After all the hubbub surrounding some potholes in Northern Arizona, U earth sciences professor Marjorie Chan hasn’t rejected her co-authored study with geology grad student Winston Seiler, which concluded that the holes are dinosaur tracks. In the works is a follow-up with a group of paleontologists who publicly rejected the claim.
“They might convince me they are right, but I might convince them otherwise, or we might come to a conclusion that neither of us have anticipated,” Chan said.
Apparently, there is no regret for publishing a study which was seemingly a big discovery one day and a sham the next8212;not the usual publicity for a study printed in PALAIOS science journal. “That’s science,” Chan said.
Science indeed, but of a particular sort. The U is not unfamiliar with what Nobel Prize-winning physicist Irving Langmuir coined as “pathological science”: “Where there is no dishonesty involved but where people are tricked into false results…in the way of being led astray by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions.”
Cold fusion was a study published in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry in 1989 by then-U Chemistry Department Chairman Stanley Pons and electrochemist Martin Fleischmann. It gained worldwide attention, but became an embarrassment as the results have not been repeatable. The experiment remains an infamous scientific blunder. If its conclusion had been real, there would be no energy concerns today, because it held the possibility to produce vast energy at cool temperatures. Cold fusion fits Langmuir’s five symptoms of pathological science:
1. Many measurements are necessary because of the very low statistical significance of the results.
2. There are claims of great accuracy.
3. Fantastic theories contrary to experience are suggested.
4. Criticisms are met by ad hoc excuses thought up on the spur of the moment.
5. The ratio of supporters to critics rises up to somewhere near 50 percent and then falls gradually to oblivion.
Support for another U research claim, the dino dance floor, is falling to oblivion. Although I’m not qualified to reject these experts’ scientific opinion, even as an amateur geologist I am inclined to find doubt, only due to Langmuir’s noted phenomenon, in Seiler and Chan’s study while we await for collaborative teams’ findings.
Only 14 percent of the impressions measured possessed “identifiable foot morphologies.” Within those 14 percent, the impressions are not identical. The paper also goes on to excuse insubordinate evidence. For example, many of the so-called footprints have irregularities, which the study says could be the result of a smaller dinosaur stepping in a larger dinosaur’s previous footprint.
Another excuse: “The impressions are of such a high density that the large number of prints obscures identification of individual trackways.”
Interestingly, the paper cites a study by U geology master’s degree recipient Peter Steen and others, to interpret vertebrate tracks. In that 2001 study, Steen et al had similar trouble identifying trackways.
“One might argue that it is difficult to recognize clear trackway patterns because of the abundance of tracks and the superposition of several trackways,” the study said.
The team’s solution was to map the tracks, then sort the tracks using sets of different size intervals in order to find any hidden trackways.
“This procedure did not reveal any arrangement comparable to a trackway pattern,” the study said, using similar evidence to what Seiler and Chan found to negate their dinosaur hypothesis. However, their desire for a more exciting result seems to have blinded them.
Chan said she does not believe her study is an example of pathological science, because it “went through rigorous peer reviews before publication, (and) generated some discussion.”
However, the many examples of pathological science which Langmuir provided were also peer-reviewed, discussed at length, and still published.
Robert N. Hall, who transcribed the recording of Langmuir’s 1953 colloquium on pathological science, noted that “pathological science is by no means a thing of the past.”
So, next time you get a hunch in your studies and really want to prove something groundbreaking, remember what professor Adrian Palmer of the linguistics department teaches in research design class: Don’t set up research with the goal of proving the more exciting hypothesis.
Logan Campbell