Ratting Out the Truth, a Response to Feynman’s Call for Scientific Integrity

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. ~ King James Bible, Cambridge Edition

The age of science is a relatively new arrival along the human continuum.  Prior to scientific explanation, we have gotten by on folklore and the elucidation of mystics.  One would assume that with advances in science, technology, and particularly with the arrival of the information age, we would have graduated from witch doctor wisdom.

Yet, Richard Feynman posits a credible theory:  that despite our advances, human logic remains fragile at best, entrenched in the desire to explain with limitation.  What is that limitation?  To produce or report only those experiment results that conform to support any given number of desired outcomes.

Is this credible science?  Is this truth?  Or is it no closer to veritas than a Holy Shaman’s pilgrimage prescription for curing cancer?

Few self-proclaimed scientists may actually have the scientific integrity necessary to report an accurate conclusion.  Feynman suggests that all credible researchers be willing to bend over backwards—not in order to prove their theories correct, but to report the complete findings of every experiment, whether or not those findings lend credence to the original theory.

Mr. Young demonstrated true scientific integrity when he systematically eliminated external stimuli in a rat-maze experiment—something which seems to have never been done before.  While Mr. Young utterly failed to accomplish his original objective, his contribution to science is entirely more valuable—the ability to construct such a biological experiment with genuine results, thereby creating the specific conditions in which a researcher can learn about rats.

“They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn’t discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats.”  (CARGO CULT SCIENCE, Richard Feynman, 1974)

Let’s not continue to fool ourselves, unintentionally or otherwise.  Let us keep a child’s zeal for ferreting out a mystery’s truths while retaining our adult responsibility to recognize what is, free of false advertising, misreporting, lies of omission, or embellishment.