I would have posted this a few days ago - as soon as I found out about it - but I've only had my internet connection activated yesterday, so here it goes.
I must say I was truly gutted to find out that Marc Hauser - evolutionary psychologist and biologist from Harvard University - had been found guilty of eight counts of scientific misconduct involving both published and unpublished studies (if you don't know what I'm talking about you can start by reading into it
here). To my knowledge Harvard has not released too many details concerning the internal investigation, but data falsification appears to be one of the likely charges. I was personally devastated, not because I have any personal affinity to Marc Hauser as an individual, but because I have personal and academic stakes in the field of cognitive neuroscience and because I find its interaction with evolutionary biology to represent one of the most promising areas of scientific investigation at present. How someone can be as selfish as to act in a way that is certain to harm science's reputation and - by extension - humanity as a whole is truly beyond me. As if we didn't have enough problems with people still going on about "Climategate" and the Piltdown Man hoax.
How long do you think it'll take the Creationists to jump onto this bandwagon too?