David Count Potocki

David Count PotockiDavid Napoleon in his StudyDavid Christ on the CrossDavid The Intervention of the Sabine Women
Now, I don’t want to idealize this. To claim that scientists are free of bias, ambition or desires would be ridiculous. Everyone has pet ideas that they hope are right; and scientists are not famous for humility. (Think of the opening sentence of “For example, scientists in the pay of drug companies are more likely than independent scientists to find that a given drug has a beneficial effect, and less likely to discover that it is harmful. Sometimes, such discrepancies are actually fraudulent; but often, they are due to differences in interpreting a data set, or the ways in which experiments are designed. And there is certainly room for interpretation in the results of experiments: many experiments don’t give clear-cut results.The Double Helix,” James Watson’s account of his and Francis Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA: “I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood.” Those words could be said of many who have not gone on to win a Nobel prize.)Moreover, to downplay evidence that doesn’t fit your ideas, and to place more weight on evidence that does — this is something that human brains just seem to do. Worse, such biases become stronger under certain circumstances.