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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October 28, 2009
You see, these are the kind of things I doubt you can get at other people’s blogs. A mere five posts after I claim I’m going to try and dial back the length and ambition of my blogging, I decide to tackle probably the thorniest problem in the history of theology. Some might call it foolhardy, others might call it hubris; I call it Entry 37.
Theodicy is a branch of theology that tries to explain the Problem of Evil. The best exposition of the problem is probably the oldest known discussion of it, from Epicurus by way of David Hume (by further ways of Wikipedia and me):
Is god willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent.
Is god able to prevent evil, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is god both able and willing? Whence then evil?
This issue cannot be explained any more concisely than that. Many people claim that their god is all powerful, all knowing, and all good. However, how could evil exist in a universe managed by an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and benevolent deity?
There is no easy answer to this question. Scratch that … there are no good easy answers to that question. There are plenty of two word answers that suffice for most people: Original Sin, free will, the Devil. But, these explanations seem porous upon close scrutiny, and moreover they also seem mutually exclusive. As I’ve said before, a pile of crummy arguments does not equal a good argument. That kind of bookkeeping didn’t work for AIG, and it doesn’t work for theists, either.
Where I’m Coming From
As with Entry 32, the impetus for this entry is the science-faith integration meetings I’ve been attending. Theodicy was the topic of one of the meetings, and I just wasn’t impressed by the background reading or the discussion. You always hear about how sophisticated and intricate modern theology is, particularly when you’re an atheist talking to a religious person about something like theodicy. Often, the person you’re talking to will agree that you have a point with regards to other people’s faith, but their faith is backed up by subtle and profound theology. Reviewers dismissed Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion via this argument so often that PZ Myers coined an internet meme for it: the Courtier’s Reply. “Of course their emperor has no clothes, but we have entire universities dedicated to studying our emperor’s magnificent garments!”
The background reading was a chapter in Denis Alexander’s Creation vs. Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? The book doesn’t seem terribly popular, and as such I haven’t been able to find much information about it or its author. Alexander is a Professor at a college in England, and he heads an institute there devoted to researching, publishing, and teaching about “science and religion.” (The institute is funded by the John Templeton Foundation. Nuff said.) A few reviewers of his book referred to him as an Evangelical Christian, but often angrily or indignantly because they didn’t like his positive treatment of evolution. All told, I’m not sure how well-regarded this book’s theology is, nor am I sure what denominational angle Alexander is coming from.
As for the folks at the meeting, I’m again hurting for denominational perspective. To use a loaded term, I suppose I would call them all “liberal Christians,” in that they aren’t biblical literalists or creationists or even cdesign proponentsists (except for our friend from Entry 32). Many of them seem to have strong science backgrounds, and they’re obviously interested in science enough to come to meetings about its intersection with their faith. I have no idea how much theology they’ve read or studied, but they certainly all had much more background knowledge than I do.
Down the Rabbit Hole
I don’t know if there’s a good way to approach a discussion of the myriad ways Alexander and the folks in the meeting tried to answer the problem of evil, especially since each could probably be its own entry. (PZ’s Courtiers are at least correct that plenty of ink has been spilled about those clothes, irrespective of their existence.) There are a lot of supposed explanations, but, from my perspective, they always wind up back at one of the Epicurean paradoxes. In addition, they’re mutually exclusive for the most part, so they don’t stack. Without further ado, let’s jump in with both feet.
Some people tried to argue that evil just doesn’t exist in a meaningful sense. Some actions or experiences might seem horrible to mere mortals, but they are ultimately good because god is omnipresent and (of course) good. This argument not only fails the smell test, but it’s obviously internally inconsistent for Christians. If not evil, then: (i) what tribulations will the afterlife be free from, and (ii) on what basis will a person be judged? Also, you have to wonder why people bother with all the following argumentation, if evil doesn’t really exist.
Once the existence of evil is established, the first thing people do is blame it on free will. God wants our love and worship, but it must be freely given to him. However, this collides with both ends of the Epicurean paradox. Even if evil arose solely from man’s free will, an omniscient god would still have known it was coming. Furthermore, an omnipotent god would still be able to stop it, if he so chose. Thus, god is the ultimate source of evil and continually allows it to happen. The only way out of this is to declare that free will is absolutely paramount; free will is so great a good that it balances all the evil in the world. That is okay* for now, but we’ll come back to it soon.
*Note also that by “okay,” I mean “consistent theologically but completely different than what the average person in the pew thinks about god.” I distinctly recall being told as a child that Jesus loves me. It would seem that Jesus loves my free will more than me, since his bookkeeping would imply that the freedom someone else could exploit to torture and kill me would be more important than my well-being.
Free will as the source of evil is a biggie, but it has a gaping hole: so-called natural evil. You’d have to burn a lot of calories to explain how a tsunami is not evil, but you’d have to burn even more to blame a tsunami on humanity’s free will. Hence natural evil. The only thing resembling a coherent explanation of natural evil anyone offered was that natural evil is a necessary consequence of the laws god imposed when he created the universe. Of course, this again makes god indifferent to the evil and pain and suffering his laws have resulted in. We’re back my criticisms of Professor Francisco Ayala in Entry 23: explaining away all the evils of the world by saying “god chose to make us via evolution” actually explains nothing whatsoever. It is a complete non-response to the charge.
However, the folks at the meeting assured me that this was no mere patina of abstraction. God works in mysterious ways, and his actions are utterly inscrutable. This is something I heard so often that I’m tempted to try and coin a meme for it, a la the Courtier’s Reply**. Of course, this is another non-answer. At best, I suppose it is an appeal to ignorance: we don’t know why evil happens, but god surely knows best. (And hopefully he’ll be so kind as to clue everybody in when we all get to heaven.) It is also inconsistent with the rest of Christian theology, because Christians are gravely certain about whole lot of other things concerning god and the universe. Am I to believe that god is so mysterious that we cannot comprehend evil, yet we’re positive that homosexual marriage makes baby Jesus cry? How can Christians be so confident of so much, if something as fundamental as good vs. evil is wholly incomprehensible?
**I’ll tell you what I want to do when I hear it: I want to bonk them on the head with something and say “Homey don’t play dat” like Homey D. Clown from In Living Color. There might be a pithy phrase somewhere in there, but I’m not seeing it.
My apologies for the snark, but Homey really don’t play the god-works-in-mysterious-ways game. Let’s bring the discussion back to free will. Another bookkeeping-type explanation for evil is that the suffering and pain it causes ultimately brings people closer to god. For instance, CS Lewis famously called pain god’s megaphone. So, evil is a net positive because it results in so great a good: leading people to god. However, god desires our freely given love. If he created (or permitted) evil so that we might be driven towards loving him, then he loaded the cosmic dice. So much for free will being all-important. I doubt many theologians would accept the notion that their god is a cheater, so they shouldn’t accept this line of argument.
The last major explanation that came up was a simple blaming of the devil, often in relation to original sin or the fall of man. This merely adds a storytelling element to the situations we’ve already discussed: an omniscient god would know this was coming, an omnipotent god could have stopped it, and it all happened because man had free will. However, I find it pretty interesting that many people try and make Satan much more than a narrative element. If Satan operates outside of god’s province, then you’re no longer talking monotheism***. Yet, if god knows/controls Satan, then we’re back to the problems outlined above (particularly the cheating issue). I’m also getting the distinct impression that this is all some twisted game for god. Our freely-given love is so important to him that horrible evils are permitted so that free will might exist, yet he created natural evils to push us towards him while permitting Satan to run rampant tempting us away from him.
***If you’re keeping count and maintaining monotheism, that would make it quadritarianism. While we’re tallying things up, I heard someone talking about The Word recently. What exactly is The Word, anyways? I’m certainly no expert, but it seems like it might belong in there. So, maybe we’re up to quintarianism. We should try to come up with another one, because sexitarianism is a pretty cool-sounding word. The Virgin Mary springs immediately to mind, for obvious and inappropriate reason.
Those are all the explanations/resolutions I can remember coming up at the meeting. I won’t claim that I was stunning the room with amazing counters and comebacks, but I do recall most discussions ending with either an Epicurean paradox or the god-works-in-mysterious-ways bit. And, every once in awhile, I was reminded that the great theologian George Michael had it all figured out years ago: I gotta have faith-a, faith-a, faith-ah! Frankly, I was expecting a whole lot more out of my first foray into theology. I’d call the lack of strong arguments stark, and I don’t think that’s putting too fine a point on it.
Replying to the Courtiers
The charge that many atheists aren’t versed in theology is probably fair. In our defense, I don’t know that anyone should expect us to study it. From the perspective of a nonbeliever, studying theology would be rather like arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. However, I don’t think this invalidates our opinions from the get-go. I’m sure most Christians have no knowledge of Hindu theology (or even the theology of the other Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam), yet they feel perfectly justified in rejecting the truth claims of Hinduism, and indeed all other religions.
In addition, it seems like a lot of this is a smokescreen. I paid a little attention to the theologian behind the curtain, and I was not at all impressed with him. Moreover, even if I’m missing or mischaracterizing something, there is little doubt that free will is the linchpin of all theodicy. As my first aside noted, this is technically fine but puzzling in practice. I don’t know that most Christians recognize or appreciate the importance of free will in their faith’s theology. Maybe they do; I simply don’t know. However, I do know that I’d be floored if I asked my grandmother what god’s greatest gift is and she replied “the autonomy to love him freely.”
Well, that’s all I have on theodicy. My parting thought is a quick call back to Entry 32. If you want to know why science requires methodological naturalism, you don’t have to look any further than the italicized lines at the beginning of this post. Ask yourself, what is the most parsimonious explanation of those apparent paradoxes?
Posted at 9:59 pm by cheglabratjoe
October 22, 2009
Entry 36: Peter Singer Pwn3d Richard Dawkins about Vegetarianism
I suppose there isn't anything wrong with my title statement this week, because Peter Singer did indeed get Richard Dawkins to concede that he's wrong about eating meat in a Q&A after one of his lectures. This is something of a big deal, since Richard Dawkins spends most of his time responding to people who are out to catch him in a public "gotcha!" moment. I'm sure there are countless legions of the faithful who would love to stump him and gleefully return to church, bragging about how they slew this New Atheist dragon.
Peter Singer and Richard Dawkins largely agree about atheism, so that's not what I'm talking about here. Peter Singer is a Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at Princeton, and he might be the most influential and controversial philosophers alive today. His views on animal rights, world poverty, and abortion are particularly provocative. The particular incident I've been referring to concerns vegetarianism.
Oh Snap!
I haven't been able to locate a recording or even a transcript of the actual exchange between Dawkins and Singer, but the incident was discussed on an episode Point of Inquiry. In summary, Singer points out that evolution ought to make us realize that "species-ism" is nothing more than an immoral and unjustifiable prejudice. Once we get past the religious belief that humans were specially created by a deity and/or possess a supernatural soul, the moral distinction between a human being and an animal evaporates.
The rebuttal that springs to mind immediately is that human beings are more intelligent or capable than animals, and thus ought to have higher moral standing than other animals. However, this argument quickly falls to pieces when you compare a profoundly retarded human being to a chimpanzee. By any reasonable standard, the chimpanzee is much more of a moral and intelligent agent than the severely disabled human. Arguments like these are what drive Singer to his strong advocacy for animal rights and his support for euthanasia, abortion, and even infanticide.*
*You'll have to see his works for the details of his arguments and positions; I don't know them terribly well, and I disagree with many of them. For my part, this exact argument got me to admit to my undergrad Intro to Philosophy/Ethics Professor that, yes, I was a species-ist. I still admit that, but for what I consider a much more nuanced reason. You'll have to judge for yourself in the next section.
The great apes are the best place to start this discussion, but let's finish going over exactly what happened between Singer and Dawkins. Singer suggested that Dawkins hasn't taken the implications of evolution far enough. The notion of eating a human being is repugnant to most people, as it well should be. Furthermore, many people (Dawkins included) champion the rights and privileges of primates, due to their apparent intelligence and capacity for emotion. Singer then claimed that evolution demonstrates that these distinctions are completely arbitrary. Common descent means that we are ultimately related to all animals. We won't eat a fellow human being because they are like us; that is, we are closely related to them. But, we are also rather closely related to cows. Many societies grant extra, near-human rights to chimpanzees and gorillas because we are closely related to them, but we are also pretty closely related to pigs.
If we draw the line at the species level, then we are merely being species-ists. According to Singer, this is not morally different than when a bigot discriminates along racial, religious, gender, or ethnic lines. Prejudice is prejudice, and it's ugly and immoral.
Dawkins ceded this point to Singer, and admitted to being inconsistent. I believe he has since said that he regrets eating meat, but does so for social and selfish reasons. Some googling turns up evidence that he doesn't take issue with meat from well-treated and humanely-killed animals, but I'm not positive. (Regardless, any meat consumption would still technically be morally inconsistent, per Singer's arguments.) At the risk of oversimplifying or putting words in Dawkins' mouth, I would say that he accepts the validity of Singer's moral argument but does not (or cannot) follow it.
Settle Down, Vegetarians ...
Wow! Richard Dawkins smacked down for not understanding and embracing the implications of evolution. Who could have imagined it? It gets even worse, since he's rejecting this evolution-based morality for one ultimately derived from the vestiges of religion. Damn! And, just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, the attack came from the guy who wrote Animal Liberation, the book that launched countless animal rights extremists' careers.
Let's take a step back and look at Singer's argument. His point is that people who eat meat have arbitrarily drawn a moral line between their own species (homo sapiens) and the rest of the animal kingdom. He claims that there is no objective reason to discriminate between killing animals for food and killing other people for food, because you are ultimately related to all other animals.
I can sympathize with this sentiment. I personally wouldn't eat bushmeat. I often joke about trying gorilla or orangutan meat, pointing out that it would be kind of like eating a person. Without fail, this gets a rise out of people. Apparently, my friends and I aren't species-ists, but we are definitely order-ists. (If you went up to superorder, you'd encompass rabbits, and I suspect most people would be off the wagon and at the dinner table.) Though slightly more inclusive, the placement of our moral line is still arbitrary.
Well, so is Singer's. Though evolution teaches us that we are related to all animals, it also teaches us that we are related to all plants. We are also related to all fungi, protists, bacteria, and even viruses**. You are related to every living organism on the planet, from blue whales to palm trees to smallpox. If Earth happened to seed life on Mars, or visa-versa, then you are even related to Martians.
**This means that, depending on your choice of definitions, we might be related to things that aren't even alive! There is no consensus definition of life, but viruses don't always satisfy all the criteria of some definitions of "living."
Just as humans and primates are not inherently special in a moral sense, animals are not either. If most people are species-ists or order-ists, then evolution neatly demonstrates that Singer and other vegetarians are equally-prejudiced kingdom-ists. Dawkins was wrong to cede the point. Vegetarianism is absolutely not the logical consequence of evolution.
"But wait," Animal Liberation Front extremists scream as they dump paint on hamburgers, "look at my gruesome slaughterhouse videos!" That is a completely separate argument concerning a completely separate issue. Animals have the capacity to feel pain, and you can argue that inflicting pain on something that can experience pain is immoral. However, this has absolutely nothing to do with evolution or species-ism. It would be a distinct moral construct.
Moreover, I suspect this construct would be fraught with its own arbitrary moral distinctions. Plants react to distress; why is that not considered pain? What about the pain experienced by a field mouse going through a wheat thresher? Do the violent death throes brought about by pesticides count as pain for bugs? And, even these considerations ignore the trillions of microscopic elephants in the room: microorganisms. It seems like it would be impossible to construct a non-domain-ist moral philosophy, as our bodies mercilessly destroy countless bacteria daily.
Settle Down Again, Folks
Now, I know that I blithely dismissed a whole lot of philosophical and ethical discussions in that last paragraph. I have no doubt that Singer and plenty of other people have spilled tons of ink constructing moral systems that conclude vegetarianism is the only morally consistent way to live. I'm not aiming to refute those, and I won't even claim that I've addressed them properly.
My point is that species-ism is a frivolous charge to levy against meat-eaters, and furthermore I maintain that common descent is not something from which to construct a reasonable morality. Charles Darwin taught us that all living creatures descended from a common ancestor: we're all cousins, where we comprise all life on earth. You shouldn't accuse a meat-eater of inconsistency between bites of a carrot or mushroom. In terms of evolution, you have both drawn arbitrary lines on the tree of life. One is indeed more inclusive than the other, but both are prejudiced.
Let me again emphasize that I'm not dismissing vegetarianism or Peter Singer's specific moral philosophies out-of-hand. What I'm doing is pointing out that his argument to Richard Dawkins was terrible. Evolution does not provide us with a good argument for animal rights. Singer accused Dawkins of not following Darwin's ideas to their ultimate logical conclusion; on the contrary, Singer hasn't followed his own ideas to their logical conclusions. If you won't eat meat because you're related to the animal it came from, then you'd better not eat fruits or grains either! You also better hope there's no eternal judgment waiting for you, because your immune system is massacring countless relatives every day.
I'm sure Peter Singer and many other vegetarians have fine moral arguments for vegetarianism and/or veganism. I would guess they're based on pain or consciousness; no matter how you define those terms, I'd think most animals are rather close to humans and well beyond plants (which would themselves be well beyond microorganisms). But, this position is not the logical conclusion of evolution, nor does not mean meat-eaters are prejudiced. If you're going to appeal to evolution or anti-species-ism, you'd better be living off rocks.
Posted at 11:25 pm by cheglabratjoe
October 15, 2009
Stick with me for a minute: I promise there’s some juicy skepticism here. It’ll come right after this graphic personal part. (Full disclosure: I am not a medical doctor, so you shouldn’t treat any information in this article as medical advice.)
I have a pretty nasty ear infection, and that’s saying something because I’m pretty desensitized to them after getting them constantly as a kid. I have such a bad outer ear infection (otitis externa, or swimmer's ear) that my doctor couldn’t visually confirm whether or not I also have a middle ear infection (otitis media, or just ‘ear infection’). Something about inflammation and white pus covering various things … it’s a mess in there.
The discomfort finally got to me on a Sunday night, so I headed to Walgreens to look for something to tide me over until going to the clinic Monday morning. I wasn’t hoping for much, since I figured you’d need a prescription for anything with steroids or painkillers or antibiotics. But, I thought I might find some kind of drops to maybe soothe a little pain here or there.
When, what to my skeptical eyes should appear, but miniature bottles and eight tiny bulbs. I’m unfortunately familiar with the blue bulbs, since I have vivid childhood memories of leaning over the sink while my mom used one to squirt water into my ears to wash crud out of there. The thought of that sounded horrible even in my good ear, much less my throbbing one, so I left that section alone for now.
Turning to the bottles, there arose such a clatter. From me, that is. Homeopathy! We had Similasan’s Earache Relief, which not only soothes the pain but also stimulates the body to naturally heal ear infections. We had Hyland’s Earache Drops, which relieves pain and congestion without the sting of alcohol-containing products. And, we had a Walgreens knockoff, which we should to “Compare to Similasan!!!” Actually, you might as well compare it to tap water. The highest concentration of any ingredient in these remedies is chamomile at 10X; that’s one part in ten billion. (For comparison, capsaicin, the compound that makes chili peppers hot, is supposedly detectable by taste at one part in a mere fifteen million; see Entry 14 for the watery details on homeopathy.)
To add insult to injury, none of these products contained what PalMD of the White Coat Underground cleverly calls the Quack Miranda Warning. I’m sure you’ve seen these, since they’re all over supplement bottles and even some foods packages. The product will make a claim, asterisk it, and note that “These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, or prevent any disease.”
Well, then. I guess it makes sense that these products don’t have the Quack Miranda Warning. A product calling itself earache relief surely must actually treat a disease. Otherwise, the product would be an outright lie, wouldn’t it?‡ Wow, disclaimers like that let me say whatever the heck I want. This is fun!‡‡
‡That statement has not been evaluated by my nonexistent legal counsel. This blog is not intended to libel, slander, or insult any alternative medicine practitioner, manufacturer, or provider.
‡‡No, it is not. Magic water Homeopathy is srs bsns.
I left Walgreens empty-handed and annoyed. My only options for over-the-counter treatment were bottles filled with water and lies. Pretty crappy, right? Well, it gets worse.
Wet Behind (And In) the Ears
Talking to my doctor the next morning, I asked about how I could prevent ear infections. What did she think about using the blue bulbs? Should I try rinsing out my ears regularly, or at least when I feel an infection coming on? Are there science-based OTC products out there that I’m just not finding?
Her response floored me. The only thing worse for your ears than using the blue bulbs is using the non-prescription drops. Allow me to rephrase that: the worst possible thing you can do to your ears is to use the earache treatment products found at your local pharmacy.
You don’t want any excess moisture in your ear canal. Too much moisture in your ears is the most common cause of outer ear infections (hence the name swimmers ear), and extra moisture in there during an infection will only exacerbate the problem. The only exception is liquid that’s loaded with antibiotics and steroids, as is the case with prescription ear drops.
Amazing. The worst possible things you can do to your ears are the only “treatments” available over-the-counter in the pharmacy. I know I’ve said that three times now, but I find it incredible. Alternative medicine, indeed.
What should you do to prevent ear infections, then? The goal is to remove moisture, but you don’t want to use a q-tip. That’s one of those rare pieces of folk knowledge that happens to be correct. You might damage your eardrum or irritate your skin, and moreover you’re just not going to manage to get all the liquid out of there. Don’t stick crap in your ears!
What you ought to do is make up a mixture of white vinegar and isopropyl alcohol (1:2 ratio) and use a dropper to fill your ear canal with it. Let that sit for a few seconds, and then drain it into a cotton ball or tissue. The alcohol makes this mixture volatile, so that your ear canal dries out much better than when straight water is in there. The acetic acid in the vinegar keeps the pH in your ear low, which helps prevent infections (earwax is naturally slightly acidic for this reason).
My doctor says that she does this almost daily. She has a long history of ear infections (her ears sounded (heh) worse than mine), so she does this any time moisture might enter her ears: swimming, exercising, using headphones, showering, etc. That seems a bit excessive to me, but I’m definitely going to start doing it regularly once my actual infection is gone.
Homeopathy: Surprisingly, the Worst Thing You Could Do to Yourself
Homeopathy is an interesting CAM modality. On the one hand, you cannot downplay its breathtaking inanity. But, you also have to admit that it’s tough to directly hurt yourself with it. Though someone could indirectly hurt themselves with homeopathy (in that they might be passing up real treatments), odds are the water or sugar pill isn’t going to cause any harm. At gunpoint, I’d rather have folks taking a truly homeopathic remedy than going through something invasive or violent like acupuncture or chiropractic.
Except, of course, in this instance. It’s all fun and games until you make your ear infection worse. We can’t pin the blue bulbs on the homeopaths, but of course those aren’t quite as bad as the water drops. (You might successfully remove some infected wax, and you don’t let the water sit in there as you do with the drops.) No exaggeration: using homeopathic earache remedies is the worst possible thing to do to treat an ear infection.
It’s one thing when a CAM modality is nothing but an overblown, expensive placebo. It’s quite another when the “treatment” actively makes a medical condition worse. The makers of these products ought to be ashamed of themselves, and Walgreens ought to be ashamed for selling literally harmful products marketed as medicinal treatments.
Posted at 9:52 pm by cheglabratjoe
October 3, 2009
Entry 34: The Flu Vaccine Is More Dangerous Than the Flu
I'm guessing you'll start hearing this one any day now. I first heard this claim a few years ago, after my school sent out an email offering free flu shots to students. That was well before swine flu dominated headlines and the vaccine-autism manufactroversy dominated skepticism, so it seems like the stage is set for this claim to make a huge comeback.
A Kernel of Truth …
The danger this claim refers to is from the autoimmune disorder Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS). GBS is a real but rare (1-2 per 100,000 people) disorder that can indeed be triggered by immunization, thus slightly distinguishing this week's statement from the usual antivax nonsense. The precise cause of GBS is unknown, but symptoms typically occur soon after an infection. Flu shots are known to cause GBS, with roughly one in a million vaccinations resulting in the disorder.
GBS occurs when your immune system mistakenly attacks part of your own nerve cells rather than a target foreign pathogen. The outer layers of the nerves are damaged, resulting in weakness and numbness that spreads throughout the body. GBS is a serious disorder, requiring hospitalization and rather intense monitoring and treatment. An estimated 3-4% of cases result in death, but it is thought that most deaths are due to inadequate or nonexistent treatment. Prognosis is generally good, with about 80% of patients recovering fully. Still, 5-10% of patients are permanently disabled by the disease, making GBS one of the most common non-trauma-induced causes of paralysis.
… Popped Entirely Out of Proportion
Although GBS is indeed real (and pretty darn ominous), it shouldn't scare anybody away from getting the flu vaccine. Any medical procedure carries risk; after all, the puncture wound from the injection might later get infected and kill you. As always, you have to consider the relative risks. Over thirty thousand people die from the flu in a good year in America, making your overall odds of dying from the flu in a given year about one in ten thousand. These odds are low, but they aren't zero.
Of course, the situation is certainly more complicated than this. Healthy adults are much less likely to die from the flu than the elderly or infirm; on the other hand, infected healthy adults might spread influenza to highly susceptible people they interact with. Being sick for a week or so might sound better than chancing GBS via vaccination, but then again a regular influenza infection also puts you at risk for developing GBS. The flu vaccine contains thimerosal, but the furor over that preservative is pure antivax propaganda. A given year's vaccine doesn't protect against all the extant influenza strains, but they're pretty good about forecasting the most prevalent type.
The last complicating factor is that the 1976 swine flu vaccine resulted in GBS much more often than other flu vaccines. An outbreak of swine flu at Fort Dix killed an army recruit, and fear of a pandemic like the 1918 Spanish flu led to the government rushing to immunize the entire country against this swine flu. The pandemic fizzled, and moreover vaccination resulted in GBS at a significantly increased rate: ten cases per million vaccinations (rather than one per million). We do not know if this increased rate is something inherent to swine flu vaccines, or if it was a fluke possibly exacerbated by the vaccine being rushed.
Despite these complicating factors, getting the flu vaccine is a net positive. The odds of an adverse reaction to the vaccine are extremely low, and your immunity may prevent your or your loved ones' disease or death.
Odds and Ends
While we're talking odds, I think that odds are someone professing this week's statement has just picked up and passed along an antivax factoid. As bad as GBS sounds, one-in-a-million odds are worse than the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year (1 in 700,000). People tend to be terrible at judging relative risks. Parents live in fear of a stranger abducting their children; in reality, a child is much more likely to drown in a neighbor's pool than to be kidnapped and murdered. You have to look at these things objectively, because mundane-sounding deaths are no less deadly than spectacular-sounding deaths.
Any way you slice it, the risk you take getting the flu vaccine is lower than the risk of getting the flu itself. That's to say nothing of herd immunity considerations; every strain of flu you're immune to is one you cannot spread to someone else. Flu vaccines aren't compulsory, so you need to decide for yourselves whether or not to get vaccinated. Just be sure that your decision is based in reality, and not misinformation or misunderstood statistics.
Posted at 7:21 pm by cheglabratjoe
September 25, 2009
Entry 33: Attacking Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food
No, I am not attacking food. I wouldn’t even necessarily say that I’m going to disagree too seriously with Michael Pollan’s overall position. That having been said, listening to an audiobook recording of In Defense of Food was both frustrating and enlightening. He has some good things to say, but the way he approached the issue and the way he argued his points were terribly off-putting.
On the whole, the book sought to explain why Americans have so much trouble eating well. He came at it from many angles, ranging from our eating habits to our beliefs about nutrition to our relationships surrounding food purchasing, preparation, and consumption. He had a lot to say, both criticizing others and offering his own advice. Probably the best place to start would be at the end, where he revealed his seven word mantra:
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
You might not think that there’s a lot to disagree with in those three sentences, but you’d be surprised. Let’s take them one at a time, and get into the meat (heh) of Pollan’s arguments.
Not Too Much
We’ll start here, because this sentence is the most obviously correct. Pollan isn’t saying much here, and to be fair he doesn’t claim that he is. If you only eat as much food as your body burns through in a day, then you’re never going to gain weight. (See Entry 19 for the details.)
Pollan used this section to make a number of lifestyle suggestions. He points out that people in many other modern cultures tend to eat until they are full, rather than eat until their plate is empty. On the sub-plate scale, portion control is key; using smaller glasses, spoons, and plates might help you eat less. You also have to look out for the unit fallacy, because not all single units of food are calorically identical. (People tend to think that all, say, muffins are equally good/bad regardless of their size.) He also suggests eating slower, enjoying your meals, and avoiding snacking between meals.
Nothing earth-shattering, but also nothing terribly controversial. While he doesn’t have rock-solid evidence that issues like eating-on-the-go or the unit fallacy directly contribute to America’s obesity problem, I’d say it’s obvious that they at least aren’t helping.
Eat Food
While this seems as much of an “uh-duh” as the previous section, this statement is actually quite a bit more controversial. Pollan’s point here is that he doesn’t consider much of what people eat to actually be food. Rather, the majority of the items on the shelves in your grocery store are food products. According to Pollan, the food is mostly around the perimeter of the grocery store: produce, meat, unprocessed dairy, and unprocessed frozen stuff.
I don’t recall Pollan ever strictly demarcating the food/food-product line, but he did give a handful of heuristics. Food products might be: anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food, anything with more than five ingredients, anything with high fructose corn syrup, anything with ingredients you cannot pronounce, and so forth. In general, you want to avoid these things because they’re likely to be worse for you than supposedly “real” food.
As you might guess, this is little more than an application of the naturalistic fallacy. (This is the mistaken idea that supposedly “natural” things are automatically good for you; just ask Socrates about that one.) I regret laying the smack down on his point so succinctly, because it does have merit. There’s no doubt that eating pint of blueberries is better than eating a pint of Häagen-Dazs. However, the reason for this has nothing to do with your grandmother or your ability to pronounce the sixth ingredient in rocky road ice cream. The reason is contained within the foods themselves; specifically, their nutritional content.
This brings us to probably the most frustrating argument in the book: Pollan’s constant railing against what he calls nutritionism. This argument was doubly annoying, because he was completely wrong but again he had a very valid point to make. Unfortunately, he totally overshot this point in his zeal to make food scientists the villain of his story. And, when scientists are the villain, we get all sorts of fun antiscientific talking points. Ugh. (For the last time, it’s fraunken-SHTEEN, people!)
So, what is nutritionism? It’s a derogatory term to describe the notion that foods are “merely” the sum of their nutritional parts. This is silly on its own, unless you ascribe some kind of supernatural power to a whole apple. Hence my frustration. But, I understand where this sentiment is coming from. Scientists have identified three macronutrients (fat, carbohydrates, protein) and a few dozen micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, other chemicals) that are absolutely necessary for human survival. As such, many of these are listed on nutritional labels so that people can make sure to eat them.
So, does that mean that scientists think that an apple is merely a bag of carbs with some vitamins floating in it? No! Well then, does that mean that scientists think humans can healthily survive on a bowl of synthetic fat, sugar, essential amino acids, vitamins, and minerals? No! Pollan isn’t arguing against scientists; he’s arguing against the Wachowski brothers’ writing in The Matrix. (Actually, if you remember the scene I’m referring to, they even gave anti-nutritionism a voice at the dinner table.) To again reluctantly characterize his crummy argument for a valid point, this is a strawman.
Scientists measure the things they can detect; what else would you like them to do? So, the science of nutrition has progressed by studying nutrients as they were discovered and determined to be important. There was no other way for this field to progress, and Pollan demonstrates this remarkably well by offering little but fallacious arguments for the contrary position. (Let’s call this idea paranutritionism.) The field continues to progress, and our understanding of nutrition continues to grow as more compounds and their complex interactions are characterized.
But, you might ask, what about those nutritional labels? What about the food pyramid? How about all those studies saying fat is bad? Or saying eggs are bad because of the cholesterol? Or claiming red wine is good because of the resveratrol? According to Pollan, these are the products of a corrupt system and evil reductionist scientists. And, once again, he’s right for the wrong reasons.
Pollan actually spends quite a lot of time detailing how political pressures and industrial consortia dictated much of our current nutritional labeling and recommendation schemes. Beyond the issue that he’s practically proposing a grand conspiracy theory, he deftly hoists himself on his own petard with that explanation. The nutritionism he so despises didn’t come from the food scientists he excoriates for it! It came from politicians bowing to industrial pressure, who in turn were bowing to the almighty dollar.
One last point, and then I promise that I’m finally done dissecting the recommendation that you “eat food.” Pollan loves omega-3 fatty acids. Adores them. Heaps so much praise on them that you’d think he was a nutter on Oprah selling acai berry ice cream. He might even have gone so far as to suggest taking omega-3 supplement pills, but don’t quote me on it. You know omega-3 fatty acids, right? Those chemicals discovered by reductionist food scientists and demonstrated to be an important singular component of good nutrition? Though Pollan nobly admitted some hypocrisy after gushing over this fat molecule, I think this is worth noting and speaks for itself.
Mostly Plants
Pollan didn’t advocate vegetarianism, but he did emphasize that you probably want to err on the plant side of things to maintain a healthy diet. In fact, you probably want to aim particularly at leaves; seeds are calorie-dense and fiber-poor, making them rather like meat in this regard. I don’t really have much of a problem with this suggestion, but I once again took issue with how Pollan arrived at his conclusion.
As I’ve hinted at, much of Pollan’s evidence for his beliefs about what to eat (at least when he wasn’t disingenuously resorting to “reductionist science”) came from looking at other cultures. Beyond his grandmother, he also discussed and surmised the eating habits of ancient and indigenous cultures. (And, beyond the naturalistic fallacy, this statement might be considered the fallacious argument from … anyone, anyone … antiquity.) He marveled that societies have thrived on all manner of diets, from high fat to high carbohydrate to high protein. Human prehistory covers the entire culinary spectrum, from fully vegetarian Jains to fully carnivorous Eskimos.
Wait a second … where did the Eskimos get their leaves to maintain their healthy diets? It would seem that the Eskimos’ example is great for the first two words of Pollan’s mantra, but ought to be ignored while considering the last two words. Well, then.
Furthermore, how do we know that the diets of ancient societies even provided adequate nutrition? Imagine the worst possible scenario of the so-called Western diet: someone morbidly obese who consumes nothing but processed, high-calorie, low-micronutrient foods. This person will probably make it into their 40s or 50s without inordinate trouble. This is well past the life expectancy of your average prehistoric man. We can squabble about infant mortality and accidental deaths all day long, but the fact remains that our hypothetical dead-at-fifty Western diet glutton would have lived to be the oldest caveman on the block ten millennia ago.
How About: Move More, Eat Less, Try Different Foods
I really wanted to like In Defense of Food, both before and after I finished it. I think there are some very good points in the book, and you cannot deny that our culture needs to drastically change the way we approach food.
An apple is absolutely not equivalent to a sugar packet and a multivitamin. However, this does not imply that apples are magical, nor does it imply that Doritos are evil incarnate. Ideally, you’d like to eat more apple-like things than Doritos-like things, but don’t obsess over it and try to keep it all in perspective.
Perspective is key. When Michael Pollan gets roundly dismissed by a critic, it’s typically because they find him elitist or impractical. These are pretty fair labels; he is clearly a hardcore foodie, and he can be idealistic to the point of naivety. At one point he even suggested that people venture out into the wilderness to gather things to eat; I’m surprised he hasn’t been sued by the family of someone who took his advice and died after eating a poisonous mushroom.
I think making an effort at some of the lifestyle changes Pollan suggests would be worthwhile. But, you have to stay grounded. I love the farmers’ market in my town, but the prices are high, the selection is paltry compared to the grocery store, and my schedule doesn’t allow me to devote every Saturday morning to shopping. I wish I had the time to cook elaborate meals from scratch on a daily basis, but there are plenty of others things I’d like to spend my time doing. Avoiding processed foods is a noble goal, but nobility has nothing to do with how little I want to cook anything beyond a bowl of cereal when I wake up in the morning.
In light of all this, I’ve decided to take my own stab at a seven word mantra for Americans to consider while working to avoid the dangers of the Western Diet.
Move more. Eat less. Try different foods.
The first two parts are self-explanatory. Per the discussion in Entry 19, everything boils down to the calorie balance. And, the only surefire ways to tip the calorie balance are to consume less of ‘em and burn more of ‘em. The last part hopefully covers the positive parts of Pollan’s message while avoiding all the baggage I’ve gone over here. Mixing up your diet will prevent you from missing key nutrients, will subtly make food a bigger part of your life, will keep you from eating Cheetos until you possibly overdose on artificial food coloring, and won’t necessarily cost you money or time.
Maybe I’ll get a chance to run all this by Michael Pollan. He’s been invited to my campus to give some talks this fall, so perhaps later you’ll get an update about what he thinks of my seven words.
Posted at 12:18 am by cheglabratjoe
September 15, 2009
Entry 01a: Update on the Blog
I just want to give my ~3 semi-regular readers a little update concerning the decreasing frequency of entries here. Part of the problem is certainly real life getting in the way of blogging, which is especially problematic in the summer when it's nice outside and sweltering in front of my computer. However, I'd be lying if I said the "Why Bother?" issue that probably kills most people's blogs wasn't a factor.
I had no delusions of grandeur when I started blogging again. I saw it as a personal outlet for a variety of things: my desire to write, my frustration upon hearing or reading silly assertions, my fondness for looking up random crap on the internet, and even scratching the pedagogical itch I sometimes have now that I'm done TAing. I always view any feedback I receive as gravy. (Delicious, well-appreciated gravy that I'm very thankful for, of course.)
That having been said, I do put a fair amount of time writing and researching these entries, and it does sting a bit to see some of them slide unread into my blog's lonely corner of the internet. I see this happen on extremely popular science-y blogs, as well. PZ Myers (Pharyngula) gets hundreds of comments per hour when he posts a picture of himself riding a saddled plastic dinosaur at the Creation "Museum," but his detailed and insightful posts about single research papers struggle to attract ten comments. Phil Plait (Bad Astronomy) posts amazing Hubble images and people go bonkers, but they largely ignore all the text explaining the images. Orac (Respectful Insolence) bombastically tears into quacks to a chorus of cheers and boos, while Steve Novella's (Neurologica) measured and meticulous takedowns of the same affronts to medicine tend to generate a fraction of the response. I'm guessing these guys sometimes feel the same frustration I do.
I thought I'd found a good solution to this problem when I heard about a new skepticism website launching. It was a bunch of regular folks coming together to write skeptical articles and organize them into a user-friendly website. This seemed pretty ideal to me, since I could have my blog as-is and submit the cleaned-up entries there to alleviate this buried post problem. Unfortunately, the site seems to have died before it even started, and that bummer definitely played a role in the entry situation here. Indeed, at one point Entry 01a was to be the announcement of my first article over there. So it goes.
So, where do we go from here? I don't want to stop blogging, because I do enjoy it. Probably the major factor stopping me from starting new entries is the time I invest, so I'm going to once again attempt to dial back the written length and required effort of these posts. Let's hope that the quality won't suffer a corresponding decline. Actually, maybe such a decline would help matters. If I start screwing things up, perhaps my visitors might experience a touch of the SIWOTI syndrome and leave some replies correcting me. And, after all, I keep on saying you need to be just as skeptical of me as you should be with the talking heads on TV ...
Anyways, I think you can expect more frequent entries in the near future. In particular, I've been hankering to flesh out some thoughts about Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, Peter Singer's opinions on vegetarianism and charity, and Bruce Hood's Supersense. These topics nicely highlight my problem, though. Each of these four entries would be a response to an entire book that I haven't even read (I listened to the audiobook version of In Defense of Food and caught a few interviews of Singer and Hood), and that makes writing a thorough discussion of the topics pretty tough. But, I need to realize that I'm writing blog entries a couple of my buddies and my parents occasionally read, not formal book reviews for Science or the New York Times.
I'm getting there. And, when I do, I'll get those entries up here. I'll also continue pestering that website I mentioned, and let you know when (or if) it's finally launched.
Posted at 8:42 pm by cheglabratjoe
July 12, 2009
Entry 32: Science Assumes There Is No God
I recently started going to meetings of a science-faith integration club on my campus. A strange place for someone who doesn’t believe in god, I know, but one of my friends usually goes to them and thought I’d be interested in the discussions. He was right, because I really have enjoyed them. The few I’ve attended so far have been about Intelligent Design, so you can expect some entries in the future about certain articles from the ID “literature.” I’m going to limit myself to those scare quotes in regards to ID, because this week I’d like to discuss something else that has come up a number of times at these meetings.
One person in particular at the meetings is fond of talking about what scientists think. He has very strong opinions about what scientists like, dislike, assume, respect, do and don’t believe, and so forth. Full disclosure: he and I (and others) often clash at these meetings. I would classify him as rather anti-science, and many (if not most) of these statements he makes are simply strawmen. I don’t think he has a good idea of how actual scientists view the world, so he’s ultimately addressing a caricature of scientists that he’s created for himself. As an extreme example, he once declared that “scientists don’t like unresolved problems.” That must be why we all keep going into work to research said problems, huh?
That’s enough picking on our friend. This week’s statement is a point he often raises, and it’s a view that many of the other folks at these meeting share. They certainly have a point; the usual hypotheses tested in scientific experiments never invoke the supernatural. Any type of research involving such hypotheses is somehow qualified: alternative medicine, parapsychology, paranormal investigations, cryptozoology, faith healing, etc. Does that mean scientists have assumed that such things don’t exist? Why don’t scientists test out hypotheses involving god, if not because they’ve dismissed deities a priori?
Science Cheats!
Scientists largely ignore the supernatural simply because there is no tangible evidence for it. Now, you might think I’ve just callously dismissed and pissed off no less than five large groups of people (based on my above list). While I might have angered them, I haven’t actually said anything controversial. If there was abundant evidence of extraterrestrial visitation, then intelligent aliens coming to earth would be a natural phenomenon. If there was clear evidence for Bigfoot, then Bigfoot sightings would be natural phenomena. If psychics could unambiguously demonstrate their precognition powers, then seeing the future would be a natural phenomenon.
That’s how science gets to “cheat.” Once a phenomenon is established beyond reasonable doubt, it becomes part of the natural world. Up until that point, the concept in question is firmly supernatural. If unequivocal proof of ghosts is uncovered, then the conclusion would not be the supernatural is real! The conclusion would be ghosts are real!, and the Loch Ness monster would still be a floating log.
A quick tangential story demonstrates this “cheating” quite nicely. During a lecture about conservation of energy, one of my professors said that it is a law of nature and has never been violated. (It is a continuity equation, as I discussed in Entry 19.) But, he pointed out that someone once called him on that assertion. This person claimed that the conservation of energy has been violated many times, but physicists just make up new types of energy to keep the balance working. For instance, a chunk of uranium ore heating up would violate energy conservation until you invoked nuclear energy. Although this person was wrong (nuclear energy is a type of energy), I can see how s/he might have viewed this as science “cheating.”
Sorry … Science Finds Your Creation Myth Less Appealing Than Clay
The incident that directly prompted this entry was a discussion of abiogenesis. Our friend was particularly distressed that scientists aren’t exploring the possibility that god created life. They’re looking a self-replicating chemicals and layers of clay and lightning strikes and panspermia, but not god. Why are the first four hypotheses I mentioned valid to scientists, but not the last one about god?
The answer is simple: chemicals and clay and lightning and meteors are natural phenomena, while deities are supernatural phenomena. We have evidence that these natural things exist/occur, and so it is possible to build plausible hypotheses based on them. We do not have evidence for supernatural phenomenon, and so you cannot build a fruitful hypothesis based on the supernatural.
More important are the practical considerations. Aspects of the natural phenomena can be tested in a laboratory setting. What sorts of chemicals can catalyze their own replication? Can layers of clay act as crude vessels for life? Does lightning cause the formation of very complex chemicals? Can microbes survive long trips in deep space? On the other hand, the supernatural hypothesis defies testing. How could the idea that god created life from non-life be explored in a scientific manner?
Abiogenesis is a very open question at this time. The only currently appropriate answer to the question “How did life start?” is “I don’t know!” Somebody’s god may well have done it, but there is no reason to think so and no way to coherently explore that possibility.
Let’s switch gears for a moment, and imagine that an astrologer is arguing that he can explain abiogenesis:
Many people believe in astrology, and use it successfully in their day-to-day life. In the past, many scientists have been astrologers, particularly astronomers. We believe astrology works via the action-at-a-distance principle, which is established physics. Thus, the alignment of the stars also might have injected life force into formerly-inanimate chemicals. Scientists ought to consider this hypothesis.
How would you respond to this (assuming you’re not an astrologer)? You would say that astrology has no evidence, its popularity and history is irrelevant, its supposed mechanism is technobabble pseudoscience, and, most importantly, its abiogenesis hypothesis is untestable, unfalsifiable, and unscientific.
Replace all the astrology with theism, and you have the appropriate skeptical response to this week’s statement.
Without Evidence, It’s All Gremlins
If I were arguing against my own article, I would assert that scientists are being very closed-minded when they snub supernatural hypotheses. The most obvious issue here is that the supernatural might turn out to be fully natural, and so scientists might be taking good ideas off the table when they ignore the supernatural. Something wacky like quantum tunneling or time dilation would’ve been considered magical in the nineteenth century, and scientists who rejected such a concept would have been dismissing natural physics.
The issue here is that these scientists would have been correct in dismissing these hypotheses at that time, because there was no data to support them. Experiments at the time lacked the sensitivity (and/or ability) to detect quantum and relativistic phenomena, so these ideas were simply not testable. Once you allow untestable hypotheses into the mix, you’re lost in a sea of nonsense. You have absolutely no way to discriminate between competing ideas. If you’re going to believe that the electrons you cannot detect are tunneling through walls, you might as well say that gremlins are doing the digging.
“Woah, Woah, Woah! What About [Dead White Guy]?!”
Again imagining myself in my targets’ shoes, I’d start arguing along philosophical or theological lines at this point. People have been discussing the supernatural for millennia, and the prominent thinkers of the past few were kind enough to write these ideas down and earn themselves Wikipedia entries. These discussions would of course provide fodder for countless entries, but we can succinctly slam this door shut for the purposes of this discussion.
Science trucks in the real world. It is a systematic method for understanding the environment around us. Evidence is paramount in science. Scientists need evidence to test hypotheses, and they cannot scientifically deal with things for which there is no evidence. This is why this entirely entry has been lousy with qualifier words: tangible evidence, testable hypotheses, unambiguous demonstrations, plausible hypotheses, etc, etc, etc.
In a handy-dandy two-word term, science requires methodological naturalism. Someone can philosophize until the atmosphere runs out of oxygen about the supernatural, but it wouldn’t affect the scientific method in the slightest. So long as the supernatural doesn’t lose the meta- in metaphysics and become physics, the scientific method simply doesn’t (and actually can’t) care.
Imagine that someone, right now, is publishing proof that a deist-type god exists. Their logic is impeccable, their premises valid, their reasoning sound, and their argument impregnable. Tomorrow, the entire world will have definitive proof that a deity exists. This fact would have no effect whatsoever on what I do in my lab the next day. If this deity (let’s call it J. R. “Bob” Dobbs, just for kicks) doesn’t interact with the natural world, then science has no bearing on it and it has no bearing on science.
Hypothesize or Abscond (That Is, Put Up or Shut Up)
The claims of my new friend notwithstanding, scientists do not assume the Christian god doesn’t exist. As a supernatural entity, a deity simply cannot be investigated scientifically. Scientific inquiry requires evidence, reproducibility, consistency, and clarity. If a concept or phenomenon possesses all these traits, then I assure you that it is not supernatural.
If a person ever makes this claim to you, I would reply with a simple request. Ask them to explain an experiment that would demonstrate that their god did or did not do something. I suspect the hangup will be falsifiability, so don’t let them off the (sky)hook in that regard.
Posted at 3:00 pm by cheglabratjoe
July 1, 2009
Entry 31: Research Should Validate Alternative Medicine
Let's start with the impetus for this entry. I give you the recent statement by Senator Tom Harkin, D-IA, in regards to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and its predecessor, the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM):
One of the purposes of this center [NCCAM] was to investigate and validate alternative approaches. Quite frankly, I must say publicly that it has fallen short. I think quite frankly that, in this center and in the office previously before it [OAM], most of its focus has been on disproving things rather than seeking out and approving.
That would have been this week's statement, but it would have made the title too long. Senator Harkin was instrumental in creating and shaping OAM/NCCAM, the branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that funds CAM research. The original stated purpose of this center was to rigorously and scientifically evaluate CAM modalities. This goal was, and may even remain, quite important. Some of these treatments were very popular yet very untested, so determining their safety and efficacy was an important public health matter.
But, Senator Harkin just admitted that NCCAM's charge wasn't actually to investigate alternative medicine. The goal of NCCAM was, apparently, to validate alternative medicine. This isn't merely a verbal flub, nor is it simply Harkin hoping that the hypothesis he bet his nickel on wins. Unless we pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, this is evidence of serious bias afoot at the NIH.
Investigate, Validate ... To-may-toe, To-mah-toe, Right?
NCCAM is charged with the scientific evaluation of alternative medicine. I'm not getting all civics-lesson on you here; this is the only way to actually determine whether or not any type of medical treatment works. While there are certainly pockets of mainstream medicine that aren't as science-based as they ought to be, medical treatments in general are investigated scientifically to determine their safety and efficacy. This is most readily apparent in drug trials: phase one looks for toxicity in healthy people, phase two tests the efficacy and safety in the target patient group, and phase three compares the treatment's efficacy to currently-available treatments.
Many alternative treatments have not been subjected to this rigorous evaluation, especially not prior to efforts like NCCAM. Alternative medicine was (and is) living off anecdotes and appeals to antiquity and popularity, the same sort of "evidence" that has kept the Four Humours in business for millennia (and counting). Rigorous scientific testing would determine once and for all whether or not these treatments worked.
But wait ... Senator Harkin isn't interested in whether or not these treatments work. He was looking for validation that alternative medicine does work. Thus, Senator Harkin already had his mind made up back when he started the OAM/NCCAM. He believed that alternative medicine worked; he just wanted science to give him an official-sounding rubberstamp to slap on it. Senator Harkin was convinced by the anecdotes and fallacies mentioned earlier, and his mind was and remains closed* to the possibility that CAM modalities might not work.
*Bear this in mind the next time some true believer calls you closed-minded: any true believer is far more closed-minded than a skeptic, since the true believer's mind is already made up and thus closed to the possibility that they are wrong. But, that's another story for another time.
Science doesn't work this way. While anecdotes are not worthless, they are only useful as generators of hypotheses. If tons of people are getting acupuncture and claiming that it somehow helped them, then it's worth investigating whether or not acupuncture has therapeutic value. The trick here is that these anecdotes don't themselves prove the efficacy of acupuncture, since they're completely uncontrolled and unverifiable. Any number of confounding factors could complicate the matter: maybe these people would've felt better regardless of what they did, maybe these people are misremembering, maybe these people just needed a little personal attention, maybe these people only claimed to feel better to placate the acupuncturist, etc, etc, etc.
A scientific study of a CAM modality would strive to reduce these variables to determine the actual efficacy of the treatment. The people participating in the study would be carefully and objectively monitored for unbiased data reporting. Half of the study participants would receive a placebo, so that the treatment outcomes could be compared to a control outcome. The testing would be double-blinded, so that neither the participants nor the therapists would know who received the placebo or the real deal. This entire process would be repeated at different institutions, so that subtler biases or even research misconduct could be circumvented. All these precautions would be necessary to eliminate the unconscious cognitive biases that creep into our everyday lives as humans. Only after these steps do we have a chance of knowing whether or not a treatment is effective.
If you'll allow me to be so bold (or italic), that last sentence bears repeating: Only after these steps do we have a chance of knowing whether or not a treatment is effective. What I've described is a scientific investigation of an alternative medicine treatment. Note the fundamental difference between this and a scientific validation of alternative medicine. Validation assumes that the treatment in question has already been proven effective. Validation is not something science does, except perhaps as training exercises. (Your chemistry labs during school could be considered validating already-proven knowledge.) Senator Harkin asked researchers to prove his beliefs correct, and then had the audacity to get annoyed at them when their data demonstrated that his beliefs are wrong. Senator, as the LOLcats would say: SCIENCE ... ur doin it rong!
Pseudoscience: The Only Bipartisan Thing in Washington
Senator Harkin communicated a variety of important points in his little spiel about alternative medicine. One aspect I haven't addressed is that he reminded us that woo is eminently bipartisan. Republicans certainly don't (and never did) have a monopoly on un-, anti-, and pseudoscientific positions. A lot of pro-science folks have been understandably pumped about the Obama administration after years of what some have gone so far as to call a Republican war on science. But, issues like alternative medicine make it abundantly clear that skepticism is necessary regardless of which political party is in power.
Complementary and alternative medicine needed to be investigated via science, not validated by it. Many skeptics feel that NCCAM was wrongheaded from the get-go, via the argument that research dollars ought to be allocated according to individual treatments' plausibility. While they have a point about prior plausibility, I disagree that NCCAM was unnecessary. I believe that public's fascination with CAM warranted some scientific scrutiny, at least to check the safety of these treatments. This is all academic, of course, since it's in the past. What matters is that NCCAM spent millions of dollars over eighteen years investigating alternative medicine, and has demonstrated the efficacy of precisely zero treatments*.
*Special aside time again! The bolding and underlining was not sufficient to highlight the starkness of that fact. The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine has yet to establish the effectiveness of a single alt-med modality. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Furthermore, no flavor of CAM has been determined ineffective. It seems that further research is always required.
The time for special NIH centers to study one Senator's sacred cow is over. If alternative medicine advocates want federal research dollars to study their favorite modality, they should have to write grants and compete with other treatments on a level playing field. If the treatment actually works, scientists are going to find it and doctors are going to incorporate it into regular old Medicine (M). M gets to cheat that way. As a quick example, everyone used to think that stomach ulcers were caused by too much acid in the stomach. A couple guys during the eighties did some novel but overlooked work suggesting that bacteria caused ulcers, and eventually the evidence was abundantly clear and M changed its ways. This story even has a Cinderella ending, since these guys won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2005.
I assure you that the same could happen to a chiropractor or acupuncturist, but the onus is of course on them to prove their theories. Homeopaths should be even more excited by this story, since they'd also be shoo-ins for the physics and chemistry Nobels. Best of luck, fellas!
Posted at 9:38 pm by cheglabratjoe
June 18, 2009
Entry 30: Daniel Dennett and Memes
And, welcome back! If you missed last week’s entry, I went to a lecture by Daniel Dennett and really dug it. Last time, I covered the lecture in general and plowed through his early points. This time, I’m going to discuss memes and how he used them to wrap up his lecture. Without further ado, let’s get back to Professor Dennett.
My Introduction to Memes
I’m a meme skeptic. I’ve never read anything that directly contained arguments for or against memes, but I’ve seen/heard them come up occasionally during interviews and discussions. My quite-uninformed opinion was that they were just a misguided attempt to quantize the humanities that lacks any evidence whatsoever. Dennett didn’t sway me, but he at least prevented me from dismissing them out-of-hand in the future.
The easiest critique of memes is that there is no hard evidence for them. Dennett summarized this skepticism as show me a meme, and that’s glib but accurate. His simple response was that words are memes: they are a quantized unit of culture, they spread from person-to-person, they evolve, they experience natural selection, and they even go extinct. There is apparently a linguistic counter to this argument, as Dennett felt the need to warn against over-Chomsky-ing words and making them all about syntax; in particular, he mentioned labels and passwords as examples of words/memes that are 100% syntax-free. I have nothing to add about this, because I know jack-all about linguistics. (I find it interesting that Noam Chomsky, who is alive, will probably go down as one of the more important thinkers in history, yet I know literally nothing about his work.)
Another counter to my own show me a meme argument occurred to me after the presentation. (There’s a chance Dennett mentioned this and I just forgot about this; if so, my bad on the semi-plagiarism.) Genes have a clear physical analogy: stretches of DNA. Well, when Darwin first put out his ideas about evolution, there was no physical evidence for genes. Hell, we didn’t know about genes period. Mendel was working with his peas around the same time as Darwin, but his work wasn’t rediscovered for fifty years after the Origin’s publication. It was another fifty years until DNA was really sorted out. So, the theory of evolution did its thing for practically a century before absolute slam-dunk evidence for genes hit the stage.
I realize I haven’t rigorously defined what a meme is. It’s basically the cultural equivalent to a gene. Just as genes are little bits of hereditary information that evolution works via and upon, memes are little chunks of culture that can spread and mutate and be selected for or against. Wait … since when does culture evolve?
Mitochondria vs. Michelangelo
… which brings us to Dennett’s next big comparison. At some point in the extraordinarily distant past, an amazing thing happened. A single-celled life form joined forces with another distinct single cell. They didn’t merely become friends or form a symbiotic tag team; they literally fused into one discrete creature. This isn’t science fiction or a tentative hypothesis (a la the lightening-struck primordial soup starting life); this is the birth of eukaryotes. Every single cell in your body contains mitochondria, and every single mitochondrion has its own DNA sequence distinct from your regular cellular DNA. Your mitochondria ultimately descend from this engulfed critter.
Eukaryotes have gone berserk since this alliance, evolving extreme complexity and diversity. Everything from humans to palm trees to mushrooms is a eukaryote. Meanwhile, your mitochondria’s distant cousins that didn’t find a friend (or enemy, for that matter) to ally with are still largely relegated to being comparatively-simple prokaryotes (like bacteria). So, why did eukaryotes take over the world? What gave this conglomerate critter its edge?
The likely explanation is that evolution had a new vector to act upon. With two distinct genomes to pass on, evolution was granted that many more potential cranes to work with. Eukaryotes have an entirely distinct route of evolutionary action that prokaryotes simply lack. This gave eukaryotes the evolutionary prowess to dominate the planet.
What does this billion-year-old cellular biology have to do with memes? Well, Dennett posits that this is happening again literally as we speak thanks to the human brain. Just as those first eukaryotes had a second genome upon which evolution could act, humans now have a “memome” that is subject to evolutionary pressures. Those first eukaryotes passed a second set of DNA to their progeny, and humans now pass memes onto their children.
Ironically, Dennett has ceded one of the mind creationists’ points. He agrees with them that modern humanity cannot be explained merely by genes and old-school evolution. However, Dennett is most certainly not admitting that some sort of skyhook is necessary to explain humanity’s section of design space. On the contrary, he is arguing that we need to look for a new type of crane. Trying to sort out human evolution without memes would be like trying to explain lizards without accounting for mitochondria, according to Dennett. Memetics is a whole new avenue upon which random variation and natural selection can work their evolutionary wonders.
Memetics in the Origin?
No, but Dennett had one last comparison to hammer memes home before wrapping up his lecture. I’ve never read On the Origin of Species, so I’m going to have to relay Darwin’s big approach to natural selection third-hand. (I really should read it, and everyone reading this should, too. My understanding is that it’s extremely well-written and accessible, and is basically a fantastic book-long argument for evolution.) Darwin outlined three stages of selection within populations, the first two artificial and the third natural.
The first type of selection is intentional artificial selection. This is what farmers and dog breeders do. You look at a population, pick out which traits you want to select for, and have the individuals with those traits mate. The second type of selection is unintentional artificial selection. The most dangerous example of this is antibiotic-resistant bacteria; no one planned for MRSA to show up, but it sure did thanks to our willy-nilly antibiotic usage. The neatest example of this is probably the samurai crabs (heikigani) popularized by Carl Sagan in Cosmos; check out the Wikipedia page for the story. And, finally, Darwin marched onward to explain natural selection.
This was a great way to approach his argument, and I won’t dwell on it because it goes without saying that the Origin is good stuff. One thing I’ll add is that we now have a zeroth level of selection (with the above list being the first, second, and third): genetic engineering. Rather than wait around for random mutations to lead to desirable traits, we can directly insert genes that ought to provide traits we’re ultimately interested in. The power this offers us probably cannot be understated, but that’s another story for another time.
According to Dennett, memes are subjected to the same four types of selection. We intentionally teach our children math and art (type one), but we do so with an accent and thus, for no conscious reason, no one from Boston pronounces their r’s (type two). Conversely, sometimes an individual will have a crazy idea that will spread and mutate from person to person with no artificial selection involved (type three). Abduction stories are a good example of this: nowadays aliens beam you into space, before that it was fairies taking you to a magical world (see Entities by Joe Nickell), and before that it was demons possessing you (see Summis Desiderantes Affectibus Papal Bull*, Innocent VIII, 1484). Lastly, we have advertisers, our society’s memetic engineers (type zero). Just Do ItTM.
*Seriously, a papal bull about succubi and incubi and magic spells during the freaking Renaissance. But, hey, I probably shouldn’t cast stones … a former US President and Nobel laureate (Jimmy Carter) swears he saw a UFO. In fairness, and despite ufologists’ claims, he believes it was a top-secret military aircraft and not an alien craft. But still …
Though it probably doesn’t sound like it, I remain skeptical about memes. I’m definitely fascinated by the idea, but I’d like to look into the claims a bit more and check out some formal counterarguments. In the meantime, I think Dennett has made a compelling case for considering memetics as a hypothesis to explain the homo block of design space. If nothing else, memetics is a much more satisfying hypothesis than the mind creationists’ god-did-it skyhook.
I Even Like Latin, But Come On …
As you can probably tell from the hundreds upon hundreds of words and the rare double-entry, I really enjoyed Professor Dennett’s lecture. I’m still thinking about pretty regularly, and I’m admittedly enchanted by the idea of memes. Nevertheless, the skeptical activist in me is rather worried about his "tactics" (for lack of a better word), especially because he’s supposed to be the nice one of the big four New Atheists (the meanies being Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens).
I covered my concern over and reconciliation of his choice to not present hard evidence for evolution last time, so I won’t bring that up again. What I want to cover now during my conclusion is his conclusion. He ended with a little story of how someone once called him out on a Darwin fish pin he had on. This person claimed that the Jesus fish is the first known acronym, because, in ancient Greek, the first letters in the phrase "Jesus Christ God’s Son, Savior" spells the word for FISH. (I could verify that this is the likely origin of the symbol, but not that it’s the very first known acronym.) He then chided Dennett, because surely DARWIN wasn’t an acronym for anything.
Dennett thought for awhile, and came up with a phrase in Latin that he thought was appropriate. (Props go to my mad google skills and a dude who attended his lecture at another university and took copious notes.) Note that ancient Latin didn’t have a w, so he used two u’s:
Delere Auctorem Rerum Ut Universum Infinitum Noscas
Destroy the author of things in order to understand the infinite universe
This a nice point to end on, because it’s something of a microcosm of Dennett’s entire lecture. It is very clever, and people on his “side” will definitely enjoy it. But, it will probably alienate people on the other “side” and, more importantly, it might drive away people on the fence.
If I was commenting on someone else’s blog or posting in a forum, right about now someone would probably be calling me a concern troll. However, I think some concern is warranted in this instance. I grabbed the UW student newspapers the day after the lecture, hoping for some reflection and perhaps a fresh take on the lecture. I got neither. The articles hardly offered any insight on the lectures whatsoever, instead focusing on Dennett’s atheism and his “radical perspective” and quote-mining his statements about life being “meaningless” and “purposeless.” This certainly could be an instance of the journalists either drumming up unwarranted controversy or having the gist of their stories prepared before the event, but I doubt it. I suspect that those stories wouldn’t have been written so negatively if Dennett doesn’t end his lecture by suggesting we destroy peoples’ god.
Looking back, I feel even better about Dennett all but ignoring his opponents (as he implicitly did by not opening with the evidence for evolution or for creationism’s vapidity). In a lecture like this, ignoring them is, interestingly, both the worst insult he could have dealt out and a strategically shrewd move. Completely ignoring them would be insulting because he would basically be saying that they aren’t worth his time (which they aren’t). On the other hand, ignoring them is advantageous because he would be giving them precisely zero ammunition.
Unfortunately, rather than continue to give his cultural competitors the cold shoulder, Dennett decided to end with his little Latin line about destroying god. Don’t get me wrong; I liked that just as much as I liked the lecture as a whole. It was a great comeback to the smartass who called him on his pin, and it’s pretty damn clever in its own right. Hell, I might even try to remember it, in case I ever get called out for the Darwin fish on my car and backpack. Nevertheless, I don’t know that it was worth it. I can’t help but suspect that that one slide turned many attendees’ opinion on the lecture from “philosopher gives thoughtful insight on evolution” to “atheist wants to kill god.” It’s unfair and unfortunate, but that’s public perception for you.
Posted at 10:52 pm by cheglabratjoe
May 3, 2009
Entry 29: Daniel Dennett Lecture
I’m just going lecture-crazy, aren’t I? The Distinguished Lecture Series here at Wisconsin is pretty cool; they bring in big-name speakers a half-dozen times a year, and tickets are free for students. I just wish I had known about it earlier. In particular, I’m pretty frustrated that I missed Richard Dawkins a few years back. I’m definitely not going to make that kind of mistake again. Of course, I say that, but only a few months ago I missed Neil deGrasse Tyson because I was running late to the lecture from the gym. That’ll teach me to exercise … dammit, I’m still pissed about that. Let’s just move on.
It’s good that I started off this entry more bloggy and less structured than usual, because this isn’t going to be my typical lecture deconstruction. (That is, assuming something can be called ‘usual’ or ‘typical’ after two occurrences.) The main reason for this is simply because I don’t really disagree with Professor Dennett. This probably isn’t too surprising to you, since he’s one of those newfangled New Atheists everybody’s talking about. Beyond that, I made something of a conscious decision early in the lecture to not do my usual inquiry thing. Boy, how skeptical of me, right? Well, let me explain.
Wow … That Is, Well, Probably the Appropriate Approach
Professor Dennett did not start his lecture with the evidence for evolution. This bothered me. I wondered what any creationists in the audience would think. I figured people might just dismiss what he was saying because he “assumed” evolution was correct. I especially worried about on-the-fence folks jumping ship because of this. Regardless of these concerns, he hopped right into his talk without bothering to demonstrate the validity of evolution or the vapidity of its competitors. He certainly discussed nuts-and-bolts evolution as necessary throughout his talk, but left out this beginning section I’ve come to expect from lectures related to evolution (Entries 23 and 24).
At this point, a stark realization struck me: I shouldn’t expect this evidence out of him. Creationism and its spawn are not scientific critiques of evolution; they are cultural phenomena. As such, they don’t really have a place in an academic lecture. This might sound like a strange statement coming from a member of the skeptical community, but note that I’m not saying we should ignore creationism. On the contrary, I think it needs to be combated at every turn. However, Professor Dennett’s talk was not about creationism or the public understanding of evolution; it was a philosophy-based examination of evolution and its future. Creationism really didn’t have a place, and he was justified in not defending evolution.
As an analogy, let’s imagine that Stephen Hawking gives a lecture here next year. (This is apparently a possibility, and it would be awesome.) If he mentions general relativity early in the lecture, should I expect him to spend half an hour explaining the evidence for it? Should I expect significant time spent debunking Newtonism and geocentrism? Or, if he mentions quantum mechanics, should I be worried if he doesn’t devote two-thirds of his lecture to the consilience of evidence for it? What if there are Bohrists in attendance?
This is a better analogy than you might think. I’m guessing most people’s response to that analogy would be a chuckling oh, come on, now. After all, there are some pretty big holes at the edges of evolution; things like abiogenesis and consciousness have certainly not been figured out. Well, what do you think happens at the edges of physics? For example, black holes pretty much break both general relativity and quantum mechanics. One might be able to argue that evolution is stronger than either general relativity or quantum mechanics, actually.
Not Your Father’s Creationists
Speaking of people worried about the evolution of consciousness, Dennett mentioned early on some prominent scientists who feel that the human brain just cannot be explained by mere evolution. They’re fine with the molecules-to-monkeys part, but they just don’t like last bit about humans and consciousness. Dennett’s term for these people is mind creationists. As he hastily pointed out, these are not dumb people; Roger Penrose ranks among them, and I’m pretty sure he’s one of those guys who might just be the smartest person on the planet.
While this sounds like a glib dismissal of these folks, all Dennett has done is recognize a pattern. From day one, creationists’ main tactic in fighting evolution has been to cite various things that seem too complicated to have arisen naturally via evolution. Look at creationism’s latest cheap tuxedos, Intelligent Design and Michael Behe’s Irreducible Complexity: some parts of biology are supposedly irreducibly complex, so they must have been intelligently designed. After a century and a half, biologists have addressed virtually all the creationists’ concerns. This is why the creationism movement must resort to playing linguistic games to retain their patina of science; there’s just no meat there.
Did you catch my weasel word? I said that scientists have addressed virtually all the creationists’ concerns. That is why intelligent, intellectually honest people can be mind creationists; human consciousness hasn’t been figured out yet. Did you catch the sneaky little word this time? Consciousness hasn’t been figure out … yet. At this point, I again expected piles of hard evidence from Dennett, and again I was left wanting. He didn’t spend an hour outlining the “materialist” explanation for consciousness, but I again realized that I shouldn’t have expected him to. That’s not what he does, and that’s not what he was lecturing about. He’s a philosopher, not a hard scientist, and he was giving a lecture on the philosophical considerations, not the hard evidence, for evolution. I have no doubt that he knows the evidence (and likely covers it in appropriate settings, such as his books), but it had no place in the lecture.
Cranes and Skyhooks
Dennett had a neat metaphor about evolution and creationism, and I wanted to relay it to you so that I can borrow the useful terminology. Imagine a design space, where complex things are “above” or “higher than” simple things. Humans and other eukaryotes would be like tall buildings in design space, while prokaryotes or viruses would be shorter structures. Evolution is a crane in design space; complexity is built up from simpler forms via natural means. Creationists of all stripes invoke a skyhook in design space; at some point, an outside force had to pull a structure up in complexity. Hardcore young-earth creationists would claim that you need the skyhook for every building, while mind creationists would only appeal to skyhooks to explain the human building (or perhaps the entire homo block).
Charles Darwin and … Alan Turing?
Dennett’s next point was to compare Darwin’s big idea to Alan Turing’s. This struck me as an odd comparison, and also a tactically poor one. Alan Turing is considered the father of computer science, and computers are definitely, well, intelligently designed. Moreover, I definitely didn’t see the connection whatsoever going into the discussion. But, Dennett pointed out that Darwin’s main observation was that he turned design on its head. He proposed that stupid processes could pump out smart-looking results. Random variation and natural selection certainly aren’t intelligent in any sense of the word, but they do a damn fine job of producing exquisitely complex designs.
I know virtually nothing about Turing, but Dennett explained his big idea as the realization that you don’t actually need to understand algebra or calculus to do algebra or calculus. He took a look at the “computers” of his day (mainly women trained in math), and recognized that the meat-and-potatoes of their job didn’t actually require comprehension of any mathematics. Thus, their jobs could be accomplished by stupid things (modern computers). As with evolution, we have something completely unintelligent simulating something very intelligent. The analogy can only be extended so far, but the concept of turning design and intelligence on their heads definitely resonates through both of these luminaries’ big ideas.
As a quick contrast along these lines, compare yourself to one of your cells. You are intelligent, conscious, alive, and a whole host of other smart qualities. However, you are made up of a bunch of dumb things: cells. Cells are not conscious or intelligent, and they’re not really alive. (If you think your cells are individually alive, you’re committing mass murder every time you scratch your arm, and the dusty corners of your bedroom are macabre mass graves.) Even if you want to quibble about cells’ smart-ness, the constituents of cells (proteins, RNA, and DNA) are certainly dumb since they’re individually nothing more than inert chemicals.
This comparison extends nicely to consciousness. Indeed, Turing’s lasting legacy (if any) in pop culture is the Turing Test. The test proceeds as follows: a person attempts to have a regular conversation with two other entities, one computer and one human. If the first person cannot distinguish between the other human and the computer, then the computer is said to have passed the Turing Test and perhaps ought to be considered intelligent and/or conscious. This would be something dumb churning out something so smart that it’s considered the single best evidence for the existence of a skyhook (the human intellect). While no computer has passed the Turing Test, there’s little reason to think that it won’t happen at some point in the near future.
Though critiques of the Turing Test as a valid criterion for consciousness abound, the analogy to biology cannot be ignored. If silicon can simulate consciousness and free will, why couldn’t carbon? Our brains need not necessarily “understand” consciousness to act in a manner that appears conscious. That is, our mind can appear non-physical and supernatural yet still be the product of mere cranes.
Until Next Time …
If it’s not obvious, Professor Dennett’s talk really got my brain juices flowing. This entry is already pretty hefty, and I haven’t even mentioned the word “meme” yet. So, I’m going to truncate it here and get into the second half of Professor Dennett’s talk next time. Have I already used the same skeptical time, same skeptical place bit? If not, forget that I qualified it. If so, hopefully you forgot about it, too.
Posted at 2:37 pm by cheglabratjoe
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