Things are not always so simple. Badly conducted research sometimes reaches the right conclusion, if I may be permitted an autoquote this is what I recently wrote in defence of the point of view that climategate has little bearing on what we should believe about global warming
"It has been claimed that Claudius Ptolemy, the greatest astronomer of antiquity and Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics falsified their data. I don't think that we need to know whether this is correct or not to judge their theories. As it happens, Noel Swerdlow mounted a robust defence of Ptolemy against the charges brought by Robert Newton whereas in Mendel's case I don't think anybody has argued with RA Fisher's (respectful) case that the data look highly suspect. But Mendel's theory looks currently much better than Ptolemy's. "
Regards
Stephen Senn
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From: Evidence based health (EBH) [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of SUBSCRIBE EVIDENCE-BASED-HEALTH Tom Smith [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 06 November 2010 16:56
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Great Anecdotes versus poor science
Of course when new discoveries are made, great observations, by great scientists are often dismissed as invalid because someone did a bad study which trumps someones observations.
Does anyone have a historically good example of this, or a list of examples.
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