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"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 intelce, 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 intelce. 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 reyzed 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, 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 intelce, 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 work, 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 intelce, 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 intelce 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 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.
The example of the sugar industry and the diet food industry is mainly to show that______.