Anti-Science and Pseudo-ScienceWe hear about science every day in the news, but few of us stop to consider what it is ? both at its best and at its worst.
Science is the practice of discovering what is true by using the scientific method. According to the scientific method, researchers make an observation that uncovers a gap in our knowledge. They devise a hypothesis to explain that gap. Then they design an experiment to test the hypothesis.
If the hypothesis can be proven false through the experiment, it is rejected. If, on the other hand, it can be verified beyond a reasonable doubt, then it becomes a law. In this system, everything is open to testing and validation.
Anti-science, by contrast, is the uncritical reliance on some sort of received wisdom or revelation, such as that found in the Bible, the Koran, or the Hindu Vedas. Anti-scientific people refuse to test their beliefs, and they persecute anyone who calls those beliefs into question. This is what Galileo faced in 1633, when he was interrogated by the Inquisition because he had written that the Earth revolves around the sun and was not the center of the universe.
On the other hand, pseudo- science is a different way of sidestepping real science by using what appears to be the scientific method to create the impression that something has been rigorously validated, when in fact it merely represents the beliefs and biases of those presenting it. In spite of these impediments, true and honest use of the scientific method has proven so effective in improving our quality of life that it’s now the universal standard. It has improved our health, extended our lifespan, increased our standard of living, and helped us to work more effectively at those tasks that sustain life and society.
Yet even as it has advanced, a deep understanding of science has been available only to a small fraction of the population. Even many accredited scientists are so steeped in their narrow specialties that they are ill-prepared to evaluate important work in other fields.
As the popular press frequently points out, the dominance of Western culture by scientific experts ? whose methods and assumptions are little understood by the general public ? has encouraged a growing anti-science backlash. This backlash fits the historical pattern that we see going back to Galileo. However, because it’s so well understood, this movement is manageable. It represents a genuine threat today only in rigid theocracies, such as modern-day Iran.
On the other hand, it’s precisely because the general public now typically accepts almost everything that’s said by accredited scientists ? or people posing as scientific experts ? that pseudo-science poses such a big threat.
While much of our attention is focused on the dangers of anti-science coming primarily from the political right, we’re prone to ignore the equally virulent pseudo-science threat primarily coming from the political left.
Why is the pseudo-science threat mostly a left-wing phenomenon? Because a disproportionate share of academics lean toward the left in terms of their politics and values.
Legendary futurist Alvin Toffler, author of the 1970 best seller Future Shock,1 highlights this asymmetry in the 2006 book he co-authored with Heidi Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth.2 The Tofflers focus on the left’s pseudo-science primarily because of its hypocrisy. The left claims that the right is under-mining legitimate science. For example, the mainstream media zero in on the threat of anti-science put forth by a few fringe groups on the “religious right.” But then, the media willingly present anything published by a scientist with academic credentials as “proven scientific fact,” despite any obvious axes the researcher wants to grind.
The Tofflers take pains to point out that there have recently been a whole set of problems with scientific research published by those on the left, among those for whom science evidence is supposed to be the highest form of truth. And just as few people would have looked among Catholic Priests a generation ago for pedophiles, few today are expecting professors at leading universities to play fast and loose with scientific data in an effort to promote their careers and deeply-held worldviews. But, in fact, that’s exactly where we need to be looking.
When people begin to accept scientific studies presented by researchers as if they were divine revelations pronounced by some medieval Pope, even the best scientists are tempted to “bend” research results to support politically motivated beliefs.
So, while we’ll continue to be alert for anti-science on the right, most people on both sides can easily identify that. On the contrary, the pseudo-science on the left poses a more pernicious problem, because it’s not generally recognized for what it is. Moreover, only a few people are really qualified to analyze the data, and many of those will inevitably share the biases of the researcher. This tendency of experts to validate the claims of other experts, when those claims support their biases, coupled with the inability of the general public to comprehend the argument on either side, increasingly leads to bad policy decisions that adversely impact society globally.
For example, food shortages and malaria are killing millions in Africa because DDT has been banned, based on flawed science. Vaccines have been in short supply because of pseudo-science used by trial lawyers to sue pharmaceutical manufacturers.
Or consider the European attack on genetically modified foods. This led to a decidedly inhumane course of action, when those foods were denied to starving people in Zimbabwe. This occurred despite the fact that, according to the Western Farm Press,3 more than a billion acres of genetically modified crops have been grown, and not one case of ill effects has ever been credibly linked to these crops. Moreover, these biotech crops have been proven to reduce the need for chemicals, such as pesticides and fertilizers, thereby improving the environment.
And, consider the thousands of lives that might have been saved during the September 11 terrorist attacks if not for pseudo-science. The towers of the World Trade Center collapsed because a lack of asbestos insulation allowed their steel skeletons to melt. According to Steven Milloy, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and the publisher of JunkScience.com, the hysteria about asbestos prevented the fireproofing material from being used on the upper floors of the World Trade Center.
Until the 1970s, new buildings were routinely constructed with asbestos added to flame-retardant sprays used to insulate steel building materials, particularly floor supports. The insulation was supposed to keep the steel from melting in a fire for at least four hours.
In a Fox News4 report, Milloy writes that the World Trade Center’s emergency plans counted on four hours as the length of time that fire crews would have to evacuate people from the building and for helicopters to douse the flames and rescue peoplefrom the roof. But the South tower collapsed in less than one hour. Why? Because New York City’s officials had believed a pseudo-science report that said asbestos sprayed onto steel girders would be harmful. At the time the ban went into effect in 1971, asbestos had only been sprayed up to the 64th floor of the World Trade Center towers.
Both of the hijacked planes hit the towers above the 64th floor. Instead of withstanding the heat for four hours, the girders melted in less than half that time.The asbestos ban was based on a study by Irving Selikoff of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, who found that asbestos workers had higher rates of lung cancer and other diseases. As a result, Selikoff convinced lawmakers to stop using asbestos in construction.
As Milloy points out, Selikoff was correct that some workers who were heavily exposed to certain types of asbestos fibers were at increased risk of disease. But Selikoff was wrong to create a panic about the use of asbestos in any form, because no study has ever found a health risk associated with spraying asbestos.Another area where pseudo-science has done its damage is in stem cell research. As we have reported before, there is a clear line of evidence that adult stem cells are more promising in terms of their potential to cure disease and even repair spinal cord injuries than embryonic stem cells.
A recent issue of the National Review5 leveled criticism at the journal Science for ridiculing the fact that adult stem cells have been approved by the FDA to treat only nine diseases, while claiming that embryonic stem cells offer far more potential.
According to responsible scientific peer-reviewed journals, such as Blood6 and Current Opinion in Hematology,7 the truth turns out to be that adult stem cells are already being used to treat at least 72 conditions. And, nine of those have been approved by the FDA. Meanwhile, embryonic stem cells are being used to treat exactly zero cases of any disease. Moreover, embryonic stem cells have been shown in numerous studies to carry the risk of causing cancer in the patients being treated.
In addition, there are more than 1,000 clinical trials underway for adult stem cells, but none for embryonic stem cells. The facts couldn’t be clearer, and yet a blind pseudo-science faith in the superiority of embryonic stem cells continues, helped along by a gullible or ignorant press and by politicians with something to gain. That’s what made the 2005 revelation about Korean scientists falsifying their own data in order to push this agenda so unremarkable.
Another example of a pseudo-science bias among researchers can be found in the debate over global warming. The most visible recent attempt to trumpet global warming is Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, which portrays stronger hurricanes, more tropical diseases, and melting ice sheets inundating cities.To reinforce the anecdotal evidence, Gore claims that “the debate about global warming has ended, and the scientific community has reached a unanimous conclusion that climate change is a reality and that mankind is causing it.”
The trouble, according to a Wall Street Journal8 investigation, is that this statement simply cannot be supported by the facts as substantiated by the scientific method. In fact, there has not been an organized scientific debate, and the irrefutable evidence we have leads to one simple conclusion: We don’t have enough information to know the answer.
What we do know is that conditions in the atmosphere and oceans vary widely over time, by themselves. Glaciers advance and retreat on their own. And in fact, the ice sheets on both Greenland and Antarctica are actually thickening, according to the new book Unstoppable Global Warming9 by Dennis T. Avery, a former senior policy analyst for the U.S. State Department.
In light of the trend toward pseudo-science and anti-science, we offer these five forecasts:
First, scientific fraud will continue to proliferate as competition and political rivalry become more intense. As in every profession, there are good scientists and bad scientists. They compete for grant money, publication, and attention. But people are smart, and this will increase their skepticism when confronted by nonsensical claims from supposedly legitimate scientists. This, in turn, will motivate more people to become more scientifically literate.
Second, stricter controls will be put in place to make sure that government grant money goes only to legitimate scientists who refrain from making unverifiable claims. Stronger peer review and better analysis of data will result in a much clearer picture of what can be proven, and what is simply wishful thinking.
Third, much of the conventional wisdom about so-called “hazardous” chemicals and products will be reconsidered as faulty studies are debunked. For example, just as the technique of spraying asbestos could be resurrected to protect high-rise buildings from fire, we may soon lift the ban against DDT to protect millions of people in Third World countries from malaria.
Fourth, between now and 2030 most of the apparent contradictions between science and religious faith will be reconciled. However, this conflict is going to get hotter before it cools off. One of the most exciting books on this topic is Creation as Science,10 by former Cal-Tech astrophysicist Hugh Ross. In a similar vein, The New York Times11 published a roundup of books by other scientists discussing their own religious beliefs and how those beliefs can co-exist with their careers in science. Among these scientists were the geneticist who headed the NIH’s Human Genome Project in the 1990s, an astronomer who teaches at Harvard, and an evolutionary biologist who teaches at Stanford.
Fifth, the marriage of science and technology will continue to provide improvements in human health and standards of living, despite the best efforts of anti-science and pseudo-science advocates. That new world, which we are now creating, will be more hospitable to religious freedom than ever before. In fact, according to a recent report in Foreign Policy,12 there is more democracy, more political freedom, more education, and more religious freedom in the world today than at any time in recorded history. We expect this trend to continue, both here and abroad.
References List : 1. Future Shock by Alvin Toffler is published by Amereon Ltd. ⓒ Copyright 1970 by Alvin Toffler. All rights reserved. 2. Revolutionary Wealth: How It Will Be Created and How It Will Change Our Lives by Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler is published by Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada, Ltd. ⓒ Copyright 2006 by Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler. All rights reserved. 3. Western Farm Press, November 4, 2005, “San Francisco Chronicle Opposes Sonoma Anti-Biotech Initiative,” by Harry Cline. ⓒ Copyright 2005 by Prism Business Media, Inc. All rights reserved. 4. To access Steven Milloy’s commentary about asbestos use in the World Trade Center, visit the Fox News website at: www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,34342,00.html 5. National Review Magazine, July 18, 2006, “Science’s Stem-Cell Scam: It Should Change Its name to Pseudoscience,” by Michael Fumento. ⓒ Copyright 2006 by National Review. All rights reserved. 6. Blood, February 1, 2002, “Mobilization, Collection, and Processing of Peripheral Blood Stem Cells in Individuals with Sickle Cell Trait,” by Elizabeth M. Kang, Ellen M. Areman, Virginia David-Ocampo, Courtney Fitzhugh, Mary E. Link, Elizabeth J. Read, Susan F. Leitman, Griffin P. Rodgers, and John F. Tisdale. ⓒ Copyright 2002 by the American Society of Hematology. All rights reserved. 7. Current Opinion in Hematology, May 2006, “Recent Advances in Globin Gene Transfer for the Treatment of Beta-Thalassemia and Sickle Cell Anemia,” by Michael Sadelain. ⓒ Copyright 2006 by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. All rights reserved. 8. Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2006, “Don’t Believe the Hype,” by Richard S. Lindzen. ⓒ Copright 2006 by Dow Jones and Company. All rights reserved. 9. Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years by Dennis T. Avery and S. Fred Singer is published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. ⓒ Copyright 2006 by Dennis T. Avery and S. Fred Singer. All rights reserved. 10. Creation as Science: A Testable Model Approach to End the Creation/Evolution Wars by Hugh Ross is published by Navpress Publishing Group. ⓒ Copyright 2006 by Hugh Ross. All rights reserved. 11. The New York Times, July 25, 2006, “Books on Science: Faith, Reason, God and Other Imponderables,” by Cornelia Dean. ⓒ Copyright 2006 by The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. 12. Foreign Policy, July/August 2006 “Why God Is Winning,” by Timothy Samuel Shah and Monica Duffy Toft. ⓒ Copyright 2006 by Foreign Policy. All rightsreserved.
