Pseudoscience and The Living Matrix – not even wrong.

So McGill hosts these “Freaky Friday” events, in which McGill scientists are supposed to explain some of the actual science behind films and pop culture. Ostensibly, anyways. Mostly it seems to be a science lecture followed by a movie. You can find details on them here.

I was put off of them last year by the UFO ones, in which a professor abused the philosophy of science to tell us that we’ve totally been visited by UFOs and there’s a massive global cover-up. That wasn’t so cool, especially since there’s enough disinformation out there already. We don’t need people muddying the waters even more.

But I’ve gone to two this year, and they’ve both been pretty cool. The last one was by a biogeologist talking about the work being done looking at indirect evidence of life earlier than was previously thought, using Carbon-12/13 ratios and the atmospheric ratios of different Sulpher isotopes. It was neat. I never thought finding old rocks, grinding them up, and then analyzing them would be so cool, but it was. The movie for that was Night of the Triffids, which was an awesomely bad old sci-fi flick.

Tonight was a lot closer to my heard. Joseph Schwarcz was the presenter, which was cool. The talk was on the growth of quackery, and as he made clear it really hasn’t changed much – more sophisticated maybe, but the claims and the content are pretty similar.

He brought us through snake oil salesmen and patent medicine, talked about Houdini’s skepticism, and showed some more modern quackery like Asea http://www.teamasea.com/, which is a 5% salt water solution. And really, it doesn’t even scratch the surface. I’m not going to go into the history of quackery, or all the various forms and authors, but suffice to say it was interesting. Check out Dudley J. Leblanc and Hadacol for an example from the 50s.

I’ll just mention one other, since it’s so overblown. Bill Nelson (you have to read his ‘bio’) invented the EPFX-SCIO, which claims the following:

The EPFX-SCIO scans the body for 9000 frequencies, each associated with a different compound, much as anti-virus software would do for a computer. The EPFX-SCIO operates at biological speeds (up to 1/1000 of a second) charting the resonance or responsse of the body to these frequencies, comparing them to a norm and ranking them in degree of reactivity, identifying both acute and chronic imbalances. Clients can then be provided information about the results and energetic therapy can be given to attempt a balancing or harmonizing of any aberrant frequencies. Offering over 200 biofeedback therapies in 72 modalities, it is the largest healthcare software package in the world, combining both eastern and western philosophies and techniques.

I don’t even know where to start…

After that we watched a film called “The Living Matrix”.

Let’s play a game. Watch the movie, and take a drink every time someone makes a claim that runs counter to basic science, or makes a factual scientific error.

Now that you’re out of the hospital, I’ll remind you that you can’t sue me for your alcohol poisoning.

The film is a painful mishmash of healing touch, energy medicine, ‘The Secret’-esque intentionality stuff, and a hefty dose of what I’ve started thinking of as “Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work” syndrome. I can’t even address their claims, since they often conflict. Near the beginning they claim that consciousness is not in the brain, and that the body does not need some sort of central organizer. But then in the second half, they spend a bunch of time wondering how the body can function without a central organizer.

They even wonder how cells can communicate with each other, and I foolishly thought they would start speaking about inter-cellular communication. Hah! No, they claim that some central organizer needs to send out simultaneous signals to all the cells at once (since they claim the different speeds of nerve transmission make complex behaviour impossible). They claim that the actual central organizer is the heart!

That’s right, we’re right back to fucking Aristotle. They say it can “imprint information” on the body using “sound waves, electricity, magnetism, and electromagnetism” and that the nerve tissue on the heart (which, you know, the brain uses to maintain a heartbeat) is actually to tell the brain what to do. Seriously – some of the same arguments as 2300 years ago when Aristotle argued the heart was the centre of consciousness. And how does it talk to cells? Well, they’ve got these receptors embedded in the cell membrane…

*facepalm* Which are used for chemical signalling between cells. Apparently they missed that bit in high school or first year bio. And none of this is about the more egregious nonsense about “fields” which is addressed a bit here.

Anyways. Suffice to say that me, the developmental biology student next to me, the one across the room, and the engineer sitting below me were all choking back astonishment and outrage for most of the film. The phrase “not even wrong” comes to mind.

The after talk was… interesting. There were a couple people who were really into it, and they talked about how they believed in intuition, or telepathy because they would think of someone and then that person would call them. This old nonsense always ignores the huge numbers of times when you’re thinking of someone and they don’t call.

So, it was fairly fun even if the film was frustrating as hell. Anyone care to explain how Rupert Sheldrake has a position at Cambridge? Oh, the they mentioned Adam Dreamhealer. Oh yeah.

You can see more thorough review of the film here.

I wonder sometimes if I’m even speaking the same language as these people.

Plasticity and Popular Science

So I’m reading “The Brain That Changes Itself” by Norman Doige. I’m liking it more now I’m getting into it, but there’s a few things bothering me about it and I thought I’d share, since at least some of them are things that bother me about popular science in general.

In the interest of fairness I’ll admit to being biased against the author from the start. He’s got a degree in psychoanalysis and apparently has a practice in it too. I didn’t even know you could get degrees in that anymore, but he seems to be on the older side. Psychoanalysis is a good part of the reason scientists often don’t take psychology seriously – even psychologists, while acknowledging how it really got their discipline going, hate the fact that it colours their entire field.

There are lots of concepts from psychoanalysis that have been very hard to discard over the years, since they’ve been around enough to become ‘common sense’. Repressed memories, for example. There’s really little evidence for their existence. If anything, people with traumatic experiences tend to relive them through flashbacks and the like. The idea of repressed memories, and psychoanalytic techniques like guided recall under hypnosis, led to the whole Satanic ritual abuse phenomenon in the 80s. We know that those conditions are perfect for creating or changing existing memories. Some very simple studies have shown this, whereby people are asked leading questions about their memories.

“Do you remember hugging Bugs Bunny at Disneyland?”

Plenty of people will answer yes to this, despite it not being possible. It gets much worse when the question is being asked during moments of emotional stress, hypnosis, or other moments when we’re open to suggestion.

But because Freud went on about repressed memories it’s common wisdom that they exist. And that’s not even getting into his sexual stuff.

So I don’t like the way Doige constantly attributes ideas as original to Freud, like a Marxist would to Marx. But that’s not my primary complaint.

It’s that he wants a Narrative. And it’s that most annoying of popsci Narratives, the ‘plucky revolutionary scientist is belittled for his ideas but bravely makes life better for a few daring clients.’

Personally, I think Kuhn needs to take a share of the blame for this. His idea of the structure of scientific revolutions, that all advances are made by the existing paradigm being broken by a new paradigm promoted by a tiny minority of visionaries, has been the bane of every skeptical scientist’s existence. Every homeopath, every UFOer, every basement crank now thinks the only reason their brilliance isn’t being recognized is because the dominant paradigm resists change.

Science does have a certain amount of inertia. Any idea which challenges established ideas does have a bit of an uphill battle. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Many, if not most, ideas turn out to be wrong. The established ones have resisted change not solely due to hidebound scientists but because they’re fairly well-supported and the evidence against them is not sufficiently compelling to force a change.

I’ll give two examples that get bandied about a fair bit.

In 1982 Drs. Barry Marshall and Robin Warren of Perth discovered that H. pylori was the cause of peptic ulcers, not stress. There’s a famous story (true) about Dr. Marshall drinking a beaker of the cultured bacterium to prove it was the cause. So – plucky duo prove cause of illness in face of doubting Thomas scientific community.

Except that the groundwork was already there. Though a study in 1954 failed to find stomach bacteria, studies through the 1970s found evidence for pathenogenic stomach bacteria. While there was opposition to Marshall and Warren’s claims, after several other groups were able to replicate their findings independently (one of science’s major modern protections against cranks) they became generally accepted. Except among much of the public, of course, where the idea that ulcers are caused by stress is still pretty common.

A second example concerns continental drift. Even until the 1960s there was no real acceptance of the theory of continental drift or plate tectonics. As soon as fairly accurate coastal maps of the continents became available, various people noted how they looked as though they ought to fit together. Plants and animals on each continent, a number of which are closely related, supported the idea. Some people suggested the Earth was expanding, but this was not hugely difficult to falsify. Others stated that the continents had been pulled apart by gravity, or the force of the Earth’s rotation, or other forces.

Alfred Wegener came up with the idea of ‘continental drift’, and provided some evidence that it had occurred. But because he couldn’t explain how it had occurred, it remained a hypothesis not widely accepted. But people kept at it, evidence accumulated, and eventually there was enough physical knowledge of the continents and the discovery of oceanic crust and the churning of the mantle gave a workable explanation.

So it’s not as though lone geniuses came up with any of this. They worked hard, came up with evidence that meshed with other independent findings, and eventually their findings were accepted. But if they hadn’t had enough high quality evidence – if their findings had never agreed with the findings of others – then they wouldn’t have been accepted.

The book also takes some potshots at horrible localizationalists and their insistence that specific regions of the brain perform particular functions and goes on about how contrary to their dogmatic beliefs, the brain isn’t a machine or a computer. It’s something of a strawman. While there have certainly been a large number of people who have rejected brain plasticity up until recently, as Doige goes through the book he keeps providing accounts of a lot of scientists, including some of the giants of neuroscience like Wilder Penfield and Donald Hebb, who didn’t take that view. And he ignores some of the things he himself presents which show that under normal conditions there are local functional regions common to all humans, and that after childhood brains become comparatively hardwired.

He also seems to tell a lot of his stories starting in the 50s and 60s, and rarely talks about anything later than the early 90s. Given the book was written in 2007 this is a bit strange. The book’s thesis is that the brain is this great changeable organ, but this view is not really disputed among modern neuroscientists. He keeps taking swings at the ideas of decades past while presenting his scientists as modern-day mavericks, and it’s a bit strange to read.

The book’s set as a series of amazing vignettes showing the miraculous theories and inventions of various scientists, which is also not guaranteed to win my affections. Nor is the NYT blurb ‘the power of positive thinking finally gains scientific credibility’, the parsing of which would take me another post.

All that being said. If you can ignore the author getting in the way of the book, and the emotionally-tinged anecdotes, it’s actually a pretty interesting look at people working with brain plasticity and how it can be used to help people with cognitive of sensory problems.

But there’s better popular science writing out there, much of it written by actual scientists.

Non-manifest truth, induction, and theories

Last week I wrote about the idea that truth is manifest, obvious to those who look without prejudice.  Several things come of this, including the conspiracy theory of ignorance, and the idea that others who disagree with what you claim to be true are in some way sinful, prejudiced, or mislead.

It also leads to the idea of science via induction.  Popper’s opposition to this idea is one of the main features of his philosophy of science, and I’ve not yet found a reason to disagree with him.

Induction proceeds like this: I see things occurring in the world.  For example, I might see a white sheep.  Eventually, I will observe many white sheep.  Therefore, as a general rule, sheep are white.  Every white sheep I see ‘verifies’ my theory of the whiteness of sheep.  Observations, he argues, cannot have any value except in light of a pre-existing theory, even if the theories are ‘sheep wool has colours’, ‘white is a colour found with sheep’.  Rather, what we start from is a theory – ‘sheep are white’ – and then proceed to test that theory via observation.

I’ll try to return to this question of induction vs. deduction via theory more, because I think it is very important.

Truly scientific theories, according to Popper, are not formulated by observing the self-evident truth of things.  Instead, theories are first formulated based on prior theories, which have either been refuted or not.  Falsifiability, whereby a theory can be refuted, is a necessary component of any scientific theory, according to Popper.  We cannot support our case through bulk of observation (where would our cut-offs be for the number of necessary observation?) but must instead attempt to refute our theory.  Theories which have survived many strict tests are then to be considered better approximations of the truth than ones which have been tested less rigorously.

I’ll finish by describing some conclusions Popper has drawn regarding scientific theories.

1. It is easy to confirm or verify theories by observation, when we look for confirmations.  If you’ve ever heard of confirmation bias, then you will understand why that is.

2. Confirmations count only if they result from risky predictions.  If your observations run counter to what you would have expected before formulating your theory, so that you expected to find a result which would have been impossible in light of your theory, they can be said to ‘confirm’ the theory.

3. Every valid scientific theory is prohibitory.  The theory should lay out things that cannot happen if the theory is correct.  And the more things the theory forbids, the better.  A very general theory, under which many things are possible, is not as testable as one which greatly restricts possible events.  This is similar to the idea that it is easier to make a list of objects which aren’t in a closed box than to make a list of the items which could be in the box.

4. A theory which cannot be refuted in any way is not a scientific theory.  Irrefutability is a weakness, not a strength, because a theory which is correct no matter your potential findings is meaningless, because it either prohibits everything or nothing.

5. Every sincere test of a theory is one which attempts to falsify or refute the theory.  Testability is a measure of falsifiability.  Not all theories are equally testable – ones which are more exposed to refutation, which are ‘riskier’, are more valuable if we find ourselves unable to refute them.

6. Confirming or corroborating evidence is only valid if it results from a serious attempt to falsify the theory.  A theory which survives multiple attempts to refute it can be said to be confirmed or corroborated by the evidence.

7. Theories can be modified post hoc to accommodate a refutation of part of that theory, but this lowers the theory’s value as it is no longer as prohibitory as before.

This last point is sharply debated, especially by Thomas Kuhn.  When I get through Popper and have some time to tackle his major book, I’ll try to address some of their disputes.

Manifest truth and ignorance

I’ve been reading Conjectures and Refutations by Karl Popper, so a number of my posts for the next while will draw heavily on the material presented in this book. In it, Popper lays out his philosophy of science, his dismissal of the idea of inductive logic, and his demarcation between science and pseudoscience. There’s a bit more to it than that, but I’m only a couple chapters in.

Here, I plan on discussing two interrelated ideas: one, the idea that truth is manifest and the subsequent idea that there is a conspiracy of ignorance.

Essentially, Popper claims the Renaissance and later the Enlightenment were based off of an optimistic epistemology, that man was able to discern truth and acquire knowledge simply by casting off prejudice and bias and using his observational abilities to see the truth manifest in Nature. Further, man possesses rational faculties which allow him to intellectually intuit the difference between truth and falsehood. Popper, while noting the origin of these ideas in Parmenides, Socrates, and Plato, places most of the blame for the idea of manifest truth on Descartes and Bacon.

Descartes thought the truth was manifest because of veracitas dei – what we clearly and distinctly see to be true must be true, otherwise God would be deceiving us. Bacon declared the veracitas naturae – the truth of nature – and that anyone who reads the open book of nature with their mind unpoisoned by prejudice will see the truth.

Now, obviously this attitude has its problems. The primary one regards error. If the truth is manifest, how can we ever be in error? By wilful and even sinful refusal to see the truth, through inculcated prejudice from tradition or culture or dogma, or through active conspiracy from others to conceal the truth.

The conspiracy theory of ignorance “interprets ignorance not as a mere lack of knowledge but as the work of some sinister power, the source of impure and evil influences which pervert and poison our minds and instil in us the habit of resistance to knowledge.”

This attitude has prevailed throughout much of history, in institutions such as the Church, Marxism, and even among some atheists. As an atheist, I often encounter a belief among believers that I am simply refusing to acknowledge the existence of god, rather than having reasons for my sincere non-belief.

Sincerity often plays a part in this – when we ‘know’ something, we often wonder how others who do not agree with our view can do so. If the truth is obvious, something must be wrong with those who do not see it. They must be stupid, or vicious, or wicked, or mislead. Personally, when it comes to less ambiguous questions (such as the age of the Earth) I am more inclined to blame ignorance of the facts rather than any of the above.

So if I’m arguing (along with Popper) that truth is not manifest, how do we gain true knowledge? If there is no wilful or conspiratorial ignorance, how is there error? Well, I’ll save that for my next post.

A natural fallacy

There is a pervasive belief, even among scientists and rationalists, that those things which are ‘natural’ are better than those which are ‘unnatural’ or ‘artificial’. Thus, they prefer herbal medicines over pharmaceuticals, natural fabrics over synthetics, and midwives over hospitals.

Now, sometimes one wishes to make an aesthetic choice – I may prefer to wear a leather or heavy cotton coat over a warmer and tougher coat, for example. But when it comes to science and medicine, aesthetic choices should take a backseat to what works.

I have several objections to the argument that natural things are to be preferred.

1. Natural is not a priori better. There are ‘natural’ things which are harmful – not just intestinal parasites, malaria, and tooth decay, but also more nebulous things such as hierarchy, or ‘cheaters’. Dying in childbirth is natural. These things are rightly viewed as problems to be solved, not things to be upheld. Many naturally occurring compounds are toxic, at least as much so as many synthetics.

2. Conversely, artificial is not a priori worse. Glasses correct degenerating vision, quinine kills malaria, toothpaste and fluoride stop tooth decay. Artificial things have greatly benefited our societies. Birth control pills for example, has given woman greater reproductive autonomy, prevents unwanted or unsupportable pregnancies, and can be used to regulate menstrual cycles. C-sections can ease births which would otherwise kill the child, mother, or both. Compared to herbals, artificial preparations use standardized amounts and isolate the compound that has its effect, allowing one to use less than one would require if taking the unprocessed herb. Cooking is just as artificial a process, and yet we do not shudder at well-grilled meat because it is somehow unnatural.

3. Natural and artificial are not useful terms. Everything that exists is natural. Anti-retrovirals make use of naturally occurring vulnerabilities in retroviruses to certain chemicals. Birth control mimics a natural state in which ovulation is suppressed or cervical mucus is thickened. We cannot make use of anything outside of nature – the worst than can be said is what we use may have unforeseen consequences.

4. Because of an irrational attachment to the label ‘natural’, things which are natural but uncommon or non-normative are painted with the same brush of loathing as artificial things. Thus, people go to great effort to demonstrate that being gay is not a choice, and that is occurs in the so-called ‘natural world’. While I don’t take issue with either claim, they are a distraction from the main issue – ‘natural’ or not, it shouldn’t make a difference. Similarly, surgical and hormonal self-modification is seen as unnatural, particularly in the case of trans-folk, who have to go to great lengths to defeat the idea that their bodies are somehow artificial or unnatural. But these things merely augment nature, or use nature’s tools. They are not somehow outside of nature.

I’m not entirely sure where this fallacy comes from. I suspect some of it comes from Christianity – the idea that the world of humans and their tools is inherently sinful compared to the ‘natural’ world created by God is a powerful and long-standing influence. I suspect a Greek scholar could tell me a great deal about pre-Christian Hellenic trends in this mode of thinking, minus the God part.

In general, I think it is a pernicious idea which has little utility, and we would do well to discard it.