You seem to have difficulty bringing your thoughts to some specific
focus. Now that you've given us some rather general platitudes, can
you answer my specific request that you CITE actual, specific, concrete
EXAMPLES of the "numerous errors" which you said could be found weekly
in Nature and/or in Science. I arbitrarily suggested specific weeks,
(e.g. 3rd week in November, 1998, for one journal, 2nd week in May,
l999 for the other), but just pick any week of your own choosing and
point out the error. Let us decide whether we agree with you that it
is an error.
F. Frank LeFever, Ph.D.
New York Neuropsychology Group
In <37668718.75DDAF17 at tc.umn.edu> "Alan J. Robinson"
<robin073 at tc.umn.edu> writes:
>>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
