Visual Fakery Is a Pillar of Darwinist Propaganda

 Misleading and deceptive imagery has long been a staple of Darwinist propaganda. In my Google science news feed on the day that I am writing this post auto-scheduled for later publication, I see a prominent example. We have a story in the Google science news feed, with a headline of "Ancient fossil discovery in Ethiopia rewrites human origins." When we click on the story, we get a press release that looks like this at the top:

Wow, looks like an impressive fossil find, does it not? But what is going on here is fakery. No one discovered any such fossil as the fossil shown. When we scroll down, we read in the fine print that all that was discovered were some teeth. 

So where did the image come from? Not one in five readers will realize the answer to that question.  The image came from a site called Shutterstock, which is a commercial site that sells stock images. The images at Shutterstock are a combination of real photos and artwork. Using the reverse image search at www.tineye.com, I was able to find how the image originated. As you can see using the link here, it is an image uploaded to Shutterstock in 2010 by Derek R. Audette. Derek is an artist, and he has uploaded 600+ images to the the stock image site Shutterstock. The images seem to be his own artistic creations. The Shutterstock site lists Derek as a ""Photographer, Illustrator / Vector Artist." Using 3D modeling programs like the one depicted below, a vector artist can create realistic-looking images of things that never actually existed.

Derek committed no fakery or fraud by uploading his artistic depiction of a fossil in 2010, having no idea how it would be used. But it seems someone at ScienceDaily.com is guilty of visual deceit by adorning this press release with an image that looks like an actual fossil but is not an actual fossil, being purely an artistic creation. 

Scrolling down further in the Science Daily press release, we get the truth. Nothing like a fossil skull was discovered. All that was discovered were some teeth. A look at the visuals in the corresponding scientific paper show the meager results, nothing better than what is shown below:

The paper's attempts to suggest that such teeth shed any light on human evolution is laughable. A few teeth don't tell us anything about human origins.  You cannot reliably identify some pre-human species from remains that are mere teeth. And for reasons I will discuss later in this post, the paper's attempts to date the teeth are not even reliable.

We have various degrees of misleading language and/or misrepresentation occurring here:

(1) A scientific paper has in its abstract referred to a discovery of "fossils" rather than stating that all that were discovered were teeth, as if it was trying to create the impression something much larger than mere teeth was discovered. 

(2) An Arizona State University press release has an extremely misleading title "ASU scientists uncover new fossils — and a new species of ancient human ancestor." All that is mentioned is the discovery of a few teeth, something that certainly does not entitle anyone to claim the discovery of "a new species of ancient human ancestor."  And it is misleading to be referring to mere teeth as "fossils" rather than using the term "teeth." An honest title for the press release would have been "ASU scientists uncover some old teeth, and speculate they are from a new species of ancient human ancestor."

(3) A Science Daily press release has repeated word-for-word the Arizona State University press release, but has gone further down the path of deceit by including a single image with the press release, an image that is an old artistic depiction from 2010, an image looking like a real skull, one that will give 90% of the casual readers of the press release the false idea that a full skull was discovered. This is visual fakery. All that was discovered were a few teeth. No one ever discovered a skull like the skull that is depicted in the Science Daily press release image. 

Fake images of fossils are easy to create using 3D modeling software. First you create or upload what is called a wireframe model, which consists of a connected set of points in three-dimensional space, each with its own X, Y and Z coordinate. The interface of the software may allow you to drag and drop particular three-dimensional points that are part of the model. You can then apply what are called textures to particular surfaces on the model, which gives them a color or look. You can then choose to perform what is called rendering, to produce a realistic looking image like the one shown below. Creating an image of a fossil that never existed is even easier than creating an image of a type of car that never existed. 

Nowadays it is even easier to create fake images of fossils, by using AI image generators such as the ImageFX product of Google. Just type in a text prompt such as "fossil of pre-human skull" and you will get output in seconds. 

At the page here we have another example of a "science news" story using visual fakery. We have a story about some fossil find, and the story has an impressive-looking visual that shows something that looks maybe like something halfway between a man and an ape. It looks like a photograph of a complete skull. But the image does not correspond to anything ever discovered. A reverse image search shows that the image is another example of photorealistic artwork uploaded to Shutterstock, some artwork created by user Busker909. The user's profile picture is a picture of a cat. It seems that nowadays stories about human evolution are often using not actual photos of fossils ever discovered, but mere photorealistic artwork got from the Shutterstock site, or maybe artwork created by AI image generators. 

At the page here, we have another example of a "science news" story using visual fakery. It is a story that includes a large image identified as "the most complete skull of an Homo heidelbergensis ever found."  There is a watermark in the image identifying the source as WH_Pics. A reverse image search shows that the image is the one here, an image from the Shutterstock site. The image was uploaded by the anonymous source WH_Pics.  This anonymous source gave the image a tag claiming that it is "the most complete skull of an Homo heidelbergensis ever found."  But since this anonymous source has no credibility, we should very much doubt that the image is a photograph of any such thing. In all likelihood it a photorealistic piece of artwork, which has been give a tag designed to increase royalties from its use.  A Smithsonian Institute page on fossils of Homo heidelbergensis shows no fossil matching this Shutterstock image. 

Certain physically impressive buildings such as natural history museums seem like cathedrals of Darwinism. One of the shameful practices long going on at natural history museums has been to display  misleading fossil exhibits that are largely or entirely fake.  An article tells us about some of the fakery going on in natural history museums:

" 'Back in the day —  and when I say that, I mean as far back as the 1800s — museums originally used plaster of paris,' Storrs says. 'It was about 40 years ago that resins came into wider use.'  For smaller bones and casts for exhibits within the museum —  plants or fish, for example —  museum staff use urethane foams to cast and sculpt the replicas themselves, says Dave Might, exhibits coordinator/artist at the Cincinnati Museum Center...Alternatively, some entire skeletons can be purchased 'off-the-shelf' from RCI. 'For example, take Tyrannosaurus rexes,' Fair says. 'There are only about 29 or so skeletons in the world, and that’s not nearly enough for all of the museums and theme parks that want one. So we produce 100% composite T. rexes.' ”

Here the "100% composite" means "100% fake." We read in the same article about "a fiberglass/polyester Allosaurus on display at the American Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C." That's a fake. On a page of the American Museum of Natural History we read "Eighty-five percent of specimens are actual fossils, as opposed to casts or reproductions." That means at least 15% of the fossils displayed are fake. We can reasonably suspect that much more than 15% of the fossils can be called fake or semi-fake.  The semi-fake fossils would be those consisting of mixtures of bones and artificial material such as plaster of Paris, fiberglass, resin or a mixture of baking soda and superglue. A page of the American Museum of Natural History tells us its displayed T. Rex fossil "is about 45 percent real fossils."  The page makes this confession hard to discover. To get to this confession, you have to click on all of the little + icons next to a picture of the T. Rex.  I would imagine that 99% of the visitors to the museum never learn that most of its T. Rex exhibit is fake.  

It is very rare for scientists to discover a complete fossil skeleton or skull. What they most often find are fragments. Then, very frequently, bone fragments are mixed with artificial filler material that might be made by mixing superglue and baking soda. The results are passed off as a single fossil, although this can be extremely misleading.  We don't know whether an organism ever actually had bone material corresponding to the filler material. And very often we also don't know whether the fragments came from a single organism, or were fragments from multiple organisms living in different times, possibly organisms from different species. We often don't know whether the resulting fossil display corresponds to the skeleton or skull of some organism that ever lived. This kind of funny business is a very big deal whenever the concocted "composite" displays are used to try to back up claims of evolutionary progressions that have never been well-established. Fakes and partial fakes should not be part of the evidence cited or displayed to back up such claims. 

A long recent article at www.undark.org ("Fossils Are Shaped by People. Does That Matter?" by Asher Elbein) is a great piece of "pull back the Wizard's curtain" journalism, a shocking expose of the shenanigans going on with the fossil exhibits of natural history museums. The subtitle tells us "Preparing a fossil is often more of an art than a science." We read about some of the fraud and fakery that is going on, although the language is generously chosen so that such words are not directly used. We read this about what started to go on in the late nineteenth century:

"The culture of scientific achievement soon merged with one of showmanship and display — goals that coexisted uneasily. The solution, Rieppel said, was to mount genuine bones liberally (but increasingly quietly) reconstructed with plaster, creating 'awe inspiring, eye-catching sculptures that pretended not to be sculptures at all.' "

That makes it sounds like plaster was secretly being used, to fool people into thinking full fossils from a single organism had been discovered.  Later we read about all the guesswork and gluing that is going on when someone called a "fossil preparator" gets some bones-in-a-rock or box of bones, and hopes to produce a compelling fossil exhibit:

"Fossils sometimes arrive in a broken or jumbled state, often with hidden facets waiting to be discovered. Uncovering them requires painstakingly isolating fossil from stone, using fine tools such as dental picks and pneumatic chisels, and alternating applications of solvent and adhesives. At every step, preparators must make choices. Some are basic: How much rock should be removed? Others are trickier: If the preparator decides one piece of bone belongs with another, do they attach it, and if so, with what glue? Should incomplete bones be rebuilt with a best guess?"

We are told that most of these fossil exhibit preparators are not scientists, and that a "wide range of people do this work, including volunteers, professional freelancers, institutional employees, and commercial contractors." No doubt, a large fraction of the fossil exhibits involve wild guesses by people who are not scientists, but were mainly hoping to make a compelling exhibit.  Did such people usually follow a rule of "do not glue bones together unless you think  they probably came from the same species, or the same organism?" Very probably not.  We are told, "By the early 20th century, for example, preparators — often under the direction of a principal investigator — physically manipulated bone surfaces and added speculative plaster to fill out the suspected shapes of incomplete limbs and skulls, which influenced interpretations of dinosaurs like Dilophosaurus." 

We are told, "Very occasionally, independent commercial preparators have intentionally created fake or exaggerated remains to sell."  Actually, the faking of fossils seems to be a kind of cottage industry in certain foreign lands, so that "very occasionally" might reasonably be replaced with "quite often." A Scientific American article in entitled "How Fake Fossils Pervert Paleontology." The subtitle is "A nebulous trade in forged and illegal fossils is an ever-growing headache for paleontologists." We hear about poor people in distant lands who first heard that you can get lots of cash by finding a good fossil, and who then started to make fake fossils in hopes of getting lots of money

We can imagine here what typically goes on. Bone fragments may be dug up from various spots at a location, perhaps with some fragments gathered from 30 meters or 50 meters away from others. The fragments are then boxed up and sent to a fossil preparator, along with a drawing of the desired output. The problem is that the fragments may be from different organisms, so the end result fossil exhibit may profoundly mislead us, creating a skeleton or skull unlike any that ever existed. The famous "Lucy" image (of bones arranged as if they belonged to one organism) is one of paleontology's most famous images.  There is a large chance the bones consist of bones from multiple species, for reasons discussed here. 

We read this about fossil exhibits:

"Many of these are prepared by commercial contractors like Triebold Paleontology. They’re often casts that contain no real bone. They represent a specific interpretation of incomplete fossils, available for a price: Triebold has provided reconstructed casts of Appalachiosaurus montgomeriensis— an east-coast relative of Tyrannosaurus rex — to two separate southeastern museums, with arms of varying sizes based on different scientists’ interpretation of the original limited material."

It seems natural history museums are paying huge sums for these shady exhibits, and turning a blind eye to all the fakery and guesswork. We read this:

"Such prices are largely based on the notion that the lucky winner is receiving a mostly real skeleton, Brown noted, and although that’s sometimes true, other times they’re really receiving something akin to a reproduction of the Mona Lisa with a few scraps of the original painting stitched in. A person might think they’re buying a dinosaur for millions, he said, 'but mostly what you bought is plastic.' ” 

We are told that these fossil preparators that make the fossil exhibits for museums "tend to have broader backgrounds, with no standard license, training, or methods." So why are we putting their gluing plaster-in-the-gaps guesswork inside buildings called science museums?

US taxpayer funds are still being used to support the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, one guilty of displaying fossil exhibits produced by the unreliable practices describes above.  The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins in that museum is filled with speculative artistic representations of previous species, containing heads and shoulders looking like wax museum creations. A kind of "glorious path to whiteness" is depicted. We do not know that any of the organisms displayed by such artwork actually looked how they are depicted. These artworks were created by artist John Gurche, who is not a scientist. A web page on the site of the  Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History has a page calling these "Reconstructions of Early Humans." The art works depict organisms that are mostly not humans. The hallmark characteristic of humans is the use of speech and the use of symbols.  The word "human" should never be used to describe some species that has never been shown to have used speech or symbols.  The use of "human" or "early human" to refer to species that probably did not use speech or symbols (and were therefore not actually human) is one of the most misleading tactics of Darwinist propaganda. Web pages of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History contain other examples of the most misleading claims of Darwinist propaganda, but I will have to leave a discussion of that for a separate post. 

Then there is the practice of creating misleading "replicas" of fossils, recreations that are not exactly the same as the original. The claimed "replica" may have features that are exaggerated to help sell some evolutionary story. I will give an example. At left of the photo pair below we see a photo of what is called the Kabwe 1 fossil, also called the Broken Hill fossil, because it was found at a Broken Hill mine in Northern Rhodesia. It is one of the earliest photos of the fossil, from the front page of the November 19, 1921 edition of the London Illustrated News, an edition you can read here.  At right of the photo pair below is a visual that is found at the wikipedia.org article on this fossil. It is a claimed "replica" of the fossil shown at left, a "replica" found at a German natural history museum. But as you can see, it is not a very close match. Certain features have been exaggerated, such as the eyebrow ridges, which look much bigger in the claimed "replica." And also the forehead in the claimed "replica" looks much more sloped than in the original fossil. 

This is fakery. Creating something you call a "replica" which looks very different from the original is deception.

In the Reuters story here, we have a photo of a professor holding something that is identified in the caption as the Broken Hill skull. But what we see looks to me more like the distorted "replica" seen above at right, not like what we see in the original 1921 photo at left, marked "original fossil" in the photo above. The same Reuters story tells us that although scientists long asserted the skull was 500,000 years old, scientists have changed their estimate to be about 300,000 years old, and that "this indicates the species represented by the skull was unlikely to have been a direct ancestor of Homo sapiens as some had thought."

Visual fakery occurs not just in natural history museums, but abundantly in the books, web pages and magazines advancing Darwinist propaganda. This can occur in hundreds of different ways. An example involves the famous so-called skeleton of Lucy. Bone fragments were gathered up over a rather large area not specified in the scientific paper reporting the find. The bone fragments of the so-called Lucy skeleton have been arranged as if they were part of a single skeleton. But the fragments were not found in an area the size of a single skeleton. The paper fails to specify how large the gathering area was. A Google AI search says that one source says the gathering area was about 160 square feet, but that claim is not made in the paper, and I would imagine it is a severe underestimation of the gathering area. We do not know whether the fragments were all found at the same depth. A book describing the find says the fragments were the gathering of three weeks by a team of people (pages 17-18), which implies that they were scattered across a rather wide area, at different depths. 

Below is the image from the paper:

The image above in the scientific paper is a very misleading one, because the fragments were not gathered from any positions corresponding to the positions shown in the visual. The only honest and scientific way to visually present information on these fragments is to have a photo of a gathering area, and to have indications of which fragments were found in which parts of such an area, and at what depths the fragments were found. It is deceptive to gather up fragments found over an area of 160 square feet or larger, at different soil depths, and to place such fragments in a flat area of only 3 square feet, suggesting they were all found closely together. We do not know whether the fragments shown above all belonged to the same individual. They may be fragments from different individuals and different species. 

Similar shady business is going on in the paleontology study here. Tiny bone fragments much smaller than a finger were gathered up over an area of 100 square meters, with the fragments then arranged into a drawn shape of hands, to suggest they are from the hands of some member of an extinct species. There is no basis for confidence these fragments are from the same individual, or even the same species. 

In reference to the press release discussed at the top of this post, I may note that the Arizona State University press release describes a chain of reasoning that is extremely dubious. We read this:

"How do scientists know these fossil teeth are millions of years old?

Volcanoes.

The Afar region is still an active rifting environment. There were a lot of volcanoes and tectonic activity, and when these volcanoes erupted ash, the ash contained crystals called feldspars that allow the scientists to date them, explained Christopher Campisano, a geologist at ASU. 

'We can date the eruptions that were happening on the landscape when they're deposited,'  said Campisano, a research scientist at the Institute of Human Origins and associate professor at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

“And we know that these fossils are interbed between those eruptions, so we can date units above and below the fossils. We are dating the volcanic ash of the eruptions that were happening while they were on the landscape."

The chain of reasoning here is extremely dubious. No reliable method is discussed. Trying to estimate when volcanic ash was deposited is guesswork. The technique described is an example of what is called biostratigraphy, which is much less reliable as a dating method than radiometric dating. "The volcanoes told us" is not a very reliable sounding answer to the question "How do you know how old these teeth are."  And if you were to reliably date some old teeth, that would not allow you to infer that you had discovered some new species. 

It is interesting that Darwinism is based on an idea that undermines the credibility of most attempts to infer the ancestry of species from fossils. Darwinism is based on the idea that there occur dramatic random variations in some member of a species, in some members of the population of a species. So, for example, under Darwinist accounts member # 233,023 of a population of 500,000 members of a species might be born looking much different from the average member of that species. But let us imagine you find something like a tooth that looks a little different from known teeth, or a skull forehead that looks a little different from the foreheads of known species. Under the Darwinist assumption that there can occur dramatic random variations in some members of the population of a species, it seems that you would  never be entitled to assume that some oddball fossil was evidence of a transitional species.  Instead, under Darwinist assumptions such a fossil might be merely evidence of a dramatic random variation in some member of the population of a species.  

You can't have it both ways. Either:

(1) The members of a species all look almost exactly the same, as if they all arose following some blueprint for that species, or 

(2) There can be born in some species oddball members looking much different from the average appearance of members of such species. 

Idea (2) is useful for the person trying to explain the idea of so-called natural selection. But if idea (2) is true, then a fossil that looks like a fossil of Species X but significantly different can never be cited as evidence of a transition from Species X to some other species. For under Idea (2) a simpler explanation would simply be a random variation of a member of Species X, an oddball outlier in Species X.  So, for example, if you had a fossil with a sloping forehead halfway between the slope of an ape's forehead and the slope of a man's forehead, that would be best explained as an oddball outlier in the population of an ape or an oddball outlier in the population of humans, not as some transitional species between an ape and a human species. 

A neglected issue is the issue of pressure distortions of fossils. Fossils are often found at deep depths where the bones may have been subjected to great physical pressure over many thousands of years. We have no idea of what distortions in bones such physical pressure may produce over a span of many thousands of years. But such a factor is typically ignored, and an assumption is typically made that some species existed with a skull matching the appearance of the found fragments. Something looking like a fragment of a sloped forehead may be a clue that  some species with a sloped forehead existed. Or maybe that species had no such sloped forehead, and the slope appearance in the bone came from the thousands of years of pressure distortion. 

The photo below (from the scientific paper here) shows an example of the type of highly speculative business that paleontologists often engage in. We see some image that looks like a skull. The authors have done a "reconstruction" which is mostly speculative. Particular bone fragments have been fitted to a rather arbitrarily chosen skull shape (plastic or computer-generated), to try and suggest they are fragments of a skull with the shown shape.  But we can have little confidence that such fragments ever belonged to a skull with such a shape. The fragments could be from  different skeletons of different species. We have no idea whether the bone fragments belonged to any species with a forehead like the forehead shown or eyes like the eyes shown. 

I can state some principles you should follow when analyzing claims about fossils:

• Treat with suspicion all objects described as "replicas" of some other fossil, as such objects may not match the original, and may be distorted to help serve some narrative end or ideological purpose. 
• Treat with great suspicion all objects or visuals described as "reconstructions," as such objects or visuals may be mostly speculative guesswork, such as the "reconstruction" in the photo directly above. 
• Recognize that most "looking like a fossil" objects identified as coming from stock photo sources such as Shutterstock are probably 3D vector artwork not actually matching any fossil ever found.
• Disregard any "looking like a fossil" image that fails to list a source and fails to correspond to a reputable-sounding account of how such a fossil was found. 
• Do not trust the authenticity of an object merely because some natural history museum is listed as it source, given how much fakery and misleading "reconstruction" work (involving plaster, fiberglass, putty and superglue) has been going on at such museums. 
• If a reputable-sounding account of how such a fossil seems to be found, do not yet trust the account unless it is or can be traced back to an original and credible account given by the fossil discoverer, explaining exactly how the fossil was found. 
• Treat with great suspicion all accounts in which fragments are gathered up from an area larger than the claimed original organism, with your suspicion being proportional to the size of the gathering area (because in such cases we do not know the fragments are all from the same individual or even the same species). 
• Do not assume that some claimed skull corresponds to a typical skull shape of some species that existed long ago, because the skull could have been greatly distorted by thousands of years of geological pressure, and because the individual might have been one of those random variations that Darwinists so often appeal to, rather than a typical member of his own species. 
• Treat with great suspicion most estimates of the age of some fossil, as such estimates are often guesswork as unreliable as the volcano reasoning discussed above, and estimates that may be overthrown by later analysis (as in the case of Broken Hill fossil discussed above, where the dating changed from 500,000 years old to about 300,000 years old). 
• Realize that very many of the objects displayed in natural history museums are purely artificial constructions made by someone guessing about what a fossil of some imagined species would have looked like. 
• Recognize that advances in photorealistic 3D modeling and artificial intelligence image generation tools (such as Photoshop and ImageFX) make it particularly easy these days to create fake images of fossils, and that many press releases and "science news" articles are using such fake images (often bought from stock image houses such as Shutterstock). 
• Recognize that the faking of fossils is a lucrative "cottage industry" in some parts of the world, which casts doubt on the credibility of accounts of fossil finds in distant lands given by persons of unknown trustworthiness. 
• Realize that paleontologists are typically not objective unbiased scientists, but are members of a belief community passionately devoted to pushing particular narratives about the origin of species, rather like some person who analyzes crime scene bones while having an intense interest in proving some particular narrative, such as a claim of murder. 
• Realize also that paleontologists are often motivated by career advancement interests and desire for fame and self-glorification, factors that can severely affect their objectivity when analyzing hard-to-interpret and hard-to-age bone fragments, leading them to favor the most interesting-sounding claims and speculations about such bone fragments rather than the most well-justified claims. 

Postscript: Another day, another fake image used in a Darwinist article. This time it is the frequently misinforming IFLScience site, with an article having a headline senselessly claiming "4.4-Million-Year-Old Ankle Bone Suggests Humans Evolved From African Ape-Like Ancestor," as if a mere ankle bone could suggest such an idea. At the top of the article is a big image of what looks like a photo of some kind of skull of an ape-like organism. It seems to be not an actual photo of a fossil, but a Shutterstock image from anonymous user "Svet foto."  We have a Shutterstock image tag of "Ardipithecus ramidus is a species of australopithecine from the Afar region of Early Pliocene Ethiopia 4.4 million years ago." Since no claim is made that the image is a photo of an actual fossil, we can assume it is another piece of photorealistic artwork created by vector illustration software as described above (in other words, a fake).

There's Very Much Hard Fraud in Scientific Research, But Even More Soft Fraud

 Reading the Science News page on Google News today, I read a shocking story at the mainstream "Inside Higher Ed" site. It's an article entitled "The Growing Problem of Scientific Research Fraud." It starts out by saying, "When a group of researchers at Northwestern University uncovered evidence of widespread—and growing—research fraud in scientific publishing, editors at some academic journals weren’t exactly rushing to publish the findings."  We then hear a little about what sounds like a "censor the bad news" affair.

But the researchers' paper did eventually get published. We read this:

"Last week Amaral and his colleagues published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. They estimate that they were able to detect anywhere between 1 and 10 percent of fraudulent papers circulating in the literature and that the actual rate of fraud may be 10 to 100 times more."

We read in the article some researcher saying, "If this trend goes unchecked, science will be ruined and misinformation is going to dominate the literature.” Figure 5 in the paper includes this graph:

The "paper mill products" line shows fraudulent papers. The "PubPeer commented" line shows papers suspected of fraud, and mentioned on a site in which scientists can anonymously discuss suspicions of fraud. The "retracted" line shows papers retracted because of their low-quality or problems discovered in them. The great majority of junk science papers are not retracted. Notice the trend lines. A larger and larger fraction of scientific papers are fraudulent or junk. 

The graph above is from the newly published paper "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly." The link for the paper's pdf file is here. 

In previous posts I discussed the issue of fraud in biology research. The posts were these:

• Study Suggests Massive Faking in Neuroscience Papers
• They're Calling It a Huge Memory Research Fraud, But Is It Only the Tip of the Iceberg?
• Fraud and Misconduct Are Not Very Rare in Biology

An article in the journal Nature asks "How big is science's fake-paper problem?"  We read this:

"An unpublished analysis shared with Nature suggests that over the past two decades, more than 400,000 research articles have been published that show strong textual similarities to known studies produced by paper mills. Around 70,000 of these were published last year alone (see ‘The paper-mill problem’). The analysis estimates that 1.5–2% of all scientific papers published in 2022 closely resemble paper-mill works. Among biology and medicine papers, the rate rises to 3%."

What's so bad if a scientific paper resembles the product of a paper mill? The article gives us a bit of a clue, without explaining it very well. It says, "Paper-mill studies are produced in large batches at speed, and they often follow specific templates, with the occasional word or image swapped." The average reader will have no idea of what this refers to, so let me explain. 

In computer programming a template is some body of text containing placeholders. The template can be used to make many different versions of a narrative, by simply replacing the placeholders with specific examples.  For example, the page here gives us a template for producing a press release announcing some scientific research. The template starts out like this:

"Scientists today announced that they are the first to successfully demonstrate SCIENTIFIC FINDING. This has long been one of the holy grails of SCIENTIFIC FIELD. 'This finding radically alters our understanding of the field, to say the least,' says FIRST AUTHOR, a SCIENTIFIC FIELDologist from INSTITUTION who led the research. 'We were stunned when we made the discovery. For a few minutes we just didn’t believe what we were seeing,'  says FIRST AUTHOR, then SECOND AUTHOR (a student of FIRST AUTHOR) yelled "We’ve done it!" and we started dancing around the LAB/OBSERVATORY/FIELD SITE. It was very exciting.”

If you are writing a scientific press release, you could manually replace the capitalized phrases to match some new research.  But templates such as these can also be inputs to computer programs. Computer programs can generate countless different versions of the narratives in a template, by doing search and replace of the capitalized words. 

So, for example, imagine you want 10,000 different versions of the story below:

"MALE HUMAN ONE had a good life, but he knew that something was missing. He tried using dating apps to meet Miss Right, but somehow it never worked out. But one day MALE HUMAN ONE had a stroke of luck.  He was at the BUSINESS PLACE ONE where he was a regular customer. He looked to his left, and was stunned by the beauty of a female he had never met before: FEMALE HUMAN ONE. MALE HUMAN ONE felt sure that he wanted to strike up a conversation with the beautiful stranger, but he couldn't think of what to say. He thought of saying TRITE OVERUSED PICKUP LINE, but thought that would never work.  Suddenly, he had a good idea. Walking up to the stranger he said, ORIGINAL WITTY ICE-BREAKING LINE." 

It would be very easy to write a computer program that generated 10,000 different versions of this story.  The computer program could just run in a loop, and thousands of times replace the phrases MALE HUMAN ONE, FEMALE HUMAN ONE and BUSINESS PLACE ONE with items randomly extracted from a list, or randomly generated. Similarly, the program could thousands of times replace TRITE OVERUSED PICKUP LINE with an item randomly chosen from a list of such lines, and replace ORIGINAL WITTY ICE-BREAKING LINE with  with an item randomly chosen from a list of such lines. 

It seems that paper mills are doing something similar, to generate phony scientific papers, which amount to phony narratives. We hear in the Nature article that some machine-learning software is being used to look for papers that are suspected products of paper mills. An estimate has been produced that 3% of the biology and medicine papers from recent years are fake papers produced by paper mills. This 3% figure is higher than for any of the other fields mentioned. We read this: "A June 2022 report by the Committee on Publication Ethics, based in Eastleigh, UK, said that for most journals, 2% of submitted papers are likely to have come from paper mills, and the figure could be higher than 40% for some."

Why would such wrongdoing occur? If you are a scientist living in a "publish or perish" culture, it may be expected that you will author a certain number of papers each year. There is an effect called publication bias, in which scientific journals prefer to publish papers reporting positive results. If you are a scientist doing experiments that have recently produced only null results, you may resort to paying some paper mill to get some result that will have a higher chance of getting published. The paper mill companies are typically in foreign countries, and have discreet names such as Suichow Editorial Services. 

A researcher named Bernhard A. Sabel has developed what he thinks is a pretty simple way to spot paper mill papers in biology and medicine: look for papers which have author email addresses that are private emails or hospital emails rather than college or university emails such as joesmith@harvard.com. The technique of Sabel is entirely different from the technique mentioned earlier in this post. 

The latest version of a paper by Sabel describes the paper mill industry:

"The major source of fake publications are 1,000+ 'academic support' agencies – so-called 'paper mills' – located mainly in China, India, Russia, UK, and USA (Abalkina, 2021; Else, 2021; Pérez-Neri et al., 2022). Paper mills advertise writing and editing services via the internet and charge hefty fees to produce and publish fake articles in journals listed in the Science Citation Index (SCI) (Christopher, 2021; Else, 2022). Their services include manuscript production based on fabricated data, figures, tables, and text semi-automatically generated using artificial intelligence (AI). Manuscripts are subsequently edited by an army of scientifically trained professionals and ghostwriters." 

Sabel mentions a case of a paper mill that emailed a scientific journal offering a sum of $1000 if the journal published one of the papers the paper mill (calling itself an editorial services firm) helped to produce. 

A paper by Sabel states this:

"More than 1,000 paper mills openly advertise their services on Baidu and Google to 'help prepare' academic term papers, dissertations, and articles intended for SCI publications. Most paper mills are located in China, India, UK, and USA, and some are multinational. They use sophisticated, state-of-the-art AI-supported text generation, data and statistical manipulation and fabrication technologies, image and text pirating, and gift or purchased authorships. Paper mills fully prepare – and some guarantee –publication in an SCI journal and charge hefty fees ($1,000-$25,000; in Russia: $5,000) (Chawla, 2022) depending on the specific services ordered (topic, impact factor of target journal, with/without faking data by fake 'experimentation')" 

Sabel estimates that paper mills are a major business, earning a revenue of about a billion dollars per year.  He estimates that close to 150,000 papers are questionable papers with red flags indicating possible paper mill authorship.  

Publicly available AI programs such as ChatGPT are making this kind of hard fraud easier. Such programs can do a million and one things. Ask such a program to generate some type of information on some topic, and you might get some largely fictional or largely inaccurate output (sometimes called "AI slop") that can be pasted into a scientific paper. 

The discussion above is largely about what we might call hard fraud. Hard fraud may be defined as something involving data that is fake or made up. But we should not limit a discussion of scientific fraud to a mere discussion of hard fraud. There is also what we can call soft fraud. Soft fraud in scientific research may be defined as the use of  extremely misleading analysis techniques and misleading data gathering techniques and misleading data presentation techniques to give the impression that something was discovered, when no such thing occurred. Soft fraud is extremely abundant in scientific research. To read about some of the things going on when soft fraud occurs in scientific literature, read my posts here:

The Building Blocks of Bad Science Literature

50 Types of Questionable Research Practices

To understand the financial factors that drive such hard and soft fraud, you need to "follow the money" by considering factors like those diagrammed below. Read here for an explanation of the diagram. 

Fake Physics Salesmen Will Not Help Us Avoid Fakery in Science Research

An article from not long ago discusses fraud in science research. We read this shocking statement (I'll boldface part of it):

"The U.S. financial system is hardly the greatest edifice of justice in the world. Yet, it demonstrates a basic level of self-policing, effort to uphold professional standards, and accountability to the rest of society. Academic institutions fall far short of these minimal standards. Known serial frauds are sheltered by their bosses and feted by their peers. The culture encourages this at every step of the way, starting with PhD candidates ordered to produce a positive result by any means necessary, continuing with coauthors and grantmakers who can’t be bothered to look at the data and check whether it makes any sense, all the way to department heads and famous bestsellers being widely cited even after they’ve been caught. Those who do not commit fraud themselves usually tolerate it in their peers. The minority who will not tolerate frauds usually weed themselves out quietly. I have lost count of how many friends of friends entered a PhD program, had an adviser who tacitly or explicitly demanded they commit fraud to get publishable results, and quit in disgust without raising a public stink. What that says about those who remain is not encouraging....With some honorable exceptions, most academics don’t care very much about the capital-T Truth....More likely, fraud will grow more and more common as young scientists realize that lies are the best way to advance their careers and that serious punishment is about as likely as being struck by lightning."

Towards its end, the article suggests that "hope rests with truthseekers outside academia." The author states this:

"More likely, reform will come through circumvention from outside the academic system. There is no shortage of people who pursue the sacred quest for Truth. Increasingly, they are not pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge in peer-reviewed journals and university campuses, but in fringe niches of internet discourse. Because the internet commentariat’s intellectual elite is more attentive to an argument’s substance than whether it observes the bureaucratic forms, these circles are much less vulnerable to the problems which afflict academia."

The article then refers us to a blogger that it claims as a great example of a truth-seeker.  I started reading his posts at the blogger's site. I was not very encouraged by the first posts I read, in which the blogger lectures us at great length about rationality, and tries to pass himself off as a rationalist. My experience has been that people lecturing you about rationality are often people clinging to irrational dogmas.  Often lectures about rationality are excuses for avoiding observational reports that conflict with someone's worldview such as a materialist worldview. The self-described "rationalist" will claim that 1001 types of things are "irrational," on the grounds that they do not fit in with his idea of how nature works.  That's a defective approach. It's much better to closely study observations that defy your expectations about how nature works, and modify such expectations and assumptions when necessary, rather than throwing away such observations and calling them "irrational." 

In one post the blogger repeats one of the most glaring errors of today's Darwinism. He states, "Evolution is powered by a systematic correlation between the different ways that different genes construct organisms, and how many copies of those genes make it into the next generation. " Genes do not construct organisms.  Genes only specify the amino acids sequences that make up protein molecules.  Genes have no specification of anything larger than a protein molecule. An organism is built out of a skeletal system and organ systems. Organ systems are built from organs and other components. Organs are built from tissues, which are built from cells, which are built from organelles, which are built from protein complexes, which are built from individual protein molecules.  By claiming that genes construct organisms, the blogger is saying something as wrong as claiming that nails and screws construct apartment buildings. 

Later in the same essay the blogger refers most erroneously to "fox genes which construct foxes" and "rabbit genes which construct rabbits." Genes do not construct visible things, and have no specification of any anatomy or cells. In the same article we have very nonsensical shadow-speaking in which humans are described as the faintest shadows of themselves. The blogger states, "We are simply the embodied history of which organisms did in fact survive and reproduce." Oops, our "rationalist" has given us the silliest kind of irrational shadow-speaking, in which humans are depicted as a billion times less than what they are. 

In another essay the blogger repeats the same errors, erroneously claiming that "DNA constructs protein brains." DNA is an inert molecule with no power of construction, and no specification of anything bigger than a protein molecule. DNA does not even have a specification of a neuron or any of the organelles that make up a neuron. 

A big section of the blogger's blog posts is devoted to selling reductionism. Very strangely, he states in one of his posts, "Ultimately, reductionism is just disbelief in fundamentally complicated things." It is rather obvious that we do not have here a careful student of biology, which everywhere presents us with examples of mountainously complex and enormously complicated things. Nowhere at the site do we get a sign that this blogger is a very thorough scholar of biology or any of the sciences.  It sounds as if he is relying mainly on armchair reasoning rather than in-depth investigation of facts and observations.  

In a later essay, the blogger makes this confession:

"So by the laws of science, if psychic powers are discovered, non-reductionism wins. I am therefore confident in dismissing psychic powers as a priori implausible, despite all the claimed experimental evidence in favor of them."

The blogger is apparently a psi denialist, one of the many so-called "rationalists" who refuse to study and accept two hundred years of compelling written evidence for the existence of telepathy and clairvoyance.  Nowhere in his very many blog posts do we have any sign  that the blogger has studied the evidence for paranormal phenomena. 

In another long section on the site, the blogger starts giving us posts trying to sell one of the most absurd and extravagant pieces of nonsense that humans have ever constructed:  the Fake Physics of Hugh Everett's "many worlds" theory that there are an infinite number of copies of you in parallel universes. Supported by zero evidence, this Fake Physics lunacy is as irrational as any doctrine ever taught. It is also the exact opposite of reductionism. Instead of stripping things down by reducing, the believer in Everett's "many worlds" theory is doing the worst conceivable extravagance in needlessly postulating an infinity of unobservable things. 

After reading this section, it becomes crystal-clear that the recommended blogger is neither a rationalist nor a reductionist. No one who tries to get us to believe in about the most irrational doctrine ever constructed can claim to be a rationalist, unless we define that term so that it includes the most irrational thinkers.  And no one claiming that there are an infinite number of copies of you in parallel universes can credibly claim to be a reductionist. The blogger loses all credibility when he most ludicrously states, " I write as if the existence of many-worlds were an established fact, because it is," referring to the doctrine of parallel universes, which is not supported by the slightest speck of evidence. The blogger in question lacks even a high-school diploma, so we need not take seriously his opinion on this matter, which is a matter related to the most abstruse quantum mechanics he does not understand. 

Materialism at its maddest, Everett's fake physics "many worlds" lunacy is morally destructive nonsense. It is morally destructive because anyone believing in it will tend to lose any basis for moral action. For example, if you are driving in winter, and you see a small child without a coat wandering on the road, you may say to yourself, "There are an infinite number of parallel universes in which that child will survive, and an infinite number of parallel universe in which she freezes to death, so I need not bother to help the child."  Never expect moral behavior from anyone who believes in this loony nonsense. Always expect dishonest speech from such people, who tend to supply us with abundant examples of their deceptive speech. 

For  the blogger to teach this most nonsensical of doctrines and also to try and pass himself off as a rationalist and reductionist is the most laughable farce. We should classify all believers in Everett's "many worlds" nonsense as being the most irrational of thinkers, and also thinkers engaged in something the exact opposite of reductionism.  

The author of the article with the opening quote gave us a good article exposing the problem of fraud and misconduct in today's scientific research. But near the end of the article he has given us a very big bum steer by mentioning a particular blogger as someone outside of academia we should go to for guidance. We should seek out diligent scholars outside academia; but we won't help fight the problem of fake research in academia by reading the posts of Fake Physics salesmen such as the recommended blogger. 

Postscript: A recent scientific paper informs us about how universities and colleges are covering up evidence of fraud and researcher misconduct:

"The vast majority of misconduct investigation reports, however, remain hidden from view. While summaries from the ORI and the US National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) Office of Inspector General are useful, they are not very detailed, and in the case of the NSF are carefully anonymized....And while public universities like Ohio State are subject to laws pertaining to the disclosure of public records, in our experience, such statutes in many states are not helpful for these types of records even for public universities. Some exempt investigation reports because they are considered personnel records; others require requesters to be residents of the relevant state; and still others consider all investigation reports to be drafts by claiming they are subject to revision until some final — and often malleable — decision by a state or federal agency... Universities often use exorbitant charges, based on the costs of legal review of relevant documents, to win their wars of attrition against requesters. And private universities are not subject to public records laws at all, of course....Recent experience suggests that in many cases, science is failing to self-regulate, prioritizing self-interests — on the part of both institutions and individuals — over reform. The existence of schemes such as citation cartels, paper mills, rigged peer review, and other abuses are clear indications many scientists are willing to take steps to game the publishing system. The rapid encroachment of artificial intelligence into the production of journal articles poses perhaps the largest threat yet to the integrity of scientific research."