Bad Science

by Linda Zimmermann

  Redheffer wanted to build a bigger and better perpetual motion machine, but he didn’t want to use his own ill-gotten money. In the time-honored American tradition, he asked the government to foot the bill. Fortunately, unlike today, where bailout and stimulus money is dispensed by the shovel-full to incompetent businesses, the government sent inspectors to make sure Redheffer’s machine was a good investment.

  Redheffer’s sketch of his alleged

  perpetual motion machine.

  In January of 1813, eight inspectors examined the machine, but Redheffer made sure they didn’t get too close—under the pretext that he didn’t want anyone to break anything. It certainly looked like a perpetual motion machine, and Redheffer may have gotten his money, had it not been for the sharp eyes of the son of one of the inspectors.

  There was a smaller machine connected to the alleged perpetual motion device by several gears, which Redheffer claimed was being powered by the larger machine. However, the son noticed that the wear pattern on the cogs of the gears indicated just the opposite—the small device was actually powering the large one!

  It was clearly a case of fraud, but not being allowed to actually touch and examine the parts of the machine, the inspectors had to resort to a different approach. They commissioned Isaiah Lukens, an engineer, to build a similar machine, powered in the same manner, and they showed it to Redheffer. Realizing he had been discovered, he beat a hasty retreat to New York City.

  Rather than learning from his experience and using his skills to build things that were actually useful, he chose instead to build another fake perpetual motion machine. Once again, the public was amazed and spent a lot of money to see the machine in action. Then one day there was a very special visitor—none other than Robert Fulton, the inventor who developed the steamboat.

  Fulton noticed an irregular motion to the machine that made it wobble, and other things that sent up red flags. He accused Redheffer of fraud, and made the following challenge—Fulton would be allowed a close examination of the device, and if no fraud was uncovered he would pay for any damage he caused. Redheffer accepted the challenge, either through arrogance, overconfidence, or fear. Fulton then proceeded in an odd fashion—rather than taking apart the machine, he started taking apart the wall next to it.

  After pulling down some boards, Fulton found a cord that went from the machine up to the floor above. When Fulton ascended the stairs to the next floor he found an old man eating a piece of bread with one hand—while with the other hand he was turning a crank to power the machine!

  The visitors present at the time, angered by the discovery that they had been duped, smashed Redheffer’s machine into little pieces. Redheffer quickly displayed his own motion—out the door to escape the incensed mob, and out of the city. Remarkably, he then returned to Philadelphia and was actually granted a patent for his fraudulent device in 1820! However, when he was still unable to get government funding, he and his machine disappeared into obscurity.

  It is interesting to note that in the patent application, Redheffer designated the device as “power, machinery for the purpose of gaining.” Unfortunately, apart from the admission fees, the only thing it really gained for Redheffer was notoriety in the annals of Bad Scientists.

  Was it Dominant or Recessive Fraud?

  What high school biology student hasn’t heard of Gregor Mendel and his groundbreaking work with pea plants? This simple 19th century Augustinian monk and teacher was fascinated by the natural world and wanted to know how traits were inherited from one generation to the next. In a brilliant and detailed series of experiments that took many years, Mendel crossed pea plants and unlocked the secret of heredity. His paper, Experiments with Plant Hybrids, must rank among the most important scientific works of history, and would eventually create the foundation for modern genetics. (And just to prove how important it was, the established scientific community took 34 years to finally appreciate it.)

  Mendel knew that one day his work would be understood and acknowledged, but he did a curious thing for a meticulous and dedicated scientist—he ordered that all his notebooks be burned after his death. That’s something akin to an artist destroying his life’s work. Mendel’s excuse was that he didn’t want future scientists to misinterpret his data, but perhaps there was a darker reason?

  In 1911, R.A. Fisher published a controversial paper suggesting that there were “statistical irregularities” to Mendel’s results. In other words, they were just too good to be true. Fisher continued to analyze Mendel’s existing data for the next twenty-five years, and then conclusively stated that many of Mendel’s results were nothing short of fraud. Outraged defenders of the father of heredity sought to disprove this nasty accusation, but reluctantly, they could not.

  Part of Fisher’s claim was that Mendel repeated blocks of data to make it look like he had conducted more experiments, as well as changed the results of several experiments to make them appear more favorable, i.e., fit his predictions. To put it in terms of numbers, the probability of obtaining the near-perfect results of one set of experiments was one in 2,000, and in another, a whopping one in 33,000. Anyone who has ever conducted scientific experiments knows that Murphy’s Law actively seeks victims wearing lab coats, so these numbers are quite disturbing. Either Mendel was the luckiest damn scientist who ever lived, or there was some hanky panky among the pea plants!

  Arguments continue to rage on both sides, ranging from condemning Mendel for sullying the pure name of science, to excusing the irregularities as innocent mistakes (the latter arguments most likely devised by Enron attorneys). However, numbers make the loudest arguments, and for all of Mendel’s good intentions (remember that’s what paves the road to hell), it does appear as if he did do some creative statistical analysis.

  But wait…In Mendel’s favor is the overwhelming fact that he was right about recessive and dominant traits, and the basic theories of heredity. One must also consider that he was trying to convince some rather thick-headed scientists, so he needed to put his best statistics forward. And how can you get angry at a mild-mannered Augustinian monk who devoted his life to the search for knowledge?

  And so, although it is somewhat out of character for this author not to slam down the avenging hammer of Bad Science, I can only deliver to this monk a slap on the wrist for fabricating some data for one of the most revolutionary concepts in the history of science.

  Perhaps my avenging genes are not as dominant as I thought…

  Hereditary Nonsense

  One of the world’s most influential naturalists was born in France in 1744. His full name was Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet Chevalier de Lamarck, but we will just refer to him as Lamarck so the printer of this book doesn’t run out of ink. Actually, ink figures prominently in the life of one of Lamarck’s followers, but let’s not put the fraud before the facts.

  Lamarck’s father sent him to study with the Jesuits, but as soon as his father died, he rode off to join the army. The day after he arrived, he so distinguished himself in battle that he was immediately promoted. He seemed destined for a great military career, until a friend picked up Lamarck by his head just for fun. (They must have been desperate for amusement in the French army.) Supposedly, this innocent act of horseplay led to severe glandular disease, and forced him to abandon his career in the military. (So remember kids, don’t try picking up your friends by their heads.)

  Anyway, the army’s loss was science’s gain. Lamarck’s intense interest in botany led to several important books, as well as the official title of Botanist to the King, which wasn’t half bad for a former Jesuit-army officer who had once been suspended by his skull. Later in life, his attentions turned to zoology, and he did some groundbreaking work in the study and classification of invertebrates.

  However, for all his legitimate work in the various fields of science, Lamarck has been criticized for letting his imagination run wild. Volumes of material he produced have been determined to be worthless, because they were all
based on pure speculation, which led to erroneous conclusions. But the bulk of the criticism leveled at Lamarck involved his theory of the inheritance of acquired traits.

  For example, what this meant was that giraffe necks grew longer, because they wanted to reach the higher leaves, and prey animals developed more slender legs so they could run faster from predators. It was a case of form following function, and Lamarck described it as follows:

  “The production of a new organ in an animal body results from the supervention of a new want continuing to make itself felt, and a new movement which this want gives birth to and encourages.”

  The changes brought about by these “new wants” were then supposedly “transmitted to the new individuals, which proceed from those which have undergone those changes”—i.e., inheritance of acquired traits.

  One scientist who disagreed, August Weisman, set about to disprove this theory by lopping off the tails of mice, generation after generation. When none of the subsequent mice were ever born without tails, he believed he had proved that Lamarck was wrong. Undaunted, Lamarck claimed that the experiment wasn’t valid, because the mice did not want their tails to be cut off, so it was not a naturally acquired trait. (I bet you didn’t have to tell the mice that!)

  Another interesting anti-Lamarckian example was that of the Jewish practice of circumcision. For thousands of years, Jews have wanted to perform the practice, but wouldn’t you know, generation after generation of Jewish boys are still born with those pesky little foreskins. Yet despite hundreds of generations of valid data, Lamarckian supporters saw this as just as invalid as the amputated mice tails.

  Before continuing with the fascinating history of acquired traits, it should be mentioned that Lamarck was also a supporter of the theory of spontaneous generation. He felt that the application of electricity and heat on gelatinous bodies created a “tension” and “orgasme” that could give rise to structure and life. (Doesn’t make much scientific sense, but it sure sounds like fun!)

  The slow but steady advance of scientific knowledge eventually discredited Lamarckian theory, but there are two twentieth century proponents worth mentioning in this bizarre saga. The first is Austrian-born Paul Kammerer, who believed he could force frogs to acquire new mating characteristics (I really don’t want to know all the details), and then have these characteristics passed on to subsequent generations.

  It appeared as though he was having remarkable success, until Dr. G. Kingsley Noble, the Curator of Reptiles for the American Museum of Natural History, paid a visit to Kammerer’s lab in 1926. One of the allegedly inherited characteristics was black and swollen “nuptial pads,” but upon closer inspection of the frogs it was found that the pads were black and swollen because they had been injected with India ink!

  Of course, Kammerer claimed he was innocent, and that the fraud had been perpetrated by a disgruntled lab assistant, but the damage was done. Dr. Kingsley published his findings in Nature, and Kammerer’s unnatural frog sex days were over.

  He was invited to Moscow, where his ideas were still popular, but just three months after the scandal erupted, Kammerer committed suicide by shooting himself. However, his legacy and the Lamarckian theory continued with Ukrainian-born Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, who was lauded by the Soviets as a brilliant scientist, but in fact, barely had a scientific thought in his head. What he did have was the backing of Stalin, which was all he needed to make a shambles of the scientific community.

  For example, in 1927, Soviet newspapers declared that Lysenko had found a method of fertilizing crops without using fertilizer. As proof, he supposedly grew winter peas on once-barren fields of Azerbaijan, a feat that promised to put food in the mouths of every peasant and cow. Unfortunately, future crops there all failed, but that minor fact was subsequently overlooked by the press.

  Lysenko seemed to have particular skill in creating pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo to describe his methods, without actually defining or explaining his new terms. He also harshly criticized legitimate scientists who saw right through his fraudulent practices. With the help of Stalin, however, he was able to circumvent this problem by having hundreds of the Soviet Union’s brightest scientists imprisoned and executed—which is one way to end contrary opinions. As a result of this homicidal practice, the country’s legitimate genetic programs were eliminated, and the geneticists along with them.

  It wasn’t until the 1960s, that genuine scientists were allowed to deliver genuine criticism against Lysenko, and once it all began hitting the Soviet fan the press jumped on the bandwagon and exposed Lysenko as a dangerous charlatan. And he did not escape Soviet justice, either. When he was finally removed as the head of the Academy of Sciences, they also took away his private bathroom. That will teach a person to destroy the infrastructure of the scientific community, suppress new ideas for decades, and cause the death of hundreds of highly educated scientists! Imagine the humiliation Lysenko felt having to use the public restrooms.

  And so the peculiar saga of Lamarckian theory comes to a fittingly ridiculous conclusion. What began with a talented army officer being lifted by his head, led to a new theory of heredity, hundreds of years of misinformation, mouse and frog abuse, suicide, and murder, culminating in the revoking of bathroom privileges.

  And so many people think that science is boring…

  Getting the Cold Shoulder

  So you’re having a lovely stroll in the countryside of Switzerland, when you come across an enormous granite boulder perched on a bed of limestone that seems completely out of place. How did it get there, you wonder? Then you stop for a picnic, and while munching on some Swiss cheese you see a huge mound of rocks and dirt that looks as though it had been pushed there by some massive plow. What force could have caused that, you ask?

  Well, if it had been in the late 1700s or early 1800s, scholars would have told you that these ancient features were the result of the Biblical Flood and drifting icebergs. Perhaps you then glanced up into the mountains where the summer sun was shimmering on an icy glacier, and you wondered out loud, “Couldn’t that glacier once have been down in this valley, pushing this mound ahead of it, and when it receded it left behind these huge boulders, not to mention cutting those grooves along the walls of the valley?”

  “Nonsense!” would come the angry reply. “I already told you these are the results of the Biblical Flood. It’s ridiculous to think that glaciers move. Now shut up, eat your cheese, and don’t ask anymore stupid questions!”

  While this little scene may not have actually played out in this manner, it certainly illustrates the mood and popular scientific opinion about glaciers in Switzerland during that period of time. However, not everyone believed in static glaciers—like the people who lived near glaciers for generations and saw them move. Of course, they had no scientific training, only years of observation, so they didn’t count.

  In 1827, Swiss geologist Franz Hugi built a small hut on top of a glacier, and carefully marked its position with stakes, as well as chiseling reference marks into adjacent rocks. As expected, the hut changed position from the reference points, which should have proved that glaciers do indeed move. Yet it would be another ten years before someone came along who was determined to make the world listen and understand the truth about these massive sheets of ice.

  Louis Agassiz was born in Switzerland, and first made his mark on the scientific world with fish. In fact, he became the preeminent authority on both living and fossil fish. His interest in glaciers began as something of a hobby, as he, too, had believed in the flood explanation—until he started seeing the evidence with his own eyes.

  Ignace Venetz and Jean de Charpentier told Agassiz about their belief that Switzerland had once been covered by glaciers, and they finally persuaded the reluctant fish expert to take some field trips. Agassiz gazed in wonder at the massive boulders—known as erratics—which appeared to have been tossed about by giants. There were the mounds of rocks and dirt—called moraines—that were like signposts along the c
ourse that the glaciers had taken. There were grooves and gouges cut into the valley walls, where receding glaciers left their calling cards. It was all quite remarkable and astounding, but it all made sense. Agassiz was now a believer, and he felt he had to enlighten the world.

  Well, it may come as no surprise that the world, especially the scientific world, isn’t big on being enlightened. In 1837, Agassiz presented his case for glaciers at a meeting of the Swiss Society of Natural Sciences. A performance of ancient yodeling techniques might have been better received. Undaunted, well, slightly daunted but still determined, Agassiz continued his work and traveled enough to come to the even more startling realization that most of Europe had once been covered by glaciers, which didn’t make his theory any easier to swallow.

  In fairness, it wasn’t just his theory. For example, his good friend and colleague, Karl Schimper, had come up with the term Eiszeit, meaning Ice Age. Unfortunately, the two men squabbled over who should get credit for the glacier theory and ended up becoming enemies—which wouldn’t be the last time in Agassiz’s life something like that happened.

  Despite the adversity, Agassiz persevered and published Étude sur les glaciers in 1840, and Système glaciare in 1847. Perhaps books on ancient yodeling techniques would have been better received.

  Actually, slowly but surely (almost as slowly as glaciers move), some scientists were beginning to get it. But having been given the cold shoulder in Europe for so long, he was delighted to come to America and accept a position at Harvard. He was also delighted to travel around the Great Lakes region and see the same signs of former glaciers, which further expanded the icy grip of his Ice Age.

  For all the credit Agassiz deserves, however, he was far from being infallible. After a trip to Brazil, he stated that this tropical country had been covered by glaciers as well, which it had not. He also held fast to the erroneous belief that the Ice Age had wiped out all life on Earth, and had created a clean slate for every plant and animal today—including mankind.