As noted already in the Guardian’s science pages, there is no lack of initiatives to tackle science’s crisis in all its aspects, from reproducibility to the abuse of metrics, to the problems of peer review. This gives good grounds for hope that the crisis will eventually be resolved, and that it will not become a general crisis of trust in science. Should that occur, and ‘science’ ceases to be a key cultural symbol of both truth and probity, along with material beneficence, then the consequences could be far-reaching. To that end, we should consider what lies behind the malpractices whose exposure has triggered the crisis over the last decade.

It is clear that a combination of circumstances can go far to explain what has gone wrong. Systems of controls and rewards that had evolved under earlier conditions have in many ways become counterproductive, producing perverse incentives that become increasingly difficult for scientists to withstand. Our present problems can be explained partly by the transformation from the ‘little science’ of the past to the ‘big science’ or ‘industrialised science’ of the present. But this explanation raises a problem: if the corrupting pressures are the result of the structural conditions of contemporary science, can they be nullified in the absence of a significant change in those conditions?

We should explore how these new conditions lead to these new pressures. There are two familiar qualitative aspects of the steady quantitative growth of the scientific enterprise. The first is the loss of ‘Gemeinschaft’, where all communities and sub-communities have become so large that personal acquaintance no longer dominates in the professional relationships. The old informal systems of rewards and sanctions are no longer effective. Under the new ‘Gesellschaft’ conditions, such intimate tasks of governance must be made ‘objective’. Ironically, applying a ‘scientific’ methodology to the tasks of governance of science leads directly to corruption, since any such system can be gamed. Allied to that development is a second one, the hugely increased capital-intensity of science, so that the typical context of discovery is no longer the scientist with his test-tube, but a large lab with division of labour on an industrial scale. In the absence of the discipline of customers for a product (however corrupted that might be), there is nothing to ensure quality control except those informal systems that are already obsolete.

Just as this new system was becoming dominant, by a cruel accident of fate a third element has intruded: stasis. The social subsystem of science whereby it reproduces itself, namely the training and certification of postgraduates, depends on the possibility of recruitment of at least a significant minority. This will necessarily be small, as even the traditional steady growth rate of science allows only a few new recruits in the course of a scientist’s career.

But when even that prospect vanishes, recruitment stalls, and the existing corps of researchers is squeezed, many pathologies inevitably ensue. The obvious one is the proletarianisation of research work. Recruits (and teachers) face the prospect of a lifetime sequence of short-term jobs on contracts, lacking any rights of security and whose renewal depends on the favour of the principal investigator. Maintaining the lofty ideals of independence and integrity becomes increasingly difficult.

Under these harsh conditions, quality becomes instrumentalised. To strive for ‘excellence’ may be impractical; ‘impact’ is the name of the game. The self-sacrificing quest for scientific rigour is displaced by the need to jockey among journals, and perhaps also engage in p-hacking to obtain interesting results. Such conditions can go far to explain the distressing results that John Ionnidis first found a decade ago. But there is a deeper cause at work. Perhaps those who engage in what we might call ‘shoddy science’ or even ‘sleazy science’ don’t even know that it is sub-standard. The problem may have been building up for decades in the past, when standards gradually slipped and the basic skills of rigorous scientific work were allowed to atrophy. As evidence we have the current state of statistical practice, of which the best is as sophisticated and self-critical as possible, but where there is also much that is an insult.

Another element of our problem is the self-image of science. There is a long history of idealistic, idealised portrayals of the scientific life. These were a natural consequence of the ideological struggles with organised religion, in which the symbol of Science was enlisted. In the complex history of ideologies of science, we can say that the turning point came as recently as the 1960’s, in the great debates where Popper and Lakatos defended the Enlightenment ideals against the corrosive critiques of Kuhn and Feyerabend. In retrospect, we notice that on neither side was there a mention of the issues of quality that have since become dominant. Later, during the ‘science wars’, sociological critics attacked the epistemological foundations of science, but not the imperfections in its practice. I did make this a central issue in my early work, but in spite of my book (Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems) having an appreciative audience among scientists, it made no discernible impact among the academic philosophy of science community. As a result of this absence of a prior disciplined discussion, the scientific community was ill-prepared to cope when the quality crisis exploded. Of course there was a broad informal familiarity with issues of quality at every level, but the anecdotes never became data for a proper public discussion. Now the community is catching up, but as even New Scientist admits, it has a long way to go.

The scene is by no means totally gloomy. For the first time ever, there is emerging a genuine polity within science, were issues are publicly debated. When Sir Timothy Gowers called for an academic boycott of a major publisher on ethical grounds, the social reality and self-image of science changed irreversibly. Given the public awareness that science can be low-quality or corrupted, that whole fields can be misdirected for decades (see nutrition, on cholesterol and sugar), and that some basic fields must progress in the absence of any prospect of empirical testing (string theory), the naïve realism of previous generations becomes quite Medieval in its irrelevance to present realities.



There are certain to be deeper interactions with the non-established forms of scientific practice, including citizen science, garage biology, Do It Yourself (DIY) science, the blogosphere and more generally the practices of the Extended Peer Community. Within established science, there are signs that those responsible for science advice, where the reality-testing is more immediate than within research, have learnt some important lessons. Another important development is the extension of the ‘peer community’ within science, seeing researchers as one sort of professional scientist among several (technicians, teachers, consultants, etc). This issue of professional responsibility is promoted by The Science Council in London. Quality and integrity are now discussed in many forums, and the whole situation is systematically reviewed in a new book, Science on the Verge.

None of these positive developments can guarantee the resolution of these new social problems of scientific knowledge, nor even the survival of science as we know it. If we include the science-based technologies of warfare, financial manipulation and environmental predation, the possibilities of civilisational catastrophe remain strong. But at least now the lid is off. We can collectively face our problems and contradictions, and disagree well.