An interesting non-sequitur, no?

 
This is in fact the argument advanced publicly by S&A against the accusation that they blatantly falsified their data. The "confirming" evidence was actually neither independent nor more sensitive, but was put forward in a rhetorical manner, to suggest that it didn't matter whether the S&A data had been falsified. As the senior author of that paper, Jeffrey R. Powell, later wrote in American Scientist, "These are the reasons the community has not become overly exercised by the brouhaha raised by Dr. Marks and his colleagues concerning particulars about the Sibley and Ahlquist data. The Sibley work is good science inasmuch as it is repeatable and independently corroborated."

Interesting criteria for good science! If independent corroboration were the criterion of good science, it would carry tremendous implications for the validity of alien abductions. This argument misses the entire role of replication in science - it is simply a first-level filter for artifacts.  Many things have been replicated but wrong, ranging from Piltdown Man (yes, there was more than one of them fabricated, and that's what convinced a lot of people) to polymerized water in the 1970s (different investigators getting the same artifact), and of course cold fusion.

Good science is much more simple to define - simply carrying out the research rigorously and honestly.

 

back