A long time ago in a college biology lab far, far away…a fellow student and I performed an experiment to assess how different foodstuffs were handled by the intestine. We were not studying anything new, we were just repeating a classic experiment to examine the effect of the composition of food on the speed of digestion. So we took a few groups of rats and fed them a high-carbohydrate diet or a high-fat diet. We determined how much food the rats had consumed, and we euthanized the rats at different times after ingesting the meal and measured the weight of the contents of the stomach and intestine. We found that the food mostly made up of carbohydrate emptied quickly from the stomach, and there was a small amount of it present in the intestine. However, the food made up of mostly fat emptied slowly from the stomach, but there was more of it in the intestine; so far so good. One of our conclusions was obvious from the results, the fatty food emptied more slowly from the stomach. But in our report on the experiment we went beyond that, and also concluded that the food made up of carbohydrate was absorbed faster into the body compared to the food made up of fat. Later we were furious to find out that our experiment report received the equivalent of a “C”! When we confronted (literally) our professor, he explained that we could not make that conclusion because we had not performed an experiment specifically designed to evaluate the absorption of the food into the body. We were incredulous at this reply. “Where else could it have gone?” we enquired. The professor explained that no matter how obvious, we could not make this claim without presenting evidence. He said that, for example, we could have measured the level of certain fats and carbohydrates in the blood vessels draining the intestines and correlated that with the amount of such nutrients inside the intestine. But absent that evidence, we had made an unwarranted conclusion. Needless to say, we were not too happy with our grade. We had worked really hard to conduct the experiment staying late in the lab preparing the diets and making all the measurements. We grudgingly accepted the professor’s argument, but still we could not shake off the idea that, at heart, the whole notion was just a stupid formalism. After all, ingested food doesn’t just disappear; it has to go somewhere. If it is not in the intestine, where else could it have possibly gone but inside the body? At the time we did not appreciate that the requirement for evidence that the professor was imposing on us, despite repeating a well-known scientific experiment and working with a well-known animal model, was meant to alert us to be cautious when performing experiments for the first time with less known systems. In fact, if we had paid attention during high school, we would have remembered a famous example of one such experiment that reached an erroneous conclusion for not following the cautious approach required by our professor. In 1662 the chemist Jan Baptist van Helmont conducted what is considered the first quantitative experiment in biology. He took a pot and filled it with 200 pounds of soil, which he had weighed after drying it in a furnace, and planted a willow tree sapling weighing 5 pounds in the pot. For 5 years he watered the tree, and at the end of this time period the tree weighed 169 pounds. Yet when he reweighed the soil after drying it as described above, he only found a 2 ounce difference. This indicated that the entire 164 pounds of the mass of the tree could not have possibly come from the soil. Helmont concluded that the 164 pounds of wood, bark, and roots arose from water. This conclusion at the time (1662) must have made sense. After all, from where else could all that extra mass have possibly originated? The only thing the tree seemingly received was water, thus the difference in weight could only have come from the water, right? Notice that van Helmont did not produce any evidence to support this conclusion. Much in the same way that we concluded (without evidence) that the food was absorbed because it could not have gone anywhere else, van Helmont concluded that the extra tree mass came from the water presumably because it could not come from anywhere else. It would be 100 more years before the work of several scientists including Joseph Priestley, Jan Ingenhousz, Jean Senebier, and Nicolas-Theodore de Saussure would establish that plants take up CO2 from the atmosphere and produce oxygen under the influence of sunlight, and that the gain in weight as a plant grows is not just due to accumulation of water or its conversion into tree material, but to the fixation of CO2 into chemical compounds which make up the solid constituents of the wood, bark, and roots. Ironically, van Helmont was the first to identify a gas produced from burning plants which he called “sylvestre”, and which we now know to be CO2, but he never made the connection that plants may take up this substance from the air. So yes, my dear old professor, you were right. Even the obvious must be supported by evidence! Image of the van Helmont experiment by Lars Ebbersmeyer used here under an Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
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In the excellent 1987 docudrama, Life Story, also known as The Race for the Double Helix, which dramatizes the discovery of DNA, Dr. Rosalind Franklin played by actress Juliet Stevenson complains to her colleague Dr.Vittorio Luzzati about leaving Paris to go to London to continue her work. “Why am I leaving Paris? She asks. Vittorio replies, “My dear Rosalind, you must turn your back on thoughts of pleasure. We are the monks of science.” To which Dr. Franklin adds, “And the nuns.” Vittorio’s comment was intended as a joke, but it did frame very well the attitude that scientists have had towards scientific work. Indeed at times the all-consuming devotion of scientists for their work has been reminiscent of a monastic class of individuals who make vows to eschew Earthly delights in favor of a chance to make scientific discoveries. This devotion and its associated work ethic were transmitted from one generation of scientists to another through teaching and example. I had a friend who, while pursuing his studies in medicine, had been accepted to carry out basic research once a week in the lab of a professor of certain renown. The first day he went to the lab he was pretty excited, and was thrilled that the professor stayed with him performing experiments until late at night. At the end of the workday the professor asked him, “At what time are you coming tomorrow?” Somewhat puzzled, my friend tried to explain that he could only come to the lab once a week. However, the professor would have none of it and insisted he come again next day. So my friend returned to the lab next day and he stayed until late again performing experiments with the professor after which the professor again asked him, “At what time are you coming tomorrow?” This went on for a week, and my friend was pretty wiped out, so he made it a point of explaining to the professor that this could not continue. He told him that not only did he have classes and patients to attend, but he also had a family. The professor was not impressed and replied, “When I was your age, I had a family, and I was in medical school too. I had to attend patients, I had to take classes; and I also had to pay my professors for teaching me”. Then he added, “I am not charging you anything. At what time are you coming tomorrow?” These stories of sacrifice and devotion to scientific work were once very commonplace. I have known of scientists who worked so hard that they started sleeping in their labs because it made no sense to go back home at the end of the workday. I knew a scientist who one day arrived home just to find his infant daughter was speaking. He quizzed his spouse as to when this had happened, and she just replied, “While you were away in the lab.” He had missed her first words. I knew of a scientist who one day in the fall began a period of intense work and concentration in his research. He worked for months eating at his research institute’s cafeteria, and sleeping in the student lounge. After he achieved what he had set out to do, he decided to step out of the building for a change, and realized that it was spring. He had worked through winter! There were research institutes where working weekends and holidays was something that was (unofficially) “expected from you”. In these places, it was virtually impossible to have a chance at succeeding without devoting the extra time. As recently as 3 years ago, I was endorsing the application of a student to a research position, and as one of the plusses I said that if necessary he would come to work on weekends. There was a long silence on the other side of the phone, and then the person with whom I was speaking said in a sarcastic tone, “If necessary?” The sacrifice and devotion were not restricted merely to the amount of work that you would put into it, but also to the monetary compensation you received. I had a professor who often remarked how happy he was to be doing science, and how astonished he was that he was actually getting paid to do it. This attitude was very common in the older generations of scientists. Some of these scientists were scandalized when new generations of students started arguing that they had a right to be funded. When they were students, most of these older professors had been content just to have the honor to work alongside great scientists; salary was merely an afterthought. This mentality was so prevalent that it transcended into the broader society. I know of a colleague who once received a phone call from a human resources person to provide him information regarding a position to which he had been accepted at a company. However, he considered that the pay he was offered was too low and he tried to negotiate a higher salary. The human resources person was confused by this request and quizzically asked, “Why do you want a higher pay, aren’t you a scientist?”
The above are some of the myriads of stories out there of a culture that stressed scientific work above everything. The stereotype of scientists, according to this culture, are the individuals that work 80 hours a week and are happy to be doing what they like, regardless of the amount of salary they are receiving. I once even read an advice to young scientists stating that they should not get married too early in their careers because that would destroy their creativity! However, this culture is fading, and I think this is due to the confluence of several factors. 1) Nowadays there is an excess of scientists contending for an ever dwindling set of academic positions and resources. Competition for funding is fierce, and mere hard work and devotion to science is no guarantee of having your own lab and a successful career. 2) Many sources of employment outside academia have opened up for scientists, and it has become acceptable to have non-academic careers in science. At the turn of this century for a scientist to accept a job in industry was still referred to in some venues as “selling out”. This is not true anymore. Many scientists have flocked to occupations in industry, government, and other areas where they are able to earn decent wages and have a life. 3) Science used to be a male-dominated profession. It is easy for a man to “devote his life to science” if his wife can stay home and take care of the kids. In today’s world where both spouses work, this model is not feasible anymore. 4) Finally, I think that society has grown more cynical and selfish, and this is not necessarily all bad. If young individuals are contemplating devoting the best years of their lives to a given enterprise, they are asking more and more the question: what’s in it for me? The hallowed halls of science nowadays have fewer monks and nuns! The image is in the public domain In a past post, I wrote about how it is not in the nature of science to analyze or comprehend God or any claim to theistic (related to God) intervention. I subscribe to the notion championed by the late Harvard paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould, who argued that science and religion work within two different areas of expertise that he labelled “non-overlapping magisterial”. However, sometimes it is difficult for society to agree on where the boundaries of these areas are and whether one discipline is intruding into another. One such problematic situation is faith healing. Faith healing is the notion that people with a disease or injuries can be healed by appealing to a deity. While it is possible that incorporating the patient’s religious beliefs into the process of the medical treatment may lead to a better outcome, the most extreme forms of faith healing claim that the medical component is not necessary for a cure. This modality of faith healing normally involves a person such as a televangelist who carries out the alleged healing act, or groups of people such as parents of a diseased child that pray for healing to occur. From a mechanistic point of view, whether faith healing works should be easy to determine. You just compare the claims to the results. However, faith healers are unwilling to have their claims openly investigated. The few people who have investigated the claims of faith healers have found that the claims for spectacular cures were either false, exaggerated, based on faulty diagnoses, or involved diseases prone to be affected strongly by the patient’s psychology. However, if the healing does not work, it can always be asserted that the faith of the person being healed, or that of the healer’s, was not strong enough, that God will refuse to be tested, that the failure of the healing was part of the divine plan, or any other ad hoc explanation with a religious component. This is why science, in principle, cannot test these claims: it cannot be stated a priori in a manner in which everyone agrees what will constitute success or failure of the claim when put to test. This ambiguity contributes to shielding faith healing from scrutiny, and if you couple this to the fact that politicians, especially those representing conservative districts, are loath to deal with this issue, you can see why the faith healing universe is a breeding ground for liars and cheats. Consider televangelist Peter Popoff. He rose to prominence in the 1980s as a faith healer. People would flock to his sermons and he would reveal to them specific information about where they lived and what illnesses they had despite never having talked with them before. He claimed that he received this information from God, and he also claimed to be able to “heal” people of their ailments. In 1986 the magician and debunker extraordinaire, James Randi, figured out that Popoff’s wife, not God, relayed this information to Popoff by electronic transmission to an earpiece he was wearing. The way this worked was that his wife would gather the information from the crowd assembled outside, and during the sermons she would tell Popoff the names, addresses, and ailments of people that then he would proceed to call out and “heal”. After being exposed as a fraud, Popoff was forced to declare bankruptcy. You would have imagined that his career as a faith healer would be over, but not so. He has made a comeback, and he is once again raking millions of dollars from people that believe in him as shown in the video below. Popoff was perhaps the easiest faith healing scammer to expose because he made himself vulnerable by using forms of deceit that could be convincingly uncovered. Unlike Popoff, however, most faith healers are careful to employ more subtle tricks that leave a lot of wiggle room for ambiguity, and they are therefore much harder to pin down. The most disturbing aspect of faith healing involves children. After all, if adult people choose to send their money to a healer or to forsake valid medical treatment for an ailment, that is their choice. But you would think that a child is another matter. As it turns out there are many cases in the U.S. where children have died because their parents did not provide them with valid medical treatments choosing instead to subject them to religious rituals. In some states, parents whose children have died as a result of these practices have been convicted of manslaughter. However, in other states there are laws that shield parents if their children die as a result of having forgone medical treatment in favor of faith-based healing alternatives. The distressing thing about these cases is that they often involve diseases that are readily treatable by modern medicine, and the afflicted children die slow painful deaths. One of the factors muddying the waters in any discussion of the effectiveness of faith healing is that most human maladies are either self-resolving or have strong psychological components. This means that in a certain amount of cases faith healing will appear to work or at least do so temporarily, and this will reinforce its perceived effectiveness among the ranks of the believers. However, when faith healing doesn’t work (which is the case in most serious diseases), one cruel by product is that the patient or their loved ones tend to blame themselves for the failures (e.g. not having strong enough faith) thus adding another level of suffering to an already dire situation. For some people, the specter of government stepping in and thwarting religious freedom and the right of parents to decide what is best for their children trumps any possible arguments against faith healers. For others, witnessing the spectacle of thousands of people being milked of their hard-earned cash or dying as a result of not choosing medical treatment for their diseases makes them cry out for justice. I believe that we must decide as a society once and for all how to assess these practices. In my opinion, establishing scientifically whether faith healing works or not is irrelevant. The issue should be viewed from a consumer point of view. If faith healers or religious leaders advertise to their followers the notion that they should forgo medical treatment for potentially life-threatening but treatable diseases in favor of faith-based approaches, then they should be held accountable for the dependability of the product they are promoting and made responsible for the outcome. Image by Russell Lee is from the National Archives and Records Administration, and its use is unrestricted. In this post we are going to go over the several razors available for us to use. These razors, while commonly used by philosophers and scientists, in fact are often used by regular people, sometimes without even knowing that they are using them! However, these razors have nothing to do with the removal of bodily hair. They are called razors because they allow us to deal with the complexity of the world around us by reducing (cutting) the amount of possible explanations to various phenomena. We use them to simplify our thought processes and focus on meaningful explanations without getting lost in a bog of deceiving alternatives. We will examine several of these razors and see how they can be used to deal with the amount of bilge that is often found among claims of conspiracy theories, the pseudosciences, and the paranormal. 1) Occam’s Razor. This is the most well-known of all razors. It was developed by the English philosopher William of Ockham back in the fourteenth century. This razor posits that when faced with choosing between two competing alternatives that explain a phenomenon, we should choose the simplest one. In other words, we should not make things needlessly complicated. Many conspiracy theories such as those which claim that 9/11 was a US government-supported operation or that the US never landed on the moon run afoul of this razor. The sheer number of moving parts that would have to operate just right under a mantle of secrecy to bring about the events alleged in these conspiracies is just too complicated. The simpler explanation is that there was no conspiracy.
2) Hitchens's Razor. The late author, critic, and journalist Christopher Hitchens promulgated the dictum which states that what can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. The implication of this razor is that the burden of proof of a claim is with the claimant. You often hear many proponents of the occurrence of paranormal events declare that these phenomena have not been disproven. By this razor’s criteria, this argument is irrelevant. If you want people to accept a claim, YOU have to prove it is true, and you had better do a very damn good job at it to be taken seriously. 3) Sagan’s Standard. The late astronomer Carl Sagan popularized this aphorism which postulates that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. This standard recognizes that not all claims are created equal. Fantastical claims which run counter to scientific laws or mountains of evidence should only be accepted upon the production of truly remarkable evidence. By the metrics of this razor, claims for psychic phenomena, faith healers, and other such things fall short of the level of proof required to accept them. 4) Alder’s Razor. The Australian mathematician Mike Alder published an essay describing this razor, although at the time he called it “Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword” (which is a cooler name). The brutal postulate of this razor (or sword) states that what cannot be settled by experiment or observation is not worth debating. If you have ever had an exchange with a flat Earth proponent and regretted afterwards having lost one hour of your life, you have experienced in the flesh what Alder was talking about. 5) Popper’s Falsifiability Principle. The great philosopher of science Karl Popper coined this famous principle which states that for something to be considered scientific it must be falsifiable. What this means is that there must be a way of proving that a claim is false if it indeed is false, otherwise said claim is not scientific. And if a claim is not scientific, its truthfulness will never be settled by observation or experiment (see Alder’s Razor above). A classical feature of the thinking of those making fantastical claims is that they always move the goalposts. No possible observation or experimental result can prove them wrong. Therefore they can’t be right. On the other hand, science can be right because it can be wrong. 6) Hanlon’s Razor. This particular razor of uncertain origin deals with the motivations behind those who propose fantastical claims. It states that one should never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. While it is true that within the ranks of those who believe in and peddle fantastical claims there are many liars and cheats, this razor reminds us that there are also scores of honest individuals who are just guilty of self-delusion or who have been bamboozled into accepting and defending these claims. In a recent post I reminded my readers about the dangers of keeping one’s mind too open (i.e. it can easily be filled with trash). Well, I guarantee that if you put these razors between you and the vast vortices of irrationality and trickery that swirl about us, your mind will be spared! The image is by Horst.Burkhardt is used here under an Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. In the popular print and social media I often spot articles about the benefits of keeping an open mind. I also read how it is very important for scientists to keep an open mind. What these articles never discuss is the danger of keeping an open mind. This danger is that you will lose your power to discriminate between sound and fallacious ideas. For example, in 1917 two girls in the village of Cottingley in England took pictures of what appeared to be fairies flying and dancing around them. Among the many people fooled into believing the pictures were real was no other than the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle. More recent examples are the comedian and trickster extraordinaire, Andy Kaufman, who in 1984 visited a psychic surgeon to treat his cancer (he died), or the actor Dan Aykroyd, of Ghostbusters fame, who believes among other things in mediums and psychics and paranormal phenomena. This is not to say that only non-scientists fall victim to keeping their mind too open. There are many scientists of renown who have ended up accepting ideas or theories that were dubious at best, or patently false at worst. The co-discoverer (along with Darwin) of the theory of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, was a believer in psychic phenomena and spiritualism; and led an anti-vaccination campaign. Isaac Newton, the genius behind the laws of gravitation, believed the Bible had a code that predicted the future which he tried to decipher for many years. The Nobel Prize winning physicist William Shockley invented the transistor and revolutionized society, but he also defended theories that proposed the intellectual inferiority of some races. Linus Pauling, a Nobel Prize winning chemist, advocated the use of vitamin C to cure cancer despite the evidence against it. Lynn Margulis, winner of the National Medal of Science, revolutionized the theory of evolution with the concept of endosymbiosis which postulates that mitochondria and chloroplasts originated from bacteria. She also championed several fringe theories, and joined the 911 conspiracy movement that claims that it was a false flag operation to justify the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The irony is that Margulis had been married to that great skeptic, the late astronomer Carl Sagan. Kari Mullis won the Nobel Prize for the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a technique which ushered a revolution in areas ranging from medicine to forensics. Not only is he an AIDs denialist along with Peter Duesberg (see below), but he denies climate change and accepts astrology. It is important to understand that the dangers of keeping an open mind have consequences that go beyond mere public ridicule. When people in positions of eminence are swayed by erroneous ideas, this can have a negative effect on society. Consider the brilliant scientist Peter Duesberg. He performed pioneering work in how viruses can cause cancer, but he was convinced that the HIV virus did not cause AIDS. His advocacy for this idea influenced the South African president Thabo Mbeki who delayed the introduction of anti-AIDS drugs into South Africa leading to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. In scientific research keeping an open mind is a quandary that involves navigating between making two types of errors. The first is that a mind that is too closed will reject things as false when they are really true. The second is that a mind that is too open will accept things as true when they are really false. The intuitive way to deal with this quandary is to try to strike a balance between the extremes. However, this is not how most scientists approach the issue. Science tends to be conservative in that it gives more importance to what has already been proven. Scientists view with skepticism those trying to subvert established science. The bar is set very high for the acceptance of new ideas. Most scientists view rejecting something as false when it’s really true as a lesser evil compared to accepting something as true when it’s really false. In the end, however, it will be the evidence and its reproducibility which will make the difference. On the other hand, in the pseudosciences and the paranormal, the advice of keeping an open mind is often dispensed by those advocating for the existence of psychic phenomena, extrasensory perception, demonic possession, ghosts, telepathy, alien abductions, clairvoyance, mediums, astrology, witches, reincarnation, telekinesis, telepathy, faith healing, and many other fantastical claims. I want to suggest that, as a first step, the safest frame of mind when considering these claims is to vanish the open mind, and assume that the persons making the extraordinary claims are at best deluding themselves, and at worst liars and cheats. This suggestion may scandalize many people, and may come across as an incredibly narrow-minded and unfair approach to investigating anything. How can you find if something is true if you are prejudiced against the possibility that it’s true? The answer is that in this fringe you are dealing with events that, in principle, run counter to well-established scientific laws, or against mountains of evidence. In other words, you are dealing with the impossible. By definition the impossible is not possible and should be treated as such. When considering these claims, if you keep an open mind, you have often lost the battle. This painful lesson has been learned by many scientists that investigated fantastical claims with an open mind just to be fooled by tricks so basic that they would make seasoned magicians roll their eyes (incidentally, this is also why it is always advisable to have a magician as a consultant when investigating these claims). Scientists are the worst possible individuals to rely upon when attempting the investigation of fantastical claims. Scientists are trained to deal with nature, and nature operates based on a fixed set of rules. Natural phenomena don’t change to prevent you from studying them. Nature doesn’t cheat, lie, or delude itself. An open mind is justified only when studying natural phenomena. An open mind in any other setting is a liability. Once you have ruled out trickery and self-delusion and stablished that what you are studying is indeed a natural phenomenon, then you can consider opening your mind to the possibility that it is true. Individuals ranging from common folk to Nobel Prize winners should always remember that if you keep your mind too open, people will dump a lot of trash in it. The image is a scan of the original Cottingley Fairy pictures and is in the public domain in the United States. The open mind image by ElisaRiva is used here under a CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) license. In season 2, episode 5 of that great show “The Big Bang Theory,” Penny (played by actress Kaelly Cuoco) asks Sheldon (played by actor Jim Parsons) why he didn’t get his driving license when he was 16 years old like everybody else. Sheldon, a theoretical physicist with 2 PhDs, replies that it was because he was busy “examining perturbative amplitudes in n=4 supersymmetric theories leading to a re-examination of the ultraviolet properties of multi-loop n=8 supergravity using modern twistor theory.” Of course the Big Bang Theory is just a sitcom, but the science depicted in the program is often quite accurate and also as cryptic as real science is too. Check for example actual titles of research published in scientific journals: -Vortex dynamics in two-dimensional Josephson junction arrays with asymmetrically bimodulated potential. -Dopaminergic Polymorphisms Associated with Time-on-Task Declines and Fatigue in the Psychomotor Vigilance Test. - Heavy cluster knockout reaction (16)O((12)C,2(12)C)(4)He and the nature of the (12)C-(12)C interaction potential. -Countertransference feelings in one year of individual therapy: An evaluation of the factor structure in the Feeling Word Checklist-58 And, last but not least, check a couple of sentences from an article I published recently: "There was a marked effect of DPD inhibition by EU on plasma 5-FU. Mean Cmax was nearly doubled (914.6 vs. 471.5 μM) and mean AUC values were increased 4.7-fold (819 vs. 174 nmol/ml x h) in animals treated with EU compared to control animals, confirming effective DPD inhibition in the model." With respect to the example from my article above, you may argue that one of the reasons the sentences are not understandable is because I used some abbreviations. OK, fair, what if I told you that “DPD” stands for "dehydropyrimidine dehydrogenase". Is that clearer? Regular folk are often bewildered by the apparent mumbo jumbo present in the scientific literature. Some may even wonder if all those big words are nothing more than gobbledygook employed by people who just pretend to know what they are talking about while hiding behind a wall of jargon. Why use all those complex words? Can’t scientists express themselves in a way that can be understood by mere mortals? Scientists, scientific writers, and science bloggers such as yours truly (on all 3 counts), do try to explain the complexities of science to non-scientists. However, to understand why it’s virtually impossible to avoid creating and using the technical jargon found in the scientific literature, consider the following thought experiment. Imagine that you learn the language spoken by a tribe in a remote jungle that has had no contact with civilization. Now imagine you visit this tribe, and using only the words of their language, you try to explain to them all about computers, microwave ovens, the internet, television, CDs, DVDs, cell phones, cars, airplanes, trains, refrigerators, washing machines and so forth. These terms are very familiar to you, but our degree of technological advance has led to the production or discovery of many entities that are not part of the immediate reality that this tribal language describes. If you incorporated these words into the tribal language and used them in front of the members of the tribe, they would think you are talking nonsense because the members of the tribe would have no real-world reference for these things. That is the same situation with scientists as it relates to the regular language people use. The language is just insufficient to name what scientists are discovering, therefore new terms have to be invented. As scientists discover and name more things and their field of study grows in complexity, its comprehension becomes daunting for the non-specialist. This is not to say that a few scientists may not attempt to hide their ignorance on some topics behind a wall of jargon, but when the vast majority of scientist write in the technical literature or talk with their peers, they must employ many words that are not in the common parlance. Nevertheless, in some areas these words eventually filter into the day to day reality of the common folk. Just consider words like DNA, genes, antibiotics, or vitamins. These words were once technical terms that are of common use today by non-scientists. So to sum it up, no, it’s not mumbo jumbo, and some of these seemingly incomprehensible words that you find vexing in today’s scientific literature may end up being part of the everyday vocabulary of your children or your children’s children in the future. I an earlier post I wrote that anyone can be a scientist. The only requisites are to follow the scientific method and ask scientific questions. Scientific questions are those that can generate testable answers (hypotheses). Scientists ask these questions. That seems like a very straightforward concept, right? As it turns out, there is a lot of subtlety involved in asking scientific questions. In fact, I would argue that asking scientific questions is not a science, it’s an art, and I believe that there are three levels of complexity in the process of formulating effective scientific questions First level: Asking questions within the right framework While both amateur and professional scientists may be “scientists”, asking minor scientific questions just for fun or curiosity is very different from asking important goal-oriented scientific questions within the context of a funded research project. The relative difference is much the same as the difference between playing in your neighborhood baseball team and playing in the major leagues. At the professional level, more than a decade of training and study is required for participants to both mature and master the intricacies of science and the methods within a particular field of study. This is because the complexities of the questions that are addressed by professional scientists are very unlikely to be answered unless they are articulated within this context. Effective questions are those queried within a framework that leads to their eventual solution. Second level: Asking questions while having in mind a way to answer them Some scientists may formulate a question and then seek the answer. This perfectly logical procedure, paradoxically, is not an optimal way of asking scientific questions. This is because it is not enough to ask a question. You need to have an idea or a hunch as to how you are going to answer the question, and this idea or hunch inevitably affects the formulation of the question. The question refines the answer which refines the question which refines the answer and so on. The process is not unlike the one depicted in the lithograph by the Dutch artist M.C. Escher where the first hand draws the second one which in turn draws the first. This process allows for the solution of scientific problems with razor sharp accuracy, and it requires an in-depth knowledge of the fields of science involved, as well as the capacity to integrate, simplify, and pick and choose relevant data from large amounts of potentially conflictive information. The ability to master this process is often the difference between clear thinking and fuzzy thinking among scientists. Third level: Asking “THE question” type of questions
The Nobel Prize winning biochemist, Hans Krebs, used to tell new arrivals to his lab that he could teach them how to dig, but he could not teach them where to dig. By this he meant that he could teach them all the necessary techniques, ways of thinking, and approaches to answer questions, but what he could not teach them was what questions to ask. To non-scientists (and even to a good number of scientists) this may seem odd. After all, what can be so possibly complicated about asking a question? The answer is, of course, nothing. There is nothing complicated about asking “A question”, but this was not what Krebs was talking about. He was talking about asking “THE question”. This distinction is a very important one. A researcher capable of asking “THE question” type of questions is to a researcher only capable of asking “A question” type of questions what an architect is to a bricklayer. The truth is that most scientists are incapable of asking “THE question” type of questions and many are not even aware that this is a limitation. Indeed, a good number of researchers would even dispute that this is an issue. These researchers have trained with other scientist who only asked “A question” type of questions, and that is all they know. From their vantage point this is how science works. You ask a series of little specific questions and subject them to test and make incremental advances that build upon each other. Now, I don’t want to imply that asking “A question” type of questions is not useful. Large numbers of researchers asking these type of questions produce valuable information that moves scientific fields forward, and when these researchers team up with applied scientists this results in practical applications. These scientists create the stepping stones on which science advances most of the time. However, it is the scientists who have the ability to ask “THE question” type of questions the ones who are responsible for the milestones. These scientists have the depth, vision, and inspiration to, going back to Krebs’s analogy, know “where to dig”. And as Krebs pointed out, this ability is something that can’t be taught. The scientists who ask these questions that get to the fundamental nature of things are very much like the artists who have the ability to create a masterpiece that will endure through the ages and captivate the imagination. I consider that, in terms of asking questions, level 1 separates the professional scientists from the amateurs, level 2 separates the good scientists from the average ones, and level 3 separates the truly exceptional scientists from the merely good ones. Of course, there is more to successful science than asking questions. There is luck, there is being at the right place at the right time, there is the capacity to promote yourself and your research, to network, to establish collaborations, to request funds, and many other activities that are not mastered by locking yourself up in a lab or an office and thinking up questions. However, those scientists who can function at level 3 are in the highest echelon of sophistication in the art of articulating scientific questions, and this is pretty darn close to the stuff Nobel Prizes are made of! Escher-inspired figure by Robbert van der Steeg used here under an Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) license. Some people claim science is a killjoy. Why measure and analyze and classify everything? Why try to figure out how everything works? Why can’t scientists let nature be and enjoy it without dissecting it apart and figuring out what makes it tick? Are scientists spending too much time locked away in labs to relate to the world like normal people? And even those that do get out and interact with nature, shouldn’t they stop viewing everything through the prism of ecosystems and niches and predator-prey relationships and whatnot? I have to strongly disagree with this notion. From my vantage point, science vastly enriches our enjoyment of the world and greatly magnifies the sense of awe that we can feel. Consider a mighty peak like Mount Everest. Imagine you are at the foot of the mountain and you tilt your head back so much that your neck hurts. You can see the great rocky summit reared against the arc of the sky gleaming in the sun sporting a plume of wind-swept snow. The highest point in the planet is so beautiful and majestic. Now allow me to quote what nature writer John McPhee wrote in his book Annals of the Former World: “When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had formed into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.” That lofty pinnacle up there was once part of a sea bottom! This knowledge expands our capacity for enjoying the beauty of Everest and its significance. And it’s not just Mount Everest. Every mountain, every hill, every rock outcrop has a fascinating geologic story behind it. The landscapes all around us are ephemeral instants of geologic time where mountains reach for the sky and are eroded to the ground for eternity. Suppose you go to the zoo with your family. You stare in amazement at the elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, pandas, lions, tigers, antelopes, apes, and other animals. Such diversity of sizes and body shapes, such colors, such beauty. All these living things form part of the tapestry of life. How many stories and paintings have they inspired? But as it turns out, we are part of the weave! Scientists have discovered that all these animals, including us, arose on this planet through a process of evolution which means we all share common ancestors. So when you peer into the eyes of a chimpanzee, you are looking back to the dawn of our species because they are one of our closest relatives. Now imagine it’s nighttime and you are in the country far away from the lights of the city. You stare at the sky and see the myriad of stars, the diffuse cloud of our galaxy the Milky Way, and perhaps even a planet or two. Those marvelous worlds and suns so far removed from us. How many songs, and poems, and stories have they inspired? Now allow me to quote what the late astronomer Carl Sagan said in his famous program Cosmos: “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff.” Yes, the components of your body and in fact of all life on Earth were created “up there” billions of years ago by some of the most titanic explosions that the universe has ever produced. Doesn’t that blow your mind away? Finally, imagine being able to create reality by the mere act of observing it. Imagine an entity that can be a wave and a particle at the same time, that can be in two different places simultaneously, or that appears to go back in time. Imagine split realities, multiple universes, spooky actions at a distance, and a cat that is both dead and alive. These are some of the bizarre or counterintuitive phenomena and ideas generated by quantum mechanics. Quantum Mechanics is the highly successful theory ushered into existence by individuals that have become the stuff of legend such as Bohr, Planck, Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger, and which has made possible computers, smartphones, the internet, GPS, and MRI. Many scientific theories have challenged specific beliefs that humans beings harbored regarding their surroundings, but quantum mechanics has called into question our most basic notions of matter, space, and time, generating amazing realms where fantasy seemingly merges with realty, and where we can wander and wonder. These discoveries, and many others that have opened our senses and imagination to the hidden secrets of our planet and the universe, were only possible thanks to generations of researchers who spent years of their lives in offices, labs, or in the field thinking, measuring, analyzing, classifying, and performing experiments. These scientists were awed by their discoveries, and they have generated inspiration for poets, painters, writers, photographers, musicians, filmmakers, sculptors, and many others. Are you ready to be inspired? Learn about science! Schrodinger's Cat by Jie Qi is used here under an Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license, Everest photo credit: Rupert Taylor-Price / Foter.com / CC BY, Galaxy (CC0), Chimpanzee photo by Afrika Force is used under an Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license. The scientific consensus has been getting a bad rap lately. Some people argue that whether science is right or not about an issue is not decided by majority vote. Rather, it is claimed, it only takes one scientist to be right to decide whether the science regarding an issue is true or not. Those that make this argument then go on to provide a list of scientists that went against the consensus and prevailed. The people making these argument then proudly proclaim that in science there is no such thing as consensus, that science does not require a consensus, and if there is a consensus, then it isn’t science! Let’s try to understand a few things about the scientific consensus.
A scientific consensus is not reached when scientists get together and “vote”. A scientific consensus, unlike the use of this word in other fields such as politics, does not involve a compromise. Also the word consensus is sometimes used to denote the current state of a field as in “the current consensus”. In a new field of study the term “scientific consensus” really means “the current opinion” and it is understood that such opinion is very likely to be overturned in the future. This is not the meaning of consensus that better serves science in the public sphere when dealing with topics like climate change or evolution. The meaning of scientific consensus that we should seek is that consensus attained in a field of science that is backed by a fully developed scientific theory. A field of science that has not generated a fully developed scientific theory is incapable of generating a true scientific consensus. The reason this is the case is because a fully developed scientific theory has grasped important aspects of reality in its formulation and is likely to have a high degree of completeness. How is such a theory developed? When a field of study is in its early stages, scientists from several countries, ethnic backgrounds, beliefs, political persuasions, etc. begin tackling a problem. All these scientists bring their intellect and life experience to bear on answering the questions being investigated. Initially there is a multiplicity of possible answers, there are uncertainties, deficiencies and limitations in the methodologies, and there is confusion. Many scientists go down blind alleys only to find they have wasted their time on a wrong approach and have to turn back. Some explanations emerge that seem to be better than others. Methodologies are improved. Hypotheses are refined. Exceptions are explained. Scientists from other areas enter the field and bring new tools and ideas (a very important development). The research performed in these other fields is found to be complementary to the research in the emerging field. Eventually as the field matures scientists from different laboratories using different methodologies begin obtaining the same results and elaborate models that they use to make predictions (another very important development). Some predictions are not fulfilled and the models that generated them fall by the wayside and are replaced by new models that are more accurate at explaining the data and making new predictions. Eventually the field coalesces around a theory. The theory is used to generate practical applications and to explain observations in other areas of science. A theory developed through the process described above is not an ephemeral construct that can be overturned at any time. The very technology that we use in our everyday lives depends on hundreds of solid scientific theories that have never been disproven. Many people who do not understand the nature of scientific truth confuse the overturning of a scientific theory with its refinement. This is because there is the erroneous notion that scientific theories should explain everything, and this is not the case. A scientific theory only has to answer the most important questions raised by scientists. Thus, when a fully developed scientific theory is produced in a field of study this means that scientists have stopped arguing with each other about the salient points addressed by the theory. In other words, they have reached a consensus. This is the true meaning of a scientific consensus. Of course, the fact that there is a consensus doesn’t mean that everything has been settled. Scientists that agree with evolution are still debating how evolution happens. Scientists that agree with climate change are still debating its extent and mechanisms. Nevertheless, a consensus does mean that the major overreaching question in the field has been answered to the satisfaction of the vast majority of the scientists involved in the research. The consensus can, in principle, be modified if the underlying theory that backs the consensus is found to be incomplete, but this is only true if the refinements to the theory in the form of new observations, new data, or new interpretations of old data or old observations, significantly modify those parts of the theory that are vital for the consensus. In the case of a fully developed scientific theory this is no easy task, and the burden of proof is on those who seek to modify the theory. Some people claim that this promotes a herd mentality that leads to dissenting scientists being penalized and those that are compliant being rewarded resulting in the discouragement of innovation. However, what has to be understood is that science is a very conservative enterprise that sets a very high bar for those seeking to challenge what is considered established knowledge. If you are going against the prevailing theory, you’d better have very good evidence. This is not the product of a herd mentality or a way to discourage innovation: it is a way of protecting established science against error. In the public debate, when you hear that a consensus has been reached in a particular field of science, you need to ask about the nature of the underlying theory that backs it. If the theory fulfils the requirements of a fully developed scientific theory, then the consensus is good. A consensus is only as good as the theory that supports it. However, suggesting that there is no such thing as a scientific consensus or that it is irrelevant is nothing more than a strategy to delegitimize science. It has been used in the past by entities such as the cigarette lobby, and it is being used today by creationists, climate change deniers, and other groups that seek to further their anti-science agendas. Image by Nick Youngson used here under an Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) license. In 1999 the secret “Wedge Document” was leaked to the world. This document outlined the master plan of the proponents of Intelligent Design to infiltrate the scientific establishment and make Intelligent Design a valid scientific notion worthy of being taught in school alongside the theory of evolution. The governing goals of the plan were: “To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies”, and “To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God”. However, the highflying expectations of the Intelligent Design movement were stopped cold by a 2005 ruling by a Pennsylvania judge that exposed Intelligent Design as nothing more than religion masquerading as science. This was the last of a string of legal defeats that creationist suffered in the United States. One of the things that caught my attention about the Wedge Document is that creationists apparently object to materialistic explanations of how life on Earth arose and evolved. This greatly puzzles me because it is widely understood that science is incapable of any other type of explanations! And this is not due to science being co-opted by materialists who want to destroy God and religion.
Let me give you an example. Suppose you throw a bicycle in a pond that contains several fish. After a while the fish will probably swim around the bicycle, but they will definitely never ride it. Can you conclude that the fish rejected the bicycle? Of course not, because it is not in the nature of fish to ride bicycles. Following this analogy, we must understand that the whole concept of a God, or any proposal that involves theistic (related to a God) intervention, is not in the nature of science to analyze or comprehend. Science cannot elaborate hypotheses that involve divine intervention to explain what happens in the world, because they are not testable. Only materialistic explanations are testable, and here is where the problem arises. Creationist believe that the Earth is 10,000 years old, that life on Earth appeared in one creation event involving 7 days, that there was a universal flood, and that the first man was created from clay directly by God. Of course science has found that the Earth is billions of years old, that the diversity of life on Earth did not appear in a span of 7 days, that there was no universal flood, and that humans evolved from other life forms. Creationists view these notions as an attack on their beliefs, and they are scandalized when this knowledge is taught in schools. Are scientists doing this to reject the literal creation story of the book of Genesis in the Bible, discredit theism, and impose materialism? The answer is no. Scientists ask questions and provide answers based on the evidence. Of course, a particular answer may conflict with your beliefs, but what are scientists to do if that is where the evidence leads them? There is no ill will, no master plan to discredit theism and impose materialism, just the search for truth. There are some scientists, such as Richard Dawkins, who disavow religion and advocate exclusively for materialistic explanations regarding the origin of life and humanity, and that is their prerogative as freethinking individuals in an open society. But a large number of scientists from many cultures are believers, and they see no conflict between science and religion. However, what these scientists understand is that religious books such as the Bible should not be used as textbooks of natural history. These scientists subscribe to the maxim attributed to Galileo that the Bible teaches how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. Science is the best method we have to find the truth about the behavior of matter and energy in the world around us. In this sense, when it comes to the natural world, science can help us in deciding what to believe or how to believe it. But science has limitations. It cannot tell us what is right or wrong, it cannot give us the guidance we seek as to the best way to live our lives from a moral and ethical point of view, it cannot provide us with values. This is the realm of religion, faith, and belief. These different areas of expertise that the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould called non-overlapping magisteria are necessary for the education of balanced human beings, and they should be kept separate. Science should be taught as science and religion should be taught as religion. Creationist should, to quote a person whose teachings they know very well, “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's”. The tittle page image of the Wedge Document is in the public domain. |
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