HOW ELSE ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO SUPPORT THE NOTION OF ETHICS BEING BIOLOGICAL...:

In the summer of 2007, while the scientist Marc Hauser was in Australia, Harvard University authorities entered his lab on the tenth floor of William James Hall, seizing computers, videotapes, unpublished manuscripts and notes. Hauser, then 47, was a professor of psychology, organismic and evolutionary biology, and biological anthropology. He was popular with students and a prolific researcher and author, with more than 200 papers and several books to his name. His most recent book, Moral Minds (2006), discusses the biological bases of human morality. Noam Chomsky called it "a lucid, expert, and challenging introduction to a rapidly developing field with great promise and far-reaching implications"; for Peter Singer, it is "a major contribution to an ongoing debate about the nature of ethics." [...]

The beginning of the inquiry leading to Harvard's 2007 investigation of Hauser was triggered by a delegation of three researchers in his lab. We know almost nothing from Hauser's or Harvard's statements about the nature of the students' charges. However, an article by Tom Bartlett published in The Chronicle of Higher Education in August 2010 offers a glimpse into Hauser's lab. It is based on a document provided to Bartlett, on condition of anonymity, by a former research assistant of Hauser's. The document, Bartlett writes, "is the statement the research assistant gave to Harvard investigators in 2007." As he explains, "one experiment in particular [had] led members of Mr. Hauser's lab to become suspicious of his research and, in the end, to report their concerns about the professor to Harvard administrators."

This experiment used a standard method in child and animal studies: a sound pattern is played repeatedly over a sound system and then changed, and if the animal then looks at the sound speaker the implication is that the animal noticed the change. In Hauser's experiment, three tones (in a pattern like A-B-A) were played by the lab assistants. After the monkeys repeatedly heard this pattern, the scientists would modify it and observe if the monkeys had noticed the change in the sound pattern. Pattern recognition of this sort is considered to be a component of language acquisition.

The monkey's behavior was videotaped and later "coded blind"--that is, the experimenters, without knowing which sound was being played, judged whether the monkey was looking at the speaker. When coding is done blind and independently by two observers, and the two sets of observations match closely, the results are assumed to be reliable.

Bartlett went on to explain that, according to the document that had been provided by the research assistant,

the experiment in question was coded by Mr. Hauser and a research assistant in his laboratory. A second research assistant was asked by Mr. Hauser to analyze the results. When the second research assistant analyzed the first research assistant's codes, he found that the monkeys didn't seem to notice the change in pattern. In fact, they looked at the speaker more often when the pattern was the same. In other words, the experiment was a bust.

But Mr. Hauser's coding showed something else entirely: He found that the monkeys did notice the change in pattern--and, according to his numbers, the results were statistically significant. If his coding was right, the experiment was a big success.

The second research assistant was bothered by the discrepancy. How could two researchers watching the same videotapes arrive at such different conclusions? He suggested to Mr. Hauser that a third researcher should code the results. In an e-mail message to Mr. Hauser, a copy of which was provided to The Chronicle, the research assistant who analyzed the numbers explained his concern. "I don't feel comfortable analyzing results/publishing data with that kind of skew until we can verify that with a third coder," he wrote.

A graduate student agreed with the research assistant and joined him in pressing Mr. Hauser to allow the results to be checked, the document given to The Chronicle indicates. But Mr. Hauser resisted, repeatedly arguing against having a third researcher code the videotapes and writing that they should simply go with the data as he had already coded it. After several back-and-forths, it became plain that the professor was annoyed.

"i am getting a bit pissed here," Mr. Hauser wrote in an e-mail to one research assistant. "there were no inconsistencies! let me repeat what happened. i coded everything. Then [a research assistant] coded all the trials highlighted in yellow. we only had one trial that didn't agree. i then mistakenly told [another research assistant] to look at column B when he should have looked at column D.... we need to resolve this because I am not sure why we are going in circles."

According to the document provided to the Chronicle, the graduate student and the research assistant who analyzed the data decided to re-examine the tapes without notifying Hauser. They coded the results without consulting with each other, and both sets of data showed that the monkeys didn't seem to react to the change in patterns. When they then reviewed Hauser's results, they found that what he had recorded "bore little relation" to what they had seen on the videotapes. The two did not think the issue was a matter of differing interpretations. As Bartlett put it, they thought Hauser's data were "just completely wrong." As news of their experience spread around the lab, according to the document, other lab members indicated they too had experienced episodes in which Hauser "reported false data and then insisted that it be used."

Several other people who had worked in Hauser's lab during the period he produced the research investigated by Harvard, and who have asked to remain unnamed, confirmed for me the account offered by the Chronicle and provided further details and examples of the general pattern of Hauser fabricating and falsifying data and pressuring others, particularly undergraduates and other junior members of the lab, to do the same to obtain the desired results. Eventually, three researchers in the lab presented evidence to the university's ombudsman and then to the dean's office, prompting the inquiry that led to the formal investigation.

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