Pirate Professor Under Fire | Durham News

0:00So, Duke Professor Dan Arelly, known for his work on human behavior, is now running for office in Israel with the pirate party. He showed up at the legislature wearing a pirate hat, saying politics is just fun. This French party isn't expected to win any seats, but Arelly's move is definitely getting attention. This whole political stunt comes right after some serious trouble with his research. Earlier this month, one of his papers got retracted because other scientists found evidence of data fraud. They couldn't find a good explanation for the anomalies and believed the data was tampered with or made up to get the results they wanted. It's not the first time Arelly's work has faced this kind of scrutiny. A study on honesty he co-authored back in 2012 was retracted in 2021 for similar reasons. Duke investigated and said he didn't falsify data himself, but he should have done more to stop it from being published. And if that wasn't enough, Arelly's name popped up over 700 times in emails released by the Justice Department related to Jeffrey Epstein.

1:02Their communications went from 2010 to 2018 and included Arelly asking Epstein for contact information for someone he met. Duke University is reportedly looking into these recent concerns about research integrity. Meanwhile, Arelly is out there trying his hand at politics, which he finds amusing. It's certainly a lot going on for a professor who studies dishonesty. And Durham News today, powered by AI bringing you what matters. I'm Corey with the story.