Before we get started, a huge “Thank You” to Johnna Cornett who reworked Cogito! into this nifty new look. Also a big thanks to my wife, Denise, who took the photo in the masthead during a trip to Acadia National Park in Maine.
Historians of science in general and paleontology in particular will recall the cautionary tale of Dr. Johann Beringer (1667-1740), a physician and a Senior Professor of Medicine at the University of Würzburg who also dabbled in natural science as a hobby. He was particularly passionate about fossils, and kept a private collection of fossils he had accumulated over the years. Then, in 1725 he was given some truly remarkable finds by some local lads he was employing to dig in the environs of nearby Mt. Eivelstadt. These fossils were unlike anything the good doctor had ever seen before; stark reliefs of animals, as well as images of the sun.
 A print of some of Dr. Beringer’s infamous stones, bearing letters resembling Hebrew. |
Soon other, even more remarkable stones crossed his desk with images and reliefs of insects, plants, birds, celestial objects and even Hebrew letters. The following year, Dr. Beringer published a treatise on the stones called Lithographiae Wirceburgensis. After expounding several possible theories to explain these strange stones, he briefly considered the possibility of fraud, but dismissed the idea. However, legend has it that just as his book was going to press, the boys presented him with a stone bearing his own name and, in a fit of panic, he tried to buy up all the copies of his book.
Eventually, it was discovered that the hoax was perpetraited by two of his university colleagues. Apparently, Dr. Beringer wasn’t particularly popular. Beringer brought criminal charges against the two men and won in court. He managed to live down the hoax and went on to write two more books. But today, Dr. Beringer has become a symbol of gullibility and pride, a cautionary tale to those in the scientific profession who would pursue hypotheses without good evidence to support them. A good link to learn more about this incident is here.
The list of scientific hoaxes is long and colorful; to it we can add various other early frauds such as the Piltdown Man, and more recent deceptions propounded by the tobacco industry and the deniers of global warming.
The last Presidential administration became infamous for not merely suppressing unpleasant facts, but for spreading actual disinformation on scientific subjects. I have run both with scientists and spooks; both are deeply committed to winnowing facts from the chaff of noise, and in the power of the mind to uncover the truth. But the intelligence analyst and operative contend with the basic underlying assumption that someone, somewhere, is trying to mess with them. Scientists, by contrast, have little reason to think that the photons speeding towards a detector are engaged in some kind of D&D (that’s Denial and Deception, not the role-playing game) operation, although it might seem like that sometimes. One of my good friends, Dr. Shawn Carlson’s distillation of the scientific method is that Science is making sure you aren’t fooling yourself. But could it also be suggested that science is about making sure you aren’t being fooled? Should the training of a scientist include more instruction on detecting deliberate falsehood?
One can–and probably should–raise the point that scientists are not ultimately looking for facts as they are trying to refine a theory and to some extent that is true. But falsified information is still what it is, and a scientist who falsifies data will see his or her career swiftly buried with a watercolor epitaph. The intelligence community behaves likewise. If a source gets tagged as a “fabricator” that source is no longer taken seriously (unless some political hacks decide that fabricated information is okay as long as it’s what the boss wants).
The recent “Climategate” circus stinks of the kind of “black operation” one might see aimed at a political enemy to try to discredit them with innuendo, and that appears to be precisely what is going on. But it raises a larger question in my own, mind, namely that the producers of so much disinformation on climate change in particular are not taken down more strongly by the scientific community. I suspect the reason is that even if they did, the mainstream press will continue to go them in the name of “balance” and lend them the air of authority. However, I cannot help thinking that the mainstream scientific community is still being too tolerant of the global warming fabricators out there. Personally, I would like to see the scientific community take up the tools of the spook when investigating the claims of deniers, following the money, actively looking for signs of fraud, and adding those factors to the equation and to their results.