Conspiracy Theory

Hoaxes and Conspiracies in Science

A living science is constantly changing as new facts and theories enrich it. As a consequence, if you look back at earlier times it's easy to find examples of most or all scientists of the day believing things that we no longer think are true. The late movie producer and science fiction writer Michael Crichton exploited this phenomenon to come up with his theory of "consensus science." Briefly, this theory can be summarized:
(A) In cases 1, 2 and 3 most scientists believed X, but
(B) X was false and Y was true, and
(C) (by implication) If there is a consensus among scientists, it is probably wrong.

One doesn't need a PhD in logic to see the flaw in that one.

I was looking over some of the stuff presented at the Heartland Institute's anti-climate science conference, and some other papers by a couple of prominent attendees. The attendees all agreed that anthropogenic global warming was a myth and a hoax, but they had quite a variety of theories as to why: deep ocean currents, solar output, exotic feedbacks, cosmic and planetary influences. Mostly I didn't pay to much attention to those, because a lot of them were know-nothing idiots - let them fight it out amongst each other. Two guys interested me though, because they had some atmospheric science chops: Bill Gray, the retired hurricane predictor, and Richard Lindzen of MIT, a guy who can actually calculate.

Bill and Dick didn't agree with each other much either, but they did agree on one thing: there was a conspiracy that had seized control of atmospheric science, and it was perpetrating this giant hoax upon the world. Now I knew that there had been a number of hoaxes in the history of science, but I couldn't actually remember any big conspiracies, so I had to look at the record. Many of the hoaxes are famous, like the Cardiff giant and Piltdown man. Most of them are sort of pathetic - some guy fudges his data and then can't stop. I couldn't seem to find any that involved more than a couple or three perpetrators though. Was there any history of giant scientific conspiracies involving thousands of scientists all over the world?

Well, there have been some claims: the conspiracy to pretend smoking causes cancer, the conspiracy to pretend CFCs destroy ozone, the conspiracy to pretend HIV causes AIDS, the conspiracy to convince us that humans evolved from lower animals, and, that contemporary favorite, the global warming conspiracy. Oddly enough, there is a lot of overlap amongst the dauntless crusaders exposing all of the above - they include a lot of the same people, funded by the same think tanks and corporations. On the other hand, the usual consensus holds that these debunkings are bogus.

Is there any example of a conspiracy theory in science that was later vindicated - some wrong idea that was proven to be a large scale hoax? Scientists have often been wrong, of course. Anybody who looks at a globe can hardly not notice the way North and South America seem to fit with Europe and Africa. Alfred Wegner noticed it in 1910, and he also noted a continuity of fossils across the oceans that was highly suggestive of the idea that the continents had split apart some time in the past. Most geologists of the time were skeptical. Nobody could figure out how to make the physics of continents plowing through rigid ocean crust work, and there didn't seem to be any good ways to test the idea. Fifty years later, new experimental discoveries opened the way to examining the ocean bottoms, and that led to a revolution in the understanding of continental drift. Wegner was vindicated, but the doubters had not been wrong to doubt - nobody knew enough to make the judgement at the time. There was no hoax and no conspiracy, just the normal advance of scientific knowledge. Many similar examples can be found, but I have yet to find one that could plausibly be described as a hoax or conspiracy.

I am pretty sure, in fact, that if AGW really is a giant scientific conspiracy, it is the very first ever. Which is why I am pretty confident in calling bullshit on Gray, Lindzen, and all their lesser cohorts. It could certainly turn out that global warming theory is wrong, but even if it is, Lindzen and Gray will still be nuts.

They are neither the first nor the most prominent scientists to doubt the conventional wisdom, and sometimes such people prove correct. But once you start seeing the bogeyman under the bed, you have probably gone over the brink.

Science is very poorly organized for supporting conspiracies. Scientists are contentious by nature, and one way to get noticed is to expose the flaws in some other scientist's thinking. The reward structure is also not set up to really reward conspiratorial work. Scientific rewards tend to flow to those who innovate - those who are doing something different from the crowd. If you are in science for the bucks, a better shot is becoming a mouthpiece for some wealthy and powerful economic interest that has skin in the game. Even in that racket though, there is hardly scope for a conspiracy of thousands - at best, a few dozen can make a living in that way.

A prominent scientist told the story of going to see a lecture by an elderly Sir Arthur Eddington, and realizing to his distress that Eddington had left the real line. "Will that happen to us?" he asked his companion. "No" was the answer, "a genius like Eddington may go nuts, but guys like you just get dumber and dumber." Sadly, though, he was wrong. Dumb guys go nuts just like the smart ones.