Invent "quality control" procedures so structured as to ensure that any work they chose to ignore is labeled as of "poor quality" regardless of its true merit.

Given the moral claims scientific organizations make, one could argue that this sort of ad hominem behaviour is fraudulent - it is certainly not conducive to rational debate. Nonetheless, it is real and seems more the sort of thing to be expected from political parties and propaganda tabloids than from professional scientists or the scientific press.

The Wave Model

This author can reply to the charge of "junk science" only for himself, not for every critic. For myself, and despite all the insinuations, my work never was junk. The serious evidence and serious arguments indicate that the wave model is correct and it was always more scientifically rational than the alternatives.

If the words "junk science" belong in the cell motility field, they should be applied to the silly, unevidenced notion of membrane flow or to the vacuousness of the cytoskeletal model. In my opinion, the only reason the established figures of this field have never tried to refute the wave model is that they know they are not capable of doing so.

The current state of the literature in this field is a disgrace and a heavy burden of responsibility for that situation must be born by the journals. Given the clear evidence that the wave model is correct, I can see no reason to be satisfied by their publication policies or by a refusal to correct falsehoods. Moreover, in discussing things with other dissenters, it seems that scientific journals always behave this way.

I think that if a scientific journal publishes lies it should be willing to correct them and so I come to my first recommendation.

Recommendation 1

Journals publishing scientific papers should promulgate legally binding codes of practice and undertake to publish only papers they believe to be factually accurate. They should also undertake to correct materially false papers and accept a duty to give all sides of a debate space to put their case. Authors, reviewers and editors all have an equal duty to be objective, disinterested and subject to the rules of evidence and rationality. Abusive, junk or shallow reviews should be returned to reviewers.

Note Journals already make this sort of claim but do so only as a matter of rhetoric. Such "codes" are voluntary and, in practice, journals do not correct falsehoods or allow dissenters space to put their case.

___

Academic Freedom

The right of academics to hold and teach their own opinions and to challenge received wisdom is enshrined in law. Attempts to prevent academic scientists speaking to the general press would breach both that law and the European Convention on Human Rights.

___

Quality Control

One cannot measure quality - it is too aetherial a "quality" to be measured. Peer review doesn't do it; citation analysis doesn't do it - these procedures are claimed to be linked to quality but merely produce indicators with their own inbuilt biases. Both peer review and citation analysis are biased in favour of established figures, large groups and large laboratories. Moreover, given the way bureaucracies work, it is unlikely that any indicator without this pro-establishment bias would ever be implemented, which brings us to my second recommendation.

Recommendation 2

Recognize that scientific decision making is biased in favour of large laboratories, large groups and established, senior figures. Recognize the reality that scientific decision making discriminates against small laboratories, small groups and relatively weak individuals.

___

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is rife in modern science and its pattern reflects the discrimination mentioned above. The victims are usually small laboratories, small groups or relatively weak individuals; the perpetrators are usually senior professors or the heads of large groups who, once they hear of or a new project or discovery, use their political clout to swamp the innovator and take it over. Peer review is often the arena in which such theft is perpetrated.

Recommendation 3

Codify rules of ownership concerning work done by students, postdoctoral fellows and other non-established figures. Their ownership of the work they do should be formally recognized and should not be left to the discretion of their Professors.

Recommendation 4

Implement a means whereby junior innovators can establish priority secure from theft by their professors. Something analogous to source safe in the IT industry may be a possibility. Source safe is a system in which any programmer who has written a piece of code or an algorithm that he or she feels is especially innovative, can establish priority and copyright.

The system will does not decide whether it will store something or what to store; it is not peer reviewed but stores anything, anyone deems worth storing and it time stamps its stored material. There is no reason why stored information should not be encrypted.

___

The Press

The freedom of the press is established by all major documents concerned with human rights. The press must be free to protect the rights of individuals. From that point of view, the manner in which science interacts with the press is quite disturbing.

In the first place the scientific press is an organ of the scientific establishment and its decisions are prejudiced in the same way as all other scientific decisions. The scientific elite provides a journal with staff and decides whether to buy it, so determining its financial success or failure. The scientific press is no more able to criticize the scientific elite than Pravda was to criticize Joseph Stalin. In the political sense, the scientific press is not a free press and its activities do not create a check on, or ensure balance in, the activities of the scientific establishment.

For all its claims of openness and objectivity, scientific debates are organized to permit only a tiny, selected minority to voice their views. Moreover, the views that minority are selected to express are not at all objective - they are subjective and self-interested; at times they are downright deceitful. Scientists must be free to look for alternative platforms.

In political theory, the other great guardian of liberty would be an independent judiciary but scientific decisions are not subject to any judicial oversight. The law generally holds that it is not competent to hear cases that hinge on the validity of academic or scientific "judgements." One cannot blame the law for not opening that can of worms but still, in such a climate, elite scientific figures can perpetrate malpractices, up to and including outright fraud, secure from oversight and with virtual impunity.

The only agencies left that might create oversight are the general press and media. In practice, the links between science and the general media are mediated by a select group of general science journals, especially prominent being Nature and Science. These journals are part of the scientific press but aim to publish scientific articles from many fields that will be of general interest. Their target market is scientists in others fields or non-scientific professionals, Doctors or teachers, for example, who will find scientific work interesting. These journals have large circulations and they are very influential because they effectively interpret science to neighbouring academic fields and to the world.

General journals will be discussed separately because their generalist, linking role gives them particular powers and, I think, responsibilities. This is especially so since a great many of the articles about science appearing in the media are written from press releases distributed by these journals. The problem with these journals is that they remain "science" journals in the traditional sense and bring with them science's culture of fawning deference to the elite and of refusal to hear, acknowledge or reply to any dissenting voice.

My general comments would apply equally to any journal with this role but I will talk about Nature since it is British, albeit American owned. I have a low opinion of Nature, which, in my view, is generally derelict in its responsibilities to scientific debate. Readers will forgive me if I again summarize the behaviour of this leading and influential scientific journal.

"Nature"

In the cell motility field three theories have been published but the scientific establishment report and will consider only two. Such reports are lies and this deception enables them to draw conclusions that are unsustainable when set against the true facts. Nature has been a major platform for this publication of false papers and it has done so with the support of peer reviews from the scientific establishment. Such publications in Nature are particularly influential and I asked them to correct it.

Nature's present editor is Dr. Phillip Campbell who will be a member of this committee. The previous incumbant was Dr. (now Sir) John Maddox. My dialogue was with Maddox but, note again, that this is not rocket science - Nature has reported three theories as two theories - I am simply asking them to report three as three, not as two.

Nature seems uninterested in facts or rational argument and refused to address the issue. It would not allow me space to put the counter-arguments, was less than polite in its correspondence and threatened me with legal action, though it did not carry through on that threat.

Note that I am a fully qualified scientist with more than a dozen publications to my name. When I published this work I was on the faculty of Cambridge University and my work was peer reviewed. The points I made seem perfectly clear and the evidence has grown stronger over time. It is true that these deceptions effectively destroyed my career but I can hardly be expected to accept that outcome as justification for deceit and threats.

If Nature feels such replies are reasonable, then I can only suspect that, in their view, nobody is competent to criticize or offer alternatives to work it has published. Is anyone on this planet thought qualified to disagree with or challenge the scientific establishment and Nature?

It seems that the generalist journals, who claim to interpret science to the community at large are, like science itself, unable to acknowledge the existence of dissenting opinion and are willing to invent justifications for lies rather than doing so. In reality, these journals - Nature and Science - seem only to represent the vested interests of the scientific establishment.

Recommendation 5

General scientific journals should not be exempt from recommendation 1.

Recommendation 6

Nobody is infallible; science is not infallible. It is contrary to the interests of science to stifle all dissent merely in the hope that, by doing so, science will appear infallible and that no error will ever reach the public domain.

My Own Position and Aims

I gave up my then job some thirty months ago to write my book. With that finished, I am left with a restricted income and two personal agendas, as well as some more general ones.

My first personal agenda is the cell motility field. I want to correct these deceptions and end their consequences. The scientific community continues to ignore my work, presumably dismissing me as a nut, but this remains a significant heavily funded topic. I estimate that, in the two decades of this situation, world-wide misspend of research funds exceeds £1 billion. I want to see funding going to projects that have a chance of being productive. The wave model has significant implications but, at present, the cell motility field remains misdirected.

My second, even more important, personal agenda is bioepistemic evolution - evolutionary theory built from a base of data, information and knowledge, with genes treated simply as holders for the data and knowledge used in biology. In this form, evolutionary theory can produce theories of human sexuality and humour, making bioepistemic evolution seem very innovative - a real scientific advance with significant social and policy implications.

I am proud of this work and think it by far the most important piece of science I have ever done and I want to it to be better known. Actually, there is some interest in it but the senior gatekeepers of British science mostly display their usual air of studied indifference. I want this situation to change and I want platforms from which to explain these important ideas.

Recommendation 7

The evidence that the wave model is correct is overwhelming. It should be either criticized to or taken seriously. Much the same applies to my work in evolutionary theory.

___

General Aims

While trying to make my cell motility work better known, I have come to know and, indeed, joined an underground subculture of science. In part this subculture comprises people who disagree with some conventional wisdom - people who have been labeled as crackpots or pseudoscientists and who, like me, feel they are not given a sensible reply to their arguments.

I cannot speak to whether any one of them is academically correct. Nonetheless, my experiences indicate that they will be right about the replies to their arguments and I find that disturbing. Science would not be contaminated by replying to dissent and I would like something done for these people.

I have, several times, asked the Royal Society how I, or any other individual or junior scientist, can present original work without that work being placed at risk of plagiarism or of simply being ignored. I would like a reply to that question.

Recommendation 8

A forum should be established in which dissenters can put forward their dissenting ideas and receive formal replies from scientists who are regarded as serious and professional.

The second and larger part of science's underground subculture consists of people who believe themselves the victims of fraud, most often of plagiarism by senior figures, or who feel they are being asked to cooperate with fraud. Again, without speaking to specific instances, I must make it clear that I believe most of these people are telling the truth as they see it and that no sensible recourse is presently open to them.

Recommendation 9

The anonymity enjoyed by senior scientific decision makers invites fraud and, in many institutes, makes it a virtual way of life. Anonymous peer review and other secret decision making should end. Scientific debate should be open and on record.

In any event, I advise that, even at its highest levels, modern science has problems with fraud, malpractice and corruption. In these circumstances, the last thing science needs is yet another layer of censorship masquerading as quality control; yet another excuse for a corrupt establishment to ignore or vilify its critics.

What is needed are checks and balances, clear rules, accountable decision making and access to legal recourse for the honest victims of institutional fraud.

References

Blank, Rebecca M. The Effects of Double-Blind versus Single-Blind Reviewing: Experimental Evidence from the American Economic Review American Economic Review, 81 1041-1967

Broad W. & Wade N. (1982) Betrayers of the Truth: Simon & Schuster

Couchman J. R., Lenn M. & Rees D. A. (1985) European Journal of Cell Biology 36 182-194 Coupling of Cytoskeletal Functions for Fibroblast Locomotion

Hewitt J. A. (1979) J. Theoret. Biol. 80 115-127 Surf-Riding Model for Cell Capping

Hewitt J. A. (2002) The Architecture of Thought A New Look at Human Evolution Holmhurst House Press, Bedfordshire

Jaffe L. F. (1994) Cell Calcium 14 736-745 Classes and Mechanisms of Calcium Waves

Kucik. D. F., Elson E. L. & Sheetz M. P. (1990) J. Cell Biol. 111 1617-1622 Cell migration does not produce membrane flow.

Macilwain, Colin (1993) US Agencies Urged to Tighten Up Peer Review Nature 364 470

Mitroff I. I. (1974) The Subjective Side of Science Elsevier, New York

Officer C. and Page J. (1996) The Great Dinosaur Extinction Controversy Helix Books, New York

Peters, Douglas P. and Ceci, Stephen J. (1980) A Manuscript Masquerade The Sciences 35 16-19

Sabbagh K. (1999) A Rum Affair How Botany's Piltdown Man was Unmasked Allen Lane, London.

Sheetz M. P., Turney S., Qian H. & Elson E. L. (1989) Nature 340 284-288 Nanometre level analysis demonstrates that lipid flow does not drive membrane glycoprotein movements.

The Author's Web Sites

A Habit of Lies - concerning scientific deception in the capping and cell motility field.
www.sexandphilosophy.co.uk - on the links between evolutionary theory, epistemology and human sexuality.

Epilogue

This submission was filed in response to the Royal Society's call about "Best Practice" on issues such as scientific quality control and the press. The committee was to assemble its report its findings by the end of 2004. However, now, at the end of 2005, I remain unable to find any final report filed by the Royal Society on these issues. The project seems to have been shelved.

John A. Hewitt MA PhD
33 Hillyfields
Dunstable, Beds.
LU6 3NS
01582 603702