My name's Joe. I'm a chemical engineering graduate student and a skeptic. If I told you about chemical engineering you'd probably want to strangle yourself with your keyboard wire, so let's talk about skepticism!
Contact email: cheglabratjoe (at) gmail.com
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September 9, 2008
This was a surprisingly tough entry to write. I try not to actively dump on pseudoscientific notions too much, at least not before I’ve detailed why I think they’re bunk. If you go too overboard with the insults and sarcasm, you’ll come off as a jerk and scare off people sitting on the fence. Worst-case scenario, you can actually drive these people towards the woo-pushers, even if your evidence and reasoning are perfectly sound. This problem is compounded by the fact that many woo-pushers are extremely good at dealing with the public and selling themselves, while scientists and doctors are historically quite terrible at it.
While I’m aware of this problem, some ideas are so out there that it’s difficult to turn down the burners and write an even-keeled discussion of them. For me, homeopathy is one of those topics. As we’ll see, the ideas behind homeopathy go against some of the most fundamental aspects of chemistry and physics. And, as if that’s not enough, people pushing this pseudoscience have managed to frame homeopathic remedies as just another type of herbal or natural supplement. This is little short of a miracle of marketing, and I’m not one to toss around the word miracle lightly.
It’s taken a few rewrites, including the painful deletion of some pithy one-liners and choice ad hominem attacks, but I think I’ve whittled my initial ranting and raving down to an almost-balanced treatment of homeopathy. We’ll start with a bit about how I discovered homeopathy. After that, I’ll cover some background on the principles behind homeopathy, which should shed some light on why this drives the chemistry-loving part of me bonkers. Finally, I’ll go over a few calculations to determine the actual contents of any homeopathic remedy you might purchase.
Onto the Vicious Screed
We’re talking alternative medicine, so I’ll steal the opening line from Quackcast. I thought it was a common phrase, but Google disagrees with me. So, Mark Crislip, I hereby grant you the sincerest form of flattery. (My google-fu tells me that’s a common phrase, at least.) Quackcast is an informative podcast about alternative medicine, but, as its name implies, it doesn’t really take much of my above writing to heart. For instance, Mark opens each episode with something like the following line: “I’ll be discussing quacks, frauds, and charlatans … oops! I mean: Supplements, and Complementary and Alternative Medicine, or SCAMs.”
I find homeopathy personally interesting for two main reasons. The first reason is that I really had no idea what it was until rather recently. It’s popular in Europe and well-known among the skeptical community, but it doesn’t seem to be a household term in America. The SGU prompted me to look into homeopathy, because the rogues completely tore into it during an early episode without defining exactly what it was. I remember bristling at this, because I didn’t think homeopathy was pseudoscience. I suppose I hadn’t ever thought about what it was, but I knew the British royal family had a homeopath, and they couldn’t possibly be that wrong about their health, right?
Wrong. Which brings me to the second reason that I find homeopathy interesting: it is a surprisingly silly notion. Many of the so-called ‘complementary and alternative medicine’ treatments at the very least seem plausible when you glance at their underlying ideas and theories. Homeopathy quite simply does not. I’ll bet you think that, in saying all this, I’ve already dismissed my stated goal of playing nice with the homeopaths. However, I suspect that’s merely because you don’t know the theories behind homeopathy. Let’s go over them.
Impressive in Name (Or Latin) Only
The main principle of homeopathy is the law of similars, often stated as “similia similibus curentur” or “like cures like.” Now this sounds good (especially in Latin), but it’s just a pre-scientific notion of disease that a guy named Hahnemann invented out of whole cloth in the early 19th century. The law of similars is the idea that taking a substance that causes a reaction similar to your symptoms will treat the underlying disease.
This conception of medical treatment is more than enough for me to stop here and get on with the rest of the article. To quote Ron Popeil, “but wait, there’s more!” Hahnemann, to his credit, realized that it was a bad idea to, for instance, tell people with indigestion to drink a beaker of acid. Thus, he developed what I’ve heard called the law of infinitesimals. Homeopaths believe that decreasing the concentration of a substance dissolved in a solvent increases its potency. Thus, if you have that acid I mentioned above dissolved in some water, you can increase its tummy-settling power by diluting it into more water. (Provided, of course, you mix and shake your preparation bottles in the special way prescribed by Hahnemann.)
This alleged healing power increases even as you reach and surpass the level of dilution where it becomes unlikely that even a single atom of the original substance remains in your homeopathic remedy. This is because homeopaths believe that the water retains the curative essence or spirit of the original substance, and the power of this quintessence increases with dilution for unexplained reasons. To maximize the purported strength of these remedies, homeopaths dilute them to an extraordinary degree. Thus, if you buy a homeopathic remedy, you are purchasing either an extremely expensive bottle of water or an extremely expensive bottle of sugar pills soaked in water.
Don’t worry if the law of similars and the law of infinitesimals sound a little fishy to you. This is magical thinking that flies in the face of the most basic tenets of chemistry and physics. There is no medical or biological plausibility to the law of similars, nor is there any chemical or physical plausibility to the law of infinitesimals.
Some Quick Calculations
Note that I said quick calculations, not quack calculations. I’m behaving!
I’d like to go over just how dilute homeopathic solutions are, mainly to demonstrate that a bottle of a homeopathic product is almost certainly pure water. For the sake of this example, the basis of the remedy will be table salt (NaCl). If you’d like to have flashbacks to high school chemistry and check my calculations, the trick is c1v1=c2v2. Concentration times volume is just the total amount, which stays constant during dilution. Each “X” in a homeopathic remedy signifies a tenfold dilution.
Let’s say you’re planning on drinking a cup of a homeopathic salt remedy; what potency would you need to have just one molecule of salt in that cup? By my calculations, 24X should give you a couple salt molecules in that entire cup. What’s fun is that the most common dilution for most homeopathic remedies is 30X. That’s right, folks: six orders of magnitude past the point where you might have a single molecule in a cup of the remedy. Sticking with salt, you’d need to drink all the water that fits in a 14.5’x14.5’x14.5’ cube to get at one molecule at 30X dilution.
And that’s not the worst of it. The homeopathic flu remedy Oscillococcinum is usually sold at 400X dilution. Again using salt as an example, this dilution comes to far less than one salt molecule per the volume of the observable universe. According to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, you should find a salt molecule or two in a sphere roughly a googol light-years in diameter at this dilution. You’re probably more likely to quantum tunnel through a brick wall by running into it than you are to find even a single atom from the Muscovy duck liver extract used as the basis for Oscillococcinum in your remedy.
That’s Enough Stoichiometry for Today
Hopefully, I managed to sufficiently whittle my original diatribe down to a somewhat fair assessment of what homeopathy really is. My overall goal in writing this entry was to inform people that homeopathic is not just another word for natural or herbal. Homeopathy carries much more pre- and pseudoscientific baggage than that. Of course, some homeopaths do indeed posit a handful of scientific-sounding explanations for the law of similars and/or the law of infinitesmals, and I’m sure I’ll cover the most popular of those in later entries.
If I failed to tone down this entry enough for you, I do apologize. Don’t hesitate to call me out in the comments; but, conversely, don’t think I’ll hesitate to ask for some evidence that homeopathy isn’t complete and utter woo. Using my psychic powers, I predict that any such reply would provide me with some new article topics.  My guess is that homeopathy just strikes me especially hard because it conflicts with chemistry at an extremely fundamental level. It ultimately contradicts the very concept of atoms, unless you ascribe some kind of supernatural power to substances inside bottles used to make homeopathic remedies.
I mentioned that homeopathy isn’t particularly common or popular in the United States, but I fear that I’m getting more and more incorrect every day. I’ve seen homeopathic mints at Trader Joe’s, an entire homeopathic display at a local ‘alternative’ grocery store, and homeopathic remedies for dogs at the pet store where my girlfriend shops for cat food. Decide on the evidence for the curative ethereal spirit of duck liver as you see fit, of course. But, know that any homeopathic remedy you purchase is pure placebo unless you believe that said quintessence exists and can affect human (and canine, it seems) health.
Posted at 12:23 am by cheglabratjoe
August 27, 2008
Entry 13: A Real Scientist or Skeptic Should Be Agnostic, Not Atheistic
This one is going to be rather personal for me, unlike the previous dozen entries. But, hey, after all, this is my blog. Besides, it’s the thirteenth entry … doo-doo doo-doo, doo-doo doo-doo …
The reason this post is so personal is because the crux of it is a controversial evaluation of available evidence I’ve made. What I’m referring to here was given away pretty clearly in the title, but I’ll make you keep reading to see precisely what the story is. If you have also thought about this issue critically and came to the opposite conclusion, I’d like to hear about it. This isn’t my normal pitiable panhandling for comments on something I’ve written; I truly would like to hear your thoughts on this. I’ve thought about this quite a bit over the course of my life (what can I say, I’m a nerd and a geek … I think about stuff a lot), and I’d be interested to hear what someone that came to the opposite conclusion would have to say about it.
I recently decided to begin calling myself an atheist, rather than my usual response to faith-based queries: “oh, I was raised Catholic.” I thought about this a lot, and realized that I gave this response because I didn’t want to offend the person asking the question. Someone who asks about your faith is probably religious themselves, and saying “raised Catholic” effectively says nothing about your beliefs but forges some kind of bond between you and them. At least you were once religious like them, and odds are they are also Christian (and maybe even Catholic) like you used to be.
I decided to stop dancing around my (lack of) beliefs because I have a right to them, and I shouldn’t feel pressured to keep them to myself. No religion deserves a sanctified place in our society, and so I should not hide my beliefs lest they offend other peoples’ beliefs. That’s to say nothing of the simple fact that my atheism shouldn’t offend anyone else, especially since I’m not trying to ‘convert’ people or anything like that. I don’t know whether or how this is going to affect me socially, because the only tangible occurrence that’s come of this decision was to put Atheist in the previously-empty Religion box in my Facebook profile. I’ll keep you posted if anything does happen with it.
All That Having Been Said …
Enough about me, onto this week’s statement. This argument is intriguing because it can come from both sides of the issue. A skeptic could say this to an atheist, by way of the argument that science cannot prove a negative. Since science cannot ever definitively disprove the existence of a supernatural deity, agnosticism is the only valid belief system if you do not accept the evidence for deities. A religious person could also throw this argument at a skeptical atheist, in an effort to liken atheism to religiosity. Since there is no proof for atheism, believing in atheism is just as un-skeptical as believing in a god quote-unquote “without proof.”
As you can probably imagine, both sides consider this pretty clever. It sounds like ‘skeptical atheist’ is an oxymoron! Oh snap! Well, I actually think that this is a complete non-issue. As we’ve seen before, the devil is in the details. (Well, he would be … if he were real.)
You’ve Got No Proof!
Each angle of this argument can be summed up as the following statements: “you can’t prove that god doesn’t exist” and “you can’t prove atheism.” The arguers here are ultimately trying to make atheism into a belief system, since it cannot be scientifically proven. I don’t believe (heh) that this is a matter of belief, but rather a matter of non-belief. Let’s take these statements one at a time.
“You Can’t Prove That God Doesn’t Exist”
What we have here is skepticism run amuck, with a touch of postmodernism thrown in for good measure. (There’s probably a better and more succinct way to describe this, but I’m no philosopher.) This argument promoting agnosticism towards a deity could be applied to anything. Let’s steal Russell’s Teapot, a china teapot orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars. We have no proof whatsoever that Russell’s Teapot doesn’t exist, but it would be absurd to argue that one ought to be agnostic towards it. To steal another religion debate favorite, we also have no proof that the Flying Spaghetti Monster does not exist. [Insert joke about His Noodly Appendage here.] Should we be agnostic towards the FSM, since there is no proof for apastafarianism?
In my opinion, a skeptic scoffing at an atheist has crossed that cynical curmudgeon line we talked about in my first few posts. (Though, interestingly, they’re crossing the line walking backwards, in that their curmudgeonry leads to very nearly the opposite result that Michael Shermer alluded to in his quote.) Their argument implies that everyone ought to be agnostic towards everything except that which has been proven to exist, up to and including the undetectable fairies frolicking on the bobbleheads on my desk. Or are they angels? I don’t know; it’s tough to tell.
Skepticism in no way mandates agnosticism towards every unproven hypothesis ever proposed; provisionally rejecting claims is completely acceptable. I would actually argue that this ought to be encouraged to an extent, lest we waste our time endlessly retesting crummy hypotheses on the off chance that they might get proven right someday. (I’d make a comment about my scapegoat pseudoscience, Bigfoot, but I’d like to continue stifling the cryptozoology taunting until I at least write an entry on it.)
As for my offhand comment about postmodernism, I’ll admit that I’m referring to a philosophy I know very little about. My extremely limited understanding of its overall premise can be summed up as the following: nothing can be truly proven or falsified because science and logic are social constructs. In five words (all I’m going to grant the subject at this time): I think this is rubbish.
“You Can’t Prove Atheism”
The other side of this coin, “there is no proof for atheism,” sounds quite analogous but is subtly different. It’s trying to turn atheism into a hypothesis unto itself, when really atheism is just the null hypothesis of theism. Hence the term: a-theism. Thus, what this statement does is get the concept of proving hypotheses exactly backwards. The burden of proof is on the hypothesizer, not the skeptic. If the hypothesis is that a theistic god exists, then I do not think the available evidence proves that the hypothesis is true. You cannot prove a negative, because one can always technically argue that the evidence is somewhere out there. All you can do is provisionally decide that the hypothesis isn’t correct, and ask the true believers to give you a call when (or if) they find something interesting.
The statement that you cannot prove atheism really doesn’t amount to a whole lot. It’s probably just a case of projection. A religious person saying this to an atheist is attempting to make atheism out to be just another belief system. What’s funny about this is that someone making this argument is running full-tilt at a brick wall of logic. Let’s imagine for a moment that religious people did somehow prove that atheism is also a belief system. This would do nothing for their ultimate hypothesis that their (or any) deity exists. All they’ve done is commit the tu quoque fallacy: “well, you’re a true believer, too.” Such a proof would have precisely zero bearing on the theistic hypothesis, it would only show that atheism is just another one of the countless religions out there.
Curmudgeons and Projectors
Atheism is a bit of a hot topic in skepticism. Many skeptics feel that atheism ought to be a major part of the skeptical movement, while others think that this would be a mistake for a variety of reasons. I consider myself part of the latter camp, which is why I prefaced this entry with a disclaimer about this being a personal matter.
I don’t think you need to be an atheist to be a skeptic. Nor do I think you need to be agnostic to be a skeptic, regardless of what any cantankerous skeptics or silver-tongued theists might argue. And finally, I don’t think that theism and skepticism are incompatible. If you’ve evaluated the evidence for theism and concluded that it is correct, that’s your skeptical prerogative. I personally disagree with you, but your conclusion is provisionally fine. Just like mine.
Posted at 12:46 am by cheglabratjoe
August 19, 2008
Entry 12: People Go Crazy During a Full Moon
Time for a complete 180 (360 if you're Jason Kidd): I'll bet you don't know anyone who believes the last entry's statement, and I wouldn't be surprised if practically everyone you know believes this one. I remember many of my teachers claiming that we students went berserk during the full moon, to the point of saying "it must be a full moon" if we were acting up and getting preemptively irritable if they'd happened to look at a lunar calendar and see that it was the day of the full moon.
You can hardly blame them for thinking that the phase of the moon influences people's behavior. The legend of the werewolf is ingrained in our culture, with lycanthropy playing a role in stories ranging from ancient myths all the way to Harry Potter. The words lunacy and lunatic come from the name of the Roman moon goddess, Luna. The purported effect of the full moon on behavior even has technical names such as the "lunar effect" or the "Transylvanian effect," though the latter sounds to me like people are mixing up their monster mythologies.
A few minutes of googling through woo-woo sites provides countless examples of things the full moon supposedly influences. Stock prices, murder rates, baby births, car crashes, suicide rates, sleep cycles, and just about everything else under the sun (heh). I didn't bother looking at the astrology sites, but I'm sure those guys just go bonkers over the full moon (ba dum, cha!). Such a widespread and powerful belief must have some basis in reality, right?
Researching the Transylvanian Effect (Cue Thunder, Lightning, Horse Whinnying)
Wrong. Over a hundred articles have been published examining the effect the full moon might have on all sorts of things, ranging from dog bites to binge drinking. The majority of the studies show no effect, and many of the positive studies have been reviewed and refuted for a variety of reasons. Some of the positive studies had statistical errors, others could not be replicated, still others championed 'increased effects' that were within the noise of their data, and one even seems to have divided by the wrong number of days in a lunar month. I found a nice, recent, freely-available review of the literature in the Canadian Medical Association Journal called "Bad Moon Rising: The Persistent Belief in Lunar Connections to Madness." Woo-debunking and some CCR, what more could you ask for?
Such a serious lack of evidence across the board was actually a bit surprising to me. Since so many people believe that the full moon causes some kind of insanity, I'd think people would be more inclined to do wacky things on the night of a full moon. A sort of "eh, why the heck not, it's a full moon" kind of attitude. But, there's no need to invoke such a hypothesis, because the alleged lunar effect is nil.
Confirming the Bias
To heck with you and your studies, one might say, millions of schoolteachers and ER workers can't be wrong. Well, yes they can. Think back to my teachers, and how they responded to the class going bonkers or the knowledge that it was a full moon. If the class was acting up, they would wonder if it was a full moon. If it was indeed a full moon, they would use this positive evidence to support their full moon belief. If it was not a full moon, they would shrug off this negative evidence and think nothing more of it. Conversely, if it was a full moon, they started the day looking for misbehavior to ascribe to the full moon. Anything the students did beyond perfect obedience would be used as positive evidence for the "lunar effect," regardless of how much the students normally acted up on any old day.
This is called confirmation bias. People who believe in myths about the full moon are just counting the hits and ignoring the misses. My teachers were only counting the positive evidence (misbehavior during full moons) and ignoring the negative evidence (normal behavior during full moons) and false positives (lots of misbehavior during non-full moons). If you only pay attention to data that supports one hypothesis, then you're going to feel like that hypothesis just keeps accumulating more and more evidence.
Believe in the Lunar Effect? That's Lunacy!
Not really, but I thought it sounded pretty good. Believing that full moons cause people to act crazy isn't going to hurt anyone, but then again neither would believing that a completely undetectable dragon lives in your garage. (Dragon analogy stolen egregiously from Carl Sagan.) The only thing the full moon has an effect on is people's ability to accurately analyze their own observations.
The full moon myth is a great example of how pseudoscience thrives. Take some long-held cultural traditions, add a dash of credulous reporting and storytelling, simmer until you achieve common knowledge status, and regularly baste with cognitive biases. In no time, you'll have a pseudoscientific belief to rival the one about only using 10% of your brain.
Posted at 1:04 am by cheglabratjoe
July 30, 2008
Entry 08a: Bobby Jindal Maybe Ought to Read Entry 08 of My Blog
Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana and potential running mate for John McCain in the upcoming US Presidential election, recently signed the Louisiana Science Education Act into law. (Watch this: I’m about to cram an entire bill into one sentence.) The bill aims to allow and assist educators to create and foster an open environment for the discussion and criticism of evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning; most importantly, it specifically allows the introduction of supplementary texts to aide in these discussions and critiques. This is the first academic freedom bill to pass through a state legislature. This bill, or at least the motivation behind it, will certainly warrant an entry or two in the future. I’ll give it a quick paragraph now, and then I’ll get back to Governor Jindal and Entry 08.
The effort to get religion into science classrooms is evolving before our very eyes; it would be humorous and ironic if it weren’t so serious. They first tried branding creationism as creation science, brazenly replacing the ism with the very word science itself. When that failed, they moved onto intelligent design, coyly leaving the designer unspecified, for a few decades and counting. Now, between the Dover case and the ongoing drubbing the scientific community is putting on Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity, ID might actually be on the way out. Even the Discovery Institute, a well-known ID think tank, has apparently been shying away from the term intelligent design of late. So now, everybody who wants theistic creationism taught in school has moved on to promoting academic freedom in hopes of getting their unscientific ideas into science classrooms. That’s enough of that for now, so let’s bring it back to the guv’nah.
As I write this, Governor Jindal hasn’t released a statement regarding this bill, at least as far as I can tell. I find this a bit surprising, considering the level of scrutiny the bill has received from the scientific community. As such, we must turn to past statements he has made regarding science education, in hopes of ascertaining his opinions on science education overall and evolution in particular.
I found one such statement, made during his gubernatorial (what an awesome word!) campaign, on a couple websites covering the bill brouhaha:
“Let’s talk about intelligent design. I’m a biology major. That’s my degree. The reality is there are a lot of things that we don’t understand. There’s no theory in science that could explain how, contrary to the laws of entropy, you could create order out of chaos. There’s no scientific theory that explains how you can create organic life out of inorganic matter.”
This really is quite an impressive paragraph. The quote continued on to advocate teaching the ‘controversy’ and academic freedom, even directly using the word creationism rather than any of its science-y euphemisms. No worries, though … there’s plenty to work with here. Let’s break it down sentence-by-sentence:
(1) Do we have to?
(2) Argument from authority.
(3) Reemphasis from authority?
(4) Mystery-mongering, setup for god-of-the-gaps.
(5) Scroll down to Entry 08 for details.
(6) Confusing abiogenesis with evolution.
Five of the six sentences in that paragraph contain a crummy argument, and the one that doesn’t contains the phrase intelligent design. That’s a big oh-fer six, if you’re filling out your scorecard at home.
The crux of his argument really seems to be the bit about entropy, since the rest of his recorded opinions on the matter don’t actually address what he thinks about evolution itself. This is quite disheartening to me, because the man is now a Governor of one of the fifty states in the Union. He actually expressed the sentiment that there are no theories in science that can explain how order arises out of chaos. Right now, there are people sailing and swimming on a large lake less than a mile from my apartment. Within six months, people will be ice fishing on the same lake. The icy order that will be created out of the current liquid chaos in the lake is staggering to comprehend, but it happens every winter and is fully explainable by basic thermodynamics. That Governor Jindal feels this phenomenon is beyond the capabilities of modern science to explain is remarkable.
There’s really not a whole lot more to say about this, hence the 08a rather than 12. This bill is a huge disservice to the people of Louisiana, and the possibility that its passage is based on blatant pseudoscience is alarming and demoralizing.
As Governor Jindal’s genetics professor at Brown quipped when asked about his former student, “without evolution, modern biology, including medicine and biotechnology, wouldn’t make sense.” Professor Arthur Landy continued, “Governor Jindal was a good student in my class when he was thinking about becoming a doctor, and I hope he doesn’t do anything that would hold back the next generation of Louisiana’s doctors.” Hear, hear, Art! I know it’s a cheap rhetorical ploy to yell "they’re hurting the children!", but this bill ultimately will hurt Louisiana schoolchildren. What students are going to want to study biology if one of their teachers takes full advantage of this law? Evolution will be framed as just a theory rather than as the fundamental cornerstone of modern biology, and its gaps and flaws will be emphasized over its awe-inspiring successes.
Science and reason lost a battle when Governor Jindal signed this bill into law. While it’s a sad day for science and reason, it’s a downright depressing day for Louisiana. Students in a science class taught by a teacher that takes advantage of this law will leave with both a terrible understanding of and a deep mistrust in science. We rely more on science and technology with each passing year, and untold classrooms full of Louisiana students will only fall further behind their peers because of bills like this.
Posted at 10:26 pm by cheglabratjoe
July 17, 2008
Entry 11: By Occam’s Razor, Gamma Ray Bursts Are Most Likely Caused by Aliens
Well, this week’s statement came straight out of left field; actually, it technically came from outside of the galaxy, but we’ll get to that. It’s not that common or reasonable of a statement, but it does highlight the misuse of an idea you’re all probably familiar with.
I think I first saw the idea that gamma ray bursts (GRBs) might be caused by intelligent life in Tuesday Morning Quarterback on ESPN.com, though the comment was probably tongue-in-cheek. (It’s impossible to tell with him anymore, which is one of the many reasons I no longer read his column.) However, I have seen this idea seriously argued elsewhere, though often by UFOlogists who don’t really feel the need to justify alien-based explanations. When justification for invoking little green men (LGM) to explain GRBs is given, it’s almost always Occam’s razor.
(A quick aside: any spelling and/or linguistic geeks out there? It seems that the spelling of Occam/Ockham changes with context, so that Occam’s razor was proposed by William of Ockham. What gives? And then there’s the little issue that we say Occam’s razor and not William’s razor, but I’ll grant you that the former sounds way more badass than the latter. A note to future generations: if I think of something cool, I want it called Joe’s X or [Last Name]’s X, and not [Hometown]’s X. I would also approve of my last name being adopted as an SI unit, but definitely not a CGS or English unit.)
As you might expect, the hypotheses astrophysicists toss out about GRBs are really complex. These things are probably the most energetic events in the universe since the big bang, so the physics are extreme by definition. People that make this week’s statement claim that Occam’s razor tells us to keep it simple. And, claiming that GRBs are just the stray shots of some intergalactic empire’s Death Star is definitely way simpler than all that high-energy physics hullaballoo. Are they right? Are GRBs just ray gun blasts from some alien war? And what does this Occam guy have to do with aliens, anyways?
ASAP, WTF are GRBs?
GRBs never last more than a few minutes, so I’ll spend roughly that amount of time explaining them. They’re incredibly powerful jets of radiation streaking across the universe, always from outside our galaxy and often billions of years old. They were first detected when the US put up satellites looking for radiation bursts from illegal Soviet space-based nuclear weapons tests, but instead they detected blasts of gamma rays coming from literally every direction in the sky.
The cause of GRBs is the subject of current scientific controversy. According to Pamela Gay of the AstronomyCast podcast, astrophysicists are pretty sure that they have at least some of the GRBs pinned down. The short-duration blasts probably come from two massive objects like black holes or neutron stars colliding and merging, and the long-duration variety may ultimately be a new type of supernova (hypernova). However, these ideas aren’t completely worked out, which makes for some disagreement and debate in the astrophysics community. Hey, it’s a real scientific controversy for once! (Unlike some fake controversies we’ve discussed ... cough, cough, intelligent design, cough.)
Splitting Hairs with Occam’s Razor
Occam’s razor can be stated in a variety of ways, ranging from the fully colloquial KISS Principle of keep it simple, stupid to the original Latin scribbled down by Friar William of Ockham: entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. It is often stated as the simplest solution is the best, or all things being equal, the simplest solution is the most likely to be true. As we saw when discussing the second law of thermodynamics a few entries ago, we need to be precise with the wording if we’re going to try and seriously apply this idea.
The original Latin of Occam’s razor translates to entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. When you apply the razor to hypothesis formation, it is usually referred to as the Law of Parsimony or the Law of Succinctness. By ‘entities,’ we here mean a priori assumptions: things we take to be true without evidence. When you form hypotheses, you make assumptions along the way. Among others, the death ray hypothesis for GRBs assumes there are death stars out there, and the hypernova hypothesis assumes that there are even more gargantuan stellar explosions than we’ve explained before out there. Occam is telling you to keep these assumptions as minor as they can be while still explaining the phenomenon of interest.
So, when you’re using Occam’s razor to analyze different hypotheses or explanations, don’t just pick the simplest one. Pick the one that makes the least significant assumptions. Imagine walking into your kitchen and seeing a broken plate on the floor. Let’s say the two hypotheses that leap to your mind are: (i) you left the cabinet ajar, your cat jumped onto the counter, nudged his way into the cabinet, and knocked a plate out for no good reason; or (ii) a gremlin did it. The second hypothesis might be worlds simpler than the first, but you have to assume freaking gremlins exist for it to be true. Friar Billy would tell you to blame the cat, if he hadn’t died 700 years ago. (Unless of course you break his rule and assume he’s speaking from beyond the grave.)
So, What Does Occam Think About LGM and GRBs?
Let’s go over some of the assumptions hiding behind the competing hypotheses for GRBs. On the alien side, we have to at least assume that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe and that this life is capable of controlling power outputs more extreme than the most colossal supernovae we currently know of. For you nerds out there, we’re probably talking a Type III civilization on the Kardashev scale, so my Star Wars reference above was appropriate. On the hypernova side, we’ve got some ultra-high-energy astrophysics that I don’t understand. But, for the sake of argument, let’s graciously assume that you must postulate some exotic form of degenerate matter or a host of new unstable subatomic particles to get hypernovae to spit out GRBs.
Balance a scale on top of Occam’s razor and the alien assumptions are going to beat out even quark matter or stars the size of a thousand suns. Science doesn’t have a handle on the intersection of relativity (the rules for big things) and quantum mechanics (the rules for small things), and things like supernovae and black holes live directly on that intersection. Speculating about the next layer of complexity is hardly a deal-breaker; in fact, that’s exactly what you’re supposed to do as a scientist. On the other hand, assuming that’s no moon, that’s a space station is just goofy.
Be Careful with Razors, Especially Occam’s
Hopefully it wasn’t painfully apparent, but this was a toughie to write. I stuck with it because I’ve wanted to cover Occam’s razor in an entry for awhile and I happened to be reading an article about GRBs where someone commented “why couldn’t these be alien weapons?” They certainly could be, anonymous commenter on forgotten site, but there’s no reason to really think so. It’s fun to think about epic space battles in a galaxy far, far away, but isn’t it also fun to think about how there are natural events happening all around us that science still can’t quite explain yet?
Occam’s razor is a great tool for skeptics, but it’s also often misused by pseudoscientists. Don’t let some ghost hunter tell you ten stories about this one time he investigated some ‘haunted’ house, and then exclaim “the simplest explanation is ghosts!” Give yourself a moment to séance with the spirit of William of Ockham, and calmly explain that assuming he’s a true believer who spent a night walking around spooking himself is far more appropriate than assuming ghosts were goosing him and breathing chilly air down his back.
Posted at 10:08 pm by cheglabratjoe
July 10, 2008
Entry 10: [The Junkyard 747 Argument]
This is a classic anti-evolution argument. It states that evolution by random mutation is analogous to a 747 being formed by a tornado ripping through a junkyard. And, since that would be ridiculous, evolution must also be ridiculous. Indeed, if evolution suggested that monkeys and daffodils spontaneously sprung fully-formed out of a primordial soup of simple chemicals, this would be a great analogy. However, since evolution doesn’t posit anything remotely like that, this statement is also a classic straw man.
These Things Usually Don’t Scare Crows Either
The straw man logical fallacy is when you bastardize a position to a ridiculous extent, and then argue against that bastardization. Since this technique simultaneously mocks and refutes something that sounds similar to your opponent’s argument, it can be an effective way to debate. Of course, that doesn’t make it valid, for the simple reason that you’re not arguing against what the other person is actually saying.
So, regardless of how clever the junkyard 747 argument might sound at first glance, there’s no need to start throwing out all our biology textbooks. Evolution is nothing like a tornado ripping through a landfill; people making this week’s argument have keyed into the ‘random’ in the term ‘random mutations’ and gone berserk with it.
Let’s briefly go over random mutations and natural selection, to see if they bear any resemblance to a whirlwind of garbage spitting out an airplane. Take a population of bacteria in a puddle. The daughter cells of these bacteria will all have random mutations of their progenitors’ genes; a small but significant error rate is a reality of DNA replication in all life. These mutations will either be detrimental, beneficial, or silent. The daughter cells with silent mutations will be just as likely to reproduce as their parent cells were, those with detrimental mutations will be less likely, and those with beneficial mutations will be more likely. There’s natural selection, folks: nature will select for the good mutations and select against the bad mutations.
If you think all that’s in any way analogous to a tornado constructing an airplane, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. (As opposed to a monkey’s extremely distant cousin, that is.) The junkyard 747 is a laughable perversion of evolutionary theory, and using it to attack evolution is an extremely flimsy straw man argument.
So, You Want Trashy Analogies?
Courtesy of Brian Dunning of Skeptoid, here’s an apt junkyard-based analogy for evolution. This story has really stuck with me since I heard it, probably because I find it really effective to turn this fallacious analogy on its head to actually demonstrate how evolution works.
Imagine a group of welders travelling from junkyard to junkyard, fiddling with pieces of junk at random. Maybe they weld two things together, or break something, or bend something else; whatever the details, the important thing is that they only make small and random changes. There are your random mutations. Now, choose some kind of selection criteria, and pick the improved junk out of your pool of junkyards based on those criteria. There is your natural selection. Have your welders make copies of your selected junk to deliver to the unselected junkyards, and repeat the mutation and selection processes. There’s your next generation of junk.
The overwhelming majority of these mutations will be useless. However, with millions of junkyards and millions of welders’ trips to these junkyards, you can end up with virtually anything. After even one generation, you’re almost certain to have the entire assortment of simple machines at your disposal. From there, you can get pretty much wherever you want. Select for locomotion, and you’ll be Flintstoning your way to Bedrock within a few generations. Select for weapons, and you’ll be aping the primates from 2001: A Space Odyssey from the get-go. (Thank you, I’m here all week. Remember to tip your waiter or waitress.) The sky isn’t even the limit; you can select things that help you glide on your way to flight, kind of like birds probably did.
Grasping at Straw Men
Another week, another weak anti-evolution argument. Luckily, there are only so many of these arguments to go around. Unluckily, and incredibly frustratingly (holy adverbs, Batman!), no amount of writing like this is going to make these arguments go away. Some of the highest-profile evolution deniers still regularly truck out these statements, almost as if they expect the scientific community as a whole to smack their foreheads and yell “omg, evolution does violate thermodynamics and it is just as ridiculous as a twister making a plane, lolz, our bad!”
Evolution is one of the most successful theories in science, and it’s going to take more than shoddy pseudoscience and witty rhetoric to disprove it. That crap, like the debris a tornado leaves in its wake, just isn’t going to fly. Unless of course you happen to be, shall we say, preaching to the choir.
Posted at 12:10 am by cheglabratjoe
July 1, 2008
Entry 09: If You Persecute Faith Healers When Their “Patients” Die, You Must Persecute Doctors for Every Patient of Theirs Who Dies
This statement was made by faith healing advocates after the recent death of (Madeline) Kara Neumann here in Wisconsin. Kara was an eleven year old girl with undiagnosed diabetes who died without receiving medical treatment because her parents attempted to heal her via prayer. The Neumanns belong to a non-denominational bible study group, and this group apparently believes that healing can only be achieved through prayer. I saw this statement on the bible study group's website, which I will not be linking to due to a number of repugnant opinions found therein. (Among other lines I found literally disgusting, they speculated that Kara's awful death from a preventable illness might have been caused by a lack of faith on her part.)
This was all over the news, and much has been said about the Neumanns and their faith healing ilk. For the record, the Neumanns have been charged with reckless homicide, they have publicly stated that they would not do anything differently if one of their other three children fell ill, and many other Christian faith healers have been ardent in their support of the Neumanns. In this post, I'm going to try and avoid discussing faith healers themselves and focus on the statement at hand.
More Logical Fallacies … Who'd Have Thought?
The titular statement basically equates faith healers with doctors, and thus appears to be guilty of the equivocation logical fallacy. (I'm no logic expert, so I might be miscategorizing this statement. However, as you'll see, it is very wrong regardless of what I call it.) Modern medicine is evidence-based, with many decades of well documented and mind-boggling success. Healing via prayer, on the other hand, has no supporting evidence beyond anecdotal stories. The general merits of prayer are a matter of faith, in my opinion. However, once it is hypothesized that prayer influences sick peoples' health, we can scientifically test the efficacy of prayer as a medical treatment.
Well I'll be damned; someone else thought it would be good to test that hypothesis, too. A seminal study ending in 2006 tracked ~1800 heart patients, and asked three different Christian groups to pray for certain patients. (Citation: H Benson et al, American Heart Journal, Apr 2006, 151(4), 934-42.) Two-thirds of the patients weren't sure whether or not they were being prayed for (half of these were, and half weren't), and the remaining third was knowingly prayed for. The groups prayed for a successful surgery and complication-free return to health, starting their prayers the night before the surgery and continuing for two weeks after. Unfortunately for faith healing advocates, being prayed for had no effect on the recovery of the control patients (52% complication rate for those actually prayed for, 51% for those not prayed for). In addition, the people who were knowingly prayed for actually had a slightly higher rate of complications (59%). Not only does prayer not heal people, it might actually make things worse!
Of course, faith healers (and religious people overall) claim that an omnipotent god cannot be constrained to fit a scientific study. This is called special pleading, yet another logical fallacy. If someone makes a testable scientific claim about a religion or deity, then that claim can be studied scientifically. Since the healing power of prayer fails that test, faith healers rely on anecdotes and shoddy reasoning. If someone is healed, even if they received months of modern medical treatment, it was due entirely to their faith. If someone perishes, they just didn't have enough faith. The term you're looking for is "non-falsifiable," and it's a bad word.
Faith Healing Malpractice (Malprayer?)
If you're going to allow faith healers equate prayer and medical treatment, you have to consider all the ramifications of such a concession. When doctors screw up, they get sued for malpractice. They're dragged into court, they have to account for their actions and decisions, and they can lose the right to practice medicine if they messed up badly enough. If faith healing is medicine, why aren't there malprayer cases in front of juries? Why doesn't the family call a lawyer when someone dies after seeing a faith healer, or after their priest gives them the anointing of the sick, or after their congregation prays for them? Unless you resort to the special pleading fallacy mentioned above, doing this ought to be no different than suing a doctor for malpractice.
The Neumanns sent out an email to their bible study group during Kara's last few hours, begging for "emergency prayers" from their faith healing friends. By the reasoning in this week's statement, all these people are guilty of malpractice. Perhaps they could have prayed harder, or used different prayer techniques. They could have prayed longer; I doubt they all prayed from the moment they saw the email to the moment god willed Kara to die. Imagine if an emergency room doctor stopped operating on you to go fold their laundry; it isn't unlikely that one of these faith healers did just that as Kara slipped into a diabetic coma and died.
Intercessory Prayer Is Not a Medical Treatment
Prayer may do many things for many people, but it does not heal the sick. Modern medicine does. People have prayed for millennia, but the average human life expectancy only skyrocketed when modern medicine entered the equation. Every person on the planet has benefitted from modern medicine; yes, even isolated hunter-gatherers, because past vaccination efforts have ensured that they can never get smallpox. On the other hand, relying on prayer for healing only leads to tragedy.
Equating faith healing with actual healing is a deadly mistake. If you're going to pray for a loved one when they are ill, pray for the ambulance to get them to the hospital quickly.
Posted at 11:09 pm by cheglabratjoe
June 24, 2008
Entry 08: Evolution Violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Drat! Science has been hoisted by its own petard! If only those biologists had ever taken a thermo class, we could have saved the last 150 years' worth of time we wasted on evolution. How could no one have thought of this problem in all that time?
Well, now that someone has been kind enough to bring up this issue, let's talk about it. You'll be happy to know that we're in my wheelhouse with this statement. I've taken three courses called "Thermodynamics," a fourth that should have also been explicitly called 'Thermodynamics,' and probably over a dozen others that discussed thermodynamic concepts in painstaking detail. I am chemical engineer, hear me roar! Thermo-woo pushers, beware!
Thermo 101
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is a tough cookie; my professors didn't spend all that time lecturing about it for their health. The first law is the conservation of energy and the third law defines absolute zero; neither of these is too tricky either conceptually or practically. You can't just create or destroy energy willy-nilly, and things can only get so cold before you bottom out on the temperature scale.
The second law can't be summed up as easily as its buddies. It can be expressed or explained in a variety of ways, ranging from the abstract (dQ = TdS) to the humorous (the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd laws say "you can't win, you must lose, and you can't leave the table"). Most hard science classes stick with the abstract, either dQ = TdS or S = k*ln(omega), probably because trying to wrap your mind around abstract concepts like entropy (S) can make your brain ache. For instance, you can use the second law to show that the rate of change in entropy with respect to volume at constant temperature equals the rate of change in pressure with respect to temperature at constant volume. Chew on that for awhile. Actually, don't ... it's inherently non-intuitive and abstract.
So what does the second law say, at least colloquially? It says that entropy must increase in an isolated system. And what is entropy? In a word, it's randomness. Thus, the randomness in an isolated system must increase any time something happens. To steal the stereotypical example from high school chemistry teachers around the world, think about an egg breaking. If you drop an egg, it will break and splatter yolk all over the floor. But, you never see a busted egg's entropy increase by spontaneously reassembling into a whole egg. This isn't the entire story, of course, but it's enough to get by on for this week's statement.
You Down Wit Entropy? (Yeah You Know Me!)
Holy crap, does that mean the people spouting this week's statement are right? Much of evolution decreases randomness by increasing complexity. The large animals walking around today are much less random than the simple unicellular organisms that dominated early life, according to the theory of evolution. But, the second law says that entropy must increase with time. Is this an intractable problem? How do we sort this out?
Let's ask MC Hawking, physicist Stephen Hawking's gangsta rapping alter-ego:
Creationists always try to use the second law
To disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw.
The second law is quite precise about where it applies,
Only in a closed system must the entropy count rise.
The earth's not a closed system; it's powered by the sun,
So f--- the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!
"Entropy", A Brief History of Rhyme: MC Hawking's Greatest Hits
Bingo. Entropy must rise in an isolated system, meaning a system that doesn't exchange heat or mass with its surroundings. The earth and the rest of the universe exchange tons of mass and heat, so the earth's entropy doesn't have to increase with time. So long as the universe's entropy is always going up, the second law isn't violated.
Let's try applying this logic to something besides evolution. By this argument, we could never make ice cubes. Freezing is a serious loss in entropy; the water molecules go from freely and randomly floating around in the ice cube tray to being rigidly locked in a big ice crystal. The trick is that the heat leaving the ice cube tray goes elsewhere (mostly behind the fridge) and increases that place's entropy. The second law states that the entropy gained by the heated air behind the refrigerator will be greater than the entropy lost by the water molecules frozen into the ice cube. Thus, the entropy in the fairly isolated system of fridge-plus-surrounding-air has increased, and so the thermo gods are satisfied. (They're free to go back to fighting Maxwell's demon.)
Nice Try, Evolution Deniers
This statement amounts to either: a little bit of knowledge being dangerous (since the bit about isolated systems is a fine point), or another example of true believers starting with their conclusion (evolution didn't happen) and hunting for anomalies. Decide for yourself which of those possibilities is more likely; I divulged my opinion on the matter in bold above. Unfortunately for any evolution deniers trying to use this argument, the anomaly isn't even there this time.
Posted at 11:37 pm by cheglabratjoe
June 18, 2008
Entry 07: Vaccines Contain a Dangerous Mercury Compound
This statement is the bread and butter of the anti-vaccination movement. It is often followed by the claim that this compound (and/or vaccines in general) causes autism in children, but that's another story for another time. This statement is maybe 1/3 true, because some vaccines do indeed include a preservative that contains mercury. Now, before you sprint home yelling "OMG!!1!" to make your tinfoil hat and join Jenny McCarthy and the conspiracy theorists, let's take a look at the other ~2/3's of the statement.
Mercury Doesn't Just Come as Quicksilver (or, Chemistry Matters!)
The compound in question is thimerosal (or thiomersal), an organomercury compound with antiseptic properties. Its usage stemmed from its ability to preserve vaccines without reducing their effectiveness; people were dying from infections of bacteria growing in vaccines towards other diseases. The addition of thimerosal to these vaccines fixed this significant problem, allowing vaccines to provide the desired immunity to a particular disease without killing the recipient with another one. So, what's the problem? Many people think this is a problem because thimeorsal breaks down to ethylmercury in your body, and this sounds very scary.
Sadly, I'm not being facetious here. The crux of the issue truly seems to be that ethylmercury sounds very much like methylmercury or dimethylmercury, two dangerous compounds. Methylmercury is bad because it is readily absorbed by your body, accumulates wherever it can in there, and may cause significant health problems. Dimethylmercury is orders of magnitudes worse. Do you remember the professor at Dartmouth (Karen Wetterhahn) who died after getting a few drops of liquid on her latex-gloved hand? Well, those drops were dimethylmercury. Heck, a little knowledge can make this all seem even worse: methyl means one carbon atom, ethyl means two carbons, and since the prefix di means two, dimethyl must also have two carbons ... "oh my god, we're poisoning the children!"
Simmer down there, slugger. Let's check out how important chemistry class minutia can be to toxicity. Everybody loves ethyl alcohol (ethanol), because it's the molecule that gets you drunk. Methyl alcohol (methanol), on the other hand, is a poison. There's a probably-apocryphal story that always goes around undergrad chemistry labs about a scientist in Russia who ended every workday by swigging a beaker of ethanol. One day, the guy accidentally chugged methanol instead of ethanol and died. I can't vouch for the authenticity of the story, but if someone did drink more than 100 mL (about half a cup) of methanol they probably would die. Lower levels of methanol exposure can lead to blindness, which is why you shouldn't drink moonshine. Dimethyl alcohol wouldn't be a stable compound, but the closest compound to it I could think of, dimethyl ether, is used as an aerosol propellant and to cryogenically freeze warts off people. While methyl- and ethyl- and dimethyl- all sound very alike, they're actually no more chemically similar to one another than barhopping, going blind, and removing warts are similar activities.
Enough chemistry babble, you might be saying. What about ethylmercury itself? Most importantly, it does not bioaccumulate. The thimerosal in vaccines all just gets normally flushed from your body (pun intended) as ethylmercury without any to-do. That having been said, it does not seem that exhaustive toxicology studies on ethylmercury itself have ever been performed. This of course is not ideal; it would certainly be better to have that information. However, one could easily argue that the years of safe vaccinations of billions of people coupled with the fact that we know ethylmercury just gets excreted makes these tests unnecessary. After all, it does seem a bit extraneous to spend millions upon millions of dollars to inject thousands upon thousands of people with ethylmercury, perform detailed chemical analysis on their excrement for weeks, and track their health for years when we already have eighty-plus years of valid-though-not-exhaustive evidence that it's safe.
Better Safe than Sorry (or, The FDA Isn't Trying to Kill You)
Did you not buy that last paragraph? Are you steaming mad that we're not absolutely positive that ethylmercury is safe? Before you write your congressperson or join an anti-vaccination group, realize that the US government also decided that it was better to be safe than sorry with this compound. By 2001, all routine childhood vaccines save inactivated influenza have contained NO thimerosal. In addition, no new vaccines approved by the FDA since 1999 have contained thimerosal, and many of the older vaccines that were effectively grandfathered in to this de facto policy have either switched to a different preservative or changed the delivery method to eliminate the need for any preservatives.
Whether you believe it or not, what we have here is an instance of the government having your best interests in mind. They were concerned that ethylmercury might somehow not be 100% safe, so they eliminated it from the childhood vaccination schedule and promoted its removal from vaccines in general. The amount of mercury people, especially children (more on that in a moment), are exposed to via vaccines has absolutely plummeted this millennium.
So, yes, some vaccines do "contain mercury;" there's your true third of the statement (and I'm being generous with my grading). However, any mercury present is sequestered within a safe and inert molecule (minus 1/3 for 'dangerous'). Furthermore, even this safe mercury compound has been all but completely removed from vaccines (minus 1/3 for exaggeration). That's a big 33% for the titular statement. Even with a huge chemical engineering core class final exam curve, this statement fails big time.
Alright, Alright, Let's Talk Autism
I was trying to avoid the autism connection here in an effort to keep this brief, but I'd be doing you a huge disservice if I didn't tie all this back to autism. The rate of autism diagnosis has been rising for years, and most people who make this week's claim go on to blame this rise on the mercury in vaccines. How about we play the scientific method game? What hypothesis would you make from the FDA's experiment of removing mercury from childhood vaccines? Nothing difficult or tricky here: you would expect the rate of increase in autism diagnoses to lessen (perhaps even plateau or reverse and start to decrease). If you remove the causative agent, the effect should go away.
Let's turn to PubMed and see if anyone's thought to check this out. I found a study that tracked the autism prevalence rates in children born in California between 1995 and 2007. (Conveniently, this data had previously been used by the anti-vaccination movement to argue that the alarming rise in autism prevalence must be due to thimerosal.) What did their analysis of this data find? No drop in autism prevalence in the years following 2001. I'll let them state their conclusions themselves: "The DDS data do not show any recent decrease in autism in California despite the exclusion of more than trace levels of thimerosal from nearly all childhood vaccines. The DDS data do not support the hypothesis that exposure to thimerosal during childhood is a primary cause of autism." The citation is Schechter R & Grether JK, Archives of General Psychiatry, 65(1), January 2008, pgs 19-24.
I'm sure the vaccines-cause-autism crowd, if they read my blog, would try to use my own advice against me and reply that this is only one study. And, yes, it certainly is. However, it is a very good study utilizing a huge amount of data that pretty much demolishes the proposed vaccines-autism hypothesis. There was no reason to think that the thimerosal in vaccines caused autism before this study, and now you have even less ground to stand on if you stick to this belief. It's a pretty tall order to explain how thimerosal causes autism when children in California still got autism at the same increasing rate after virtually all the thimerosal in childhood vaccines was removed.
Of course, that's not going to stop many people from thinking vaccines cause autism. That's the danger in believing in something rather than approaching it skeptically: you might look awful silly when you keep on believing even in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence.
It would be one thing if it stopped at people looking foolish, but it's much more serious and tragic than that. These people are putting their children's lives in danger because they believe in something that has absolutely no rational basis. If that doesn't bother you, then we're just going to have to agree to disagree because that bothers the hell out of me.
Please. Vaccinate your children. In my frank opinion, it would be despicable of you to let your child die of a preventable illness because you believe in pseudoscience.
Posted at 10:12 pm by cheglabratjoe
May 15, 2008
Entry 06: People Have Been Doing Acupuncture for Thousands of Years, Who Are You to Criticize It?
I mentioned acupuncture in the first post for a reason. Most people seem to take the efficacy of acupuncture as a given, so any time I dare mention otherwise I'm all but guaranteed to get a strong response. There are a variety of arguments that immediately get thrown in my face, and the one in the title sticks out the most in my mind. Just who the heck am I to criticize something people have been doing since the dawn of time? A skeptic, that's who.
This statement amounts to nothing more than a single logical fallacy: the argument from antiquity. (My apologies for harping on about logical fallacies, but it's not my fault that pseudoscience-pushers tend to resort to them.) This fallacy is a specific example of the more general argument from authority, but it gets tossed around enough that it has more than earned a specific name for itself. The statement grants acupuncture some kind of specialness or significance merely because it happens to be old. But, the fact that acupuncture has been used for thousands of years says absolutely nothing about its effectiveness. Period.
Well, closing the door on this topic that succinctly is no fun, so let's look at another system of medicine that has also been used for thousands of years: the four humours theory of disease. In case you're not familiar with it, this is the one that claims your health is controlled by a balance of the four humours (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm) and that any disease can be treated by removing a purported excess of one of them, say by bloodletting or inducing vomiting. This was the dominant theory of disease in the western world for at least two millennia (from Hippocrates to the mid 1800's), and possibly much longer depending on where the Greeks got the idea from. We scoff at it nowadays because it's been totally out of fashion in our society for about 150-200 years, but this was serious medicine in the very recent past. Unless I'm remembering my stories incorrectly, multiple signers of the Declaration of Independence subscribed to humouralism, and we all like to fancy them the most enlightened thinkers of their day.
What ancient pedigree does acupuncture have that humouralism doesn't? If you're going to try and claim that the former is still practiced while the latter is relegated to history's funny pages, I suggest you look into the unani system of medicine. Here's a link to a page from the Government of India's Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Sorry folks, the four humours are also still out there. The only difference between humouralism and acupuncture, at least in the scope of this particular argument from antiquity, is that acupuncture happens to have become a fad in the western world. Heck, maybe I should try and start the humoural medicine fad. I'd feel bad bleeding people, but maybe I could induce vomiting by showing them the bills they might incur by visiting quacks.
Giving acupuncture some kind of special importance merely because it's old is fallacious reasoning. If you do this, you're obliged to give the same weight to things like the four humours or even über-woo like reading animal entrails and sacrificing virgins. Extreme age in no way confers correctness to a belief. People in the ancient world could believe incorrect things just as easily as we can nowadays. Don't compound the problem by repeating their mistakes.
Posted at 12:02 am by cheglabratjoe
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