To reply to Frank LeFever's questions about errors in Science and
Nature... This might be of especial interest to Frank as he is a
neuropsychologist, and of interest to scientists in general now that
brain research is blossoming.
As an intellectual and scientific discipline, psychology, the study of
human behavior, is in a unique situation and has a unique set of
problems. Psychology has an extensive scientific literature dating back
to the 19th century, but the vast majority of scientists in other
disciplines along with most educated members of the general public are
not familiar with this material. What passes for psychology for most
people, and is what is presented in introductory classes in college,
is mostly "pop" psychology as it is written about in popular books
and magazines.
What is worse is that many of these people think that they understand
human behavior scientifically, and are qualified to write about it and
comment on it in both the popular and scientific press. Some of the
worst offenders are at the world's most prestigious universities, e.g.
Penrose at Oxford, and Gould, Lewontin, and Wilson at Harvard. These
are people whose scientific qualifications are in physics, paleontology,
and entomology. How did they get to be such experts in human behavior?
In my own opinion it's about time the scientific establishment started
cracking down on this academic malpractice.
This lack of true scientific knowledge even extends to many
researchers and practitioners in the behavioral and brain sciences.
Thus the typical neuroscientist's or psychiatrist's model of human
behavior is usually some sort of pastiche of Freudianism and
behaviorism,
which have not stood up to rigorous scientific scrutiny. A new but
equally unscientific psychology has now appeared on the scene -
evolutionary psychology. Sir John Maddox, editor emeritus of Nature,
commented on this in his book "What Remains to be Discovered".
There is a fundamental methodological flaw in evolutionary psychology
which was exposed by Lewontin and Gould in a famous article
"The Spandrels of San Marcos". (Unfortunately, one of the few things
they have gotten right about human behavior.)
As I mentioned in an earlier post, research in the behavioral and brain
sciences has really taken off since the mid 1980s, validating many
earlier hypotheses, but disconfirming many more which still continue
to circulate in the scientific, practitioner, and lay communities. It
has long been an article of faith in the medical community that the
brain
can be safely ignored when it comes to the study of physical disease.
This has gone hand in hand with a general tendency in the 20th century
to ascribe unexplained medical phenomena for which there is no readily
apparent physical cause to psychological and social environmental
factors. Now that we know otherwise, the general lack of rigorous
knowledge of the brain and human behavior in the scientific community
is holding up the very progress of science and medicine itself.
AJR
