*Quoted from "Not Even Trying: The corruption of real science" by Bruce Charlton

My belief is that science has rotted from the head down – from the top to the bottom - and therefore blame mostly lies with senior ‘scientists’. The careerism of senior ‘scientists’, and their abandonment of the Iron Law of truthfulness, has been the main cause of the now pervasive corruption of science (not least because the senior appoint the junior, the bosses choose the minions). So the roots of dishonesty in science constitute a ‘treason of the clerks’ phenomenon.

While the ultimate cause of the treason has been the abandonment of truth conceived as a transcendental value – as I argue below – the proximate mechanism by which corruption has been implemented was peer review. Since the middle twentieth century there has been massive expansion in the size and influence of peer review, peer review infiltrated into all the major scientific evaluations – peer review has become the self-perceived core process of science. Yet peer review is no more, no less, than the opinion of senior scientists. And not individual judgment, but a procedure for gathering opinions of a group, followed by some kind of more-or-less formal, more-or-less explicit procedure for deriving a single decision from the group of opinions: by vote, by veto, by some kind of weighted quantification, by an impressionistic judgment of the decision, or whatever.

In practice, most peer review is a ‘black box’ mechanism – and all the more effective for its unknown operations. A question is fed-into the black box of peer review, some senior scientists deliberate in some way and some answer emerges – an answer that is impossible to critique yet regarded as authoritative (as if a committee of senior scientists constituted a kind of super-multi-brain with magically-combined wisdom and expertise!)

The essence of peer review is therefore the ‘peers’ – which implicitly means a plurality of senior figures from (broadly) the same domain or field of research endeavour; and the ‘review’ element which in some way derives a bimodal or categorical evaluation from the plurality of opinions.

To put it another way, the triumph of peer review is a triumph of the committee over the individual, of procedure over judgment, of the selective and explicit over the unbounded and implicit. The even-more-significant aspect of peer review is the rhetorical success of implying that a committee procedure is more objective and more valid than individual judgment; the almost-wholly successful trick of disguising that peer review is pure opinion, and therefore just as ‘unreliable’ and prone to corruption as individual judgment – but that in fact peer review is worse than individual judgment for the same reason that a committee decision is intrinsically worse than an individual decision: because the committee decision is removed from individual responsibility, hence removed from responsibility altogether.

(Responsibility is an attribute of individual authority. Without I.A. there is no responsibility – merely a legal contract.)

Yet peer review is neither necessary nor sufficient as a definition of science, it is orthogonal to science; and therefore domination by peer review marks the disappearance of ‘real science’ and the inclusion of its activities within the system of large, complex trans-national bureaucracies.

So peer review does not solve the problem of subjectivity; rather it replaces potentially responsible individual subjectivity with necessarily irresponsible group subjectivity. Thus the advantage of peer review is precisely the opposite of its propaganda – peer review has become universal because it is irresponsible, not despite this. For peer review; irresponsibility is a feature, not a bug.

Overall, senior scientists have set a bad example of untruthfulness, self-seeking and lack of principle in their own behaviour, and (surely not unrelated) they have also tended to administer science in such a way as to reward hype and careful-dishonesty, and punish modesty and strict truth-telling. Some senior scientists have laudably refused to compromise their honesty, however they have done this largely by quietly ‘opting-out’, and not much by using their power and influence to create and advertise alternative processes and systems in which honest scientists might work. They have not exposed the pervasive and mandatory dishonesty of modern ‘science. Presumably they began by not wanting to discredit what real science still remained, but ended by colluding in the disguise of the non-scientific nature of pseudo-scientific professional research.

But, to be fair to the honest real scientists, those that did speak out loudly and clearly – such as Erwin Chargaff - were first marginalized, then ridiculed, then completely ignored and forgotten – as being embittered failures, motivated by ‘sour grapes’ and envy...

Peer review - of ever greater complexity, hence irresponsibility - has now been applied everywhere: to academic education and research training, job appointments and promotions, to scientific publications and conferences, to ethical review, to research funding, to the allocation of medals, prizes and awards. And peer review processes are set-up and manned by senior scientists. In a sense, peer review (where it matters, where it makes a difference to policy and practice) simply is monopolization of all evaluation, reward or punishment processes by senior scientists; yet not as autonomous individuals but as components of a process which nobody-in-particular controls. This seems something like the worst of all possible worlds; most of the actual disadvantages of tyranny but without any of the potential advantages of having ‘somebody’ in control.