@ Mark Of course the scientific method is not flawless but if someone can come up with a better alternative I would like to see it. I don't doubt politics come into play but I think those who don't like what science is telling them, overgeneralize that believing in the scientific method is "faith based". Nothing coud be farther than the truth.
Barb C.:>)
Barb, I think you're missing the point of this critique. This is not an objection to the scientific method, it is an attempt to revive it. Nobody is criticising the scientific method itself, what we are saying is that the modern political reality means that science as a whole has lost its integrity.
Individual researchers' application of the scientific method is not the problem; the problem lies in what happens in the large, when decisions are made about what kinds of science can take place and what has most prestige and respect. Those decisions are driven by financial interests, even if the scientists taking part in the process may choose to blind themselves to those forces.
Numerous alternatives - reforms - to the current academic practice have been mentioned in this discussion. Many of these are already significant and growing movements within the scientific community. Some of the key issues are:
- Open Access (free public access) to Research Publications
- Open Access (free public access) to Research Data
- Requirement to pre-register scientific studies and publish all data, regardless of whether the study is 'successful' or 'career-enhancing', or not. This is necessary to eliminate the problem of publication bias, which is widely recognised as a serious issue affecting the integrity of the existing body of published literature.
- Encouragement of more Replication Studies, work which does not currently take place to a sufficient extent because it is not regarded as prestigious.
However, beyond these moves, which are already underway, there is a more fundamental issue: Funding. The privatisation of research, particularly since the 1980s, has destroyed academic freedom and that is ultimately the source of this crisis. If most research is funded (or not funded) by those who have a vested interest in the outcome, this distorts the scientific literature. This is not so much a question of whether, strictly speaking, the publications themselves are accurate - it's more a question of which specific questions (in detail) may be asked and which questions may not be asked.
This really is not about the scientific method itself: it is about how science is managed in the modern political environment. Politics - and money - trumps the scientific method today. Big businesses
use science, and manipulate the process, to defend their interests. Many academics blind themselves to this corruption because they need to 'follow the money' and just want to get on with the research they want to do. Their own research may be valid, but what they don't see is the researchers who have left academia because they are unable to get funding to pursue their different research interests in the way they want to. An individual academic can easily be blind to the distortion of the field as a whole, but it is an act of faith to believe that the scientific method is immune to these political and financial forces.
A friend of mine who used to do research (before quitting after becoming disillusioned) once told me a simple example of how it works. She conducted a trial, funded by a drug company, aimed at determining whether a particular drug was associated with a risk of cancer or not. Her study found that it was. She was not permitted to publish that study, because all intellectual property was owned by the drug company which funded it, and she got "the wrong answer". 8 other similar studies were similarly funded at other Universities. The ones that found there was no association were published, the ones that didn't, weren't. And so the published body of evidence now tells us that this drug is safe. This was all completely legal. The drug company funded the research, and they have the right to decide what to release and what not to release. But when this sort of thing is happening, it makes a mockery of science, and regardless of the strengths of the scientific method, it is an act of blind faith to trust the outputs of science as a source of truth in a world where this sort of corruption is endemic.
