The Undergrowth of Science: Delusion, Self-Deception and Human Frailty

by Walter Gratzer

We think of scientists as sober, precise thinkers, but they can be wildly off the mark. Consider cold fusion, N-rays, or polywater--three "discoveries" that turned out to be complete nonsense. But serious scientists somehow convinced themselves that they were real.
In The Undergrowth of Science, Walter Gratzer recounts the blind alleys that honest, dedicated researchers have wandered down--and had to be dragged out of by more cool-headed colleagues. Self-deception runs through each of Gratzer's many examples, a distressing if sometimes hilarious theme. We meet the American researchers who convinced themselves that memories were captured in RNA molecules; if extracts from the brains of trained rats were injected into the untrained, they argued, the knowledge was passed along. Gratzer also describes the group of serious scientists took up the cause of Uri Geller and assorted 11-year-old children who claimed to have the power to bend spoons with their minds--but only if the observers wanted them to succeed. When less biased researchers saw the children slyly bending the cutlery with their feet, their scientific defenders voiced outrage at the unfairness of the test. Politics sometimes plays a role as well, as it did when the U.S. government spent millions looking into the strange and miraculous Soviet invention of polywater. It turned out to be normal water contaminated with silicates.
Gratzer guides us through the rogue's gallery of false discoveries, from mitogenic radiation to the recent (and infamous) cold fusion. Informative and entertaining, yet with a serious point to make, this book offers much insight into why good science sometimes goes bad.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, History

344 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 9, 2000

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gratzer's book falls naturally into two halves with a coda. The first half gives us seven case studies (ranging from the notorious N-rays through polywater and cold fusion to a rather grim section on medical idiocies) where science has been flawed because of failures of human perception or nature.

The second half, starting with Franco-German nationalist rivalry and working through Soviet and Nazi scientific failures and cruelties, explores 'bad science' under the influence of ideology with another grim coda on the history of eugenics.

Gratzer is looking at this from the point of view of science so he is not interested in the political reasoning of Stalin or the Nazi Movement which would be another book. To get the full picture, we might be wise to see science as simply 'second order' to other priorites rather than just a target.

There are some revealing quotations from Stalin in the book which do not suggest a stupid man but only one with other priorities in which scientists were always tools and never involved in ends of value in themselves equal to the ends of the ideologists.

We will come back to this issue of means and ends in a moment but one conclusion must be that if science is to deliver the social goods, then it has to be left to pursue its own means to social ends without interference - much as politicians should avoid interfering in generals' decisions in war.

The first half requires some degree of scientific knowledge and Gratzer (I think, rightly) does not concede ground to generalists too readily. The second half provides a narrative far more accessible to the general reader, highly readable and with sound historical sourcing.

The difficulty of the early chapters is well worth working through because Gratzer is building up a general picture of why science so often can go wrong. To his credit, he tends to let the facts speak for themselves and restricts his own theorising as to why this should be so.

My own conclusion from it all was not that science in itself is flawed if carried through properly but that there are intrinsic perceptual flaws within the socialisation process surrounding science that allows a variety of human weaknesses to shift science from end to tool or means.

There is no point in summarising the contents of the book. There is no section that does not enlighten and the only common denominator in the early cases is this shift from ends to means - compounded by careerism and self interest, delusion and failures of perception.

The role of politics in the later cases is interesting because, without going beyond his brief, Gratzer is good at pointing out just how self-defeating ideologies like nationalism, communism, national socialism and (in eugenics) 'bourgeois liberalism' were when it came to useful science.

No ideological system should be sacrosanct in the potential for our criticism, Dreadful crimes were committed against persons in the name of bad science under American democracy while all systems had some degree of self correction within them in some areas, notably physics.

The main lesson though is not that people can be stupid and self-serving (we all knew that in any case) but that bad science is self-defeating for those who promote it at a higher level - the Nazis did not get the Bomb, Soviet agriculture was under par and American social policy was primitive.

The question that naturally arises is - is it still going on now? I suspect not very much at the harder edge of science dealing with material things and grand theory but I remain suspicious of science as it moves closer to claims about complex systems, especially individuals.

There are signs that the social sciences are about to implode as a result of a closer inspection of its experimental methods over many decades. Time and again we now see keynote experiments questioned as to methodology and the lessons of the first half of Gratzer's book not yet learned.

As for ideology, the general ideology of late liberal capitalism is to give science its head and not interfere although it is clear that politics, often reasonably, dictates the general direction in which science goes through funding decisions rather than interfere with what it does with those funds.

If I had to put a bet on the area which will cause future generations to cringe in embarrassment, I suspect it will be somewhere around the religion of climate change with neither side in the debate wholly to be trusted although individual scientists no doubt do their best.

There is something about the sociopolitical dynamics of public investment and management of environmental science that sniffs, no more, of some of the same deluded practices outlined in this book albeit in a lower key. I do not know. It is just an instinct having read the book.

I just cannot believe, given the nature of individuals in our species and the structure of our belief systems, that 'bad science' (as opposed to full on pseudo-science or nonsense) simply died out on the day the book was published in 2000. The cold fusion story had dragged on until 1992.

One thought is about something Gratzer does not major on. He is not really giving us a book about sociology so I do not blame him for not engaging with the point but I am fascinated not by the deluded but by all those people who let the deluded carry on in their deluded way.

Of course, terror had its role to play in the Soviet system and, to some extent (certainly if you were Jewish), in the Nazi system but good science always co-existed with bad science and it is not certain that talented people could not have shifted the game with circumspection in many areas.

The way that people get carried along, unquestioningly, by social ends and then collaborate in the perversion of means is fascinating. Some cultures seem to be much better than others at simply standing firm and preserving the sphere of influence of something like science - or religion.

I found myself rather proud of being British in the section on eugenics, of British scientists generally standing up for what was right in the twentieth century (with a few delusions about the Soviets) and of the general lack of interest in European nationalist squabbles.

Certainly the American experience with eugenics is a bit too close to that of the Germans for comfort and perhaps there is something in American 'progressive' ideology that really is as potty as German national socialism in its own way.

But how is it that lack of scrutiny, accountability and questioning by peers, funders and the media allows matters in 'free' societies to carry on in this way. I can have only one obvious conclusion - most people simply know a lot less than they are claiming to know about what is going on.

I suspect that peers are cautious about criticising other peers because of their own uncertainies and fears of error (which is fair enough) while funders are relying on a cautious caste and the journalists with noble exceptions have to rely on dossiers from 'experts'.

Well, we all know about experts after the political farrago of 2016. The sociology of the expert, or rather the cult of the expert, seems to be of no interest to anyone. One suspects, after a while, that no one actually wants to open the lid and peer into the mental vacuum where they live.

There are people who really do know what they are doing as 'praxis', the doing of experimentation or theory or administration or whatever, but there is also a whole class of people sitting on top of them engaged in the politics of self-representation in a competitive social struggle.

This is what most comes out of the book (which by the way might give the wrong impression that bad science is more of a problem than it is given the scale of scientific endeavour) - that flawed individuals are promoting themselves and their careers in societies that are very manipulable.

Several times we come across behaviour that is close to sociopathic - notoriously in German racial 'science'. And the fact that the biological sciences (less certain in the past) became holding pens for much nonsense while the physical sciences proved more resilient is interesting.

This is why I think the crisis of trust will next come in ideologically-driven social and environmental sciences because biology has become much harder with a number of serious advances since the discovery of DNA and other major developments to give it 'bottom'.

If it is not a crisis in the social sciences, then the area I would look for burgeoning expert nonsense is probably in the increasingly hysterical claims on the wilder shores of transhumanism and futurism where one senses already that some claims are going far too far.

Here is an ideology that purports to depend on science in order to drive technology. Its interest in science and technology is not the issue. The issue is ideology because if scientists are being seduced by its claims, their weaker members are liable to fall into Gratzerism.

The prognostications about artificial intelligence and consciousness spring to mind first but also some of the complex mass engineering projects may prove to be a little less based on reality than their media-savvy proponents suggest. Too many of us are being seduced by all this far too easily.

The book is good history and good science. It is highly recommended as (generally) readable, thought-provoking and highly intelligent. Perhaps the thoughts it provokes suggest some caution in taking public science too much at its own word without maximum durability testing.

But it also suggests that science should be questioned certainly but not interfered with. The best corrective for bad science is good science undertaken by good scientists and the real problem is sociological - the conditions in which science is done and used.

The logic of it is that if we want good science, we are going to have to think about how to allow scientists to get on with the job but encourage its self-critical strengths and ensure that political and ideological interference is severely limited. There is something to be said for the ivory tower.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is highly recommended - a review of the history of scientific fads, from N-Rays through cold fusion, with lengthy chapters on how political forces affected the sciences in Nazi Germany and Soviet Europe.

[Tech Nossomy · Rating 3 out of 5]

An anthology of scientific delusions, from the misguided to the plain fraudulent, some more well known than others. There are 11 chapters each devoted to one particular episode of where either science or their delusional protagonists has gone astray, and tying them all together in the 10-page Envoi at the end of the book.

The story of Mesmer has been discussed extensively in other literature and little is uncovered that was not already known. Here the name is spelled as Messmer for unknown reason.

Well written and well researched, with many side stories to enhance readability and nowhere straying from the central theme. Also, the book does not dwell into the more well known frauds which have become cliches at this point, such as the Piltdown-man fraud and the superconductivity at high temperatures experiments in the late 1980s, just to name a few.

The book lacked in the topic of its subtitle: relatively little is discussed as to the origins of human frailty for example. Scientists or pseudo-scientists could be motivated by their claimed results for example by greed or a yearning for recognition, but this does not explain the core issue at hand or where delusion and self-deception come from.

Bought at thrift store and read a mere 2 months after the author's passing.

[Frederick Bingham · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a book about the periodic movements in science where scientists come into a cycle of self-delusion and retreat from a completely unbiased viewpoint. It discusses several examples of this. I skimmed through most of them. The interesting chapters were on cold fusion, Lysenkoism (Soviet biology) and science in Germany during the Third Reich. Others that I skipped were on polywater, eugenics and N-rays. This is an interesting book, but written in a dry academic style.

[dini · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting topics, but the writing was rather dry.

[Mike Klymkowsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkable history of people's (scientists and others) ability to delude and befuddle themselves.