Apart from our liberty itself, it is hard to think of a more important issue.  When we look back over the broad range of human history, we see the adoption of science as a bright and glowing milestone of progress.  Until mankind had enough freedom to apply science, productively, with the resulting explosion of technology and the rise of vibrant economies, it was still a world where we submitted to the harshness of the environment and the harshness of tyrannical rulers.

Look at what had to come together to make an era where flourishing could become the norm:  

• Human nature: made up of imagination, the capacity to reason, and choice - which makes possible technology (always improving ideas, processes and things)
• Technology: Nearly everything can be improved, and humans are nearly incapable of not wanting to do just that... all that is needed is the political protection of the ability to profit from that.
• Science: It had been mostly  an academic hobby supported by royalty acting as patrons, as in the art world - waiting on property rights and greater wealth before it could explode.
• Capitalism: Nations with laws that protected property rights to a degree: Now people could experience productivity that was profitable.  They could go wild with their imagination, reason and choice.  Specialization goes into high gear.  And technology in that safe environment of mostly free economies exploded, resulting in the generation of wealth - wealth that funded science and science in turn is a fountainhead for new technology.
• Corporations: With the freedom to evolve organizations better suited to human collaboration we find the modern corporation.  Compared to all that went before (feudal structures, city-states, guilds, churches) the modern corporation permitted the best kind of voluntary collaboration - joining self-interest, flexibility in structure, organizing around shared purposes, providing a sustaining profitability, and powerful fund raising. Result: An explosion in productivity.

Metaphysical human nature is a constant, but all the others have dependencies.  We are watching capitalism diminshed with regulations and taxation.  We know that the mysticism of religion has never disappeared.  We see that the altruism still lives strong in collective schemes of every stripe.  But Science, as a body of knowledge, was just supposed to grow - maybe rapidly, maybe slowly - but it wasn't supposed to go backwards or decay!

...one could claim that science is by nature self-correcting, but the problem appears to be getting worse before it gets better.

Science has to hold truth above any hidden agenda.  Without that, it isn't self-correcting.  What we see now is that some people don't know how to use reason to locate the truth, while others don't care about the truth because they hold that the end justifies the means and their hidden agenda is service to some cult or religion, like climate change, or like Intelligent Design, or the new merging of sociology and progressive politics.

As these proponents gain enough sway in the centers of education, then what they don't teach (a science that is pure in its pursuit of the truth or the art of critical thinking) will, with time, disappear from the human knowledge database.  After all, what is not passed on to the next generation will, in time, no longer be available to be passed on.  It will be gone.  What we see now is the promise of Atlantis sinking slowly into a dark age.

(Edited by Steve Wolfer on 3/16, 5:53pm)

I agree with the broad thesis that government funding of scientific research has led to the politicization of science.  Vannevar Bush makes a suitable bogeyman. On the one hand, he closed the Eugenics Board of Carnegie Institute in Washington. However, very much else of his remains negative in effect. He fought pretty much successfully to have the government fund "everything" in science on the theory that we could know where the next advances would come from.  And here we are today.  

At the detail level, much needs to be considered.  I believe that perception has magnified the egregious examples into a trend that is not there.  

Several differently framed searches in two large academic databases supported the easy claim that misconduct, fraud and hoax were unknown in science before 1950 and remain rare today.  The JSTOR database contains three million full length articles from 1200 journals, almost all peer reviewed academic periodicals, with significant titles going back before 1900.  Searches uncovered zero articles about misconduct in scientific research from 1900 to 1950. From 1950 to the present, 40 articles addressed the related problems.  An obvious upswing occurred after 1987.  The Gale CENGAGE Learning PowerSearch^TM database covering 1980-2010 yielded 56 titles.  Of course, many were reports of headline news about Jan Hendrik Schön and other immediacies in (nominally) peer-reviewed news magazines such as Science, Nature and Science News.  -- PROCEDURAL MISCONDUCT BY SCIENTISTS: PREVENTION AND REMEDIES by Michael E. Marotta,  PHYSICS 406: Ethical Issues in Physics, Dr. Patrick L. Koehn, Eastern Michigan University, Winter 2010.)

It is not that fraud in scientific research did not exist before 1950, but that it was unknown because it was not investigated.  The problems cited by Luke Setzer and agreed to by Steve Wolfer and David Wooten are the result of scrutiny and publicity that did not previously exist.  Today, every research university has an Office of Research Integrity. The ORI of the federal Department of Heatlh & Human Services is a large and active criminal investigation agency. 

Giordano Bruno was not a scientist.  Howevermuch we admire his freethinking inquiries, he did not practice the scientific method.  Galileo did.  Bruno was more like the ancient Greek philosophers who speculated about "atoms" but who did not actually carry out scientific investigations.

David Wooten is certainly correct in his assertion that science in the Middles Ages was more advanced than most Objectivists seem to know.  (See Science in the Middle Ages on my blog here.)  But there is nothing intuitively obvious about the solar model we all accept -- and do so without evidence.  I mean that.  Most people who claim that "the Earth goes around the sun" have no idea how to demonstrate that -- or know that it was not proved until the 1830s.  It is actually a modern mysticism to claim that "the Earth goes around the sun." The same applies to the rotation of the Earth: not proved until the 1830s - and few who claim to "know" it could prove it.

I agree fully that scientific research is and always was plagued by fraud. (See "20% of Scientists are Crooks" on my blog here.) But in that, they are not special.  It is likely that 20% of the goods on the market right now have no clear title.  But 80% do; and 80% of scientists never stray from the practices of truthseeking.  

Of the hidden variables, the fact is that most science education does not even address the scientific method.  Kids learn it in elementary school or junior high, and if you go into a physical science or engineering, it never comes up again.  In truth, university social science curricula do teach the scientific method.  (See "Is Physics a Science?" on my blog here.)  

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 3/18, 3:04am)

Steve, peer-reviewed scientific journals of the early 20th century did not publish articles about fraud in research.  However, misconduct was known.  

• Everyone knows about Piltdown Man.  
• Robert Millikan is another paradigmatic case: he traded for the silence of a co-worker; and he selected his data, rather than reporting it. On top of that, other scientists who repeated the problematic oil drop experiment only reported results close to Millikan's, rather than to accept the data they found.  
• Percival Lowell is famous for the canals of Mars.  He hired astronomers by taking them to a vista and having them draw what they saw.  (Photography was important, but then as now, being able to sketch what you saw was still important).  In fact, the view included telephone wires crossing a valley.  If the artist did not see the telephone wires, then he was not going to see the canals on Mars, either, and he did not hired.  Lowell was more than just an optimistic viewer.  He also wrote imaginative magazine articles about the advanced civilization that built the canals.)  (I am sure you know that there are no canals on Mars.)
• The eugenics movement was only derailed by our abhorence for the Nazis.  Even so, during World War II, the U.S. military kept White and Negro blood separate.  That was just one aspect of a huge affront by otherwise acceptable scientists.
• Thomas Edison carried on squabbles against both George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla over alternating current electricity.  Edison "proved" that AC was inherently dangerous by publicly electrocuting animals. Though Edison was indeed intelligent and never claimed to be a scientist, his campaign against AC fed public fears. He simply did not know calculus, so he could not do the math -- neither could the people he impressed; and they voted.  Eventually AC won out over DC.
•  If you read any of several books about bad science, you will find N-rays, phrenology, and other fallacies.  (I review four books on my blog here. I did not mention Martin Gardner's famous book which every person literate in science has read.)  

Those are all from the 1950s and earlier. But the peer-reviewed scientific journals did not publish investigations of fraud and misconduct in scientific research.  Eventually, things changed.

“A Social Control Perspective on Scientific Misconduct” by Edward J. Hackett appeared in The Journal of Higher Education (Vol. 65, No. 3, pp. 242-260). A survey covering the five years 1983-1988 of members of the Council of Graduate Schools found that 40% (118) received allegations of possible misconduct.  Those institutions whose external funding exceeded $50 million “were far more likely than others (69% to 19%) to hear such allegations.”  The same article cited a 1991 survey of AAAS members in which 27% of 469 respondents claimed to have “personally encountered or witnessed scientific research that they suspected was fabricated, falsified or plagiarized during the past ten years.”  In that same issue of the JHE, Mary Frank Fox wrote: “During the last fifteen years, hardly a year has gone by without the surfacing of a notorious case of misconduct in science.”  She then cited nine by name. - My paper for "Ethical Issues in Physics" cited above.

As for government funding being the "cause" I said that Vannevar Bush was an easy bogeyman.  I did not say that he was the devil.  We all know that the tobacco industry also paid for the research it wanted.  Government-funded research was supposed to be "above the dollar."  Of course, that chimera was hard to capture.  And this is not limited to science.  We all know the joke about the accountant who got the job because when asked, "How much is two plus two?" he asked back, "How much would you like it to be?" 

It is not that "science is getting things increasingly wrong" but that as a culture we are more science literate, Americans moreso than most of the other industrialized societies. Globally, we are less trusting of authority, therefore more likekly to demand more proof and better oversight.  

“A slightly higher proportion of American adults qualify as scientifically literate than European or Japanese adults, but the truth is that no major industrial nation in the world today has a sufficient number of scientifically literate adults,” he said. “We should take no pride in a finding that 70 percent of Americans cannot read and understand the science section of the New York Times.” Approximately 28 percent of American adults currently qualify as scientifically literate, an increase from around 10 percent in the late 1980s and early 1990s, according to Miller's research. (Science Daily here.)

 

Steve, you did claim that my facts were lacking.  I responded, twice, in Post 2 and in Post 4.  Your other "philosophical" claims - too many people do not know how to think; sociology is now merging with political progressivism; rank pragmatism motivates researchers - were hackneyed.  So, I did not reply then. I will now.

MM: It is not that fraud in scientific research did not exist before 1950, but that it was unknown because it was not investigated.

SW:  If it was unknown before 1950, then you don't know if it existed before 1950. Maybe it didn't exist to any significant degree. By your admission, you don't know. Your statement also makes it appear that fraud was the only issue being discussed, and that the government funding is the cause, and that the only way to know that there are problems in science is with a formal investigation. Lots of unwarranted assertions.

 

MM: The problems cited by Luke Setzer and agreed to by Steve Wolfer and David Wooten are the result of scrutiny and publicity that did not previously exist.

SW:  No, that's not true. The problems I cited did not arise from the scrutiny you mention. My points were philosophical as much as political. It was that newer generations coming out of the universities have more individuals that don't reason clearly, and that there is an increase in the adoption a kind of group-think in the area of the "politically correct."

[...]

SW: What we see now is that some people don't know how to use reason to locate the truth, while others don't care about the truth because they hold that the end justifies the means and their hidden agenda is service to some cult or religion, like climate change, or like Intelligent Design, or the new merging of sociology and progressive politics.

 

Your complaints are as old as universities themselves, even going back, perhaps, to the Greeks of the 5th century. (See the dialogues of Plato for Gorgias and Protagoras.) We accuse our intellectual enemies of being intellectually dishonest.

In Goethe's Faust, the Doctor (who holds four doctorates), confesses that he led his students around by the nose, only to discover that we know nothing. So, he turns to Magic.  (It is in the opening, Scene I.)  Remember the context, Goethe was writing for the Enlightenment, setting the conflict in the arbitrary (late) Middle Ages.  

Sociology was always tied to progressive politics, ever since Mrs. Leland Stanford fired Edward Ross for calling her late husband a robber baron.  (Ayn Rand agreed with that assessment.) It is unfortunate, but telling, that only the progressives took issue with social evils that we libertarians now also reject, chief among them racism, the subjugation of women, and imperialism.  Yes, progressivism carries totalitarian baggage.  So does conservatism. The point, here, though is that that complaint is 100 years old.  Your general woe over the worsening of our times goes back to the loss of Eden.  It appears in Hesiod: once we lived in an age of gold; now we live in an age of iron. 

In fact, things are getting better.  Atlas Shrugged is going to be a television series.