Fake Science

A great leap in human civilization was the codification of science as a way of knowing the world. It is an open system with a number of techniques such as peer review and the insistance on repeatable experiments which puts somewhat of a brake on lies and manipulation. In the short term science can be scammed. But in the long run it has been a food methodology for building real knowledge about the world unlike systems of authority (religion, schools, bureaucracies, and most families).

Here is an example by Carrie McLaren on the BoingBoing web site that shows how some people can fake science in the short run:

I collect books by people who have raised apes in their homes. One of the first, The Ape and the Child, was written in by behaviorist W.N. Kellogg, a man with a peculiar brainstorm: that he should raise a chimpanzee as a twin to his own infant son, treating them in exactly the same fashion, and comparing their development. Kellogg was fascinated by case studies of feral children: if kids raised by wolves become wolf-like, he hypothesized, could a human such as he mold an ape to act human?

Kellogg made four films of his studies and 1 of those films is now online.

Results? Mixed. The chimp, Gua, took more quickly to her civilizing education than her brother. She appeared smarter, stronger, and more emotionally developed on a number of counts: she was better at using glasses and silverware, walked earlier (chimps generally don't walk upright), responded to verbal commands sooner, and was more cooperative and obedient.

What we don't learn from Kellogg's study, however, is that chimps' "domestication" peaks around age 2, when humans' surpass them. And the reason we don't learn that is because Kellogg discontinued his study when his charges were around 2. Kellogg explained that he had accomplished his goal: he proved that environment matters. After all, you don't see a lot of chimps eating cereal from a spoon in the wild.

But Kellogg's claim was a bit disingenuous. The fact that environment shapes animal development was already well understood. The real reason he abruptly halted the study, then, was likely because of results that Kellogg never anticipated: his son Donald started imitating the chimp.

For example, though Donald had learned to walk before Gua joined the Kellogg family, he regressed and started crawling more, in tune with Gua. He'd bite people, fetch small objects with his mouth, and chewed up a shoe. More importantly, his language skills were delayed. At 19 months, Donald's vocabulary consisted of three words. Instead of talking he would grunt and make chimp sounds.

Gua got sent back to the Yerkes center in Florida, where she promptly died. And Donald? Not much is known of his life, but, at 43, he committed suicide.

This study got a lot of press when it was published, but Kellogg ended up deeply regreting it — not because of what it did to his son, but because it prevented him from being taken seriously as a scientist.

You must always be critical of information and information sources. Here McLaren shows how Kellog tailors his facts to fit his theories. In the long run this didn't work as you can see he lost his reputation as a scientist. But in the short run he had a bit of fame and got people to take his pet theory seriously. The strength of science is the strength of democracy, it allows anyone to participate and allows truth to emerge from competing viewpoints. Science is a methodology to create knowledge. Democracy is a methodology to defuse partisanship and allow a civil society to emerge. Neither is perfect, but they are clearly better than any other techniques we have invented.