送交者: 红旗飘飘 于 2006-5-12, 13:10:09:
Science 30 January 2004:
Vol. 303. no. 5658, pp. 606 - 609
A Danish government committee has ruled that one of the world's leading evolutionary biologists, Anders Pape Møller, is responsible for data fabricated in connection with an article that he co-authored in 1998 and subsequently retracted. Møller, a professor at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, has denied that his data were fabricated and has told Science that he plans to sue his chief accuser, Jørgen Rabøl, or the panel that issued the ruling, the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD), for defamation.
The charge, stemming from a bitter dispute between Møller and Rabøl, a former colleague, has cast a shadow over the relatively tight-knit world of behavioral ecology, the study of mating and other behaviors in an animal's natural environment. "It's a sad thing," says Malte Andersson, president of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology.
One point that's indisputable is Møller's reputation as a towering figure in the field. Møller has been a key proponent of the idea that traits such as long symmetrical tails in barn swallows, which attract potential mates, are a sign of beneficial genes. He has also shown that stress caused by environmental factors such as parasites can lead to the development of asymmetrical body parts. The failure to overcome such stress is a sign of weaker genes, he theorized, and therefore asymmetric traits are less attractive to potential mates. "He is prolific not just in papers but in ideas and in setting trends," says Ian Jones of the Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada. "It's hardly possible to write a paper in behavioral ecology without making extensive citations of Anders's work."