Harvard’s Marc Hauser (background here – scroll down) didn’t like people monkeying around in his lab.
In an important essay on Hauser, and on research fraud in general, Charles Gross concludes the obvious:
[I]rreversible damage has been done to the field of animal cognition, [and] to Harvard University…
December 25th, 2011 at 6:48AM
Leaving aside outright fraud, there are myriad other problems which exist.
Many PIs are unwilling to put in the time that is required to teach their students how to keep a decent notebook in the first place.
“Experiments of this and such type require the following detailed information regarding experimental apparatus and procedures: yada, yada, yada. It is imperative to obtain the following data from this experiment, to record it in the following format, and to archive the raw data according to our established protocols, etc. etc.”
Simply specifying these things is not enough, one must be willing to bust chops. Professors take the path of least resistance, and simply trust that their students are on the ball.
There is ONE prof. in my department who demands to see that notebooks are in order on a regular basis (every 3 weeks he checks to see if entries up to date, specific data recorded and backed up, procedures written in the style of our professional association, etc.) This professor is seventy something years old, and will be retiring in one year, and after that the department is full of hacks!
To be fair, certain standards are generally met for publication, but there is much unpublished work out there that might be completed later on by other students. However, any after the fact determination is going to take much more time and effort than it should and this is a real waste of time for those who are tasked with doing so.
Those groups (or individuals) who fail to provide good quality supporting information earn themselves a bad reputation. Everyone in the field knows who is cutting corners and who is a pro, let there be no doubt about that.
Surprisingly:
Work done by hacks may be viable, even very good, and this is often the case! Moreover, if those published procedures were written by someone who was shooting from the hip and they still give reproducible results, then those methods are idiot proof! This is a very good thing in the end, but the inefficiency of getting to such circumstances, the details lost which might have given rise to greater understanding or birthed new projects represent a very high cost to have paid.
As you might have guessed, I speak only on matters relevant to the hard sciences: no human subjects, no animals, no black-box analytical techniques, no bio even, just pure and applied physical sciences.
I cannot imagine that usable results could ever be had taking this approach to biology, let alone ‘evolved morality’.