Scientists and other Scholars who publish work considered "crank" by most peers

This is probably a big ask but I am hoping to find out who exists–or has recently existed–who fits the following criteria:

  1. Is an academic who could be considered well-published in their field
  2. Has a view that is considered not just wrong, but “crank” levels of wrong, by a large number–preferably most or even all–others in their field
  3. At least occasionally speaks about and publishes about this “crank” idea in peer-reviewed or otherwise “gated” well-established venues* in their field–venues universally or near-universally considered reliable academic venues by people in the relevant field

*so like, journals, conferences, curated academic web/blog sites, etc.

The best example I can think of is any proponent of String Theory, which isn’t really a good example at all. But it’s my understanding that many physicists do despair that String Theory is at crank-ish “not even wrong” levels of “wrong.”

What better examples exist? Are there really biologists out there, for example, who could be considered realistically to be “respected scientists,” in the sense outlined above, who openly espouse and even get stuff published on creationism or Intelligent Design? Climate scientists who do the same arguing against global warming? Etc.

Bjorn Lomborg could be considered a candidate.

I think the Anti-vax researcher, Andrew Wakefield is the poster child for this.

The classic example was “continental drift”. There was some evidence (magnetic traces, mostly) that continents could move and had moved, but until a workable mechanism (plate tectonics) was proposed to explain how it could happen, “Continental Drift” was a fringe theory and proponents were considered nuts.

One of the very, very, very few cases of complete woo ultimately becoming the dominant paradigm.

Unfortunately often cited by current advocates of woo.

You’d be wrong about String Theory. It’s isn’t crankish nonsense but it does get a lot of attention despite being just one approach amongst many to get past the standard model and tie the 4 fundamental forces together.

I was thinking of Roger Penrose and his attempts to tie consciousness to to quantum events in the brain. He’s deeply respected in theoretical physics and mathematics but his views on consciousness are basically dismissed.

Yeah that’s a good example albeit a very old one, and your last line is unfortunately apropos because I am trying to advocate for an idea a lot of people think is woo but which there are a handful of relevant serious respected scholars who say the idea should at least be taken seriously. So I’m trying to show this idea is in a better position than other “crank” ideas in at least that regard. I hope I’m right. :wink:

Does he present these ideas successfully in “gated” and peer-reviewed venues? Or is it something he talks about just in his popular works?

Phys Life Rev. 2014 Mar;11(1):39-78. doi: 10.1016/j.plrev.2013.08.002. Epub 2013 Aug 20.
Consciousness in the universe: a review of the ‘Orch OR’ theory.

Roger Stritmatter would probably qualify in literary studies: he’s a full professor at Coppin State University, best known for maintaining a website dedicated to the proposition that the Earl of Oxford wrote the works of Shakespeare. IIRC, he’s got at least some publications in respectable venues that touch on this idea.

A request for clarification: Are you asking for:

(a) respected scholars who
(b) have something that is widely considered a crank belief and
© have publications supporting that belief in peer-reviewed journals?

If so, I’m not sure there’s anyone who meets all three criteria… if a belief is truly considered “crank” by most peers (as specified in your thread title), then it seems to me that, by definition, it’s not likely to get past a peer review.

(On edit: I’m thinking mainly of scientists. This may not be as true for other scholars.)

Linus Pauling (Nobel laureate) had, in his later years, some weird ideas about vitamin C and whatnot. I believe he even had some articles on this subject published in well-renowned journals.

How about Linus Pauling. He is one of the most important theoretical chemists who contributed a great deal to chemistry and quantum physics and won two (!) Nobel Prizes. (OK, one of them was a peace prize, but the other was for chemistry.) He also discovered the biochemical mechanism of sickle-cell anemia.

He was also a Soviet sympathizer, and wrote a book How to Live Longer and Feel Better which advocated that everyone take huge doses of ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) and that this would cure all your ills. I’m pretty sure this is where the myth of Vitamin C curing or preventing colds comes from. He later published papers asserting that Vitamin C could treat heart disease, atherosclerosis, and other maladies.

His experimental trials were laughably bad with poor controls, and followup studies using proper controls found no difference between Vitamin C and placebo for all of these conditions.

James Lovelock is held in extremely highly regard - on account of his obvious brilliance and achievements as a scientist outside of the ‘system’ - but I’m not sure how seriously his Gaia hypotheses are taken. Suspect they might be referred to as ‘crank theories’ had a less distinguished scientist rolled them out.

Should say that I’ve not read the papers, and thinking about very large regulatory systems and network effects in biospheres all sounds sensible. I believe he went a long way past that, though, with little data or mechanistic ideas to hand.

Linguist Merritt Ruhlen is a lecturer in Anthropological Sciences at Stanford. His efforts to reconstruct the Proto-Human language, the highly conjectural common ancestor of all the world’s languages has very few supporters and loads of critics. According to the latter, his theories fall into the “not-even-wrong” category.

“… the search for global etymologies is at best a hopeless waste of time, at worst an embarrassment to linguistics as a discipline, unfortunately confusing and misleading to those who might look to linguistics for understanding in this area” (Campbell and Poser 2008:393).

Truly famous names can sometimes get bunk published. Often bunk that’s not really up their main area of expertise. Such as Penrose on consciousness or Pauling on vitamin C.

I’m not sure how examples of this support the OP’s desire that his particular flavor of “Eminent scientist both supports bunk and gets it published … a little” be accorded extra respect.

Science publishing is ultimately a human social phenomenon. It’s not purely social as in Facebook “likes”. But the social aspects of peer review and noteworthiness are things which *detract *from the truth value of the totality of a given journal’s output, not *contribute *to it. Said another way if you’re looking at two articles, one by a big name and one by a nobody, it’s more likely the nobody has done the better research and found the better truth.

IOW, bunk remains bunk even if it’s popular and celebrities like it. Whether those are entertainment celebrities or science celebrities.

The fact a broken calendar has been right twice in a century is no reason to decide that broken calendars are good Oracles.

Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, depending on how you define recent. They managed to publish by inertia after nearly everyone had concluded their Cold Fusion was woo.

Oh, and nobel prize winning physicist Brian Josephson now believes in lots of hardcore woo including parapsychology, but he’s not now publishing in the same peer reviewed areas as his earlier, more respectable, work.

Quite the opposite–my expectation/hope is that what I described in the OP is a really rare thing.

Fred Hoyle has to be the champ.

[QUOTE]
In addition to his views on steady state theory and panspermia, Hoyle also supported the following controversial theories:
[ul]
[li]The correlation of flu epidemics with the sunspot cycle, with epidemics occurring at the minimum of the cycle. The idea was that flu contagion was scattered in the interstellar medium and reached Earth only when the solar wind had minimum power.[citation needed][/li][li] The fossil Archaeopteryx was a man-made fake.[34] This assertion was definitively refuted by, among other strong indications, the presence of microcracks extending through the fossil into the surrounding rock.[/li][li] The theory of abiogenic petroleum, where natural hydrocarbons (oil and natural gas) are explained as the result of deep carbon deposits, instead of fossilized organic material. “The suggestion that petroleum might have arisen from some transformation of squashed fish or biological detritus is surely the silliest notion to have been entertained by substantial numbers of persons over an extended period of time.”[citation needed][/li][li] The use of the fifty-six Aubrey holes at Stonehenge as a system for the neolithic Britons to predict eclipses, using them in the daily positioning of marker stones as proposed in his 1977 book On Stonehenge. The use of the Aubrey holes for predicting lunar eclipses was originally proposed by Gerald Hawkins whose book of the subject Stonehenge Decoded (1965) predates Hoyle’s.[citation needed][/li][/QUOTE]

[/ul]

Eric Laithwaite is a good example. My father was actually present at his infamous lecture.

Stephen Jay Gould

http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/evolute.html