Colleagues,
A quick note
this week to introduce a very thoughtful lecture on "scientific
heresy" by Matt Ridley, a British scientist who has published numerous
books in the fields of genetics, human society, and the philosophy of
science. I've copied the first third of
the lecture below, though in my opinion the whole piece is worth a read (the full piece can be found here: http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/11/1/scientific-heresy.html).
Ridley's list of
"lessons" is particularly useful.
I won't spoil it for you. Here it
is.
It
is a great honour to be asked to deliver the Angus Millar lecture.
I
have no idea whether Angus Millar ever saw himself as a heretic, but I have a
soft spot for heresy. One of my ancestral relations, Nicholas Ridley the Oxford
martyr, was burned at the stake for heresy.
My
topic today is scientific heresy. When are scientific heretics right and when
are they mad? How do you tell the difference between science and pseudoscience?
Let
us run through some issues, starting with the easy ones.
Astronomy
is a science; astrology is a pseudoscience.
Evolution
is science; creationism is pseudoscience.
Molecular
biology is science; homeopathy is pseudoscience.
Vaccination
is science; the MMR scare is pseudoscience.
Oxygen
is science; phlogiston was pseudoscience.
Chemistry
is science; alchemy was pseudoscience.
Are
you with me so far?
A
few more examples. That the earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare is pseudoscience.
So are the beliefs that Elvis is still alive, Diana was killed by MI5, JFK was
killed by the CIA, 911 was an inside job. So are ghosts, UFOs, telepathy, the
Loch Ness monster and pretty well everything to do with the paranormal. Sorry
to say that on Halloween, but that’s my opinion.
Three
more controversial ones. In my view, most of what Freud said was pseudoscience.
So
is quite a lot, though not all, of the argument for organic farming.
So,
in a sense by definition, is religious faith. It explicitly claims that there
are truths that can be found by other means than observation and experiment.
Now
comes one that gave me an epiphany. Crop circles.
It
was blindingly obvious to me that crop circles were likely to be man-made when
I first starting investigating this phenomenon. I made some myself to prove it
was easy to do.
This
was long before Doug Bower and Dave Chorley fessed up to having started the
whole craze after a night at the pub.
Every
other explanation – ley lines, alien spacecraft, plasma vortices, ball
lightning – was balderdash. The entire field of “cereology” was pseudoscience,
as the slightest brush with its bizarre practitioners easily demonstrated.
Imagine
my surprise then when I found I was the heretic and that serious journalists
working not for tabloids but for Science Magazine, and for a Channel 4
documentary team, swallowed the argument of the cereologists that it was highly
implausible that crop circles were all man-made.
So
I learnt lesson number 1: the stunning gullibility of the media. Put an “ology”
after your pseudoscience and you can get journalists to be your propagandists.
A
Channel 4 team did the obvious thing – they got a group of students to make
some crop circles and then asked the cereologist if they were “genuine” or
“hoaxed” – ie, man made. He assured them they could not have been made by
people. So they told him they had been made the night before. The man was
poleaxed. It made great television. Yet the producer, who later became a government
minister under Tony Blair, ended the segment of the programme by taking the
cereologist’s side: “of course, not all crop circles are hoaxes”. What? The
same happened when Doug and Dave owned up; everybody just went on believing.
They still do.
Lesson
number 2: debunking is like water off a duck’s back to pseudoscience.
In
medicine, I began to realize, the distinction between science and pseudoscience
is not always easy. This is beautifully illustrated in an extraordinary novel
by Rebecca Abrams, called Touching Distance, based on the real story of an
eighteenth century medical heretic, Alec Gordon of Aberdeen.
Gordon
was a true pioneer of the idea that childbed fever was spread by medical folk
like himself and that hygiene was the solution to it. He hit upon this
discovery long before Semelweiss and Lister. But he was ignored. Yet Abrams’s
novel does not paint him purely as a rational hero, but as a flawed human
being, a neglectful husband and a crank with some odd ideas – such as a
dangerous obsession with bleeding his sick patients. He was a pseudoscientist
one minute and scientist the next.
Lesson
number 3. We can all be both. Newton was an alchemist.
Like
antisepsis, many scientific truths began as heresies and fought long battles
for acceptance against entrenched establishment wisdom that now appears
irrational: continental drift, for example. Barry Marshall was not just ignored
but vilified when he first argued that stomach ulcers are caused by a
particular bacterium. Antacid drugs were very profitable for the drug industry.
Eventually he won the Nobel prize.
Just
this month Daniel Shechtman won the Nobel prize for quasi crystals, having
spent much of his career being vilified and exiled as a crank. “I was thrown
out of my research group. They said I brought shame on them with what I was
saying.”
That’s
lesson number 4: the heretic is sometimes right.
What
sustains pseudoscience is confirmation bias. We look for and welcome the
evidence that fits our pet theory; we ignore or question the evidence that
contradicts it. We all do this all the time. It’s not, as we often assume,
something that only our opponents indulge in. I do it, you do it, it takes a
superhuman effort not to do it. That is what keeps myths alive, sustains
conspiracy theories and keeps whole populations in thrall to strange
superstitions.
Bertrand
Russell pointed this out many years ago: “If a man is offered a fact which goes
against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence
is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is
offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his
instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.”
Lesson
no 5: keep a sharp eye out for confirmation bias in yourself and others.
There
have been some very good books on this recently. Michael Shermer’s “The Believing Brain”, Dan Gardner’s “Future Babble” and Tim Harford’s “Adapt”* are explorations of the power of
confirmation bias. And what I find most unsettling of all is Gardner’s
conclusion that knowledge is no defence against it; indeed, the more you know,
the more you fall for confirmation bias. Expertise gives you the tools to seek
out the confirmations you need to buttress your beliefs.
Experts
are worse at forecasting the future than non-experts.
Philip
Tetlock did the definitive experiment. He gathered a sample of 284 experts –
political scientists, economists and journalists – and harvested 27,450
different specific judgments from them about the future then waited to see if
they came true. The results were terrible. The experts were no better than “a
dart-throwing chimpanzee”.
Here’s
what the Club of Rome said on the rear cover of the massive best-seller Limits
to Growth in 1972:
“Will
this be the world that your grandchildren will thank you for? A world where
industrial production has sunk to zero. Where population has suffered a
catastrophic decline. Where the air, sea and land are polluted beyond
redemption. Where civilization is a distant memory. This is the world that the
computer forecasts.”
"Science
is the belief in the ignorance of the experts", said Richard Feynman.
Lesson
6. Never rely on the consensus of experts about the future. Experts are worth
listening to about the past, but not the future. Futurology is pseudoscience.
The rest of Ridley's speech examines the consensus
position on climate science from a perspective of attempting to determine how
much of what is widely accepted as scientific fact is in fact
pseudoscience. While Ridley acknowledges
that there has been some evidence of faults in the camp of the critics (the
"heretics", as he calls them), those flaws, he argues, are dwarfed by
the scientific sins of the proponents of the "warmist" position. Moreover, he argues, the sins of the warmists
against science are more important because they, and not the skeptics, are the
ones who hold in their hands the levers of public policy:
The
alarmists have been handed power over our lives; the heretics have not.
Remember Britain’s unilateral climate act is officially expected to cost the
hard-pressed UK economy £18.3 billion a year for the next 39 years and achieve
an unmeasurably small change in carbon dioxide levels.
At
least sceptics do not cover the hills of Scotland with useless, expensive,
duke-subsidising wind turbines whose manufacture causes pollution in Inner
Mongolia and which kill rare raptors such as [the] griffon vulture.
At
least crop circle believers cannot almost double your electricity bills and
increase fuel poverty while driving jobs to Asia, to support their fetish.
At
least creationists have not persuaded the BBC that balanced reporting is no
longer necessary.
At
least homeopaths have not made expensive condensing boilers, which shut down in
cold weather, compulsory, as John Prescott did in 2005.
At
least astrologers have not driven millions of people into real hunger, perhaps
killing 192,000 last year according to one conservative estimate, by diverting
5% of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel.
When pseudoscientists are handed the reins of power,
Ridley reminds us, the results are rarely pleasant. The Lysenkoist version of genetics was
favoured by Stalin, resulting in millions of deaths by starvation during the
forced collectivization of the peasantry, and setting the Soviet biological
sciences back by two generations (a blessing in disguise, perhaps, given the
Soviets' dogged pursuit of biological weapons despite having signed the BTWC).
And eugenics - the pseudoscientific doctrine much
beloved of early 20th Century intellectuals like George Bernard Shaw - was
widely praised, and in fact became state policy in places like Nazi Germany,
with appalling results. 60,000
"genetically unfit" persons were sterilized in the Untied States
between the 1920s and 1970s. Eugenics
even became policy in Canada. Tommy
Douglas, the hero of Canadian socialism and darling of the Canadian left, who in 2004 was voted "the
greatest Canadian", advocated state use of genetics in his 1933 masters'
thesis, which was entitled "The Problems of the Subnormal Family",
and in which he advocated "sterilization of the mentally and physically
defective." Forced sterilization of
"mental defectives" indeed took place in Canada; in Alberta, for
example, between the passage in 1928 of the province's eugenics-inspired
sterilization statute and its abolition in 1972, 4,725 sterilizations took
place. All in the name of a spurious pseudoscientific
doctrine. To paraphrase Ridley, the cerealogists might be kooks, but unlike the eugenecists, no government has ever cited cerealogy as justification to take a knife to your 'nads.
History demonstrates that there can be horrific social
and international costs when pseudoscience is permitted to gain a stranglehold
over public policy. All the more reason
for those of us who style ourselves "scientists" to eschew
pseudoscience in favour of the real thing; and all the more reason, as Ridley
argues, not to be afraid to be dubbed "heretics" when our
professional ethics oblige us to call B---s--- on pseudoscientific nonsense whenever,
wherever, and in whatever shape it rears its ugly head.
Cheers,
//Don//
