Why So Much Peer Reviewed Science Is So Wrong
Ever since Daubert , lawyers have been fending off motions to exclude by proclaiming that the scientific studies on which their experts relied were peer reviewed and thus unassailable. Sadly, judges tend to think that a peer reviewed paper must indeed be some incremental addition to the field's body of knowledge. But are the claims in a paper that's been peer reviewed guaranteed to be true? No. But surely they're at least likely to be true, right? No. In fact, the conclusions reported in most peer reviewed scientific literature are wrong. Even those papers published in the journals with the highest impact factors are either wrong or have never even been tested an alarming percentage of the time.
Peer review is not some sort of certification of a high truth value for someone's research. Peer review exists to make sure no paper gets published whose author had gone about measuring temperature with a yardstick.
Science these days isn't what it was 100 or even 25 years ago. Seldom is what's found in prominent journals simply the reporting of observations (e.g. mesothelioma in a 2 year old girl) or the results of laboratory experiments (e.g. drinking an petri dish of H. pylori and developing peptic ulcer). In recent decades "science" has come to mean in many, many cases the sifting and re-sifting of data until some result so unlikely to have been due to chance alone appears. That result is then deemed knowledge.
But how unlikely, how very rare, must the result have been before it's crowned "Truth"? As unlikely, as rare, as being dealt two pair in a 5 card poker hand.
If you've ever played poker and bet the house on such a hand you're probably homeless. On the other hand, if you've made a living peddling liability theories resting on such odds down at the courthouse you're likely to have several homes.
Anyway, if you want to read about how science went so wrong and why, you can't do better than "Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science" just published in The Atlantic. It's the best and most important article you'll read this year about the current state of medical science.
