To discuss or to conclude ?

Dr Marc Hauser, a primate psychologist, has recently been charged with 8 counts of scientific misconduct by Harvard University.

I wrote to Dr Marc Hauser while applying to grad school and for what its worth, he was a thorough gentleman. There was no need for him to reply to a student that was clueless about neuroscience. He was clearly interested in teaching. He, and his papers, were instrumental in initiating my journey into neuroscience. They never failed to convey a sense of possibility. But, I have long since diverged from his particular area of expertise.

Dr Marc Hauser has recently been charged with scientific misconduct. A lot of his science consists of observing monkeys by only ever so slightly changing the wild environment that monkeys are used to. Data from these kinds of set ups are inherently hard to figure out and not amenable to extremely thorough statistical analysis. Even then, some things can be gleaned.

Dr Marc Hauser believes that much about the way humans think (and therefore behave) can be learnt from the way monkeys behave. And that much is true. How much we can really learn is a different matter, one that is and should be fully debated. But that we can learn nothing at all, as many will want to believe after this incident, is really stupid (for lack of a more direct word). I happen to work with monkeys as well. My experiments are rooted in solid science. But when I'm only plainly interacting with them, it's not hard to see that they're very much like humans. When you come out into the city and watch a bunch of humans, it never passes your mind that they act very similarly to the monkeys in your lab; much more than other pets such as dogs and cats are. It is hard not to find yourself anthropomorphizing, but it is an ability that must be mastered if any good science is to be done at all.

It took me a while to learn to take very seriously what is said in the Results and Analysis section in a Journal Paper while to no more than consider what is said in the Discussion section of the paper. One is cold truth. The other is an addictive trail to a magical fairlyland where all sorts of wondrous things are possible. The way of science is to repeat and replicate what is said in the Results and Analysis section and to test what is conjectured in the discussion section. Progress is made either when many wondrous things, turn out in fact, to be possible or when we can confidently say that some things belong to fairlyland.

Perhaps Marc Hauser's error was that he confused Discussions and Results. And it is a practiced art to know your limits, to stop yourself from going too far, to stop yourself from insisting rather than conjecturing.

Marc Hauser is credited with bringing the entire field of evolutionary cognition to the fore. But his irresponsible behavior (if that is what it is) must not be condoned. But often, because of the way humans are, we can do a double flip and throw a whole field of science out of the window. And it can take years before we come to reconcile with it again. There are those of us who will now insist that all of his science (and those of his trainees) is absolute trash. But maybe, if we thought of all his studies as Discussions rather than Results and Analysis, academia can find a way to not only make peace with it, but to improve the science itself, instead of abandoning it.