Scientist Flubs and Flops #10

 

• "Neo-Darwinism can't account for sexual reproduction."  -- biologist Josh Mittledorf PhD, "Cracking the Aging Code," page 31.
• "It is not sufficient to postulate an amazing feat of mis-copying that contrived to produce a highly beneficial structural change. We have to postulate the simultaneous occurrence of three miracles. Whatever miracle occurs to a male, say, there must be the even greater miracle that just the same structural change occurs, by a chance mis-copying to a female, and furthermore, that the two miracles must happen in the same place at much the same time, otherwise the changed male will not find the changed female. Mathematically, this means that the probability of an appreciable change being successfully propagated is the product of these three small numbers, making the result negligibly small." -- Scientist Fred Hoyle (link). 
• "Replication is one of the deepest mysteries of biology. It is really something totally counterintuitive if cell is seen as a sack of water plus some chemicals. We have a lot [of] facts about what happens in the replication at DNA level but how this miracle happens is a mystery. At cell level the situation gets even more complex." -- M. Pitkanen, physics PhD, "Getting philosophical: some comments about the problems of physics, neuroscience, and biology."
• "How cells control their size and maintain stable size distributions is one of the most fundamental, unsolved problems in biology...Even for the bacterium E. coli, arguably the most extensively studied organism to date, no one has been able to answer this question."  --Suckjoon Jun, an assistant professor of physics and molecular biology (link).
• "Brain-wide association studies need thousands of individuals to achieve higher reproducibility. Typical brain-wide association studies enroll just a few dozen people. So-called 'underpowered' studies are susceptible to uncovering strong but misleading associations by chance while missing real but weaker associations. Routinely underpowered brain-wide association studies result in a surplus of strong yet irreproducible findings."  -- Press release describing the study "Reproducible brain-wide association studies require thousands of individuals" by several scientists.
• "False report probability is likely to exceed 50% for the whole literature. In light of our findings, the recently reported low replication success in psychology is realistic, and worse performance may be expected for cognitive neuroscience." --Denes Szucs and John P. A. Ioannidis, ""Empirical assessment of published effect sizes and power in the recent cognitive neuroscience and psychology literature" (link). 
• "Irreproducible, inflated effect sizes were ubiquitous, no matter the method (univariate, multivariate)." -- A paper by numerous scientists.
• "There are no completed large-scale replication projects focused on neuroscience." -- Randall J. Ellis,  2022 (link).
• "Personally I’d say I don’t really believe about 95% of what gets published...I think claims of 'selective' activation [in brains] are almost without exception completely baseless."  -- neuroscientist Tal Yarkoni (link).
• "The results show a rapid growth of RFPs [red-flagged fake publications] over time in neuroscience (13.4% to 33.7%) and a somewhat smaller and more recent increase in medicine (19.4% to 24%) (Fig. 2). A cause of the greater rise of neuroscience RFPs may be that fake experiments (biochemistry, in vitro and in vivo animal studies) in basic science are easier to generate because they do not require clinical trial ethics approval by regulatory authorities." -- Bernard Sabel and 2 other PhD's,  "Fake Publications in Biomedical Science: Red-flagging Method Indicates Mass Production." (link). 

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