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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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
May 7, 2008
Entry 05: History Shows That Homosexuality Dooms Civilization to Failure
This one's an oldie but goodie for me. I remember hearing this from a family member as a kid, and I've seen and heard it plenty of times since then. It's all but guaranteed to come up when people try to argue that homosexuality is dangerous or wrong without resorting to overtly religious reasons.
So, we've got homosexuality bringing entire civilizations to their knees (no pun intended). That's a pretty bold statement, don't you think? Destroyers of great civilizations: pestilence, strife, famine, barbarians ... and people of the same gender having sexual relations with each other. Let's see if one of those doesn't fit with the others.
Shoddy Logic, Shoddy History
Here's a huge reason to be skeptical of this claim: it assumes causation from correlation. They see that A (the culture has homosexuals) and B (the culture failed) both happened, and they then leap to the conclusion that A caused B. That's a big no-no. By that logic, I could consider the observations that I (A) wore new socks today and (B) it was cloudy, and argue that wearing new socks caused it to be overcast. Heck, maybe a society that's in decline and doomed to fall in the near future somehow causes an increase in homosexuality. That's no more or less (in)valid a claim that the one in the title of this post. Or maybe A and B are both caused by Z. Or maybe there's no relationship between the two at all. The fact that two things both happened implies nothing about whether or not (or how) they caused each other.
Here's another way to look at this statement: pretty much every civilization that's ever existed has failed. The only ones that haven't are the ones still around today, right? So, once you try to use a civilization like Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome (the go-to civilizations for people making this statement) as an example of this supposed devastating effect homosexuality has on a culture, it's meaningless. Regardless of the presence or absence of homosexuality, every civilization from that time period has failed. Pointing at one society from that time period that was known to condone homosexuality and yelling "it was the gays" is silly. There's no reason to think that homosexuality indicated any ancient civilization's imminent collapse.
Pretty open-and-shut, I'd say. History doesn't show that homosexuality and the catastrophic failure of a society are correlated. And, even if they were, it would not imply that homosexuality causes the downfall of civilizations. If you are against homosexuality, why not be honest about the real reasons instead of hiding behind nonexistent history and faulty logic?
I'm Sorry, Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome Failed?
Before we go, I'd like to examine the claim that Ancient Greece and Rome failed. I'll admit, I'm mainly doing this because I'm one of the dying breed who took Latin in High School and thus am a bit of a Roman history nerd. I would argue that Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome constitute two of the greatest civilizations ever, so just blowing them off as "failed" is just about as silly as blaming their downfall on homosexuality. I'll also throw some Wikipedia-based summaries on just how gay these societies were out there, for no other reason than to make homophobes uncomfortable. (Hey, I've lasted like 4.75 articles now without a childish affront to pseudoscience-pushers, so throw me this bone (again, no pun intended).)
Let's start by looking at homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome for a moment. (I can't imagine what my internet history is going to look like after researching this stuff.) Pederasty was widespread in ancient Greece, and relationships between adult men were also common. If Wikipedia is to be believed (decide on that as you will), homosexuality was actively encouraged in the military because it improved morale and camaraderie. In Ancient Rome, homosexuality was largely adopted by the aristocracy along with the rest of Greek culture. There are hordes of stories about the emperors' sexual escapades with both genders, and there's even art preserved on the walls of Pompeii depicting a man-man-woman threesome in a position that many modern heterosexual men would not consent to.
With all that homosexuality, these civilizations must have failed miserably. (If you think so, shame on you for skipping to the end of the post for the good parts!) Sure the Greeks eventually got conquered by the Romans, but not before laying the cultural and philosophical foundations for all of western civilization. To this day, we prize Greek ideas such as democracy and free inquiry as the most important aspects of our society. And Ancient Rome did little short of conquer the known world, spreading its adapted Greek culture across Europe, Africa, and Asia. And, when Rome did quote-unquote fail, it precipitated the freaking Dark Ages, the modern euphemism for a millennium-long stagnation of society and culture.
Yeah, those societies failed, all right. And it was all the gays' fault.
Posted at 11:42 pm by cheglabratjoe
May 1, 2008
Entry 03: No One Bothers to Research [Herbal Remedy] Because There's No Money in It
I'm starting your regularly-scheduled posts with this topic because it was my direct impetus for firing up this reincarnation of my blog. Don’t worry; it's also an interesting statement. Not only are both parts of the statement completely and utterly incorrect, but it also might indicate belief in a grand conspiracy theory. And those are just a lot of fun, what with the black helicopters and the agents in sunglasses at night. (Shoutout to Corey Hart ... the 80’s singer, that is, not the Milwaukee Brewers outfielder.)
I saw this comment recently online. The herb in question was St. John's Wort, and the general context of the statement was as follows: (a) western medicine, mainly Big Pharma, is only interested in making money; (b) drug companies only make money off patented, expensive drugs; (c) no one can patent St. John's Wort or other herbs since they're already out there in the open; and thus (d) the title of this post.
I could get into critiquing the person's overall argument, but let's stick with the titular sentence. We'll hit the "no one bothers to research St. John's Wort" part first, and then move onto the "there's no money in [herbal remedies]" bit. And, if there's time, we'll touch on the conspiratorial undertones of the statement as a whole.
Getting that Wort on St. John Looked Into
So, you think there's no research being done on St. John's Wort? Well, Pubmed would have to go ahead and disagree with you. Pubmed is a database of academic research articles related to biomedicine, encompassing fields from medicine to cell biology to nursing to biochemistry. So, if you're interested in finding articles related to anything biological, it's probably the first place to look for them. The best thing about Pubmed is that you don't need to access it from an institution that pays thousands upon thousands of dollars for the right to use it. You won't be able to read the articles for free, but often you'll get the abstracts (brief summaries) and if nothing else you'll at least get a list of article titles.
Let's check Pubmed for research on St. John's Wort. A Pubmed search of "st. john's wort" reveals ONE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED FORTY articles as of late March 2008; I note the date of that search because a few brand spanking new articles appear to be coming out every week. Notice also that this is hardly a comprehensive search, because Pubmed only searches so many research journals for so distant a time period. Sure seems like a bunch of people have and are bothering to research it!
St. John’s Wort(h)
Now, let’s discuss how "there's no money in St. John's Wort." Just who the heck is paying all these professors and grad students and research medical doctors to do all that work and write all those articles? Surely not drug companies, since there's no money in it. It must be the National Institute of Health (NIH) or National Science Foundation (NSF) or some other governmental agency footing the bill. Get on the horn to your congresspeople! This egregious waste of precious funds must be stopped! Even if those academics discover that St. John's Wort does something good, no one will bother manufacturing it because there's no money in it! Rabble! Rabble rabble! (For St. John's sake, please tell me you're noting the sarcasm here.)
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Precise numbers are hard to come by, since the herbal supplement industry seems completely haphazard and disorganized. (This isn’t terribly surprising, given the deregulation the supplement industry received via the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994.) Poking around online, I’ve seen estimates of herbal supplements sales of $13 billion per year, $5-10 billion per year back in the late 90s, and $20 billion per year for “natural” supplements (whatever that means ... I’m assuming herbs count).
These numbers seem reasonable to me, because the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (part of the NIH) conducted a survey in 2002 of over 31 thousand adults and found that 19% of respondents used some kind of herbal supplement during the twelve months preceding the survey. Going back to our herb of interest for a moment, 4390 of the 31044 people surveyed claimed to have taken St. John’s Wort in the previous year.
Extrapolate from these dollar figures and percentages as you see fit, but you’d be hard-pressed to claim there’s no money in herbal supplements. These numbers could be off by an order of magnitude and they’d still make for a huge and growing market for St. John’s Wort and indeed all herbal supplements. Just think about the pill aisle in every grocery store or the back wall of every drug store ... do you think there’s no money being made in all those little bottles?
It’s a Conspiracy!
What’s lying beneath the surface of this patently false statement? A grain of what I like to call the Evil Pharmaceutical Oligopoly conspiracy theory. A better and more popular title would be the Big Pharma conspiracy theory, but I like the word oligopoly and I’m pretty sure I came up with that phrase so I’m taking this opportunity to prop up my own little moniker for it. In ultra-abbreviated form, this conspiracy involves Big Pharma and ultimately the entire medical industry colluding to make money, all consequences and peoples’ health be damned.
Beyond the factual errors in the statement in question, it implies that medical research only ever occurs if it will result in a brand name pharmaceutical. Imagine the large-scale conspiring this would require. This hypothetical E.P.O. would have to completely control the NIH and probably the NSF. It would have to squelch any and all research that implied well-known compounds give health benefits: no more research into the vitamins and minerals! Also, what would happen if some guy at a university or small company found a bona fide health benefit in St. John’s Wort or Vitamin K? They would have to kill him or at least pay him off, right? They can’t very well have people running around saying something they don’t control can help people.
If you believe all that occurs on a daily basis, all the power to you (for now); I’m sure we’ll get to grand conspiracies as a general topic at some point. Just please recognize the incredible chain of ideas you need to adhere to if you truly believe that the medical industry conspires to keep people sick.
Make That “People DO Research Herbs, and There IS Money in Herbal Supplements”
Well now, that ended up being a pretty good one. It sounded reasonable at face value, but ended up being complete crap and even coyly appealed to a grand conspiracy theory. Always stop and think about what “facts” people use to justify their arguments, especially if these “facts” eventually require you to drink the Kool-Aid pouring out of a conspiracy theory.
Posted at 9:13 pm by cheglabratjoe
April 29, 2008
Entry 02a: Skeptical Sources (For Real This Time)
All right, all right ... I'll take off my skeptic hat for a minute and give you the places I trust for my skeptical news and views. I'm certainly not recommending you take everything these folks say as gospel, especially since they absolutely wouldn't want you to do so either. However, these people are great skeptics and have earned a considerable level of credibility for it. In addition, they have taught me virtually everything about what I'm hoping to do in this blog.
My first source has to be the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast. They were my introduction to the world of skepticism, and I couldn't have asked for a better way to get started. I can't say enough about the show, and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in skepticism or science in general. The driving force behind the show is Dr. Steven Novella, a neurologist at Yale and an expert debunker of woo (as he likes to call pseudoscience). He especially excels at exposing the logical fallacies that underlie many pseudoscientific claims. This seemed a bit nitpicky and unnecessary at first, but I quickly realized that a myriad of woo-based arguments all rely on the same basic set of logical miscues. So, if you hear me discussing a logical fallacy, I'm sure I owe my arguments either in part or wholly to Steve.
The next source is the Skeptoid podcast by Brian Dunning. Brian takes a topic or claim, presents it as its proponents would, and then analyzes it skeptically. Each episode is about ten minutes, so they're easily digestible and are a wonderful resource. He's also more open-minded than many skeptics, which is an admirable trait that I personally have trouble adhering to even after only a year in skepticism. Outside of a few glib comments, he gives the woo a few credulous minutes before dropping the cold hammer of reality on it. (You'll notice I didn't give poor Bigfoot that much consideration here; sorry, big fella.) I'd recommend Skeptoid to anyone even vaguely interested in science-y topics, because they're very accessible and won't eat up much of your time (unless you do like I did and plow through the entire back catalogue immediately upon discovering it).
These two podcasts have been and still are my go-to places for skepticism. Steve and Brian are tough to beat: they know their stuff, they don't take pseudoscientific crap from anyone, and, on top of that, their work (both writing and podcasting) is entertaining and funny.
Some other skeptical folks I've checked out in various capacities are Michael Shermer, the Skepticality podcast, Richard Dawkins, the TV show Bullshit!, PZ Myers, Carl Sagan, Phil Plait, and of course James "The Amazing" Randi. A few of these guys stray a bit from hardcore woo-debunking (most notably Dawkins, as you probably guessed), but you can rest assured that these people aren't going to be spouting pseudoscientific nonsense at you. I would especially recommend Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark. I unfortunately listened to a terribly-produced audiobook recording of it, but the book itself was so great I still managed to love listening to it.
So, there you go. If you're interested in skepticism, I'd check all of these folks out. If you'd like a suggestion on where to start, I would recommend tossing some Skeptoid episodes that sound interesting to you on your mp3 player. Give them a listen at the gym or during your commute, and see if you like what you hear.
I'll mention more sources as I discover (and borrow material from) them. I'm always on the lookout for more islands of skepticism in the sea of woo we're all treading water in.
Posted at 11:30 am by cheglabratjoe
April 24, 2008
Entry 02: Skeptical Sources
I hate to start off with a whimper instead of a bang, but I thought it would be good to outline where I'll be getting my information for future blog posts from. Maybe I can give you a quick rundown of 'safe' websites or sources where you can obtain 'real' information on a variety of hot pseudoscientific topics. Well, here's the list:
Nowhere.
Unfortunately, you're always going to have to be skeptical of your sources, even when said sources claim to themselves be skeptics. As was mentioned in the last post (in italics, no less), skepticism is more of a method than a position or belief. There's no concrete list of Things Skeptics Believe In anywhere, and there never can be. The best you can hope for is a scientific consensus: something that experts around the world agree is the best hypothesis yet put forth to explain the available data.
Sometimes finding this consensus is pretty cut-and-dry; for instance, if you're wondering if the earth is flat or spherical, it wouldn't be too difficult to find information supporting the correct side of that debate. Nevertheless, you can easily find websites out there touting the belief that the earth is flat. So, in this and any other instance, always be skeptical of any one source!
Now, in light of this advice, how do you avoid becoming the grumpy curmudgeon also mentioned italically in the previous post? Indeed, if you went from source to source pooh-poohing each bit of evidence presented to you, I'd call you a less kid-friendly synonym of the word curmudgeon. But here's the trick: when virtually every legitimate scientific source agrees that something is correct, go ahead and start letting yourself be convinced. You can trust reputable skeptics to know this consensus, but always be wary of running into someone's sacred cow (I'm pretty sure everybody's got at least one).
Now, a couple points before I wrap up. You might be saying to yourself, "Well hold on there, sport! The scientific community laughed at Einstein and Copernicus, and they wound up rewriting science!" If so, simmer down, I'm sure we'll be getting to that point in a future post. In the meantime, mull over my opinion that it might be a touch arrogant to fancy yourself the intellectual equal of some of the smartest people to ever walk the planet.
You also might be frustrated that I'm glossing over a very obvious catch-22 ... I'm telling you that you need to be skeptical to learn about skepticism. But again, the take home message is that skepticism is a *method* as opposed to a system or list of *beliefs*. A skeptic hears a controversial claim, thinks about it rationally and scientifically, and comes to a provisional conclusion based on the available evidence. A true believer takes the controversial claim as fact, and starts propping up inadequate positive evidence and rationalizing away conflicting evidence. Those are fundamentally disparate approaches.
Finally, I'll allow that I sound a little bit paranoid, since I'm basically telling you to trust no one. No worries ... I'm not going all kooky conspiracy theorist on you. Again, I'm just emphasizing that you ought to be skeptical of any single claim you hear. I don't care if the source is a raving lunatic on the street corner or a Nobel laureate (James Watson, in particular, though it is getting tougher and tougher to distinguish him from a lunatic on the street corner), keep a skeptical mind about the claim and appeal to the scientific consensus on the subject. Remember, any one person or group can believe in literally anything, and can believe it fervently. That in no way means you ought to believe it, too.
That includes me, mind you. Don't blindly accept everything I say, either. Hell, if you read one of my posts and you feel the need to go out and research the topic for yourself, don't think I'll be mad or anything. How could I be?
That's exactly what I want you to do.
Posted at 12:20 am by cheglabratjoe
April 14, 2008
Entry 04: Ben Stein Told Me Those Mean Scientists Won’t Let Intelligent Design Play with “Darwinism”
***NOTE: No need to be skeptical of my ability to count; this was going to be my 4th post, but I decided to bump it up because the movie in question opens today. Since I fancy myself a "science blogger" now, I'd be remiss not to write something about this and post a link or two to
If you haven't heard, Ben Stein is back in the public eye. "Ferris Bueller 2: Save Ferris"? Nope. "Win the Rest of Ben Stein's Money"? Sadly, no. What he is doing is starring in a film called "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," and it consists largely of the statement in the title of this post.
One side note before we really begin. The film also describes a link between the theory of evolution and the Holocaust. Essentially, they posit that "belief" (that's in quotes because you don't believe in scientific theories, as we discussed in Entry 02) in "Darwinism" (that's in quotes because it's ridiculous to try and cast a scientific theory as a belief system) leads you directly to eugenics and the Holocaust. I find this trivialization of genocide for political, social, and religious purposes utterly offensive and repugnant, and will not be responding to it at the moment. Perhaps at a later time.
Back to those jerk scientists who are holding down Intelligent Design. You could say they're "conspiring" to keep ID out of the academic literature. And, hey, the movie apparently calls these conspirators "Big Science." Hmmm. After Entry 03, are alarms going off in your head? Haven't we heard this before from the Big Pharma (sorry, Evil Pharmaceutical Oligopoly) conspiracy theorists? And, for that matter, the UFOlogists? And the cranks who think lizards living in the center of the earth run all the world's governments?
I'm not going to hammer the conspiracy theory aspect of this film because we just talked about conspiracy theories. Besides, with Intelligent Design, there's plenty of room for all sorts of skepticism. The complaint that science isn't letting ID proponents into their sandbox to play is, on the surface, valid. You'd have a hard time getting an ID paper into a scientific journal; I'm not going to hide that because there's no reason to. But wait, does that mean scientists are biased against new ideas? Are they protecting their "Darwinistic" dogma? Is "Big Science" really out there keeping Ben Stein from proving the validity of ID? Put simply: no.
Thinking Intelligently About Intelligent Design
Let's look at what Intelligent Design ultimately is. I'll be glossing over their claims and ideas, of course, but you can easily find more information if you'd like. I'm sure Michael Behe would cry reading this overview, but I'd take more pity on him if he'd called on me so I could ask him a question when I wasted my time attending a lecture of his a few years ago. (Kidding, kidding ... he was very busy getting patted on the back by the ultra-religious people filling the auditorium.)
Their argument is that life is too complex to have evolved by natural selection, and thus must have been designed by an intelligent entity. The specific rationales and biological evidence they throw out there to support their argument are manifold, as you might expect. I'm sure we'll be coming back to a number of their juicier statements in later posts, but for now let's consider just that statement itself: "Life is too complex to have evolved by natural selection, so it must have been intelligently designed."
This statement amounts to a pack of logical fallacies. The first and foremost of ID's fallacies is the argument from personal incredulity: "I can't imagine how something as complex as modern life could have evolved via natural selection, so it must have involved the supernatural." Well hey, plenty of people don't think life is too complex to have evolved via natural means, most notably the overwhelming majority people who study and work in biology. So just saying that you think life's too complex to be natural doesn't make your ideas a scientific theory.
The next aspect is the argument from ignorance: "The ability to precisely and comprehensively explain the evolutionary history of all life on earth is beyond modern biology, so the theory of evolution is inadequate and gods or aliens must be involved." Just because modern biology can't fully explain everything does not make it wrong and necessitate a supernatural conclusion. Modern physics cannot fully explain black holes; that doesn't mean we need to throw up our hands and say "god makes black holes work!" There's a reason scientists do research: humans don't know everything! (Hell, we hardly know anything in the big scheme of things.) However, this doesn't mean that everything scientists haven't sorted out yet is controlled by supernatural forces.
And finally, there is huge false dichotomy in there: "If the theory of evolution is wrong, intelligent design must be right." Uh, what about other possibilities? Absence of evidence for one thing in absolutely no way implies anything positive about another. The fact that it didn't snow the day I began writing this post does not imply that it was sunny; if you must know, it was cloudy and it thunder-showered. Even if evolution was proven completely wrong, that proof would give zero credence to ID.
Am I getting off on a huge tangent here? Not at all. My point in all that was to briefly demonstrate that, as a theory, Intelligent Design is terrible. I didn't even touch on the facts that it is wholly non-falsifiable and explicitly invokes the supernatural, either of which itself would utterly rule ID out as a scientific theory. At best, Intelligent Design is a pack of misconceptions and logical miscues. At worst, it's a wolf in sheep's clothing (that is, creationism in science's labcoat).
All People Are Created Equal, but Not All Scientific Theories Are Created Equal
Even granted all that fallacy mumbo-jumbo, so what? Maybe ID is a crappy theory, maybe there are some holes in it, but why not give it a shot in the laboratory or classroom? There's no reason to discriminate against ideas, everyone should be given their chance to play with their theories in the sandbox of science. Right?
Wrong! Science is NOT a democracy. It's a meritocracy: theories have to earn their acceptance through trials by fire. You hear about peer-reviewed journals all the time, so let's briefly describe how that works. The peer-review process for publication consists of an editor sending your new paper to experts in that field (your research competitors, that is) to tear it apart top-to-bottom looking for any chinks in the armor of your experiments, results, discussions, and conclusions. Assuming the paper passes that process, it gets published; step one of the peer review process is then complete. Note that your ideas are in no way fully accepted by the community yet. Steps two through N continue far into the future, as various scientists across the world and for many years read your paper, think about your claims and discussions, repeat your experiments, and build upon your work. Only after years of verification and further work are your ideas (provided they are correct, of course) finally largely accepted.
I'm not parroting some ivory tower ideal to you or anything, this is really how science works. Most graduate-level elective courses I've taken spent tons of time doing literature critiques; we'd all read a paper in a respected journal by a respected professor, and pick through it page-by-page looking for weaknesses and things we disagreed with. It was never a chore to fill 50 minutes doing this, I'll tell you. Because of this, only when I see the same good science done over and over in a variety of papers by a variety of authors do I start accepting the results as genuine.
Sometimes, it's even more direct than that. A significant portion of my research is "model discrimination." I take data, fit a variety of mathematical models to that data, and run analyses to determine which model is best able to predict that data. I'm not exaggerating in the least here, my analyses literally spit out things like "Model A is 20% more likely to be correct than Model B based on the available data." That's science, folks. If my work offends the proponents of Model B, that's just too bad. If I demonstrate that some Model C is orders of magnitude less likely than other mathematical models, then I am under no obligations to continue using it to appease the Model C'ers. I don't have to cater to their beliefs, because their pet theory is demonstrably junk. Produce the goods, or don't waste your time writing articles or applying for grants or writing books. You're not going to get in for the sake of diversity or kindness, because that's not science!
Scientists Aren't Being Mean, They're Just Doing Science
Regardless of any number of sob stories, Intelligent Design is not science and does not belong in the classroom or the laboratory. As I mentioned briefly, ID is not falsifiable. You can't prove a negative, so you can never prove that some intelligent designer didn't somehow design life. You can always say things like "the designer wanted to make it look like everything evolved" or "the designer let that evolve, but designed all this other stuff." Non-falsifiable theories aren't science, by the very definition of science. End of story.
However, even if you loosened the definition of science enough to let ID sneak in the back door, it's not going to hold up. As we discussed, it amounts to a variety of logical fallacies. Modern evolutionary biology is a dynamic and robust field that has given the world countless advances in both applied and pure science. Intelligent Design, on the other hand ... well, let's sum it up as "not so much." If only it got the "not so much" credit it deserves.
Expelled From Expelled
We're going too long, but I've got a great story to tell concerning this new movie. There was a screening at the Mall of America that science blogger PZ Myers signed up to attend. He went through all the proper channels to attend the preview, and he told them he would bring some guests (which the movie people encouraged, to promote the movie). As he and his guests waited in line, security pulled PZ out of line and told him he had been asked to leave. It seems the makers of this film are very concerned about Intelligent Design proponents being shut out of the scientific world, but have no qualms about shutting scientists out of seeing their movie. That's to say nothing of the rudeness and inconvenience to PZ, of course. Or the small fact that he is in the movie, but wasn't allowed to see it!
I personally feel that this reveals quite a bit about the people behind this film, but that's not why I'm relaying the story. I'm telling this story because the people who kept PZ out of the theater didn't bother checking who he had brought as guests. That was quite the oversight on their part, because one of his guests was Richard Dawkins. Oops. Boot out the science blogger, but keep the world-renowned evolutionary biologist, staunch atheist, and best-selling author. Well done, boys!
If you'd like to track this movie, an organization called the National Center for Science Education is maintaining a website called Expelled Exposed dedicated to keeping tabs on what's going on with the film. At the moment, the website only contains the few reviews available for the film; it wasn't screened for critics, but I'll let you use that nugget of information to draw comparisons to Meet the Spartans as you see fit. However, the site should be greatly expanded within the next few hours, and ought to be a great resource for getting the scoop on what's really going on with this movie.
Posted at 11:44 pm by cheglabratjoe
April 9, 2008
Entry 01: Back in the Saddle Again
N-th time's a charm! I'm going to give reinventing this thing a shot again.
I recently discovered that I'm a 'skeptic.' I was putzing around on the internet sometime last summer, and ended up on the James Randi Educational Foundation website. If I remember correctly, I had been reading about Scientology, and surfed my way to other, ahem, interesting topics over time. I'd been on the JREF site before, but for whatever reason I stuck around this time and completely ate up everything I read.
I eventually saw a link to the podcast The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, and decided that it was time to start listening to podcasts. I had a 30+ minute walk to school at the time, and listening to music just wasn't doing it for me. I gave the then-current episodes a shot, and after only a couple dialed back to the first episode and began plowing through all ninety of the hour-long SGU podcasts then available. I was hooked on skepticism … if my iPod was on, it was blaring the SGU.
Now, you might be wondering what exactly I mean by 'skepticism.' I'd actually be interested to hear what your knee-jerk reaction to the term was (note that my reinvention does not involve ceasing the response-begging), because it was a rather ugly word to me before my fortuitous surfing. I envisioned a 'skeptic' as someone who refused to believe something regardless of how much evidence you showed them; they would always stay 'skeptical' of your claim that the earth goes around the sun or that freezing old water bottles won't give you cancer. Fortunately for me (since I'm calling myself a skeptic now), I was completely in the wrong on that one.
I'm not going to come up with a better description of skepticism than the following paragraph from skeptic.com (most like written or adopted from the writings of Michael Shermer):
Some people believe that skepticism is the rejection of new ideas, or worse, they confuse "skeptic" with "cynic" and think that skeptics are a bunch of grumpy curmudgeons unwilling to accept any claim that challenges the status quo. This is wrong. Skepticism is a provisional approach to claims. It is the application of reason to any and all ideas — no sacred cows allowed. In other words, skepticism is a method, not a position. Ideally, skeptics do not go into an investigation closed to the possibility that a phenomenon might be real or that a claim might be true. When we say we are "skeptical," we mean that we must see compelling evidence before we believe.
I have a feeling most people would read that paragraph and agree with it (I really hope that I'm not being stupidly optimistic in saying that). I doubt most people run around believing every single thing they hear and refusing to apply reason to any decisions they make.
However, what do you do when you get forwarded a chain email making some claim about carcinogens or conspiracy theories or Bill Gates donating a penny per forward to help locate lost children with leukemia? Do you immediately forward it to your address book, or do you go to Snopes to see if it's a hoax or urban legend? Based on the hundreds of forwards preceding the text of these emails by the time they hit my inbox, I'd wager that many people fall on the non-skeptical side of that question.
Now, that's not too tough a criterion … if you spend enough time on the internet to make your way to my blog, I'd assume you have a pretty good sense of when an email is bogus. What about when you hear a Bigfoot story? Do you buy it, or do you say to yourself "boy, it seems odd that there's a population of six foot tall primates living in the Pacific Northwest that no one has ever really seen." That's still pretty farfetched, so let's dial it back a bit. How about ghosts? Or maybe psychics? Perhaps any sort of sixth sense or E.S.P., including but not limited to telepathy (reading minds), psychokinesis (moving things with the mind), clairvoyance (sensing things beyond the capabilities of your normal five senses), or precognition (predicting the future)?
If you're like many people, there was a point in that list of topics where you went from agreeing with my skepticism to being offended that I dare lump X in with all that other junk. And if not, I could go on … usually by the time you hit acupuncture, you've offended everyone by likening their opinions to those of a Bigfoot true believer.
Now you might have a number of questions for me, especially if I've offhandedly compared something you hold near and dear to believing in Bigfoot. And, of course, if you believe in Bigfoot, you're probably not reading this blog anymore. (Or you're scrolling past all this text to click the Comments link and post angry invectives … if so, great! Flame away!) Feel free to ask any and all of them, certainly. But, let me first lay out my plans for the blog to let you know the direction I'll be coming from.
The idea of writing up a comprehensive outline of a single topic of this sort is daunting, to say the very least. Entire books are written on minute aspects of topics like UFO crash landings, JFK assassination conspiracy theories, and, yes, Bigfoot. My goal is to take an extremely small statement made by proponents of these ideas, and present a rational discussion of it. This should allow me to really dissect and explore something, but in a reasonable amount of time so that posts will actually ever appear here.
In addition, this approach will emphasize what I think is a serious problem with these sorts of topics. If someone you're talking to starts trying to spread their beliefs, they're going to throw arguments and facts and opinions at you. (That's not a critique of their methods or anything, that's just how you argue.) You can judge their opinions as you see fit, but there's virtually no way to verify on-the-fly if their facts are true or if their arguments are valid. My hope with this blog is to demonstrate that, more often than not, true believers' facts are fake and their arguments are faulty. (Despite how inflammatory that sentence sounds, I'm not saying anything controversial there ... if their facts were really facts and their arguments were sound, they wouldn't have to resort to believing in these things because they would be real!) If nothing else, I hope you'll see that some extremely popular and/or superficially reasonable statements are a load of hooey.
This approach probably won't directly help with any individual discussion you might have (unless of course you hear a statement I happen to have covered), but it will show you the sorts of tactics used by true believers. Moreover, as I mentioned before, it will also result in many more posts than if I tried to sit down and compose an entry about "ghosts."
So, we'll see how this goes. I think this format will work for me. Not only should the posts come with some regularity because I'm not biting off way more than I can chew (unlike the last few times I've tried to start writing in this thing), but also it will let me rip on a ridiculous statement I happen to see in a news article or hear walking down the street. Right now, I just shake my head and get annoyed, maybe go off on it to my girlfriend or roommate or classmates if they happen to be there. Now, I can complain about it to the whole world.
And even if only one person out there ever reads this and that one person only learns a tiny little fact, well dammit that's one less bit of pseudoscience and illogic out there. And that's a good thing for everybody.
Posted at 11:39 pm by cheglabratjoe
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