Science of hoaxing, forging, trimming, and cooking

 In his fifth chapter (of six) Babbage wrote of “the art of making observations and experiments.” He began with a warning against becoming obsessed. with the appearance of precision.

“The extreme accuracy required in some of our modern inquiries has, in some respects, had an unfortunate influence, by favouring the opinion, that no experiments are valuable, unless the measures are most minute, and the accordance amongst them most perfect.” The warning was prescient; the problem is serious, now as then. He then addressed “the frauds of observers,” offering a classification that pre- figures present-day definitions.

There are several species of impositions that have been practiced in science, which are but little known, except to the initiated, and which it may perhaps be possible to render quite intelligible to ordinary understandings. These may be classed under the headings of hoaxing, forging, trimming, and cooking.

He looked on outright hoaxes with ironical amusement, giving an extended example of a report from Naples, forty years earlier, of a new family and species of mollusc, described and pictured “with great minuteness” including its structure, its shell, and its mode and speed of movement. The discoverer had named it after himself. The new creature got picked up, diagrams and all, by a French encyclopedia.

“The fact, however, is, that no such animal exists.” The discoverer had found on the Sicilian seashore three bits of bone from a known species of mollusc, and had then, Babbage said, “described and figured these bones most accurately, and drew the whole of the rest of his description from the stores of his own imagination. Such frauds are far from justifiable; the only excuse which has been made for them is, when they have been practised on scientific academies which had reached the period of dotage.” He went on:

Forging differs from hoaxing, inasmuch as in the latter the deceit is intended to last for a time, and then be discovered, to the ridicule of those who have credited it; whereas the forger is one who, wishing to acquire a reputation for science, records observations which he has never made. . . . Fortunately instances of the occurrence of forging are rare.

Trimming consists in clipping off little bits here and there from those observations which differ most in excess from the mean, and in sticking them on to those which are too small; a species of “equitable adjustment,” as a radical would term it [i.e., in British politics of the day, one who agitated for more equal distribution of wealth], which cannot be admitted in science.

This fraud is perhaps not so injurious (except to the character of the trimmer) as cooking, which the next paragraph will teach. The reason of this is, that the average given by the observations of the trimmer is the same, whether they are trimmed or untrimmed. His object is to gain a reputation for extreme accuracy in making observations; but from respect for truth, or from a prudent foresight, he does not distort the position of the fact he gets from nature, and it is usually difficult to detect him. He has more sense or less adventure than the Cook.

Babbage drew most of his examples from fields most familiar to him, mathematics, physics, and especially astronomy (hence “observers”). His types flourish in biology, of course, and in the social sciences. He wrote “Of Cooking” as though solemnly offering recipes, “receipts.” One of its numerous processes is to make multitudes of observations, and out of these to select only those which agree, or very nearly agree. If a hundred observations are made, the cook must be very unlucky if he cannot pick out fifteen or twenty which will do for serving up.

Another approved receipt, when the observations to be used will not come within the limit of accuracy, which it has been resolved they shall possess, is to calculate them by two different formule. The difference in the constants employed in those formule has sometimes a most happy effect in promoting unity amongst discordant measures. . . .

It sometimes happens that the constant quantities in formule given by the highest authorities, although they differ amongst themselves, yet they will not suit the materials. This is precisely the point in which the skill of the artist is shown; and an accomplished cook will carry himself triumphantly through it.

Yet cooking was not without risks.

There are some few reflections which I would venture to suggest to those who cook, although they may perhaps not receive the attention which, in my opinion, they deserve, from not coming from the pen of an adept. ...

In all these, and in numerous other cases, it would most probably happen that the cook would procure a temporary reputation for unrivalled accuracy at the expense of his permanent fame. It might also have the effect of rendering even all his crude observations [we would say, raw data] of no value; for that part of the scientific world whose opinion is of most weight, is generally so unreasonable, as to neglect altogether the observations of those in whom they have, on any occasion, discovered traces of the artist. In fact, the character of an observer, as of a woman, if doubted is destroyed.

Babbage’s forging is, of course, what we now call fabrication. His trimming and cooking are varieties of falsification; the distinction is useful. His sardonic dry tone is inimitable.
The most prominent of the classic frauds illustrate Babbage’s typology in all its variety. Eight frauds and a hoax demand our attention.

The hoax is Piltdown Man. The other cases implicate some revered names: Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel, Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, Robert Millikan, Ernst Haeckel, Sigmund Freud, Cyril Burt.

‘We look at the classic cases with a double vision, though many commentators seem not to realize how this may affect their judgement. We cannot help assessing them by today’s standards—not that today’s standards are necessarily higher than those of the past, except perhaps in the view of the more smug of the leaders and defenders, and certainly not that the standards are more often lived up to, but rather that they are more sophisticated about what goes into research, careful or sloppy, honest or fraudulent. Simultaneously, though, we must see the classic cases in their own terms, in the scientific community of their time and the wider milieu in which they took place. Such is of course the central task of the historian. But to think the thoughts of the past is never more difficult than in the sciences.

Must it be said that the raising of questions does not prove guilt? Yet universal and conspicuous in accounts of these classic cases has been the dismay evinced by those who themselves raise the questions, bring out the evidence. Scientists, often, and not far below the crust, are sweetly idealistic. They have heroes. More than that, for many scientists science itself is a heroine—the French have got the gender tight, La Sciénce—whose innocence and pristine reputation must be defended. When great scientists are attacked, the prosecutors themselves leap to the defense of the accused. Mendel. Mendel? The monk in the garden? The problem is that some of his data are too perfect. Yes, well, “Mendel was the first to count segregants at all. It is rather too much to expect that he would be aware of the precautions now known to be necessary for completely objective data.” Darwin. Darwin? The problem is that some of the photographs in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals were doctored. Ah, but, “In many ways publication of Expression marked the birth of empirical photography. It could not conform to rules about scientific photography,  because it was part of the creation of those rules.” 

So strong is the compulsion to save the great men, to protect the reputation of science herself, that defense turns nastily ad hominem.

Pasteur. Pasteur? The hero of generations of French schoolchildren, the inspiration of countless careers in science? The problem is that his entries in his private notebooks contradict, significantly, his public claims for how he had achieved his most celebrated victories, including immunization against rabies. No, no, “complete rubbish,” his accuser is “trying to pull a great man down” and is himself “guilty of unethical and unsavory conduct when he burrows through Pasteur’s notebooks for scraps of supposed wrongdoing.”

From the book:
The GREAT BETRAYAL FRAUD IN SCIENCE HORACE FREELAND JUDSON