Taxacom: Science fraud - Nature

Thu Aug 24 14:31:03 CDT 2023

I would add that the examples given concern instances where the fraud
involved a minority but what happens when the fraud is committed by the
majority (as in CODA practice)?

On Thu, Aug 24, 2023 at 3:26 PM John Grehan <calabar.john at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yeah  - not wanting to go down the COVID hole, or any other subject. Just
> happened to be example issues. Cheers, John
>
> On Thu, Aug 24, 2023 at 3:04 PM Tony Rees <tonyrees49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi John, you wrote:
>> >  If a climate paper was published in Nature or Science, which are not
>> climate journals, is this because the authors wished to avoid peer review?
>>
>> No, I think it is fair to say that these are special cases, that sit
>> somewhere above more discipline-specific journals, for articles deemed to
>> have high importance; and accordingly, would seek out the best (?) experts
>> in relevant fields for review of any particular article. That would be the
>> hope, anyway :)
>>
>> Not going to go down the rabbit hole of origins of Covid at this time,
>> however I note that the Rupert Murdoch-owned "Australian" was strongly
>> promoting views by a Sky News Journalist (who wrote a book on the same
>> subject last year) that everything is a cover-up and the virus escaped from
>> the Wuhan Lab. I fact checked her first 4 statements and they were all
>> incorrect, after which I lost faith in her analysis. For now I think the
>> best summary is probably at
>> https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FOrigin_of_COVID-19&data=05%7C01%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C8389025a177c4c78176608dba4d8beb0%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638285023061957490%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=r86F4UlYvjU3i%2BlLpehqzhnEPEVpnmPPAfv1eJ89hEk%3D&reserved=0, which Taxacom readers
>> are welcome to consult for more detail, or even amend if they disagree with
>> it.
>>
>> Regards - Tony
>> Tony Rees, New South Wales, Australia
>> https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fabout.me%2FTonyRees&data=05%7C01%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C8389025a177c4c78176608dba4d8beb0%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638285023061957490%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=jQh7y9hbiQysnRHc065twuI%2BnTyPP92A2M2kcsDn1tQ%3D&reserved=0
>>
>>
>> On Fri, 25 Aug 2023 at 04:43, John Grehan <calabar.john at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> That's an interesting quote about not publishing in a climate journal
>>> for a climate paper:  "This is a common avenue taken by 'climate skeptics'
>>> in order to avoid peer review by real experts in the field." But just
>>> because a climate paper is not published in a climate journal does not mean
>>> that it can avoid 'peer' review. It depends on the journal and the intent
>>> of the editor to ensure that proper peer review takes place. If a climate
>>> paper was published in Nature or Science, which are not climate journals,
>>> is this because the authors wished to avoid peer review?
>>>
>>> On Thu, Aug 24, 2023 at 2:40 PM John Grehan <calabar.john at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Thanks for that clarification Tony. As for Nature "might have a higher
>>>> degree of scrutiny" - who knows. Saw this as yet unresolved issue below,
>>>> this time involving Nature. I don't keep regular track of such questions,
>>>> although perhaps I should, and write something on fraud in CODA
>>>> biogeography - but then who would publish such?
>>>>
>>>> A growing number of people, including prominent scientists, are calling
>>>> for a full retraction of a high-profile study published in the journal
>>>> Nature in March 2020 that explored the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
>>>> The paper, whose authors included immunology and microbiology professor
>>>> Kristian G. Andersen, declared that evidence clearly showed that SARS-CoV-2
>>>> did not originate from a laboratory.
>>>> “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory
>>>> construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the authors wrote in
>>>> February.
>>>> Yet a trove of recently published documents reveal that Andersen and
>>>> his co-authors believed that the lab leak scenario was not just possible,
>>>> but likely.
>>>> “[The] main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of
>>>> this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing
>>>> this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that
>>>> scenario,” Andersen said to his colleagues, according to a report from
>>>> Public, which published a series of Slack messages between the authors.
>>>> Anderson was not the only author who privately expressed doubts that
>>>> the virus had natural origins. Public cataloged dozens of statements from
>>>> Andersen and his co-authors—Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C.
>>>> Holmes, and Robert F. Garry—between the dates January 31 and February 28,
>>>> 2020 suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 may have been engineered.
>>>> ” …the fact that we are discussing this shows how plausible it is,”
>>>> Garry said of the lab-leak hypothesis.
>>>> “We unfortunately can’t refute the lab leak hypothesis,” Andersen said
>>>> on Feb. 20, several days after the authors published their pre-print.
>>>> To complicate matters further, new reporting from The Intercept reveals
>>>> that Anderson had an $8.9 million grant with NIH pending final approval
>>>> from Dr. Anthony Fauci when the Proximal Origin paper was submitted.
>>>> ‘Fraud and Scientific Misconduct’?
>>>> The findings have led several prominent figures to accuse the authors
>>>> of outright deception.
>>>> Richard H. Ebright, the Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and
>>>> Chemical Biology at Rutgers University, called the paper “scientific
>>>> fraud.”
>>>> “The 2020 ‘Proximal Origin’ paper falsely claimed science showed
>>>> COVID-19 did not have a lab origin,” tweeted Ebright. “Newly released
>>>> messages from the authors show they did not believe the conclusions of the
>>>> paper and show the paper is the product of scientific fraud and scientific
>>>> misconduct.”
>>>> Ebright and Silver are among those pushing a petition urging Nature to
>>>> retract the article in light of these findings.
>>>> Among those to sign the petition was Neil Harrison, a professor of
>>>> anesthesiology and molecular pharmacology at Columbia University.
>>>> “Virologists and their allies have produced a number of papers that
>>>> purport to show that the virus was of natural origin and that the pandemic
>>>> began at the Huanan seafood market,” Harrison told The Telegraph. “In fact
>>>> there is no evidence for either of these conclusions, and the email and
>>>> Slack messages among the authors show that they knew at the time that this
>>>> was the case.”
>>>> Only ‘Expressing Opinions’?
>>>> Dr. Joao Monteiro, chief editor of Nature, has rebuffed calls for a
>>>> retraction, The Telegraph notes, saying the authors were merely “expressing
>>>> opinions.”
>>>> This claim is dubious at best. From the beginning, the Proximal Origin
>>>> study was presented as authoritative and scientific. Jeremy Farrar, a
>>>> British medical researcher and now the chief scientist at the World Health
>>>> Organization (WHO), told USA Today that Proximal Origin was the “most
>>>> important research on the genomic epidemiology of the origins of this virus
>>>> to date.”
>>>> Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaking from the White House podium in April 2020,
>>>> cited the study as evidence that the mutations of the virus were “totally
>>>> consistent with a jump from a species of an animal to a human.” Fact-check
>>>> organizations were soon citing the study as proof that COVID-19 “could not
>>>> have been manipulated.”
>>>> Far from being presented as a handful of scientists “expressing
>>>> opinions,” the Proximal Origin study was treated as gospel, a dogma that
>>>> could not even be questioned. This allowed social media companies (working
>>>> hand-in-hand with government agencies) to censor people who publicly stated
>>>> what Andersen and his colleagues were saying privately—that it seemed
>>>> plausible that SARS-CoV-2 came from the laboratory in Wuhan that
>>>> experimented on coronaviruses and had a checkered safety record.
>>>> Indeed, even as media and government officials used the Proximal Origin
>>>> study to smear people as conspiracy theorists for speculating that COVID-19
>>>> might have emerged from the Wuhan lab, a Defense Intelligence Agency study
>>>> commissioned by the government questioned the study’s scientific rigor.
>>>> “The arguments that Andersen et al. use to support a natural-origin
>>>> scenario for SARS CoV-2 are based not on scientific analysis, but on
>>>> unwarranted assumptions,” the now-declassified paper concluded. “In fact,
>>>> the features of SARS-CoV-2 noted by Andersen et al. are consistent with
>>>> another scenario: that SARS-CoV-2 was developed in a laboratory…”
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, Aug 24, 2023 at 2:22 PM Tony Rees <tonyrees49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hi John,
>>>>>
>>>>> I took a look at the paper which is online and open access. I must say
>>>>> when I saw it at the time of original publication I thought its main
>>>>> conclusions very odd and at variance with almost all other research on the
>>>>> topic.
>>>>>
>>>>> Just to be clear per your thread title - the paper does not appear in
>>>>> "Nature" (which I imagine might have a higher degree of scrutiny), but in
>>>>> "The European Physical Journal Plus" which is a different outlet, albeit
>>>>> from the same publisher.
>>>>>
>>>>> Best - Tony
>>>>> Tony Rees, New South Wales, Australia
>>>>> https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fabout.me%2FTonyRees&data=05%7C01%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C8389025a177c4c78176608dba4d8beb0%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638285023061957490%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=jQh7y9hbiQysnRHc065twuI%2BnTyPP92A2M2kcsDn1tQ%3D&reserved=0
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Fri, 25 Aug 2023 at 03:59, John Grehan via Taxacom <
>>>>> taxacom at lists.ku.edu> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Recently when I noted about ZooNova as a publication option, a Taxacom
>>>>>> colleague implied (oof list) that the journal was dubious because he
>>>>>> considered one (or more) papers to be dubious (in that person's
>>>>>> judgement).
>>>>>> Here is a classic case of a 'Top' journal retracting a paper, showing
>>>>>> that
>>>>>> the supposed 'prestige' of a journal has nothing necessarily to do
>>>>>> with its
>>>>>> content. In this case it was picked up on because the paper in
>>>>>> question
>>>>>> appears to have run afoul of a sufficient number of prominent or
>>>>>> influential researchers. In biogeography this does not happen, as the
>>>>>> prominent (powerful and influential) players all play to the fraud
>>>>>> (that
>>>>>> being the misrepresentation of what CODA methods can or cannot do or
>>>>>> support). Power is everything in science.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Top science publisher Springer Nature said it has withdrawn a study
>>>>>> that
>>>>>> presented misleading conclusions on climate change impacts after an
>>>>>> investigation prompted by an AFP inquiry.
>>>>>> AFP reported in September 2022 on concerns over the peer-reviewed
>>>>>> study by
>>>>>> four Italian scientists that appeared earlier that year in the
>>>>>> European
>>>>>> Physical Journal Plus, published by Springer Nature.
>>>>>> The study had drawn positive attention from climate-sceptic media.
>>>>>> The paper, titled "A critical assessment of extreme events trends in
>>>>>> times
>>>>>> of global warming", purported to review data on possible changes in
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> frequency or intensity of rainfall, cyclones, tornadoes, droughts and
>>>>>> other
>>>>>> extreme weather events.
>>>>>> Several climate scientists contacted by AFP said the study manipulated
>>>>>> data, cherry picked facts and ignored others that would contradict
>>>>>> their
>>>>>> assertions, prompting the publisher to launch an internal review.
>>>>>> "The Editors and publishers concluded that they no longer had
>>>>>> confidence in
>>>>>> the results and conclusions of the article," Springer Nature told AFP
>>>>>> in an
>>>>>> email late Wednesday.
>>>>>> The journal's editors published an online note stating that the paper
>>>>>> was
>>>>>> retracted due to concerns over "the selection of the data, the
>>>>>> analysis and
>>>>>> the resulting conclusions".
>>>>>> --
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>>>>>>
>>>>>> Nurturing nuance while assailing ambiguity and admiring alliteration
>>>>>> for about 36 years, 1987-2023.
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
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>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
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>>>
>>
>
> --
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> link, then the 'Ghost Moth Research page' link.
>

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