Allow Us To Explain

Surprise! Sometimes Science Gets It Wrong. Here Are 5 Examples From This Year.

by Jill Pantozzi | 11:05 am, December 28th, 2011

We’ve covered tons of science(!) stories over the past year but this is an extra special one. Why? Because science apparently got a bunch of stuff wrong. Cut them some slack, this isn’t an exact science.

There’s countless reasons scientific discoveries may be later proved wrong. New evidence may surface, lab mistakes or even the scientists themselves screwing with the results. Here are the top 5 science journal discoveries that were retracted this year:

5. Los Angeles marijuana dispensaries lead to drop in crime.

The RAND Corporation had claimed that medical marijuana dispensaries saw lower crime rates because of guards and security cameras around facilities. “The city’s lawyers soon found critical flaws in RAND’s data collection, largely stemming from RAND’s reliance on data from CrimeReports.com, which did not include data from the L.A. Police Department,” says the report. “RAND blamed itself for the error, not CrimeReports.com, which had made no claims of having a complete set of data, and, in fact, didn’t even know about the study.”

4. Butterfly meets worm, falls in love, and has caterpillars.

This seemed like some sort of crazy, overlooked logic but it’s kind of turned into a science war. The original study by zoologist Donald Williamson, said that “ancestors of modern butterflies mistakenly fertilized their eggs with sperm from velvet worms. The result was the necessity for the caterpillar stage of the butterfly life cycle.” Williamson hasn’t actually retracted his work, researchers Michael Hart and Richard Grosberg have refuted it on the grounds of “we think you’re nuts.” Actually, “they based their arguments entirely on well-known concepts of both basic evolution and the genetics of modern worms and butterflies. When Symbiosis published its butterfly-meets-worm article in January 2011, Hart raised questions with the editor. As of November the paper is no longer available.”

3. Treat appendicitis with antibiotics, not surgery.

Got appendicitis? Don’t worry about removing that useless organ, just take some antibiotics! Or at least, that’s what some Indian researchers claimed. “Italian surgeons had raised a red flag with the study in a lengthy letter published in 2010 in the same journal, politely citing a multitude of problems with the study’s methodology. The Indian researchers responded a month later with their own two-paragraph letter defending the methodology and calling for a larger study to establish the superiority of antibiotic treatment over surgery,” according to the report. The journal editors did a retraction on the basis of alleged plagiarism.

2. Litter breeds crime and discrimination.

Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel is accused of fabricating data on this one. Why? Well it seems he’s a frequent liar. “The journal Science retracted the paper in November upon realization that Stapel, a media darling whose name frequented the New York Times, may have faked data in at least 30 papers.” Stapel has since been suspended from his job pending investigation.

1. Chronic fatigue syndrome is caused by a virus.

Researchers from the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Reno, Nevada claimed connections between CFS and something called xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV). Unfortunately, things got fishy when no other lab could replicate the results they found. “Science issued an ‘Editorial Expression of Concern’ in July after the authors themselves refused to retract their paper.” The authors did finally retract part of their paper due to “contaminated samples,” but the damage was done. The journal is now investigating whether or not the samples were purposefully contaminated because of an incident in which “senior author Judy Mikovits was fired from the Whittemore Peterson Institute in September and arrested in California in November over charges for possession of stolen property and unlawful taking of computer data, equipment and supplies.”

(via Yahoo)

TAGS: science!

http://www.thechildhealthsite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=1 Edcedc8

since most scientific discoveries [admittedly I only really follow astrophysics, metaphysics and astronomy] usually superseded by a newer discovery, making most science wrong?
too much Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Kuhn.
http://twitter.com/rubrick John Richardson

Just because somebody makes an idiotic claim that turns out to be incorrect doesn’t mean that the science is wrong. That’s like someone saying 2+2=5 makes mathematics wrong!
Caravelle

Read “The Relativity of Wrong” by Isaac Asimov (easily googlable) and see why that comment isn’t quite accurate.

A lot of the examples of science being wrong in this post are outright fraud, and if not that they have very poor methodology. This is not the same issue as good science coming to different conclusions as evidence builds up.
http://twitter.com/Super_Widget Joanna

Butterfly falls in love with caterpillar? Isn’t that some sort of pedophelia? O.o
Anonymous

It would if that’s what happened. It says the butterfly fell in love with a worm, which is altogether a different species, so it’s more like bestiality. :)
http://zadl.org SuperZADL

Most of these arent science stories, but statistics. Also, a lone crank or two spouting a wrong theory doesn’t make science wrong. It makes science reporting wrong.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Matt-Fonti/100001721665554 Matt Fonti

The really sad part is, some nuts are going to point to these and say “See! Science isn’t reliable at all! All scientists are corrupt liars pushing there own agenda!” when the fact that these mistakes/lies were caught is a testament to the strength of the scientific method. Oh well. Here’s to another year of discoveries.
Anonymous

I see we have a bunch of literalist buzz-kills on our hands.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_VK7U6RFTAUIPW2JR2NGPBP2IYA super

when science gets it wrong is when scientist puts an agenda or politics ahead of facts and manipulates or massages information to support there cause. Then they demonize any who disagree with there “facts”. Science is never settled.
http://www.thechildhealthsite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=1 Edcedc8

cool, I was meaning to read that.
Anonymous

“Nuts” isn’t the word those people deserve. More like “eager to decry the other side as idiots to make themself look good”, because nuts they aren’t in being sceptic about science and the people who represent it. For instance, the Stapel case has dug up some really ugly bits about some scientists caring more about being publicized than the accuracy of their work. Stapel said he felt pressured into publishing more than he humanly could because his peers did the same thing. This image of science < fame/money has be affirmed by various sources.

In fact, the research that got Stapel caught was published by another scientist with a very obvious agenda. The research was to find a correlation between eating meat and being a bad person and the other scientist, herself vegetarian, was all too eager to accept suspicious data that presented meat eaters as assholes extraordinaire. She later admitted that had the data shown the reverse correlation, she would have been more hesitant to publish. Moreso, the University she works at has forbidden the student body to talk or publish about the case and has denied it access to details on the case, despite repeated requests to be open.
http://revolvingdoorcommune.wordpress.com Teresa Jusino

The point of this article, though, is that SOMETIMES science is wrong. Whether that means “superseded by a newer discovery” or just proving an exception to a widely-accepted theory, it means that the initial hypothesis is wrong.

AND THAT’S OKAY! :)

Everyone is jumping to science’s defense as if it’s infallible. The whole POINT of science is that we’re looking to figure things out. It stands to reason that SOMETIMES mistakes will be made. But even the title doesn’t say “Science is wrong” but “science GETS it wrong.” Which it DOES. Sometimes. I think a bigger problem than the possibility that someone would use this to show that science isn’t reliable at all (which a minority of people would do anyway), is the possibility that people would argue this article in an attempt to show how science is always right. Which it isn’t. And assuming it’s always right stops people from asking questions. And if scientists didn’t question, they wouldn’t bother GETTING at the truth.

Also, statistics are a mathematical science: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics
http://www.facebook.com/people/Matt-Fonti/100001721665554 Matt Fonti

You’re right, of course, about those people who are sceptical of scientists because of the possibility of corruption. That possibility is always there and it’s important to watch out and be wary of it.

When I said ‘nuts’, I was really more referring to people like Kent Hovind who think science is a religion, and people like VenomFangX, mysticalforest, nephilimfree, ppsimmons (you can watch their stuff on youtube-WARNING-REQUIRE HIGH LEVELS OF MASOCHISM) who leap at every opportunity to declare science wrong for their own agendas.

Sorry, should have been clearer and more specific
Frodo Baggins

Hey, Fucko, we like to call it inter-species erotica.
Frodo Baggins

Isn’t Kent in jail for embezzlement now?
Elena Korshikov

This article actually proves that science is RIGHT, in that it catches mistakes, and stops crazy people from publishing crazy sh*t. Articles like this just make crazy people that don’t understand how science works point to them and say: see????

I honestly expected more from this website, and this article is very disappointing.
expatpatriot

To be fair, this isn’t “science getting it wrong.” it’s science getting it right when wackos and charlatans pretend to be doing science. The nutso claims were quickly peer-reviewed, determined to be unsustainable, and tossed in the ashcan.

Bad headline. Very bad headline.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Matt-Fonti/100001721665554 Matt Fonti

Until 2015-Not sure if I’m looking forward to it (for hilarity) or worried (because people will still listen to him)