Friday 9 June 2023
When the science is untrustworthy?
Fossil Friday: The Gupta Scandal
This Fossil Friday features conodont microfossils from the Triassic of the Himalaya region in India (Goel 1977) to illustrate a veritable crime story. You may have heard of cases of fraud in paleontology such as the famous hoaxes of Piltdown Man and Archaeoraptor, but the greatest scientific fraud of the century is not so well known outside of professional paleontologist circles. It was Indian scientist Vishwa Jit Gupta, professor of geology at Panjab University, who played the “star role” in this biggest case of fraud in paleontology and maybe all of science ever (Lewin 1989).
A Dubious Accident
Gupta was India’s most celebrated paleontologist, with 455 scientific publications (including two Nature papers and five books), when the scandal started to come to light in 1989 (Talent 1989, Lewin 1989, Anderson 1991, Nature 1993), but it took nine years for the total truth and magnitude of the scandal to be revealed (Ruffell et al. 2012, Webster 2016). It turned out that over 30 years of research with 126 gullible co-authors, Gupta had falsified data, stolen fossils from colleagues and collections around the world, and then claimed to have found them in the Himalayas, often in made-up localities and layers. Gupta’s “fraudulent practices have involved most invertebrate phyla as well as the vertebrates and include fossils of Cambrian to Cenozoic age” (Webster et al. 1993). Gupta did not only commit scientific fraud on an unprecedented scale, but he even issued death threats with head money to whistleblowers including Australian geologist John Talent, one of whom one was actually killed in a dubious accident (Carleton 2005, Ruffell et al. 2012). After a final report in 1994 found Gupta guilty of all charges, “an article in the Indian weekly The World called for Gupta to be stripped of his PhD and DSc degrees, both of which had been demonstrated to be based upon fraudulent work. Strangely, though, when the Academic Senate of the Panjab University met to decide Gupta’s fate, only five out of the 55 senators voted for his dismissal. Gupta was allowed to keep his position within the university, to supervise research students and to retain his degrees” (Fossil Industry 2022).
Good to Remember
Gupta retired normally in 2002, with super-annuation benefits (Patnaik 2015), and none of his fraudulent publications has been retracted. Nor was he ever held legally accountable for his unbelievable misconduct. In 2013 a book was finally published in India about the case (Shah 2013). Nowadays, such a scandal would likely never have been uncovered at all, because political correctness would hardly allow anyone to accuse a scientist from a non-Western country of such outrageous behavior or even find that “India is also a leading nation in fraudulent scientific research” (Patnaik 2015). An obvious question that is also not allowed to be asked concerns the desolate state of a whole scientific discipline, where such a massive fraud could happen in the first place and stay unnoticed for decades. Good to remember when somebody tells you to just trust in science and to stop asking inconvenient questions.
References
Anderson I 1991. Himalayan scandal rocks Indian science. NewScientist Febr. 9, 1991. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12917551-600-himalayan-scandal-rocks-indian-science/
Carleton S 2005. What happens to the Whistleblowers? ABC The Science Show Sept. 3, 2005. http://web.archive.org/web/20050911052826/http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s1451250.htm
Fossil Industry 2022. A famous case of Indian fossil fraud and theft. Fossil Hunters Dec. 21, 2022. https://www.fossilhunters.xyz/fossil-industry/a-famous-case-of-indian-fossil-fraud-and-theft.html
Goel RK 1977. Triassic Conodonts from Spiti (Himachal Pradesh), India. Journal of Paleontology 51(6), 1085–1101. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1303823
Lewin R 1989. The Case of “Misplaced” Fossils. Science 244(4902), 277–279. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.244.4902.277
Nature 1993. Palaeontology under a Himalayan shadow. Nature 366(6456), 616. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/366616a0
Patnaik PR 2015. Scientific Misconduct in India: Causes and Perpetuation. Science and Engineering Ethics 22(4), 1245–1249. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-015-9677-6
Ruffell A, Majury N & Brooks WE 2012. Geological fakes and frauds. Earth-Science Reviews 111(1-2), 224–231. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2011.12.001
Shah SK 2013. Himalayan Fossil Fraud – A View from the Galleries. Palaeontological Society of India Special Publication 4, University of Lucknow, 141 pp.
Talent JA 1989. The case of peripatetic fossils. Nature 338(6217), 613–615. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/338613a0
Webster GD 2016. An evaluation of the V. J. Gupta echinoderm papers, 1971–1989. Journal of Paleontology 65(6), 1006–1008. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S002233600003331X
Webster GD, Rexroad CB & Talent JA 1993. An Evaluation of the V. J. Gupta Conodont Papers. Journal of Paleontology 67(3), 486–493. https://www.jstor.org/stable
A pair of knights joust?
Friendly Sparring, Verbal and Otherwise, on a Recent Episode of The Bryan Callen Show
Michael Shermer is one of comedian and podcaster Bryan Callen’s go-to science skeptics. So when Callen invited Dr. Stephen Meyer on his show recently, he knew he’d have a colorful back-and-forth on his hands if he also asked Shermer to join in. The result is the type of interaction we’re secretly craving more of these days — energetic conversation between people with differing views but who demonstrate respect for one another, for themselves, and for those who may be watching.
“So afterwards, we’re going at it!” Shermer jokes with a chuckle early in the proceedings. And why not? In their younger years, Stephen trained as a boxer and Michael rode bikes professionally. After the verbal sparring, there may be a chance for these athletic scholars to settle things off-camera.
One reason a Shermer/Meyer match-up makes sense is that both men demonstrate a healthy level of intellectual humility, an essential ingredient in any debate over important scientific ideas. “I’ll talk to anybody,” Shermer acknowledges, “because I’m curious to know, is it possible I’m wrong in this new idea?” Indeed, Shermer recently spent over two hours wrestling with Meyer’s arguments on his own Podcast discussing Return of the God Hypothesis.
Higher, Unmeasurable Truths
As Callen probes Shermer on whether higher, unmeasurable truths exist in life, Meyer helps to focus the conversation on the science:
There are both observables and unobservables as we begin to think about the big questions. And the God question, I think, is a question of metaphysics, but it’s also a question of science. And even the most staunch atheists inadvertently reveal that they accept that as well. Richard Dawkins, for example, has said that the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if at bottom there is no purpose, no design, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Dawkins’s way of framing the issue, says Meyer, implies that metaphysical hypotheses, whether materialism, theism, deism, or pantheism, can be tested, just as scientific hypotheses can be tested, by making observations about the properties of life in the universe.
A Conference in Wales
Not so fast, contests Shermer. “The idea that there’s one theory here, and then there’s the God hypothesis — no. There’s actually a dozen over here and we don’t know which one’s the right one.” Shermer reported on a conference he had recently attended in Wales where he watched Roger Penrose, Brian Greene, and others debate the Big Bang and the origin of the universe. “There is not agreement that there was a beginning called the Big Bang,” says Shermer. “There is no ‘A’ Beginning, it just keeps cycling through…”
“No, no, that’s not actually accurate,” interjects Meyer politely:
There is empirical evidence of a beginning. What Penrose does is postulate an infinite cycle of beginnings for which he has no evidence and has to posit something called a phantom field, which other physicists have rejected on the grounds that the phantom field has attributes that no other physical field ever postulated in physics has, namely mind-like characteristics. It can reduce entropy at just the right time in just the right way to allegedly produce another cycle of expansion, but there’s no evidence for an infinite cycle of beginnings. That’s a pure theoretical postulation.
“What’s More Magical?”
The sparring continues over fine-tuning, the origin of complexity, and why mind is a better candidate for a prime reality than matter alone. “Michael and I both agree that we both oppose magical thinking,” says Meyer. “But the question is what’s more magical?” Is it more magical to posit causal powers to brute inanimate matter that our observation shows isn’t capable of producing the effects in question, or to posit a mind, knowing that minds are real and knowing from our own observation what minds are capable of doing?
Throughout their conversation both Meyer and Shermer reveal a fair bit of common ground, from effective political systems to their adherence to Bayesian logic. That means they also both agree that it’s not possible to be 100 percent positive about a given hypothesis. Which is why Meyer follows the same methods of reasoning that Charles Darwin and his 19th-century contemporaries used in their own work. Examine multiple competing hypotheses, test and evaluate their explanatory power, and make an inference to the best explanation. As Shermer puts it as he defines what truth is, “something confirmed to such a degree it would be reasonable to offer your provisional assent.”
“I’m also a skeptic,” says Meyer, “but I’m a skeptic about the magical thinking that materialism now entails. I think Michael and I have a lot of commonality and epistemology but difference in judgment about where the rub is.”
Come for the sparring. Stay for the civility. Enjoy for yourself this friendly, thoughtful exchange on the God question!
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