TEXT C "Finagle" is not a word
that most people associate with science. One reason why science is so respected
these days is that the image of the scientist is of one who dispassionately
collects data in an impartial search for truth. In any debate over intelligence,
schooling, bias, energy--the phrase "science says" usually squashes the
opposition. But scientists have long acknowledged the existence
of a "finagle factor"-a tendency by many scientists to give a helpful nudge to
the data to produce desired results. The latest example of the finagle factor in
action comes from Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard biologist, who has examined the
important 19th century work of Dr. Samuel George Morton. Morton
was famous in his time not only for amassing a huge collection of skulls but
also for anything the cranial capacity, or brain size, of the skulls’ as a
measure of intelligence. He concluded that whites had the largest brains, that
the brains of Indians and blacks were smaller, and therefore, that whites
constitute a superior race. Gould went back to Morton’s original
data and concluded that the results were an example of the finagle at work. "I
have reanalyzed Morton’s data," Gould wrote last week in the journal, Science,
"and I find that they are a patch work of assumption and finagling, controlled,
probably unconsciously, by his conventional prior ranking."
Morton reached his conclusions, Gould found, by leaving out embarrassing
data, using incorrect procedures, making simple arithmetical mistakes (always in
his favour) and changing his criteria again, always in favour of his
argument. Left alone, that finding would not be particularly
disturbing. Morton has been thoroughly discredited by now. Scientists do not
believe that brain size reflects intelligence, and Morton’s brand of raw racism
is out of style. But Gould goes on to say that Morton’s story is
only "an admittedly egregious example of a common problem in scientific work".
Some of the leading figures in science are believed to have used the finagle
factor. One of them is Gregor Mendel, the Bohemian monk whose
work is the foundation of modern genetics. The success of Mendel’s work was
based on finding a three-to-one ratio in the dominant and recessive
characteristics of hybrid plants he was breeding. He found that ratio. But
scientists recently have gone back to his data and have found that the results
are literally too good to be true. Like Morton, Mendel gave himself the benefit
of the doubt. And so, apparently, did Claudius Ptolemy, the
Greek astronomer whose masterwork, The Almagest, summed up the case for a solar
system that had the earth at its centre. Recent studies indicate that Ptolemy
either faked some key data or resorted heavily to the finagle factor.
All this is important because the finagle factor is still at work. In the
saccharin(糖精) controversy, for example, it was remarked that all the studies
sponsored by the sugar industry found that the artificial sweeteners were
unsafe, while all the studies sponsored by the diet food industry found nothing
wrong with saccharin. No one suggested that the scientists were
dishonest; it was just that they quite naturally had a strong tendency to find
data that would support their beliefs. The same tendency is observable in almost
every Controversial area of science today-the fight over race and intelligence,
the argument about nuclear energy, and so on. It is only
occasional that the finagle factor breaks out into pure dishonesty. One
example seems to be the research of Cyril Burt, the British scientist whose
studies were used to support the belief that intelligence is mostly inherited.
It now appears that Burt invented not only a good part of his results but also
made up two collaborators whose names appear on his scientific papers.
The moral that Gould draws from his study of Morton is not that scientists
are wicked but that they are just human beings, like the rest of us, and so
should be subjected to skepticism like the rest of us. "The culprit in this tale
is a naive belief that pure objectivity can be attained by human beings rooted
in cultural traditions of shared belief--and a consequent failure of
self-examination," Gould said. In other words, listen to what
science has to say, but never get far away from a grain of salt. At the end of the passage, Gould suggests that the results of a scientific research be treated with______.