You’ve probably heard the story of Austrian monk Gregor Mendel who experimented with the breeding of wrinkly peas, but whose research was unfortunately ignored for decades after Darwin until their insights were synthesized together in the twentieth century. What you probably haven’t heard is the allegation dating back to R. A. Fisher that he faked his data. Everyone uses his insights, if not the exact values of all his estimates, so not surprising that gets dropped down the memory hole. The page linked from there quotes some authors saying “[F]or the moralist, no distinction can be made between an Isaac Newton who lied for truth and was right, and a Cyril Burt who lied for truth and was wrong”", which I found amusing because I’d always heard that Burt’s heritability estimates match up fairly well with modern twin-adoption studies.
August 18, 2012
August 18, 2012 at 7:28 pm
I would think that the allegation against Mendel is well-known. It often crops up in discussions about scientific fraud. But it’s interesting that unlike Mendel’s, Burt’s reputation was ruined by allegations of fraud, even though his supposedly fraudulent results have been replicated a number of times.
August 19, 2012 at 9:56 am
I’ve read that reanalysis of Burt’s data failed to reveal evidence of intentional fraud — that his errors were random (tending in both directions) and largely the result of sloppiness in his later career. There’s also a book — “Cyril Burt: Psychologist” — that attempts to vindicate his reputation, though I have not read it and don’t know how it was received among field experts.
August 22, 2012 at 3:56 pm
It’s certainly possible that Mendel’s assistants were just very, very good at their job. Never underestimate what a sufficiently-motivated monk can accomplish.
Fun fact: Mendel was originally studying inheritance in rodents, but his superiors made him stop because the other monks were becoming a little too interested in their mating habits.
August 23, 2012 at 4:59 pm
From what I’d heard, Mendel was ignored so he never really had a reputation was destroy, much less an academic one since he wasn’t a professor.
Chip, that sounds like the Gould/Morton reanalysis, where if anything the errors are in the opposite direction of what Gould assumed.
melendwyr, I’m not sure what you mean with that comment about good assistants. Interesting bit about the rats, I hadn’t heard that.
September 4, 2012 at 9:38 pm
Mendel didn’t do all of the physical work involved in his research. He got the monks he was in charge of to assist him with the task of emasculating and cross-pollinating the peas – it would have been rather difficult to do that all by himself.
Monks frequently have a well-deserved reputation for quality in exacting, methodical work. Like the Swiss with clockwork.
August 28, 2012 at 1:34 pm
The mention of Gould and Morton reminds me that Gould himself has been accused of falsification:
http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/59
The attacks on Burt by Leon Kamin and others have been similarly rebutted.
It seems to me that what both Gould’s and Kamin’s attacks on Morton and Burt respectively have in common is an ideological rather than a scientific motivation. Kamin by his own testimony belonged to the Communist Party from 1945 until midl-1950:
http://www.thecrimson.harvard.edu/article/1955/6/13/furry-kamin-markham-listed-by-state/?print=1
Gould said that he had “learned his Marxism, literally, at his daddy’s knee”:
http://socialistworker.org/2002-1/410/410_08_StephenJayGould.shtml
The implications of genetics, as it relates to the human race, are incompatible with the Marxist insistence that conditions form consciousness, that consciousness is a blank slate, that there is no such thing as inborn “human nature,” and that all social and economic inequality are therefore products of an unjust and oppressive social order. Gould, Kamin, Lewontin, and other Marxists writing on these topics all display an alarming tendency to allow their ideology to trump their science. As E.O. Wilson wrote of Gould, “He’s willing to denigrate his own field of evolutionary biology in order to downgrade the enemy, sociobiology, which is a small but important branch of evolutionary biology. When Darwin conflicts with Marx, Darwin goes.”
August 28, 2012 at 11:16 pm
That was precisely what I was referring to with my mention of Gould & Morton.
September 15, 2012 at 12:13 pm
Gould, Kamin, and Lewontin are Jews. That’s all there is to it.
September 26, 2012 at 11:35 pm
Oy vey.