The Problems With Peer Review In Establishing New Science .

[Guest]

Read James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds.

 

There's a good chapter in there about the groupthink that is mainstream science.  On the one hand, he points out, it is good.  Harebrain stuff doesn't go mainstream easily.  Loose ends tend to get tied up.  Researchers know their research had better be sound.  Scrutiny will be done.

 

(Usually.)

 

Then there's the downside.  To paraphrase Surowiecki, you have to trust in the integrity, flexibility, insight and gut of the mainstream.  Ideas they don't like are going to have a hard row to hoe even if they are valid.  They aren't going to even look at stuff they don't consider seriously. 

 

 

 

Which experience has proven time and again you cannot do.  A bunch of irrational individuals with biases, preconceptions, and imperfect information do not magically become a single, perfect, rational, and fully informed mind by the mere act of aggregation.

Step 1 - obtain piece of bigfoot.

Step 2 - describe piece of bigfoot as have been described over 1,000,000 holotypes in the scientific literature.

Step 3 - submit paper to journal of choice.

Step 4 - stand back as editors trip over themselves to rush your paper into print.

Step 5 - pop cold one and wait for media to beat a path to your door.

And (again) you describe the One True Way...only it isn't.  It ignores the voluminous evidence on proffer already.

 

I go back to my mountain analogy.  You are demanding One Big Rock before you will admit to the mountain.  The pile of a billion pebbles need not apply.

That's not true science.  That's abusing science.

Melba didn't have Monkey. And by the majority of accounts, her science was garbage. 

 

Let's see their multi-year study with, multi-author peer reviewed paper to prove it then.

Same standard you "science" types demand of proponents, but when YOU get confronted with it you run like Dracula from a cross.

[Guest JiggyPotamus]

I could not agree with you more sir, and very well said. I completely concur with the belief that professional science, composed of individual scientists who have the same pitfalls of all other human beings, has been shown to halt scientific progression through personal bias. It is amazing to me to think that science has a strict method of fact-finding, and certain methods are supposed to be used, yet this same logical and critical thinking is cast aside sometimes when someone is attempting to challenge scientific beliefs. And the greater the foundation of the belief, the more progress is halted towards getting the information out there.

 

Scientists are supposed to be curious individuals, people who wish to seek the truth, whatever it may be. They are not supposed to disregard ANYTHING at all if there is evidence to support that thing. A scientist should not be allowed the luxury of opinions when it comes to many things, in my opinion. They are not in the business of belief, but in the business of fact. I can only imagine the trouble that sasquatch related reports would have if the authors were attempting to get them published in a credible journal. Despite the fact that sasquatch cannot be disproved, mainstream science has cast the idea aside. Why? I suppose I could understand this if there were no evidence to support the idea, but this is not the case.

 

So what I am saying is that a good scientist will always be open to ideas like this, as long as there is a something to suggest the possibility. It may not be probable, but that is not the same thing as impossible. And I would bet that if a group of random scientists were asked about whether bigfoot could exist, the majority would scoff at the idea. And when the first pioneers actually begin attempting to bring bigfoot into the mainstream scientific community, I can only imagine the types of arguments that will be used against them. They will NOT be scientific arguments, or many of them won't.

 

Look at what some scientists were saying when they were interviewed regarding the Ketchum paper...Some of them actually used the argument that because the journal was not "reputable," or that there was talk of Ketchum owning the journal, that the report itself had to be bogus. I don't care where something like that is published, because it does not matter. What matters is what is contained within. And I can guarantee that there were people who were attacking her methods simply because of the subject matter she was dealing with. Had it been focused on something more routine, there would not have been the same outcry. I am not saying that the paper itself is perfect, because it is not. But, it makes a compelling argument for the existence of sasquatch in my opinion. 

 

Scientists are the ones to blame, not science itself, because the methods that have been laid out are still sound. It is the personal bias of these so called scientists that are actually holding back the progression of fields like this.

[Guest DWA]

^^^Sums it up.

[Guest Cervelo]

No the scientist are not at fault and are holding nothing back ... they really only ask one thing....

Prove it

[Guest DWA]

Absent the stuff on Ketchum.  I just didn't like the way she worked; and I'm suspicious of any bioloigical review that attempts to prove something without a type specimen.  There are too many questions when the organism the DNA came from can't be pointed to.  And Ketchum did say a number of things that make her credibility a tough sell.

 

But I'll buy the rest.

[Guest]

          I have noticed many skeptics use the line"show me in a peer reviewed journal" . I want to point out some of the real problems with the peer review process .  How many ground breaking theories would have been published in the past ? Imagine Darwin trying to publish Origins if he did it today . Newtons Principia .Scientis use the peer review card to silence scientific dissent . Kind of hypocritical to use non peer reviewed venues like the media to push your views on the public . Then use the rhetorical sneer of "does your view appear in a peer reviewed journal ?" when someone has a dissenting view .

         The peer review system often is biased against non majority veiw points . Scientific theory that challenges conventional wisdom often faces challenges that have nothing to do with science but are political in nature . The overwhelming flaw in the traditional peer review system is that it listed so heavily toward consensus that it showed little tolerance for genuinely new findings and interpretations.Today, the refereeing process works primarily to enforce orthodoxy.  Far to often the referee is quite often not as intellectually able as the author whose work he judges. We have pygmies standing in judgment of giants.

   Finally a link where scientists tackle the problem . The comments are very valuable to .

http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/three-myths-about-scientific-peer-review/

   With all of the problems of peer review how will science ever take a good look at the questions raised in this forum ? How will science ever invest what it will take to study bigfoot ?

 

Define "groundbreaking". If you mean theories that radically change our perception of reality, than probably not too often and scientists probably are initially antagonistic towards radical new theories but even your source shows that they do get published eventually if enough data supports them.

 

Bigfoot is not on the same level of the theory of evolution or the Higgs boson particle. It would likely be other twig on the tree of life. You'll feed paper that "challenge conventional wisdom" as much as Meldrum's.

[norseman]

Read James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds.

There's a good chapter in there about the groupthink that is mainstream science. On the one hand, he points out, it is good. Harebrain stuff doesn't go mainstream easily. Loose ends tend to get tied up. Researchers know their research had better be sound. Scrutiny will be done.

(Usually.)

Then there's the downside. To paraphrase Surowiecki, you have to trust in the integrity, flexibility, insight and gut of the mainstream. Ideas they don't like are going to have a hard row to hoe even if they are valid. They aren't going to even look at stuff they don't consider seriously.

Which experience has proven time and again you cannot do. A bunch of irrational individuals with biases, preconceptions, and imperfect information do not magically become a single, perfect, rational, and fully informed mind by the mere act of aggregation.

Step 1 - obtain piece of bigfoot.

Step 2 - describe piece of bigfoot as have been described over 1,000,000 holotypes in the scientific literature.

Step 3 - submit paper to journal of choice.

Step 4 - stand back as editors trip over themselves to rush your paper into print.

Step 5 - pop cold one and wait for media to beat a path to your door.

And (again) you describe the One True Way...only it isn't. It ignores the voluminous evidence on proffer already.

I go back to my mountain analogy. You are demanding One Big Rock before you will admit to the mountain. The pile of a billion pebbles need not apply.

That's not true science. That's abusing science.

Yes it is the only way....and it doesn't ignore the evidence it just does not find it conclusive enough to create a new species based on the data. And why should it? It doesn't do it with any other new species.....so why lower the net for Sasquatch???

Oh and your analogy? Your too busy picking up and examining pebbles to step back and look around......there is no mountain....just a broad flat plain.

Proof is needed and that is the only way....and the only way it should be. Stop lamenting over your pebble pile and start searching for that big rock!!

[dmaker]

The problem with Bigfoot pebbles is that so often the person proclaiming them is simply wrong. They end up, after proper examination, to be something completely mundane. 

[clubbedfoot]

Perhaps BF needs to be theorized via mathematical equations....

[Squatchy McSquatch]

Lack of monkey is why no peer review.

[Guest DWA]

This is new stuff.  Science doesn't even look at evidence until proof is obtained.

 

You know how far our species would have gotten operating that way, right?

 

We wouldn't have gotten into caves, much less out of them.

 

The people who are waiting for proof don't seem to understand that's their job.

[Guest Urkelbot]

Science does look at evidence befor proof is obtained.

This evidence let's you create a testable hypothesis which can than be proven or disproven.

What are scientists even supposed to be studying? It would be one thing if there was a body or even some DNA all kinds of work could be done. You could argue that scientists should be finding Bigfoot. But who is paying for this? No one is handing out grants for Bigfoot research. If they were I bet lots of scientists, especially out of work ones, would take the money. You should be blaming the government, corporate America, the university system for not setting aside money for this research.

I don't really understand all the anger and hostility towards science I have seen from the Bigfoot community. It seems rather odd and it has a similar vibe that comes from creationists.

[Guest DWA]

Science does look at evidence befor proof is obtained.

This evidence let's you create a testable hypothesis which can than be proven or disproven.

What are scientists even supposed to be studying? It would be one thing if there was a body or even some DNA all kinds of work could be done. You could argue that scientists should be finding Bigfoot. But who is paying for this? No one is handing out grants for Bigfoot research. If they were I bet lots of scientists, especially out of work ones, would take the money. You should be blaming the government, corporate America, the university system for not setting aside money for this research.

I don't really understand all the anger and hostility towards science I have seen from the Bigfoot community. It seems rather odd and it has a similar vibe that comes from creationists.

 

I don't feel like blaming Massive Entities for this problem.  Isn't that a little conspiracy-theorist? 

 

It's like all the people who think there's a continent-wide conspiracy to gin up a fake, biologically and ecologically plausible case for a large omnivorous bipedal temperate-zone primate with at least two plausible ancestor candidates in the fossil record.  It's like that.

 

This is individuals who are causing this problem, individuals who mouth off about things they know nothing about.

 

One has ditched a considerable amount of one's scientific credibility when one does that. 

 

Max Planck has already indicated that these people will eventually be taken care of.  I just don't feel like waiting for a bunch of funerals to find out what is causing all this evidence, because my funeral might be among them.

 

I have never seen anyone with a skeptical take on this - scientist or no - who has done a halfway-decent job of (1) reading up on the evidence and (2) thinking about it.

 

When that is the case, peer review is a joke.  There can be no peer review of something about which all the 'peers' are ignorant.  Sorry.  Way it is.

 

This has happened many times in the history of science.  The human race would know more and be better off if it happened fewer times.

 

I don't see how a stone denial of things one is uncomfortable with is compatible with peer review.

 

Save the peer review for the things scientists know something about.  They should know a whole lot more about this than they do; that is apparent every time the mainstream opens its mouth on this subject.

[Guest Cervelo]

[Guest Urkelbot]

I was looking through google scholar to see some of what bigfoot related stuff was published.

 

There was this published somewhat recently http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2699.2009.02152.x/full#b15.  Although this doesn't really support a bigfoot exists argument.

 

This one about the Yeti is kind of funny.  http://www.lanevol.org/LANE/yeti_files/yeti_1st_April_MPE_2004.pdf  It must have been horse hair.  

 

Here is the one that was argued about recently from the bison hair http://bigfootforums.com/uploads/post-212-0-35172400-1329429980.ipb

 

Its kind of funny how in the biogeography paper they cite the two other journals which indicate that Bigfoot is an ungulate.  I suppose i could see how that would anger serious bigfoot researchers what with scientists poking fun at the bigfoot phenomenom.

 

Meldrum had a paper published here http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_18_1_meldrum.pdf

 

I could see a paper with an in depth statistical analysis of Bigfoot footprints compared against other species random footprints possibly being published.  If scat was found a biologist could do metagenomic survey of microorgaisms within it and compare that against known species.  Metagenomics is still pretty new but they have done it several different animals scat.

 

But honestly what else can really be published until DNA or a body is found?  

 

Maybe I am wrong but what other great papers about Bigfoot have been rejected by the peer review process?  I remember reading Krantz had a some stuff rejected near the end and of course the failed Ketchum paper.