Peter Gallagher

I won’t recount all their sto­ries: down­load the paper and decide for your­self. I think the evi­dence con­vinc­ingly sup­ports M&M’s con­clu­sion that

“…[W]ithin an aca­d­e­mic milieu, there can be strong peer pres­sure not to ques­tion polit­i­cally pop­u­lar results, even when they are prima facie doubtful.”

Among the most cel­e­brated cases of such herd-mentality was the broad accep­tance of a mis­lead­ing recon­struc­tion of his­tor­i­cal cli­mate (Mann’s ‘hockey-stick’ graph), as revealed by co-author Ross McK­itrick (an econ­o­mist at uni­ver­sity of Guelph) and Stephen McIn­tyre (a retired Toronto sta­tis­ti­cian and pub­lisher of the Cli­mate Audit web­site). That <a href=“http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html” title=”- Bishop Hill blog — Cas­par and the Jesus