Bad Science Quotes

“Psychological pseudoscience dies hard, especially when there are commercial interests at stake.”
― Paul Gibbons, The Science of Successful Organizational Change: How Leaders Set Strategy, Change Behavior, and Create an Agile Culture

“Scientific prayer makes God a celestial lab rat, leading to bad science and worse religion.”
― Michael Shermer

“What I tried to make clear in Good Calories, Bad Calories was that nutrition and obesity research lost its way after the Second World War with the evaporation of the European community of scientists and physicians that did pioneering work in those disciplines. It has since resisted all attempts to correct it. As a result, the individuals involved in this research have not only wasted decades of time, and effort, and money but have done incalculable damage along the way. Their beliefs have remained imperious to an ever-growing body of evidence that refutes them while being embraced by public-health authorities and translated into precisely the wrong advice about what to eat and, more important, what not to eat if we want to maintain a healthy weight and live a long and healthy life.”
― Gary Taubes, Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It

“It may be easier to believe that we remain lean because we're virtuous and we get fat because we're not, but the evidence simply says otherwise. Virtue has little more to with our weight than our height. When we grow taller, it's hormones and enzymes that are promoting growth, and we consume more calories than we expend as a result. Growth is the cause - increased appetite and decreased energy expenditure (gluttony and sloth) are the effects. When we grow fatter, the same is true as well.

We don't get fat because we overeat; we overeat because were fat.”
― Gary Taubes, Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It

“Even if these researchers do see the need to address the problem immediately, though they have obligations and legitimate interests elsewhere, including being funded for other research. With luck, the ideas discussed in Good Calories, Bad Calories may be rigorously tested in the next twenty years. If confirmed, it will be another decade or so after that, at least, before our public health authorities actively change their official explanation for why we get fat, how that leads to illness, and what we have to do to avoid or reverse those fates. As I was told by a professor of nutrition at New York University after on of my lectures, the kind of change I'm advocating could take a lifetime to be accepted.”
― Gary Taubes, Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It

“I fear we must use bad science to accomplish good politics.”
― James Cambias, A Darkling Sea

“Just stamping out anti-science and bad science will eliminate an enormous amount of business waste”
― Paul Gibbons, The Science of Successful Organizational Change: How Leaders Set Strategy, Change Behavior, and Create an Agile Culture

“Nobody has ever found any genes linking ethnicity or race to school results. Like Henry Garrett half a century earlier, [Gerhard] Meisenberg chooses to skip over the social, historical, and economic aspects of racial inequality. Rather, he believes that scientific evidence that doesn't yet exist will explain the gaps eventually. He takes it as given that the answer must be biological.”
― Angela Saini, Superior: The Return of Race Science

“…sometimes you need to be imaginative about what kinds of research you do, compromise and be driven by the questions that need answering, rather than the tools available to you.”
― Ben Goldacre

“...Why is it, that from the moment you enter medical school to the moment you retire, that the only disorder you will ever diagnosis with a physics book - is obesity? This is biology folks, it's endocrinology, it's physiology - physics has nothing to do with it. The law of thermodynamics is always true, [but] the energy balance equation is irrelevant...”
― Gary Taubes

“The recommendation of graded exercise has caused untold physical damage to thousands of people. In fact, a 2018 survey found that 89% of ME sufferers experienced worsened symptoms after increasing activity. If graded exercise were a drug, it would have lost its licence.”
― Carol Monaghan

“The psychological view of ME led to the controversial and now debunked PACE trial—PACE is “Pacing, graded Activity, and Cognitive behaviour therapy; a randomised Evaluation”... As the trial progressed and the results did not meet the authors’ expectations, they simply lowered the threshold to define improvement. In some cases, those whose condition had deteriorated were classed as “recovered”. That is simply not good science.”
― Carol Monaghan

“Pulling bad science apart is the best teaching gimmick I know for explaining how good science really works.”
― Ben Goldacre, I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That

“Just as animal research tells us that gluttony and sloth are side effects of a drive to accumulate body fat, it also says that eating in moderation and being physically active (literally, having the energy to exercise) are not evidence of moral rectitude. Rather, they're the metabolic benefits of a body that's programmed to remain lean.”
― Gary Taubes, Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It

“It is hard to see how scientific theories that don't correspond with reality and consequently don't work can benefit marginalized people, or anyone.”
― Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

“Just because a supposed finding's hurled beneath the banner of 'science' does not mean it's of peak reliance, and in theory any layperson will tell you that obvious fact. It is in practice that the word itself, 'science', rings like a dinner bell for those hungry to expel religious dogmas.”
― Criss Jami