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Concept
Junk science
Summary
The expression junk science is used to describe scientific data, research, or analysis considered by the person using the phrase to be spurious or fraudulent. The concept is often invoked in political and legal contexts where facts and scientific results have a great amount of weight in making a determination. It usually conveys a pejorative connotation that the research has been untowardly driven by political, ideological, financial, or otherwise unscientific motives.
The concept was popularized in the 1990s in relation to expert testimony in civil litigation. More recently, invoking the concept has been a tactic to criticize research on the harmful environmental or public health effects of corporate activities, and occasionally in response to such criticism. Author Dan Agin in his book Junk Science harshly criticized those who deny the basic premise of global warming,
In some contexts, junk science is counterposed to the "sound science" or "solid science" that favors one's own point of view. Junk science has been criticized for undermining public trust in real science.
The phrase junk science appears to have been in use prior to 1985. A 1985 United States Department of Justice report by the Tort Policy Working Group noted:
The use of such invalid scientific evidence (commonly referred to as 'junk science') has resulted in findings of causation which simply cannot be justified or understood from the standpoint of the current state of credible scientific or medical knowledge.
In 1989, the climate scientist Jerry Mahlman (Director of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory) characterized the theory that global warming was due to solar variation (presented in Scientific Perspectives on the Greenhouse Problem by Frederick Seitz et al.) as "noisy junk science."
Peter W. Huber popularized the term with respect to litigation in his 1991 book Galileo's Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom. The book has been cited in over 100 legal textbooks and references; as a consequence, some sources cite Huber as the first to coin the term.
Official source
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