About that academic fraud

Clayton Cramer links to an article about an archaeologist who has been forced to retire from his university position because he falsified data.

Clayton's comment:

Obviously, one scientist's fraud isn't going to significantly damage the claims of evolution, which is dependent on a lot more evidence than this, but this is an extraordinarily gross form of dishonesty. Like Piltdown Man, this wasn't an honest mistake. If it takes this long for blatant dishonesty to get caught, it makes you wonder how long it takes for honest mistakes to get sorted out.

Um...

One thing that's not terribly clear in the article is, just how long did it take?

The Guardian mentions Professor Protsch had a 30-year career, but Deutsche Welle asserts that he has falsified data during the entire thirty years. DW, in fact, paints a picture of university neglect equivalent to the NY Times' disregard of Blair's misconduct.

Well, suppose the average mistake is 15 years old. Darwinian evolution is over 150 years old, so that's not a bad record. I suspect if people had been doing their job, someone would have checked Prof. Protsch's work a bit sooner.

However, it should serve as a bit of a come-uppance for the Creationists and Science Conspiracy Theorists that, as Duane Smith at Abnormal Interests writes:

The real lesson is that scientists discovered it. Real science is self correcting. Sometimes it takes a long time, sometimes it is immediate, but science is self correcting.

...continued in full post...

And what's more...

One should remember that it was scientists that debunked the Piltdown Man hoax. Why don't sciences opponents find these frauds and errors? Because, they very seldom study the evidence. They simply rail against it. Without a theory it is had to know what is supported by evidence and what isn't. It is even harder to know what evidence to and not test if one denies or ignores the salience of most evidence that does not support one's own position.

"...they very seldom study the evidence." It would help them make a better case if they actually did study the evidence. At the very least, they'd be arguing against what scientists actually believe, and not some caricature of it. Of course, if they studied it too carefully, they might be convinced by it, and we can't have that, can we?

Now another interesting question is, how much damage did this fraud do? Piltdown Man did very little harm, because relatively few anthropologists accepted it. It just didn't fit the pattern that was forming, outlined by other pieces of the puzzle that had been unearthed. When it was debunked, the only people who had to rewrite their theories were die-hard Anglophiles who wanted modern man to have evolved in Britain, regardless of what the evidence said.

In this case:

No great body of scientific literature or research developed around any of these Protsch "Men" and "Women."

Bottom line, while any fraudulent evidence can cause harm and set back or divert research, Protsch's fraud did a minimum of scientific harm but could provide another bonanza for the creationist.

It looks like no one believed this find fit the pattern either.