{"id":39107,"date":"2017-05-04T16:41:53","date_gmt":"2017-05-04T15:41:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/?p=39107"},"modified":"2017-05-10T17:06:03","modified_gmt":"2017-05-10T16:06:03","slug":"richard-smith-roger-bacon-on-ignorance-and-peer-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2017\/05\/04\/richard-smith-roger-bacon-on-ignorance-and-peer-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Smith: Roger Bacon on ignorance and peer review"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Franciscan philosopher Roger Bacon (c1214-1294), who some regard as the father of modern science, argued in his great text Opus Majus<\/em> that there were four sources of ignorance:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Frail and unsuited authority<\/li>\n
  2. The influence of custom<\/li>\n
  3. The opinion of the unlearned crowd<\/li>\n
  4. The concealment of our ignorance in a display of apparent wisdom<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I must confess right away that I didn\u2019t read this in the Latin of Opus Majus<\/em> but in the English of Bertrand Russell\u2019s History of Western Philosophy<\/em>. It\u2019s important that I confess this as I\u2019m taking Russell as an authority (or at least a reliable messenger), which Bacon criticised, and because I haven\u2019t and couldn\u2019t read the original Latin<\/a>\u2014and Bacon was a strong proponent of learning languages and studying the original texts.<\/p>\n

    When I read Bacon\u2019s four causes of ignorance, I thought immediately of peer review. It\u2019s clear to me that Bacon would have dismissed peer review.<\/p>\n

    Firstly, peer review depends entirely on \u201cfrail and unsuited authority.\u201d It has no evidence base in the scientific sense of experimental studies demonstrating its effectiveness. It\u2019s important because authorities say it is, and those authorities are, I suggest, \u201cunsuited.\u201d They are unsuited because they may be distinguished physicists or biochemists but they have not studied and experimented with peer review.<\/p>\n

    Secondly, peer review depends wholly on custom. It may not be as old as people think, but it is \u201cthe way we do things around here\u201d in deciding on which grant proposals will be funded and which papers published where. And there are now huge vested interests: profits made, jobs provided, and reputations built. Bacon thought that concealment of our ignorance in a display of apparent wisdom was the main source of ignorance, and T S Eliot would agree: \u201cIn order to arrive at what you do not know\/You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.\u201d\u00a0But custom (the way we do things here)\u2014with its failure to recognise, and to even celebrate, ignorance\u2014runs a close second.<\/p>\n

    Thirdly, the \u201cunlearned crowd\u201d\u2014editors of journals, authors of Scholarly Kitchen<\/em>, publishers of profitable journals, and sadly most scientists\u2014insist that peer review must be central to science.<\/p>\n

    Fourthly, scientific authorities conceal their ignorance in a display of apparent wisdom. I can\u2019t claim to know everything about peer review, but I have been following evidence on peer review for nearly 40 years. That evidence, as I\u2019ve written many times<\/a>,\u00a0fails to show effectiveness (and I accept that absence of evidence of effectiveness is not the same as evidence of absence of effectiveness) but does show that peer review is slow, expensive, something of a lottery, inefficient, wasteful of scientific resource, poor at detecting error and fraud, prone to bias, and anti-innovatory. Yet when I present this evidence to the learned\u2014as I have done at the Royal Society, UNESCO, and other theatres of supposed wisdom\u2014it is dismissed with anecdote: \u201cI\u2019ve had many papers improved by peer review.\u201d<\/p>\n

    I\u2019m sure that if Roger Bacon were to return from the grave he would condemn peer review outright.<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    Richard Smith<\/strong>\u00a0was the editor of\u00a0<\/em>The BMJ\u00a0until 2004.<\/em><\/p>\n

    Competing interests:<\/strong>\u00a0None declared.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The Franciscan philosopher Roger Bacon (c1214-1294), who some regard as the father of modern science, argued in his great text Opus Majus that there were four sources of ignorance: Frail and unsuited authority The influence of custom The opinion of the unlearned crowd The concealment of our ignorance in a display of apparent wisdom I […]<\/p>\n

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