Scientists Are Largely To Blame for the Public's Rather Low Trust of Them

 A scientific study published in Nature not long ago was a study about the public's confidence in scientists, one entitled "Trust in scientists and their role in society across 68 countries."  There was a big number of people questioned: 71,922 respondents in 68 countries. The results section of the paper inadvertently gives us an example of one of the reasons why scientists are not trusted all that much. Can you guess what the reason is if I quote the line having that example? The line is this: " Overall, trust in scientists is moderately high (grand mean, 3.62; s.d., 0.70; 1 = very low, 2 = somewhat low, 3 = neither high nor low, 4 = somewhat high, 5 = very high)."

That line misstates the results of the survey. A result of 3.62 on this scale is well short of a result of "somewhat high" (which would be a 4.00), so a result of 3.62 should not at all be described as "moderately high." The authors of the paper have misstated their own results. They should have stated their results something like this: "Overall trust in scientists is less than somewhat high."

We have yet another example of what is constantly going on in the world of science these days: scientists misstating the results of their own research, making untrue claims about what their research showed, with such misstatements appearing either in the title of their papers or the text of  their papers, and often in both. A fairly large fraction of all scientific papers have such misstatements in which scientists incorrectly describe what their own data showed. Such misstatements about their own research is only one of countless reasons why the public tends to lack a strong trust in scientists. 

Why do such misstatements by scientists occur? Partially because scientists are trying to get their research sound like it fits in with whatever dogmas are popular among scientists, to maximize the chance that their paper will get published. Another reason is that scientists are trying to make their research sound as important as they can make it sound. Nowadays scientists are judged by two numbers: how many papers they have authored or co-authored, and how many citations such papers have got. The more a scientist can make his paper sound important, the more likely he will be to get a citation. 

It is very interesting that the paper "Trust in scientists and their role in society across 68 countries" found no relation between science knowledge and trust in scientists. We read this: "We did not find credible evidence that trust [in scientists]  is higher in countries with higher average science literacy scores and government expenditures on education, which challenges assumptions that public understanding of science, and policy measures to increase such understanding, foster trust in scientists." 

So it seems that some public ignorance of science facts or scientist behavior is not the main reason for the public's rather low trust of scientists. What is the main reason? The main reason is the behavior of scientists themselves. The public tends to lack a high trust of scientists because of reasons such as these:

• Scientists have for more than 160 years made a frequent use of the misleading phrase "natural selection," which does not actually refer to any selection (selection is a word meaning a choice by a conscious agent).
• Scientists have frequently made use of the doubly-deceptive phrases such as "selection pressure," a reputed effect that does not actually involve either selection or pressure. 
• Scientists have condoned and failed to reduce the very massive current occurrence of misleading university press releases, very often announcing new research and making claims about such research not matching anything shown by the research (with the press release claims very often not matching anything even claimed in the corresponding scientific paper). 
• Scientists have very often published deceptive brain scan visuals, which "lie with colors" by using misleading coloring effects in which very tiny brain activity differences are depicted in bright colors, leading people to think that particular regions of the brain "light up" and are much more active during certain cognitive activities, when in reality the difference is only about 1 part in 200 (the type of difference we might expect from random fluctuations, even if brains do not produce minds and do not store memories). 
• Scientists have frequently claimed or insinuated that brain scans (done through fMRI machines) are measuring brain activity, a claim that is not correct because such scans  merely tells us about blood flow in the brain, and do not measure an intensity of the chemical or electrical signals that are at the core of brain activity. 
• Scientists have frequently repeated enormous deceits about DNA, genomes and genes, with endless repeats of the strategically motivated false claim that DNA, genomes or genes contain a blueprint, recipe, program or specification for making a human body,  an idea that is untrue because  DNA, genomes and genes merely specify low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up proteins, and do not specify any anatomy structures or even how to build any type of organ or cell. 
• Scientists have written extremely misleading experimental studies that try to fool people into thinking that you can tell what a person was thinking or hearing or seeing by scanning his brain. The type of "smoke and mirrors" trick that typically goes on is that the study involves both brain scanning and also the use of an AI system or databases or eye scanners or data backdoors, and the prediction of what the person was thinking, hearing or seeing usually is powered mainly by such things that are not brain scans.  
• Scientists have been guilty of enormously deceptive claims that there is no fundamental difference between the minds of humans and animals, or only quantitative differences.
• Scientists have misrepresented  both the scope and the findings of investigations they have run regarding paranormal phenomena. 
• Scientists have made frequent use of misleading language trying to make animals sound like they have minds rather like humans, and trying to make humans sound like beings who have minds like animals. 
• Scientists have often been guilty of misleading equivocations involving the word "evolution" that shift between four different definitions of evolution, switching between defining evolution as (1) mere gene pool variation; (2) macroevolution (dramatic anatomical transformations such as dinosaurs turning into birds); (3) common descent (the idea that all organisms are descendants of the same ancestor), or (4) the claim that all earthly organisms have natural accidental origins  (the factuality of the first definition being used to "prove" the correctness of the three vastly more presumptuous definitions, none of which involve things proven or observed). 
• Scientists have often been guilty of misleading equivocations involving the words "variant" and "variations" that switch around between mere assertions of variations in the size, weight and health of some organism to assertions that nature produces "variants" that involve dramatic new features (something not well-observed in the study of any generation of organisms).
• Scientists have often used misleading cell diagrams that depict cells as being thousands of times simpler than they are. A Nature article says that "textbook depictions of the cell’s innards have changed little since 1896," and quotes a scientist saying, "Nothing is drawn the way the cell actually looks."
• Scientists have made frequent misleading uses of the term "building blocks of life," which include calling biologically irrelevant molecules not used by living things "building blocks of life" (as in this article), and also referring to amino acids as "building blocks of life" (a misleading term because building blocks do not have to be used in any particular sequence, but amino acids only make functional proteins when they are arranged in very special sequences as special as the letter sequences needed to make intelligible paragraphs), and also calling cells the "building blocks of life" (a very misleading claim because cells are enormously complex internally dynamic structures, unlike building blocks, which are static and very simple structures, simply rectangular prisms of clay). 
• Scientists have made misleading claims that "trees of life" (speculative social constructs of analysts made after countless arbitrary analysis choices) are "yielded" or "produced" by genomes, things that do not naturally tell any story about a "tree of life."  
• Scientists have made innumerable appeals to a "primordial soup" claimed to exist billions of years ago, one supposedly filled with the lowest building blocks of life, despite a lack of evidence that any such thing ever existed, and despite the failure to produce any such soup in any experiments realistically simulating the early Earth. 
• Scientists have made frequent misleading uses of the phrase "body plan," in which a body plan is strangely defined as the mere rough shape of all organisms in the same phylum, despite the term suggesting something vastly different: a blueprint for how to build the whole structure of an organism. 
• Scientists have placed in their scientific papers a huge number of  inaccurate citations, claiming that some paper showed or supported some claim that it never showed or supported, typically made by scientists who never read the paper they are citing (a scientific paper estimated that only 20% of people citing a scientific paper actually read the paper they are citing). 
• Scientists have made inaccurate descriptions of what was stated by people who were brain zapped to try to produce an out-of-body experience, in which the subjects hesitating and ambiguous responses (often in response to "leading" questions) are described as reports of an out-of-body experience, when such a report was not given by the subject. 
• Scientists have very frequently used misleading analogies, such as comparing Darwinian evolution to a tinkerer (a tinkerer is a conscious agent willfully attempting to improve something by trial and error, and evolution is no such thing). 
• Scientists have made very bad misstatements about the complexity of protein molecules,  such as documented here and here and here,  such as when an author claims that a typical protein molecule involves only about 100 amino acids, when the median number of amino acids in a human protein molecule is about 431, exponentially harder to achieve than merely 100. 
• Scientists have often engaged in misleading language designed to "sweep under the rug" the vast levels of organization and purposeful molecular machinery in organisms, such as language describing humans as "bags of chemicals" or "star stuff." 
• Scientists have often made deceptive appeals to artificial selection (a purposeful guidance of breeding) to try to support claims about so-called "natural selection" (claimed to involve no purposeful agency).
• Scientists have made frequent misleading uses of the term "early human" to describe long-extinct organisms without any evidence to show that such organisms had any of the defining characteristics of humans (such as language and the ability to use symbols). 
• Scientists have sometimes told outright lies about what they saw when they witnessed the paranormal, such as the well-documented case of lying by the physicist Sir David Brewster (discussed here). 
• Scientist have made frequent claims that certain parts of the human body are "vestigial structures" with no current use, despite evidence that such structures do actually have a function. 
• Scientists have often made profoundly misleading claims or insinuations that the origination of life from non-life merely requires "the right ingredients," as if you could get life from non-life by just dumping in some ingredients like someone making a soup. 
• Scientists have sometimes made misleading claims (ignoring the state of vast organization required for even the simplest living thing) that there could have been some lightning bolt "spark that started life on Earth." 
• Scientists have made extremely misleading statements that Darwinian evolution is not random, evoking some special, uncommon definition of the word "random" different from the normal definition of that term: "happening, done, or chosen by chance rather than according to a plan."
• Scientists have sometimes used extremely misleading language in which non-biological reactions in lifeless chemicals are referred to as "metabolism" (contrary to the definition of metabolism, which is chemical reactions required for the maintenance of living thing), used for the sake of deceptively blurring the difference between life and lifeless chemicals.
• Scientists have made many decades of extremely misleading claims of universal acceptance or near-universal acceptance of Darwinist dogma or other materialist dogmas, claims not well-established by secret ballot opinion polls (the only reliable way to measure the opinion of scientists), and contrary to the published opinions of experts rejecting such dogmas. 
• Scientists have made misrepresentations about how successful ESP and clairvoyance experiments were conducted, inaccurately describing how such research was conducted (a prominent example is documented in the paper here by a Yale psychologist). 
• Scientists have made misleading claims in which mere gene pool fluctuations are referred to as evolution. A biologist complains about such deceits on the page here, noting that it is often claimed that bacteria are "evolving very quickly," and saying emphatically that "this is not true" because "for millions, or even billions of years, bacteria have not transgressed the structural frame within which they have always fluctuated, and still do."
• Scientists have made misleading claims that when scientists say something is a theory, it means it is well-established (a claim that can be refuted by many examples, such as the common example of the term "string theory" to describe a completely unsubstantiated type of physicist speculation).
• Scientists have made frequent misleading characterizations of Darwinism nonbelievers, often involving attempts to insinuate people making no reference to scriptures are fundamentalists.
• Scientists have written deceptive papers in which purely software implementations are passed off as things that help to explain human memory, by means of outrageous language abuses in which sections or layers of software code are improperly given anatomical names corresponding to parts of the human brain, and in which tricky equivocation occurs involving mixing up the human definition of memory (involving mental experiences) and the computer definition of memory (not involving mental experiences). 
• Scientists have made deceptive claims about chance protein evolution, such as the assertion by one authority that if you have "trillions" of random protein molecules you can get "any function you want" (because the average amino acid length of a human protein is more than 400 amino acids, and because there are 20 possible amino acids in each position of a protein, such a statement underestimated by about 10 to the 500th power the difficulty of getting by chance "any function you want"). 
• Scientists have used misleading language about natural history, such as failing to describe enormous leaps of organization and complexity as very complex innovations, but merely describing them as "variants" or "diversification."
• Many a scientist will claim to be the author of hundreds of scientific papers, neglecting to tell us that he is merely the co-author of such papers, most of which typically have a number of co-authors such as 5, 10 or 20. 
• Scientists have made misleading claims that evolution might have occurred before life existed, claims evoking a special use of the word "evolution" very different from  normal definitions. 
• Scientists have massively repeated a doubtful claim that human genomes and chimp genomes are 98% or 98.6% the same, ignoring a 2005 paper with the title "Eighty percent of proteins are different between humans and chimpanzees." A 2021 study found that "1.5% to 7% of the human genome is unique to Homo sapiens," suggesting the claim of 98% similarity was probably in error. A 2002 paper is entitled "Divergence between samples of chimpanzee and human DNA sequences is 5%, counting indels."  The paper  "Complete sequencing of ape genomes," which you can read here, reports in its Supplementary Figure III.12 (row 7 and row 8) that according to one measure, the difference between the human genome and the chimpanzee genome is about 12%. 
• Scientists have massively repeated false claims about the Miller-Urey experiment, wrongly suggesting the experiment (using the wrong gases to simulate the Earth's early atmosphere and involving a very special glass apparatus unlike anything that would have been available billions of years ago) did something to show that amino acids would have been common billions of years ago. 
• Scientists have written misleading articles announcing an observation in space or a meteorite of some building block of a building block of a building block of one-celled life, and suggesting this supports ideas of abiogenesis (an unguided origin of life), while failing to tell us that the reported observation was some negligible amount such as a few parts in a billion.   
• Scientists have been complicit in chicanery, shenanigans and misrepresentations involving fossils, often including gluing together (using a mixture such as superglue and baking soda) fossil fragments not known to be from one organism and claiming they are from a single organism, and often involving the display of entirely artificial "fossil exhibits" involving no real fossils, with such deceits massively displayed in natural history museums. 
• Scientists have made frequent appeals to an utterly erroneous principle that any fantastically improbable bonanza of luck can happen as long as there are millions of years of chance events. 
• Scientists have made frequent appeals to a "many random trials equals some successes" principle that is not generally true (whenever the chance of something happening is sufficiently low, we should expect no successes, even if there are a near-infinite number of random trials). 
• Scientists have often made extremely misleading statements about the quality of evidence for spiritual and psychical phenomena that tend to contradict Darwinist explanations, often when they have never seriously studied such evidence, often claiming very large bodies of solid evidence gathered over decades or centuries are "no evidence," combined with misleading stereotypical, mudslinging or gaslighting characterizations of the people who have reported such phenomena.
• Scientists long repeated false claims that the developing human embryo passes through a fish-like stage, along with claims that this helps show that humans are descended from fish, the alleged resemblances being merely pareidolia "Jesus in my toast" types of claims.
• Scientists have for quite a few decades made erroneous claims about origin-of-life studies, which have not made any substantial progress in explaining an origin of life from non-life. 
• Scientists have used doubly-misleading language in which experiments involving deliberate continuous artificial selection by humans and producing mere disorganized clumps of cells are referred to as examples of "multicellularity evolution," when they are neither multicellularity (examples of organisms with many cells) nor natural evolution.  
• Scientists have used misleading language about the origin of life, such as referring to amino acids as "seeds of life," which is as misleading as saying bricks are the seeds of cathedrals. 
• Scientists have used Questionable Research Practices. A survey of evolutionary biologists and ecologists reported that "around 64% of surveyed researchers reported they had at least once failed to report results because they were not statistically significant (cherry picking); 42% had collected more data after inspecting whether results were statistically significant (a form of p hacking) and 51% had reported an unexpected finding as though it had been hypothesized from the start (HARKing)."
• Scientists have been complicit in the display by natural history museums of "fossil exhibits" that are entirely plastic, plaster or fiberglass, with countless visitors getting the idea that such things were real fossils (read here for details).
• Neuroscientists have made false claims that certain people who died silently had brain activity that can help explain near-death experiences, despite there being no evidence such persons were conscious, and despite evidence showing that the electrical activity in the brains of such persons disappeared at the same time their hearts stopped (contrary to such claims). 
• Scientists have made statements  trying to suggest that macroevolution (something we cannot observe in the current world) is still occurring, articles with titles such as "Why do animals keep evolving into crabs?" -- titles that are misleading because they refer to speculations about events claimed to have occurred many millions of years ago. 
• Scientists have told enormously implausible tales such as the tale of monkeys rafting across the Atlantic ocean millions of years ago, or the tale of iguanas rafting 8000 kilometers across the Pacific ocean millions of years ago, with such wild unbelievable tales described as facts. 
• Scientists have evoked an utterly fallacious principle which one Darwinist evoked by saying "let us suppose instead that each step made in the good direction provides a small advantage in terms of survival or fecundity to the being that makes it," a principle extremely erroneous because improvements in survival or fecundity (reproduction) almost always require many coordinated changes before any such advantage is achieved. 
• Scientists have made misleading claims using the ambiguous and imprecise term "consensus," a term with multiple meanings (including unanimity of opinion or a mere majority opinion), with the claims misleadingly suggesting that scientists agree about matters such as whether Darwinism explains the complexity of the biosphere and matters such as a natural origins of humans and a brain cause of minds, even though there is no good evidence scientists agree about such matters, and some polls and some long "dissenter lists" suggesting they do not agree about such matters, along with very many candid confessions statements by scientists sounding like the statements someone would make if he had little or no confidence about such matters (see here for a very long set of such statements by scientists). 
• Neuroscientists have been guilty of decades of poor research practices, such as the use of way-too-small sample sizes of fewer than ten subjects, failure to follow blinding protocols, lack of pre-registration, and the use of an unreliable "see-whatever-you-want-to-see" method for trying to measure animal recollection ("freezing behavior" estimation) rather than the reliable measurement techniques discussed here.  
• Scientists have passed off deliberately faked fossils as important evidence of evolution (such as the fraudulent Piltdown Man fossil which for forty years was hailed as a fossil of key significance). 
• Scientists have for for many decades used the misleading term "organic molecules," using a terminology in which any and all molecules containing carbon are called "organic," even when the molecules are not used by any living things (a habit that has fueled innumerable misleading science stories in which people are led to believe that the discovery of biologically irrelevant molecules have some biological significance).  
• Neuroscientists have long repeated utterly absurd claims that it takes hours for a human to form a long-lasting memory, claims that are contrary to every person's experience, which is that permanent memories can form instantly, with the claims being made because the people making such claims want us to believe that memories are formed through synapse strengthening known to take at least hours.  
• Scientists have frequently published highly speculative "tree of evolution" charts not labeled as speculative, and wrongly suggested some consensus opinion exists about some detailed evolutionary ancestry scenario for humans; but the great variation in the details of such charts show that no such consensus exists.
• Scientists have published highly speculative "brain functional map" charts suggesting some knowledge that particular parts of the brain produce cognitive functions, suggestions that are unwarranted (see here for evidence against one of the standard elements of such charts). 
• As shown in the "Censoring William James" example clearly documented here, scientists have sometimes tried to make it look as if some other scientist who believed in the paranormal and found much evidence for the paranormal reported no evidence for the paranormal. 
• Some scientists have given deceptive definitions of "cognition" or "cognitive" while claiming that mere microscopic chemistry or one-celled life could have been cognitive, while trying to suggest such primitive beginnings could have been a "root of cognition" or "rudimentary cognition" -- definitions that define cognition as less than how dictionaries commonly define it: "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses."
• Scientists have used deception and/or the withholding of key facts in discussing peppered moth evidence and finch beak evidence for Darwinian evolution, described in detail in the article here.  
• Scientists have made grossly untrue claims about what is interstellar space, such as the glaring falsehood recently told by an astronomer saying that there "seems to be no limit" to the degree of chemical complexity that interstellar space can produce (the reality is that no one has ever found in interstellar space any molecule even a hundredth as complex as the more complex protein molecules in human bodies). 
• Scientists have told very bad lies that a split-brain operation (severing the nerve fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain) results in two separate human minds, contrary to the facts that no such thing occurs, and that such an operation leaves people with a single self.
• Scientists have told the utterly false claim that without the theory of evolution, there would be no modern medicine such as vaccines (evolutionary theory has actually played almost no role in the rise of modern medicine, and medicine would be just as advanced if no such theory had ever arisen). 
• Neuroscientists have used tortuous extremely convoluted analysis pathways in which brain scan data or biological data is passed through a series of programming iterations, often involving poorly documented gobbledygook code that no one but the original programmer could have ever understood, with the effect of the rigmarole iterations being some "black box" manipulation that not even the original programmer can now understand, and the resulting mess (perhaps having some desired pattern) being passed off as some enhancement of the original data, even though there is every season to suspect the result is a corruption, distortion or contortion of the original data. 
• Very many scientists produce papers slanted in the favor of claims favoring pharmaceutical companies or biomedical device manufacturers who pay such scientists directly or indirectly, or who fund their research; and such scientists typically fail to confess their conflicts of interests and financial causes of bias, except in some fine-print "competing interests" statement unread by the vast majority of their science paper readers. 

Relatively few people have heard about such deceits, misrepresentations and misleading statements, because science journalists have acted like science cheerleaders rather than as good journalists. Had science journalists done their job properly, the Nature opinion survey discussed above would have shown even less trust in scientists. A recent New York Times article details many examples of shady or deplorable scientist behavior surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. 

It seems clear that scientists are largely to blame for the public's rather low trust of them. Scientists have again and again betrayed the public's trust, and acted in ways that should have caused the public to distrust them. 

The affair last month of a scientist making unfounded claims about finding a biomarker for life on a distant planet was only the latest in very many cases of scientists crowing about achieving grand and glorious things they did not actually achieve. The affair is thoroughly documented in my post here. In this case the performance of scientists was actually pretty good, with quite a few scientists rather quickly informing us that an unfounded claim was unfounded.  In many other cases, unfounded claims are made by scientists, and hang around for decades or centuries, becoming socially constructed achievement legends that persist because they seem to bolster some ideological story line that materialist scientists are ever-so-eager to have us believe.