Imaginatively Misidentifying Scientists Are Like Someone Seeing a Mouse and Calling It an Elephant

 Scientists may make the goofiest misidentifications, and whenever it sounds like some grand achievement, gullible science journalists fall for it "hook, line and sinker," spreading the tall tale far and wide. 

We had an example of this recently in the science news. Here is how a paper was handled on the Science News page of Google News. 

The headlines were all false. Nothing at all like a "nearly invisible dark galaxy" had been found, and no evidence of any dark matter had been produced. I may note that the Science News page of Google News now has a "group headline" feature that cannot be trusted, and which tends to parrot false clickbait claims made in the group of "science news" stories it is presenting in one spot of its page. 

A look at the scientific paper shows what is going on. Some scientists saw some globular clusters about 300 million light-years away. Globular clusters are dense concentrations of stars, and they make some of the most beautiful sights in deep space. Below we see an example of a globular cluster. 

Credit: ESA/Hubble& NASA

Now, normally globular clusters are seen kind of at the edges of galaxies, much larger groups of stars, rather than existing far away from any galaxy. The diagram below shows the typical distribution of globular clusters, shown as circles in the diagram. 

 The astronomers report seeing four globular clusters existing without much of any nearby regular galaxy consisting mainly of evenly distributed stars. The astronomers have wrongly claimed that this is evidence that these globular clusters are embedded within a galaxy that is almost entirely invisible dark matter. But these globular clusters do not provide evidence of any such thing. At best, they  merely give evidence suggesting globular clusters can form outside of a galaxy, or within a galaxy that is mostly faint visible gas, looking different from an ordinary galaxy. 

What is going on is imaginative misidentification. Seeing merely four rather funny-looking visible globular clusters (things vastly smaller than galaxies), the scientists have claimed that what they see is a surrounding dark matter galaxy. Their observations provide no warrant for such a claim. They have not actually seen any dark matter at all. All they saw was some visible globular clusters and some gas. 

The world of dark matter cosmology is a world of imaginative misidentification. Cosmologists are often claiming that they saw invisible dark matter, when all they saw was visible matter. In their papers or press accounts of their papers, we frequently get misleading  language, such as "scientists saw dark matter" or "we saw dark matter." Instead of using language what we should be reading is language such as "scientists inferred dark matter" or "we inferred dark matter."

Dark matter has no place in the Standard Model of Physics. No one has ever seen dark matter, which cosmologists claim is invisible. But the theory of dark matter is a cherished tenet of the small group of scientists called cosmologists, consisting of no more than a few thousand scientists around the world. In such a small group of scientists, belief traditions can arise, and stubbornly persist over many decades or centuries, despite a lack of observational warrant for such beliefs. 

And so it is in the world of cognitive neuroscientists. The largest society of cognitive neuroscientist is the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and it has only about 2000 members worldwide. The members of such a society make a cloistered little clique in which groupthink predominates. 

Experts tend to exist in "echo chambers" where groupthink and herd effects may predominate. Often involving way-too-narrow and way-too-specialized fields of study (sometimes called silos), such echo chambers can be found in the ivory towers of academia or the ideological enclaves that are   monasteries or seminaries (schools that train people to be clergy). Within such an echo chamber people will tend to hear only people who belong to the same belief community, people who share the same ideology. Existing in such an ideological enclave, absurd or immoral or unwarranted opinions may be voiced, and may be regarded as great wisdom by anyone who looks around and sees other members of the belief community nodding in agreement. 

In the world of cognitive neuroscientists, we see abundantly cases of imaginative misidentification similar to that occurring in cosmology. Some examples are:

• Neuroscientists who look at ordinary brain cells having no special characteristics, and claim without warrant that they are "engram cells" storing a memory. 
• Neuroscientists who claim they see "representations" or "encoding" when they looked at something in the brain showing no actual sign of any representation of learned knowledge or learn experience, and no sign at all of any real encoding going on. 
• Neuroscientists who look at ordinary cells having no special characteristics, and who announce that they are seeing "place cells," based on some claim of "superior activation" that is typically without good warrant, being based on low-quality studies using way-too-few subjects for any reliable result to be claimed.  
• Neuroscientists who look at ordinary connections in the brains having no special characteristics (ordinary axons and synapses), and then announce without warrant that they are seeing "circuits for..." this or that cognitive experience or capability. 
• Neuroscientists who look at some chemistry readings failing to provide any warrant for claims relating  to cognition, who announce that they are seeing "the chemistry of" some grand thing such as romantic love or spirituality or ambition.