Implausible Boasts Keep Blighting Our Science News Sites

 When you read science news sites, you will typically read a great deal of shameless hype.  Runaway hype and exaggeration  is currently going on in Internet sites reporting scientific research. Major websites have learned the following fundamental formula:

                                     Clicks= Cash Income

The reason for this is that major websites make money from online ads. So the more people click on a link to some science story, the more money the website makes. This means that science reporting sites have a tremendous financial incentive to hype and exaggerate science stories. If they have a link saying, “Borderline results from new neuron study,” they may make only five dollars from that story. But if they have a story saying, “Astonishing breakthrough unveils the brain secret of memory,” they may make a hundred dollars from that story. With such a situation, it is no wonder that the hyping and exaggeration of scientific research is at epidemic levels. Call it a "hypedemic."

Part of the problem is university press offices, which nowadays are shameless in exaggerating the importance of research done at their university. A scientific paper reached the following conclusions, indicating a huge hype and exaggeration crisis both among the authors of scientific papers and the media that reports on such papers:

“Thirty-four percent of academic studies and 48% of media articles used language that reviewers considered too strong for their strength of causal inference....Fifty-eight percent of media articles were found to have inaccurately reported the question, results, intervention, or population of the academic study”

Let us look at a recent example of such a thing.  At the widely read site www.phys.org we have a headline reading this: "How the insect got its wings: Scientists (at last!) tell the tale."  The story attempts to persuade us that scientists have finally discovered how the first wings appeared.  We have this boastful triumphal-sounding prose:

"It sounds like a 'Just So Story'—'How the Insect Got its Wings'—but it's really a mystery that has puzzled biologists for over a century. Intriguing and competing theories of insect wing evolution have emerged in recent years, but none were entirely satisfactory. Finally, a team from the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, has settled the controversy, using clues from long-ago scientific papers as well as state-of-the-art genomic approaches."

Who is it who has made this boastful claim? When we look at the article byline, we find that there is a byline of "by Marine Biological Laboratory." That should make us suspicious.  We have a press release by the Marine Biological Laboratory, boasting of some alleged accomplishment made by people at the Marine Biological Laboratory.  That kind of "blowing your own horn" puff piece is rather like some politician's PR desk releasing some press release talking about what a great job he's doing.

We then read a claim that makes no sense. Here is the story told:

(1) First there was some crustacean with a little lobe or outgrowth on its leg.

(2) Then this little lobe moved up along the back of some animal. 

(3) Then that turned into a wing on an insect. 

The article quotes a scientist telling this tale: "The leg lobes then moved up onto the insect's back, and those later formed the wings." 

Later in the news story we are told once again one of the biggest myths of modern biologists, the very untruthful claim that genes contain instructions for anatomical structures. We are told that a scientist was "comparing the genetic instructions for the segmented legs of a crustacean." Genes do not contain any instructions for anatomical structures. Genes do not specify the structure of limbs, organs or even cells. Genes merely specify low-level chemical information such as the polypeptide sequences that are the starting points of proteins. 

We are told little else by the press release of the Marine Biological Laboratory. There is a reference to a paper that is behind a paywall. But at the link here you can read an open-access paper by the same scientists mentioned in the press release, Bruce and Patel, one in which they discuss their thoughts on the origin of insect wings. Figure 1 shows a shrimp-like crustacean, with one of its little legs highlighted; and above that is an insect with a big wing, and the wing highlighted.  The paper tries to suggest that a little leg (or lobe on the leg) on the front of a shrimp-like organism transformed into a big wing on the back of an insect organism.  It says, "two ancestral crustacean leg segments were incorporated into the insect body, moving the leg’s epipod dorsally, up onto the back to form insect wings."  Really, and while that mystifying migration and radical transfiguration occurred, a shrimp-like crustacean was also turning into a vastly different type of animal, into an insect? 

This speculation is as silly as the theory that animals got arms after their toes moved up the side of their body and turned into arms. 

	Crustaceans	Insects
Body segments	2	3
Number of antennae	2 pairs	1 pair
Wings?	Never	Sometimes
Chewing appendages	Usually 3 pairs	1 pair
Location of appendages	Cephalothorax and abdomen	Head and abdomen
Respiration	Gills	Tracheal system

See here for this table's source

In Figure 1 of this paper by Bruce and Patel we have a drawing designed to show us some structural similarity between a part of a crustacean leg and an insect leg. The drawings aren't labeled as diagrams, but are labeled as  "cartoons," which doesn't exactly inspire our confidence.  When we compare these two "cartoons," we find the structural similarity isn't even very strong. So we get no visual reason for thinking one structure evolved from the other.  Since the authors have claimed that insect wings evolved from a crustacean leg or part of such a leg, why aren't they showing a diagram comparing the details of an insect wing and some part of a crustacean? It's because nothing on a crustacean looks anything like an insect wing. 

These scientists have done nothing to prove this silly theory about the origin of insect wings, and in their paper they repeatedly refer to their speculation as being a "model." In physics a model usually involves some complicated mathematics, but a model in biology is a mere speculation, and may be a mere "just so" story.  There is a rather obvious reason why the story is unbelievable. Some primitive structure moving from the front of a shrimp-like organism to its back (or the back of an insect descended from such an organism) would have no use in such a place while the structure was some preliminary fragment of a wing.  So you cannot trace any path from front leg-like structures in crustaceans to back wings in insects, with each stage being useful. A similar difficulty would apply to any sort of attempt to explain an origin of insect wings, the difficulty that half-wings or quarter-wings would be useless, so there's no reason why they would appear. 

Why is such "grasping at straws" occurring? Because scientists have no credible theory of the origin of insect wings. In a previous story on phys.org a scientist states, "Insects evolved their wings long before birds and bats, yet, we do not know how their wings evolved."  There is no compelling evidence that insects evolved from crustaceans, and the evidence for such a thing is so weak that the current wikipedia article on "evolution of insects" merely says (rather hesitantly) that "insects may have evolved from a group of crustaceans." A science site tells us this: "Differing mostly in their body parts, insects, such as ants, flies, wasps and dragonflies, have tri-segmented bodies consisting of the head, thorax and abdomen; crustaceans, such as crabs, lobsters, shrimps and crayfish, have only two body segments — the head and thorax."  No one has a credible explanation of how a two-segment organism without wings could change into a three-segment organism with wings. The idea that a shrimp-like animal evolved into a flying insect is very far-fetched, rather like thinking that chickens evolved into monkeys. 

Darwinists have no credible explanation for the origin of anatomical structures.  Since DNA does not specify anatomical structures, we cannot postulate the appearance of a useful new anatomical structure by imagining lucky random mutations in DNA. DNA does not specify anatomical structures, so no amount of lucky changes in DNA can explain how useful new anatomical structures could arise. Evolutionary biologists often try to bridge this gap by using deceptive language trying to make it sound as if DNA was some kind of blueprint for an organism. We know exactly why it can be no such thing.  The "language" used by DNA (the genetic code) is a "bare bones" poor-man's language capable of specifying only low-level chemical information.  And if some molecule in the body were to contain instructions for making something as immensely organized as an organism, they would be instructions so complex there would be nothing in a body capable of interpreting them. 

"The genome is not a blueprint," says Kevin Mitchell, a geneticist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin. "It doesn't encode some specific outcome."  His statement was reiterated by another scientist. "DNA cannot be seen as the 'blueprint' for life," says Antony Jose, associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at the University of Maryland. He says, "It is at best an overlapping and potentially scrambled list of ingredients that is used differently by different cells at different times."  Sergio Pistoi (a science writer with a PhD in molecular biology) tells us, "DNA is not a blueprint," and tells us, "We do not inherit specific instructions on how to build a cell or an organ." Michael Levin (director of a large biology research lab) states that "genomes are not a blueprint for anatomy."

Nowadays when scientists have merely come up with a silly speculation, they may do something like putting up a big shiny achievement trophy on their mantle, making it sound like they're the first to explain some long-standing mystery.  That's what happens all the time in scientific academia: professors boasting about mighty achievements they did not really accomplish, and bragging about understanding things they do not at all understand, like someone crowning his own head with a laurel wreath, or sewing a self-devised merit badge on his own shirt. 

I can imagine how it would work if national news sites worked the same way as science news sites.  The national news sites such as www.cbsnews.com would be filled with "puff piece" stories that just repeated word-for-word press releases straight from the PR desks of politicians. You would read all these "news stories," and say to yourself, "Wow, I never knew my mayor was such a world-changing wonder-working epoch-making genius." 

In my next post I will discuss another recent example of an unjustified boast on science news sites, the very incorrect claim that the AlphaFold2 software of the DeepMind company has solved the long-standing protein folding problem. 

Postscript:  Darwinists have no credible explanation for the origin of winged pterodactyls in the fossil record.  A common attempt to explain a gradualist origin of birds is to imagine the evolution of birds from so-called flying squirrels, animals that can jump from one tree to another. But flying pterodactyls appear in the fossil record about 200 million years ago, which is 170 million years before the earliest appearance of squirrels in the fossil record.  Also, birds appear in the fossil record 30 million years before the first squirrels. 

EHF: Reports of Chinese Kids With Paranormal Powers

The 1997 book "China's Super Psychics" by Paul Dong and Thomas E. Raffill makes some very interesting claims about paranormal events in China. When it uses the acronym EHF, the book is referring to Exceptional Human Function or paranormal abilities. Referring to a Zhang Baosheng, the book states this:

"For China's Ministry of Space Industries (this space exploration agency is China's equivalent to NASA), Baosheng used psychokinesis to move pills out through the mouth of a tightly sealed medicine bottle. The scientists filmed this demonstration using high-speed photography (400 frames per second). One pill showed up halfway through the mouth of the bottle."

On page 14 we read this remarkable claim:

""Since the 1980s, Professor Song Kongzhi has been doing research in human body sciences, including many experiments on people with EHF. He has revealed that Zhang has the power to move shoes, hot-water bottles, keys, and other objects through wooden boards and walls and make large objects move back and forth. On one occasion, before a large number of witnesses, Zhang caused a hundred-pound sack of sugar to move through the walls of a storehouse, ending up in front of them. This was seen by EHF researcher Mr. He Ren of Heilongjiang University and Dr. He Yannian of Beijing's Institute for Research in Chinese Medicine. One source for this story is Assistant Professor Lin Weihuang of the physics department of Beijing Teachers' College."

The next page claims this, "Many people in mainland China with EHF have reported that when they read with the hands or with the ear, guess things, or see through objects, the mind forms something like a screen with an image of the target being sought. " I have read quite a few nineteenth century accounts claiming that under hypnosis some people might experience what was called a "transposition of the senses," such as someone with blindfolded eyes reading a card with his hands, or reading a card that was merely placed in front of his stomach or his ears.  The same phenomenon was reported by the very distinguished scientist Cesare Lombroso in a 1909 book in which he reported the following (before discussing numerous similar cases in medical literature):

"While she had lost the power of vision with her eyes, as a compensation she saw with the same degree of acuteness (7 in the scale of Jaeger) at the point of the nose and the left lobe of the ear. In this way she read a letter which had just come to me from the post-office, although I had blindfolded her eyes, and was able to distinguish the figures on a dynamometer." 

Something similar is reported on page 23 of the book Supernormal Faculties in Man by Eugene Osty, where we read this:

"M. Boirac had occasion to see in Paris Mme V-----, who claimed, when hypnotized, the faculty of reading by her finger-tips. He verified that when her eyelids were closed by gummed paper and a thick bandage placed over that she could not only read visiting cards and printed papers, but letters written in ink or pencil in characters so small as to be almost imperceptible."

Boirac's original account cited above can be found on page 262 of his book Psychic Science: An Introduction and Contribution to the Experimental Study of Psychical Phenomena.

The main difference between such accounts written before 1930 and the EHF accounts from China is that in the accounts from China the "reading by the finger tips" is reported as occurring during normal consciousness, not hypnosis. On page 44 of the "China's Super Psychics" book,we have an account that will seem unbelievable only to those who have not read the many nineteenth century accounts of similar events occurring with hypnotized subjects:

"Zhang Naiming invited Tang Yu to his lodging, giving him a test paper he had already prepared and folded six times. As Zhang and the provincial-party secretary Yang Zhao watched Tang Yu intently, he held the test papers by his ear for a little bit, then said, 'You wrote the four characters an ding tuan jie [stability and unity] in blue ink.'  His test result was absolutely right! Of course, they did not test only one time. Each time, they tested with two or three words, or as much as a sentence or two. In one test, they wrote four lines of poetry by the famous classical Chinese poet Li Bo, which Tang Yu also was able to read with his ear."

Pages 45-46 of the book tells us that follow-up on this anomaly was stifled after party officials  (with materialist tendencies) and their press subordinates began denouncing the reports, but that tests showed similar abilities in Tang Yu, Wang Qiang and Wang Bin.

On page 47 we have a tale of clairvoyance:

"When Marshal He Long of the Central Military Commission was on a tour of inspection in Guangdong province in 1964, a staff officer in the army told him there was a teenage boy in the local region who could see through walls and other objects. When he first heard this seemingly nonsensical story, his first reaction was disbelief. However, he immediately thought that if it did exist, it would be an excellent tool for the military. For this reason, he decided to see for himself. After the child was summoned, he asked him, 'I've heard you have a great ability to see through walls. Can you see what I have in my pocket?' The boy turned his gaze on He Long's pocket, and after concentrating for some time he said, 'It is a medical certificate!' On hearing this. He Long roared with laughter and said, 'Correct!' "

On page 48  we are told that "over twenty scientific researcher workers confirmed" that young Jiang Yan had an ability to read with her ear.  We read this on page 49:

"Anhui Keji Bao (Anhui Science and Technology News ) was just as strong in reporting on EHF children. In its issues of April 6 and 21 it reported that two schoolgirls in Xuancheng Junior High School, Hu Lian and He Xiaoqin, were able to recognize color and read words with their ears. The story was confirmed by the school."

On the same page we read of a test of a similar ability:

"To start out, Ye had a test paper prepared for Zhang. It had the words three smiles written on it and was folded several times. He gave this piece of paper to Zhang Baosheng. Zhang took it, put it in front of his nose, took a whiff of it, and said, 'You wrote the words "Three smiles." It is written in red ink.' Marshal Ye delightedly said he was right. Then they did several more tests of reading with the nose. These were all successful."

On pages 50-51 we are given the names of 39 boys and girls reported to have one or more of a set of EHF capabilities, a set that includes:

• color perception by ear;
• breaking twigs with mind power;
• moving objects with the mind;
• transporting objects by thought;
• telepathy;
• clairvoyance;
• reading by ear and armpit;
• seeing through walls;
• reading with fingertips and scalp;
• setting watches from a distance.

On page 54 we have an account very similar to countless successful tests reported in nineteenth century literature (some examples are here and here):

"The eighth test of Zhang Lei's powers involved remote viewing of a piece of writing. The testers wrote on a slip of paper the first line of a famous Chinese classical poem, 'A patch of moonlight before my bed.' They folded it up and put it in a tin box. After nine minutes, she was able to read it correctly." 

Pages 59-72 describe a raging literary battle in China between those reporting paranormal phenomena, and those such as the elderly conservative Yu Guangyuan (1915-2013) fiercely opposing it on ideological grounds. 

On page 80 we read this account of psychokinesis:

"On another occasion, a team of EHF researchers at Yunnan University performed an interesting test on Shao Hongyan and Sun Liping, young girls from the city of Kunming. They placed them in a room and asked them to use mind power to break marked willow branches three meters away outside the room. The result was that in under a minute, Shao Hongyan said the branch was broken. The experimenters went out to check, and the indicated stick was broken. Not long after that, the stick that had been assigned to Sun Liping also broke. Everyone applauded and exclaimed. The experimenter on the research team then made another request. This time, the target for the experiment was a row of willows six meters away. In about three minutes, the two girls shouted that they were broken. The experimenter went out and saw eight broken pieces. After that, they did another experiment and broke over twenty branches."

On page 142 we are told that transposition of the senses such as reading with the ear was not a rare skill for children:

"Induction of EHF in children in China began with some assistant professors in Beijing University who staked their careers on this research. They started in an elementary school, doing EHF induction and training with boys and girls around ten years old. To everyone's great surprise, 60 percent of them had powers like 'reading with the ear.' Feeling very excited about this, they published these results in Nature Magazine, and there was a huge response to this. After this, under the direction of scientists, tests were done on all elementary-school students in the country. The success rate was in the 30- to 40-percent range. The most exciting result came from Shanghai...The average for the whole city was 60 percent, including 30 percent of the children who developed the abilities after only one session, while the remaining 70 percent would require many sessions to bring out their powers."

On pages 147-148 we have an account of a young Xiao Xiong who was tested for clairvoyance.  Her father wrote the words "yellow dog" and put them in a pencil case, asking the child to identify the words. The child correctly named the words. Moreover, there was another copy of the words found in the pencil case, which the father couldn't account for, in the child's handwriting.  Doing a similar test with the words "high mountain flowing water," the child gave the correct answer, and there was again found a mysterious second copy of the words. We are told other children were found to have the same strange ability of "psychic writing."

On page 149 we read of a test of this ability for "psychic writing":

"Five people supervised the experiments. The chief researcher, Zhao Yun, placed a blank sheet of paper and a blue inkpen in a folder. The cap of the pen was left on, however. The folder was sealed tight with adhesive tape. Child H was instructed to think of the Chinese characters for precious object. He placed the folder under the left foot, and then looked up and gazed forward. After one minute, H said, 'It is finished,' and Zhao Yun opened the folder. The words 'precious object' were written on the paper in blue ink." 

On the same page we have this interesting account:

"EHF researchers at Yunnan Wenshan Teachers' College in Yunnan Province selected five children with EHF for further training. At the start, the only thing these children could do was to read with the ear. But after a week, they had developed to a point where they could read with their fingers, palms, toes, and the soles of their feet, as well as the 'third eye' point on the forehead. Their powers were getting stronger every day, and after a month of this training, they could reset the hands of a watch by mind power."

I will pass over the discussion of EHF children mentally causing flowers to bloom (or mentally causing flowers to be picked) given on pages 150-154.  I will also pass over a discussion of the interesting case of Yao Zheng, who could supposedly open flowers or start fires through mind power. This reminds me of a claim made in a report on paranormal phenomena in the Soviet Union, the claim that Nina Kulagina could create burn marks on skin. All I can say is that if someone ever became a psychic arsonist or committed psychokinetic assault, it would be hard to get a conviction from a jury. 

That same report describes on page 5 Russian experiments in which certain people could tell what was inside sealed envelopes merely by touching them:

"The investigations reported by Larissa V. Vilenskaya are an example. She has been conducting research with E. K Naumov (who is not currently active) and now appears to be involved with a variety of her own investigations. One aspect is her study of a phenomena initially referred to as 'skin vision' or, more recently, 'dermo-optics.' This relates to an apparent ability of some people to identify colors of concealed 'targets' simply by touching the opaque outer covering."

It is very interesting that such a paranormal ability of "skin vision" or "reading by finger touch" has been reported in three different places and times: (1) abundantly in Western Europe in nineteenth century literature on hypnotism (previously called Mesmerism or animal magnetism); (2) in late twentieth century Russia as shown by the quote above; (3) in China around 1980 or later as mentioned in this post. 

I asked only one person born in China whether she had ever heard of anything like children being able to "read with their ears" or "read with their fingers" when blindfolded.  She immediately replied that her uncle's daughter had such an ability (an ability to read with her fingers when her eyes were closed), along with a paranormal ability to tell what was secretly hidden in closed boxes; but that such an ability lasted in the child for only a few years. 

Researchers Won't Cooperate With a Survey Asking About Their Questionable Practices

 In the journal Science there was recently an article with a  headline "Largest ever research integrity survey flounders as universities refuse to cooperate."  It seems that some Dutch scientists created a National Survey on Research Integrity to learn more about the degree of poor practices occurring among science and medical researchers. The Dutch scientists had a real simple plan: just send many thousands of researchers a brief list of questions asking about "Responsible Research Practices" and "Questionable Research Practices." I am unable to find out what the exact questions are, as they are not listed on the web site of this survey. 

You would think that such a survey attempt would not run into any difficulty. But it seems that fewer than 15% of the scientists sent the survey have responded to it. The article tells us that "university presidents argued that a survey would just not be suitable for such a sensitive topic."  Only 5 out of 15 universities agreed to participate in the survey,  and only "on the condition that they could have a say on the survey’s setup and content."  This "have a say" amounted to pressure that more positive questions should be included in the survey, more questions asking about good behavior such as sharing data.  We can imagine a politician making a similar demand, which might work like this:

Journalist: Now, I want to ask about that rumor you are cheating on  your wife. 

Politician: Well, let's make a deal. I'll answer that question, but only if you first ask a question about the time I was nice to a hungry puppy, and another question about the time I gave some food to a homeless person. 

Despite the survey having been made more pleasant with questions about both good behavior and bad behavior,  only 13% of those getting the survey have answered it.  This is even though the survey was designed with some fancy scheme designed to "anonymize" individual responses, so that you can't tell who sent a particular response, and no one will suffer consequences from confessing bad behavior. It seems our scientists don't want to talk about all the poor  practices that are going on in science research. 

So the response of the typical scientist getting the survey is rather like the response of the politician below:

Journalist: Do you often tell lies in your Senate speeches? 

Politician: No comment. 

Journalist: Do you sometimes take bribes? 

Politician: No comment. 

Journalist: Is it true you are a bigamist? 

Politician: No comment. 

Luckily, we don't really need a survey to discover all the questionable practices that go on in scientific research. We can just do random inspections of scientific papers, using resources such as the Physics paper server at arXiv.org and the biology preprint server to find such papers.  Here is how some bad practices can be found:

• In an experimental paper, do a search for the word "blind" to discover whether a blinding protocol was used. You will find that in very many or most such papers there is no mention of a blinding protocol, meaning there was a fair chance of biased  data gathering or biased data analysis, in which researchers see what they're hoping to see and find what they're hoping to find. 
• In an experimental paper, do a search for the phrase "sample size calculation" to discover whether the researchers made any attempt to calculate the minimum study group sizes needed to get a robust result. You will usually find that they did not. 
• In an experimental paper, do a search for the phrase "n=" and "n =" to find the study group sizes that were used. You will very often find that study group sizes smaller than 15 were used, meaning that there was a high chance of a false alarm because of a too-small sample size. 
• Search for the phrase "conflict of interest" to find any conflicts of interest.  Such a search will often show that some of the researchers were employees of a company that stands to profit if the study claimed a positive result, or investors in such a company. 
• Search for the phrase "registered" to see whether the study was a pre-registered study that declared (before it began) that it would test one particular hypothesis using one particular method.  You will almost always find the study was no such thing. Studies that were not pre-registered are often kind of "fishing expeditions" in which dozens of possible effects or correlations are looked for after the data has been collected; and when such "HARKing" (Hypothesizing After Results are Known) occurs, there may be a large chance of a false alarm.  
• Analyze the paper to see whether the study's title made some claim that is never established by robust evidence, something that very often occurs.
• Analyze the paper's abstract to see whether the study's abstract made some claim that is never established by robust evidence, something that very often occurs. A scientific study found that 48% of scientific papers use "spin" in their abstracts. 
• Whenever you read some dubious claim that has a reference number, as if the claim was proven by some previous paper, track down the corresponding paper to find whether it actually showed or asserted such a claim. You will often find it did not. 

According to a previous meta-analysis, when asked if they had knowledge of a colleague who fabricated or falsified data, or modified research data, "between 5.2% and 33.3% of respondents replied affirmatively." According to Figure 5 of the same meta-analysis, six different studies found  that about 2% of scientists confess that they themselves fabricated, falsified or altered data.  We have every reason to suspect that the actual percentage of scientists doing such a thing is much higher, simply because the percentage of people who confess to wrongdoing will always be much smaller than the percentage that commit wrongdoing. One paper ("Analysis and Correction of Inappropriate Image Duplication: the Molecular and Cellular Biology Experience") concluded that "as many as 35,000 papers in the literature are candidates for retraction due to inappropriate image duplication."  They found that 6% of the papers "contained inappropriately duplicated images." A study tells us the following about a survey of scientists:

"Up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys asking about the behaviour of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% (N = 12, 95% CI: 9.91–19.72) for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices."

In The Lancet, Stuart Clarke wrote the following:

"The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, 'poor methods get results'... In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours."

Questionable research practices

We should remember that a good fraction of scientists are scrupulously honest people who rigorously follow high standards very carefully, but we should also remember that many are no such thing, and that some of the most important claims of modern scientists are claims that will not seem very well-established after we carefully inspect the types of questionable research practices and weak arguments used to try to substantiate such claims.  

The Mystifying Mrs. Morel

On page 30 of Eugene Osty's book Supernormal Faculties in Man, we read of a Mrs. Morel who was said to have paranormal powers. A woman presented to Mrs. Morel a cape, telling her that a jewel worn with the cape had been stolen. Mrs. Morel stated, "It has not left the house...I see her wrapping the jewel in an old newspaper and throwing it under a table in a long room like a hall." We are told that later that evening a servant reported finding the jewel "in the hall in an old newspaper. " 

On page 79 we have a report of how a mere glove was given to Mrs. Morel, who was asked "What am I to see about this woman?" and then told, "Look for what is troubling her at this moment." Mrs. Morel correctly said she saw that the woman had lost a large jewel, and also gave correct details about how the jewel would be recovered.

On page 96 we are told that Mrs. Morel was given a piece of ribbon and told that the person to whom the ribbon belonged had left his house before the Germans arrived, and was asked to "see what has happened to him since." We are told Mrs. Morel "gave his exact description" and gave a description of him going down 17 or 18 steps, carrying gold.  We are told that the scene described by Mrs. Morel was "exact," that the stairs contained 17 steps, and that the man had been carrying gold. 

On page 97 we read that a woman gave a letter to the hypnotized Mrs. Morel from the woman's husband (believed to be overseas), and asked Mrs. Morel to tell of his health.  Mrs. Morel said that the husband was "in this town, in Paris."  She gave the same answer eight days later. The wife later found that the husband had a mistress in Paris, who he was seeing during part of the time he claimed to be overseas.  

On page 99 we read that Mrs. Morel was given a photograph, face down, and asked about it by Eugene Osty. She first described exactly the person who had sent the photo to Osty. Asked to speak about the person in the photo, she correctly described the person as someone who had suffered "a quick transition from full life to death," involving "something in the head." The photo was of a man who had died fairly quickly from meningitis or some other cerebral affliction, dying in 15 days. 

On page 100 we read that a book of a dead soldier (an instruction manual in the artifical language of Esperanto) was given to Mrs. Morel, who was asked about its owner.  Mrs. Morel correctly described the soldier's death. 

The incidents above occurred when Mrs. Morel was under hypnosis.  We have here further evidence that clairvoyance can occur most dramatically when certain people are hypnotized, something that was abundantly described by quite a few nineteenth century writers, such as I quote in the posts here, here and here.  On page 120 we read this:

"Some few subjects, much more rarely met with, only show the faculty when in profound hypnosis. Madame Morel, from whom I have obtained several of the results quoted in this book, is of this type. She is hypnotized by the direct gaze, and suddenly falls into a sleep so profound that all mental life seems extinct in her brain ; she seems a body without thought or spontaneity, keeping any attitude in which she may be placed. But as soon as her psychism is called into activity by questions, one is amazed to find, in spite of the cataleptic state, the same intellectual activity as in the subjects whose faculty appears under light hypnosis or in the waking state."

On page 131, we have a general description of the amazing powers in Mrs. Morel: 

"I. Any object placed in the hands of Mme Morel almost immediately arouses the mental perception of one of the persons who have previously touched it, and allow of her receiving knowledge concerning that person's life. 

II. Each human individual who has touched the object may be evoked and cognized. The experimenter cannot know in advance which of the personalities will first come up. To reach the personality on whom investigation is desired it is sometimes necessary to dismiss a varying number of those that are not required. 

III. Human individuals connected with the lives of the persons who have touched the object may also, though more rarely, be cognized. This fact has caused some persons to take for errors revelations that were only misdirection of the faculty. 

IV. Each of the persons thus evoked is perceived distinctly, without there ever being transpositions or confusion of the physical states of the different persons who have touched the object. 

V. As soon as mental evocation of the personality has been obtained the object that called it up may be taken from the percipient and destroyed. The percipient, nevertheless, continues to describe the states of life in the distant person just as if he were present, or at any rate as if the object were still being held. 

VI. Every one of the personalities which have been evoked by contact can be cognized with reference to the totality of his being, in its whole duration and extension ; at whatever moment in the life contact may have been made. For instance, with an object touched twenty years before and never since, the percipient can cognize the life as it is at present and can recognize its course. 

VII. The physical and chemical nature of the objects is not a perceptible factor in their usefulness. With Mme M., however, the objects that stimulate best are those with which contact has been frequent and prolonged, and which have not been touched by others."

The skill described in Mrs. Morel has been given the name of psychometry, which means a paranormal ability to deduce information from a material object, relating to a person associated with that object. The Osty book is from the twentieth century, and there were similar  descriptions of psychometry incidents in nineteenth century books. One such book is Manual of Psychometry: The Dawn of a New Civilization by Joseph R. Buchanan M.D. Below is an example of one of the book's accounts of psychometry, and note how the author states that he successfully performed such experiments "more than a thousand times." 

"I was sitting with my young friend in an apartment in the Astor House, when I resolved to test his powers. I proceeded to my trunk and took forth four letters written by individuals of strongly marked and peculiar characters. I placed them successively in his hands and requested him to watch the mental impressions to which they gave rise in his mind, and report his conceptions of the characters of the writers. He did so, and his descriptions surpassed my anticipations. He entered into the spirit of each character as familiarly as if he had been in contact with the individual, and described not only his intellect and his principles of action, but even his personal appearance and physical constitution. He knew not of whom he was speaking — he did not even know what letters I had placed in his hands — yet I can say, without exaggeration, that his description would not have been more correct if he had described the individuals from familiar personal knowledge ! Does this statement, kind reader, appear utterly incredible? I have repeated such experiments more than a thousand times with similar results, and could adduce the testimony of thousands who have been the witnesses or the subjects of such experiments. If human testimony can establish any proposition, it is sufficiently strong upon this subject."

On page 37 the writer tells how tests of psychometry were particularly successful when he had subjects hold in their hands or hold to their foreheads a letter written at a time of strong emotion:

"I have usually selected for my first experiments, letters written under intense feelings. The best that I have used, is a letter written by a gentlemen of strong character and ardent emotions, immediately after the death of his wife. The overwhelming grief and agonizing sense of desolation, with which he narrated the death of his beautiful and queenly bride, never failed to arouse vivid feelings in those of high impressibility. In one of my first experiments, that letter was placed in the hands of a lady, the wife of Dr. C. of Boston, who, as well as her husband, was entirely skeptical as to such experiments. The first effect discovered was visible in the tears which she could not restrain. Several times, in other cases, I have simply placed the letter upon the forehead, and left it to tell its own tale of woe, in the sad countenance and tearful eyes of the subject of the experiment. Where the sympathy was thus complete, they were generally able, upon composing themselves, to inform me that the feeling aroused in their own minds, was that of grief — such as would be caused by the loss of some very near and dear friend or relative. Quite a number have been able to state, from their impressions, that the grief of the writer, was caused by the death of his wife ; and some have even vaguely described her appearance." 

On pages 46-48 Buchanan describes an experiment in which he placed a letter vigorously written by Andrew Jackson to the forehead of a Mr. K.  This Mr. K. correctly identified the tone of the letter, and also stated that the letter "was from such a man as Gen. Jackson."  Buchanan later reports trying the same experiment with a Bishop Otey, who said the letter was from "just such a man as Gen. Jackson" when the letter was placed upon his forehead. 

More recently, a book called Visions of Time by David E. Jones PhD presented evidence of psychometry involving people who told correct details about the people associated with hard-to-recognize  archeological artifacts presented to them.  His research is described here.