Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

In this bracing indictment, Ritchie (Intelligence: All That Matters), a lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College, charges that in recent decades the scientific establishment has become host to a “dizzying array of incompetence, delusion, lies and self-deception.” He names outright “fraudsters” such as condensed matter physicist Jan Hendrik Schön, who falsified data supporting his 2001 claim to have invented a carbon-based transistor to replace the silicone microchip, and shows how scientists can more subtly massage data by “p-hacking,” or nudging experiment results to show significant effect. Ritchie sees software such as Photoshop as having significantly contributed to the rise of deceptions, as when, in 2004, South Korean biologist Woo-Suk Hwang manipulated photos of cells to back up his claim of having cloned a human embryo. Regarding popular scientific literature, he takes aim at overhype, using as an example Matthew Walker’s 2017 bestseller Why We Sleep, for using what he considers to be thin evidence to insist sleeping eight hours a night is not only healthy but vital. On academe, Ritchie suggests the pressure to publish has also encouraged scientists to exaggerate results. Thorough and detailed, this is a sobering and convincing treatise for anyone invested in the intellectual credibility of science. (July)