In an era in which science is under threat from religious fundamentalism, medical quackery, and general scaremongering, there has been a scientific backlash against all forms of thinking outside the scheme of rational empiricism. This is evidenced in the Channel 4 documentary entitled "Enemies of Reason," in which Richard Dawkins chases down such "primitive" beliefs and outmoded ways of thinking which "impoverish our culture." Likewise, in the United States, the biologist Jerry Coyne recently asserted at Edge magazine:

We don't reject the supernatural merely because we have an overweening philosophical commitment to materialism; we reject it because entertaining the supernatural has never helped us understand the natural world. Alchemy, faith healing, astrology, creationism—none of these perspectives has advanced our understanding of nature by one iota.

The economic and political reasons for this polarising antagonism are understandable (see this previous post). However, in historical terms this total rejection of supernaturalism can be challenged. The first half of my research thesis examines the history of supernaturalist encounters from within - rather than opposed to - mainstream empirical science. It shows how, from Athanasius Kircher's Mundus Subterraneus, through the nineteenth-century's Society for Psychical Research, through James Clerk Maxwell's thermodynamic demon, to Marvin Minsky's demonic model of consciousness, rationalists have engaged with the supernatural when science reached the limits of Enlightenment methods of enquiry. And whilst science since the Enlightenment has driven us through multiple technological revolutions in a remarkably short span of time, it is worth remembering (as Coyne clearly has not) that for the majority of human history supernatural ways of interpreting the world have been the dominant ones, and human knowledge and technology still developed over this far longer period, albeit much less spectacularly.

In my view, then, the distinction between scientific and supernatural epistemologies is not quite so polar as scientists such as Dawkins or Coyne make out (though I appreciate their motivations). I should add that my argument does not assert that supernatural methods are in any systematic way better than rational ones, nor that things like ghosts or demons or astrological effects exist in reality, only that thinking that they might exist and using alternative methods working under that assumption can produce insights normal science would struggle to reach were it to follow its normal tangents. Once the alternative approaches map out the new ground, often quarantined from normal practice by being labelled "thought experiments" or "placeholder terms," science invariably assumes control once again in matching, or falsifying the match between, hypothesis and reality. I have to be supremely careful in my research that whilst re-evaluating the historical value of supernatural modes of enquiry, I also demarcate the limits to it, where rational science takes over with its time-honoured methodological reliability.

The best way to tackle the assertion that supernaturalism is the equal to science, would be through systematically deconstructing supernaturalist claims and exposing them as empirically unreliable, whilst allowing that in special cases supernaturalism offers a subtle sub-set of the methodologies at its disposal. Nevertheless, given the level of scientific illiteracy among the general public, the influence of a press generally insensitive to the difference between good and bad science, and, in my own field, the belief among postmodern academics that science is a relativistic and ideological epistemology, it is very tempting to do a wholesale demolition job of supernaturalist beliefs, and lose the subtlety of their merging with rationality. Thus the acerbic tone adopted by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt in their critique of postmodernist theory, tellingly entitled Higher Superstition; the aggressive manner adopted by Richard Dawkins; the patronising voice adopted by popular defenders against Bad Science, such as Ben Goldacre and David Colquhoun.

But when I read the response to Dawkins' programme by Neil Spencer, the Observer's astrologer, I realised that in spite of the nuances of my research it can be very difficult to avoid taking this directly oppositional stance in the public sphere, when the claims made are so obviously empirically false, and the tone of the supernaturalist thinker is just as acerbic as that of the scientist about which he complains. Inspired by the methods of Goldacre and Colquhoun, I tried to deconstruct his counter-attack in which he asserts the value of superstition, astrology, and alternative medicine. I start with astrology:

There was the usual objection to astrology dividing people into 12 Sun signs, and my usual reply: that's eight more than the Myers-Briggs personality test used by commerce. Actually, astrology's basic personality types number 1,728.

Rather than "more being better," one would expect that a personality model that divides people into four types will be more reliable than one that uses 1,728, since even a randomised response to the Myers-Briggs test would give a subject a 1-in-4 chance of being placed in the correct category (although as I understand it the test actually uses 16). It is not feasible that I fit neatly into one of 1,728 personality types, whereas all standard personality tests do not give absolute categories, but percentages which allow for people to straddle groups. Further, the Myers-Briggs test relies on subjects answering questions about themselves, and draws conclusions from that data based on aggregate samples of a large population. By contrast astrology draws conclusions from the stars, and applies them to people based on nothing more than the coincidence of their birthday. Rather than people determining the range of possible personalities (which is what we do tacitly in everyday life when meeting another person for the first time, with a large degree of success), astrologers cherry pick from a pool of personalities and apply them to people according to the rigid and arbitrary rule of celestial mechanics. As Dawkins showed, a reading for one star sign such as Capricorn has the same predictive value for an individual of a different zodiac, as for the person actually born in January.

But if the numbers game does not work, there's always the name game:

Am I bothered by Dawkins calling me names? Not really. I'm in some esteemed company - Resurgence publisher Satish Kumar, and Dr Peter Fisher, clinical director of the Royal Homeopathic Hospital (and the Queen's physician) - also fall under Dawkins' stony disapproval.

Declaring himself unaffected by being called names, he nevertheless decides to name them instead, assuming we will be impressed where he was not. So, in keeping with this intelligent tactic, let us name names back at him: Pinker, Crick, Maxwell, Darwin, Kelvin, Einstein...Actually, rather than going on with this squabbling, which is conducted on the level of a playground argument, lets switch to some serious empirical scrunity:

Homeopathy's supposed cures are, according to Dawkins, merely the result of the placebo effect. 'It's our own minds that cure the pain,' he concludes. How that explains why animals respond to homeopathy isn't confronted.

I'm not sure which study Spencer was thinking of in asserting that animals respond to homeopathy. It certainly wasn't the large-scale, double-blind, placebo controlled trial on dairy herds in Sweden in 2003, which found no evidence of effect, but a "considerable risk to animal welfare" in the continuing use of the treatment. Nor was it this study from the Veterinary Record in 2006. Or this one from Oslo. Or this from Canada. In fact, if you use Google Scholar to search for "homeopathy animal placebo," you will be hard pressed to discover any of the evidence Neil Spencer cites (or, rather, fails to cite, given that he gives no further references).

But wait a minute. Clearly I am the one being silly by looking for such scientific studies at all. Perhaps the failure to detect any difference between placebo and homeopathic remedies is precisely that:

Everything must be subject to randomised, controlled double-blind trials, just like medical drugs - 'drugs that work' as Dawkins insists.

Now instead of tackling Spencer by evidence, I'm just getting angry. That bloody medical science, always so pernickity when deciding whether or not to produce expensive quantities of a drug and release it into a large medical population; so annoyingly demanding in its tests for the effectiveness of alternative therapies. There is certainly a case for containing the burden of proof on medical trials, and separating responsibility for testing from the pharmaceutical companies which produce the treatments (Goldacre himself comments on this in The Guardian this week). But in the meantime, I'm not sure I trust the coin-toss method.

Though having said that, according to Spencer, we are not certain of getting better even by drugs which have been subjected to such a lengthy, scientifically controlled testing process:

The medical profession admits that the success of approved drugs can be as low as 60 per cent.

True. But according to a study in the quacks' journal Homeopathy, the success rate of that alternative therapy is around 70 per cent, so not much better than mainstream medicine. (Though the study asked patients who had paid for and received homeopathic treatment - with no placebo control - whether they thought their condition had improved. Surprise, surprise, having handed over wads of cash, many of them did.) And when you consider that most mainstream medicine will often be treating otherwise chronic, life-threatening illness, whereas homeopathy will tend not to be used by people lying incapacitated in intensive care wards, the apparently lower success rate of some approved drugs is understandable.

Finally, keeping the argument at its markedly unsubtle ebb, we get back to names again:

Galileo was, after all, astrologer as well as astronomer. Likewise Johannes Kepler, who was preoccupied with Pythagorean mathematics and Platonic solids. Isaac Newton was fascinated by alchemy, as was Robert Boyle, father of chemistry.

It is noticeable that all these scientists date from before the eighteenth century, and it is entirely consistent with theories of paradigm shift that the new scientific methodology did not immediately replace the old, supernaturalist speculations. Today, four hundred years on, and having consistently proved its superiority, one would hope that the scientific revolution has been completed.

Nevertheless, the fact that it has not remains interesting; in the esteemed company of Boyle and Newton, I am intrigued by astrology and alternative therapy too, or I would not be dedicating a substantial chunk of my thesis to it. Likewise, the Times Higher this week reports of the nine "psi" research groups across UK universities. As parapsychologist Chris French explains, "The fact is that the majority of the population does believe in this stuff, and a sizeable minority of the population claims to have had direct experience of the paranormal. If psychologists have nothing to say about this topic, they are missing out on a broad part of human experience." Indeed, Dawkins' own programme featured a psychologist interested in the depth of belief in water dowsers; comically, they continued to believe they could dowse, despite their success rate being exposed as no better than would be expected by chance. I was disappointed Dawkins as an interested scientist did not ask the follow up question, which is that dowsing outside the laboratory conditions must have some effect, given its survival into the twenty-first century. Possibly water dowsers are excellent interpreters of natural signs, such as increased vegetation or changing lie of the land, and might well use this entirely explicable if implicit method, rather than explicitly a twitching branch, to predict where water might run. Learning how they become so expert at interpretation would be fascinating, as indeed was Derren Brown's analysis of the manipulations of "cold reading" used by spiritualists at seances (believe me, once the illusionist reveals the subtle pressures they exert on an audience, those who continue to do it believing they are actually communicating with spirits seem nothing more than silver-tongued salesmen).

As serious researchers correctly suggest, there is no doubt that astrology, supernaturalism, ghosts are part of human culture. Whether they exist or not in the physical world, they undeniably exist for half of us in the mind, which is why even the most rational of scientists sometimes use them in thought experiments to provoke the scientific community into debate. They are therefore worthy of physical, psychological, and in my case literary study, and it is this significance that proponents should assert. Were they to do so, they would make opponents like Dawkins appear to be attacking a straw man, and one moreover which allows itself to be subjected to the same rigorous empirical enquiry as the more mainstream science of which he is an exponent.

But this will never happen, so the view has to remain thus: it is interesting that humans fall for it; it is interesting that it once was thought to work; it has generated some valid knowledge in the past. But just as I could use a flint to light a fire, but prefer a match, true science has a way of getting things done which alternative therapies and superstitious beliefs simply cannot match. This is why I, like Dawkins or the other defenders of reason, find it hard to otherwise than to mock and patronise the absurd beliefs and false claims of a "primitive" such as Spencer.

Labels: astrology, Bad Science, Enemy of Reason, homeopathy, Richard Dawkins, Science and Culture

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian's redoubtable Bad Science columnist, has been dealing with some classic hysteria about electrosmog radiation caused by Wi-Fi. First up is the Independent, with Julia Stevenson describing how she "fought back back after being diagnosed by her naturopath with overexposure to Wi-Fi and mobile phone frequencies." I know what a naturalist is. I know what a psychopath is. Dare I ask what a "naturopath" is? Best piece of bad science goes to engineer and homeopath Gary Johnson, who peddles a therapeutic device:

The heart of the unit is a programmed microprocessor unit that produces a holograph field that is amplified through an internal aerial system. This protection field protects the human system from the negative effects of EMR,” says Johnson. He says he has had great success in alleviating patients’ symptoms, and claims the unit offers unlimited protection from any negative electromagnetic emissions in a 700-square metre radius.

I know maths G.C.S.E.s are not what they used to be, but surely newspaper sub-editors should know that you cannot have a square circle. And what the hell is a holograph field? Oh, that's right, it's that thing they have on Star Trek. Anyway, Goldacre and the commentators responding to his post do a comprehensive demolition job on this article.

That a broadsheet newspaper should give space to this tripe is bad enough. That the BBC's Panorama should also generate hysteria over the Wi-Fi radiation worming its way into our children's brains is simply unacceptable. Goldacre does not have to work to hard to point out that the science was used to provide a technical gloss to essentially a sensationalist piece of tabloid journalism:

“Ooh its well into the red there,” says reporter Paul Kenyon, holding up the detector (19 minutes in). Gosh that sounds bad. Well into the red on what? It’s tricky to calibrate measurements, and to decide what to measure, and what the cut off point is for “red”. Panorama’s readings were “well into the red” on “The COM Monitor”, a special piece of detecting equipment designed from scratch and built by none other than Alasdair Philips of Powerwatch, the man who leads the campaign against WiFi. His bespoke device is manufactured exclusively for Powerwatch, and he will sell one to you for just £175. Alasdair decided what “red” meant on Panorama’s device. So not very independent then.

But why should it take Goldacre to come down on the BBC? Their own editorial policy on accuracy and facts states that:

We should report statistics and risks in context, taking care not to worry the audience unduly, especially about health or crime. It may also be appropriate to report the margin of error and the source of figures to enable people to judge their significance. This may involve giving trends, taking care to avoid giving figures more weight than can stand scrutiny. If reporting a change, consideration should be given to making the baseline figure clear. For example, a doubling of a problem affecting one in two million people will still only affect one in a million.

I have suggested before that we need for scientific evidence the same sort of protection not unlike libel laws. But if media producers such as the BBC cannot get it right, despite being as close to being an objective and reliable reporter as any organisation can be (and to be fair, the claims were attacked on the BBC's own Newswatch), I am not sure what more legal support could do. Of course, my depression could just be the result of those pesky wireless waves...

Labels: Bad Science, Science and Culture, wi-fi radiation

The television advertisements broadcast in the United States by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, launched partly in response to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth film, are a poststructuralist's paradigm. In the former film, soft-focus, saturated images of children blowing dandelions, and trains trundling down rural railroads, contrast with dull images of third-world farmers pounding grain. This regression, the film suggests, is what a world would be like without oil (no mention of renewable substitutes here). Its punchline hammers the point home in terms every bit as binary blankly binary as Bush's "you're either with us or against us" ('you're either for the war or a terrorist') speech: "Carbon Dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life." The meaning of words change before the eyes of the reader; even the supposedly absolute and permanent formulas of chemistry metamorphose into rhetoric and ideology.

Secondly, the advert signals once and for all the death of the author(ity), even of science, as a quick look at the background of the "Experts" on the board of the CEI reveals. The President of the CEI has a degree in Mathematics and Political Science; Chair of Energy and Global Warming policy is someone with an MSc from the London School of Economics; the Director of Energy Policy is "working part time toward a Ph.D. in American Government from Catholic University." In my PhD course, my graduate school is always emphasising my need to gain transferable skills; but even though I work in an interdisciplinary field across sciences and arts, I would not claim to qualified to speak with a solid foundation of empirical knowledge on the case of the former. But perhaps unlike in the British university system PhDs in "American Goverment" give one the skills to make accurate and objective scientific claims.

Preceeding these technical criticisms, though, my gut reaction is one of utter despair at the inequality in the battle between science and political ideology. As the CEI so stridently asserts, scientists as a body are not sure precisely how fast climate change is taking place. Even as I type this, the BBC Climate Change Model running silently in my taskbar reminds me that climate change may well be happening faster than some scientists think, but that its effects may also have been over-exaggerated. But these are concerns that are quantitative in type; the overwhelming majority of scientists working in the field are agreed that in our earth is experiencing a qualitative revolution in its climate, one that breaks so radically from past events that, regardless of the details, impacts on life are already being felt.

The unfairness of the playing field in which these scientists must compete against the likes of the CEI is that (as I mentioned in my previous post about Richard Dawkins) for scientists to assume the rhetoric of dogma and politics - which they have to do in this most pressing issue - is for them to open the arena to all-comers. Noting just a few coincidental contentions in the broad canvas of scientific consensus, even opponents with little awareness of scientific practice can argue that, having stepped out of their remit for the objective pursuit of knowledge, scientists are legitimate targets on the assumption that the science as a whole is founded on faith (as in Creationism) or warped by liberal politics (as in relation to global warming).

It leaves me deeply depressed for the lack of respect we have for the Baconian enterprise that has constructed a world in which we live longer, can communicate through the internet and, yes, drive cars. In his weekly column in The Guardian, Ben Goldacre tries in vain to correct some of the media's grotesque perversions of scientific evidence. These often assume that one trial on one particular issue (MMR and autism is a favourite), though it has failed the standards of scientific practice, has the same authority as the rest of scientific evidence on the issue put together, even though the silent majority of scientist have been required to meet high benchmarks of double-blind laboratory testing and peer-reviewed publication. A few years ago, Elton John was awarded hundreds of thousands of pounds in libel damages, following tabloid claims that he was bulimic. It seems to me that we need a similar sort of law to protect scientific knowledge from similarly, but more significant, defamatory abuses.

Labels: Bad Science, Ben Goldacre, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Environment, Science and Culture