Skepticblog

Autism is a spectrum of neurological disorders that involve, primarily, reduced social aptitude. People with autism tend to make less eye contact, they have less of a response to viewing a human face, and they are less verbal. Half a century ago autism was blamed on bad parenting, but that view is now considered outdated and even cruel.

Autism is a brain disorder. Neuroscientists are learning more and more about what is different about autistic brains from more typical brains. One feature seems to be reduced communication among neurons in the brain. Autism is diagnosed clinically. It is usually first recognized by the parents, who then bring their child to medical attention and after an evaluation the diagnosis is made. At present there are no supporting laboratory tests – we don’t diagnose autism by an MRI scan, EEG, or blood test. It is diagnosed by clinical observation and some standardized questionnaires and cognitive tests. At the more subtle end of the spectrum the diagnosis may not be made right away, not until the child is a bit older and can be more thoroughly evaluated.

The median age at diagnosis was 4.4 years in 1992. This has steadily decreased, to less than 3.4 years by 2001. This effect is greater in higher socioeconomic status (SES) groups. Low SES children are diagnosed later than higher SES children, and this gap has widened in the last 20 years. There has also been a linear increase in the number of autism diagnoses since 1992, aggregating in birth cohorts, with a greater effect for higher functioning children with autism. This suggests that more diagnoses are being made at the milder end of the autism spectrum, and at a younger age, with a strong social influence. (continue reading…)

Proponents of so-called complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) are forcing us to answer a question no one has explicitly asked – should there be a scientific basis to medicine? Proponents are generally very coy about this topic, and in most venues want to pretend that they are being scientific, while really promoting “other” forms of evidence and “other” ways of knowing. They promote health care freedom laws designed to weaken the scientific standards of medicine, while simultaneously infiltrating academia with assurances that they are science-based.

Unfortunately most academics and health care professionals are simply naive to the situation (so-called “shruggies”) and too easily accept these assurances without checking out the facts themselves. Their initial reaction to those of us who are calmly but insistently pointing out that the CAM emperor has no clothes is to assume that we must be overreacting, because CAM can’t truly be as bad as we say. Homeopathy can’t really be made of nothing, can it? But it’s a large industry, with entire hospitals in the UK. How can it be as nonsensical as the skeptics are saying?

This naivete extends, unfortunately, to many university administrators, who are used to being egalitarian and accommodating. Proponents of CAM are sincere, and know how to play the game, so they put their best academic foot forward (often lubricated with grants from ideologically dedicated organizations like the Bravewell collaboration) and work their way into academia. They are persistent, and good at dismissing their critics as closed-minded, unfair, or having an axe to grind.

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It is well established that people generally have a well developed ability to recognize human faces. There is a substantial part of the visual cortex dedicated to doing just that, giving us the ability to recognize any of thousands of familiar faces in a fraction of a second. This is a useful skill to have for a social species like Homo sapiens. In addition to being able to recognize individuals, we can also gain information about health, fertility, gender, age, mood, and intention from looking at the face. We can also convey a great deal of non-verbal communication by facial expression alone.

A recent study published in PLOS One looked at the small question of what part of the face do people generally look at when trying to recognize an individual? In particular the authors were exploring the question of cultural differences.

Prior research has shown that Westerners tend to look at each eye then the mouth when sizing up another person. This suggests that they are looking at the details of these individual features. Asians, however, generally look at the center of the face, around the nose, perhaps so that they can take in the spacial relationship among the various facial features. These are two different strategies that can be used for facial recognition. This finding raises at least two questions – are these differences genetic or learned, and is there an adaptive reason for them? The research suggests that it is largely learned (Asians who grew up in the West use a combined Western and Asian style of facial recognition.)

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A  ”crank” is a particular variety of pseudoscientist or “true believer” – one that tries very hard to be a real scientist but is hopelessly crippled by a combination of incompetence and a tendency to interpret their own incompetence as overwhelming genius. In a recent article in Slate (republished from New Scientist) Margaret Wertheim tries, for some reason, to defend those cranks who believe they have developed an alternate theory of physics. In the article she does a good job of painting a picture of what a crank is, but it seems almost incidental as the main thrust of her article is to criticize science for being inaccessible. The result is confused and misleading.

In order see exactly why a crank is a crank one needs to have a clear idea of how mainstream science works and why (something that cranks often lack themselves). Science is often portrayed in popular culture in the quaint manner of the lone genius working away in their lab and developing ideas largely on their own. Further, any true advance is met by nothing but scorn from their colleagues and the scientific establishment. This view may have been somewhat relevant in the 19th century and earlier, but rarely has any relevance to modern science.

Science has progressed in most areas to the point that a large body of knowledge needs to be mastered before meaningful contributions are possible. New ideas and information are shared with the community throughout the process of research and discovery, in papers and at meetings, and ideas are criticized and picked over. Each component of a scientific theory needs to be experimentally or observationally established, and there should be good reasons to distinguish one theory from another. Any viable theory needs to at the very least account for existing evidence and should be compatible with well-established theories or facts, or have a compelling explanation for why they aren’t.

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One concept that is important to being a scientist or critical thinker is that terms need to be defined precisely and unambiguously. Words are ideas and ideas can be sharp or fuzzy – fuzzy ideas lead to fuzzy thinking. An obstacle to using language precisely is that words often have multiple definitions, and many words that have a specific technical definition also have a colloquial use that is different than the technical use, or at least not as precise.

Recently on the SGU we talked about randomness, a concept that can use more exploration than we had time for on the show. The term “random” has a colloquial use – it is often used to mean a non-sequitur, or something that is out of context. It is also used colloquially in the mathematical sense, as a sequence or arrangement that does not have any apparent or actual pattern. However, people have a  generally poor naive sense about what is random, mathematically speaking.

There are at least two specific technical definitions of the term random I want to discuss. The first is mathematical randomness. Here there is a specific operational definition; a random sequence of numbers is one in which every digit has a statistically equal chance of occurring at any position. That’s pretty straightforward. This operation can be applied to many sequences to see if they conform to a statistically random sequence. Gambling is one such application. The sequence of numbers that come up at the roulette table, for example, should be mathematically random. No one number should come up more often than any other (over a sufficiently large sample size), and there should be no pattern to the sequence. Every number should have an equal chance of appearing at any time. Otherwise players would be able to take advantage of the non-randomness to increased their odds of winning.

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Joe Nickell has been a working skeptic for a long time, and I am very happy to call him a friend. In writing this post I am reminded of something he said to me that struck me as particularly insightful – (paraphrasing) cynicism is a cheap form of skeptical one-upsmanship. In other words, it’s easy to seem more skeptical than the next guy just by being more cynical. True skepticism, however, is hard intellectual work.

This resonated with me, and brought into sharp focus what has bothered me about many encounters I have had in which someone was chiding me for not being skeptical enough. Sometimes this was coming from a perspective that I would now consider denialism, the specific denial of a generally accepted scientific or historical fact for ideological reasons. At other times the cynical pseudoskepticism was really just paranoid conspiracy mongering. For example, I recently received the following e-mail:

I sort of lost interest in you folks way back when OBL was “killed’” and his body disposed of at sea and photographs withheld, all inviting skepticism but instead skeptics earning nothing but ridicule from your team. I decided you weren’t really skeptical enough about some things, just others. Something about the behavior of otherwise excellent minds in the shadow of a powerful military state with an excellent propaganda apparatus. Except that in this case the propaganda was clumsy, the lies flagrant and out there to see …

The e-mailer is referring to our discussion on the SGU of the killing of Osama bin Laden by US forces. At the time we received many e-mails from those who thought we should taken a more “skeptical” perspective – the position that the US government was lying about the killing of OBL to some extent, and perhaps even entirely. Skepticism regarding the government is a typical context for this sort of response.

This can serve as an excellent example, in my opinion, of the difference between true skepticism and the cheap imitation – cynicism.

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One thing that I notice when the issue of so-called complementary and alternative medicine (CAM, although some of my colleagues add the “s” from “so-called” to make is SCAM) is brought up in the media is that many misconceptions will be cited as fact, often by both sides, although far more by the pro-CAM side. CAM advocates seem to rely almost entirely on misconceptions and factual errors.

In Australia recently an ABC program aired that was highly critical of CAM, and now CAM advocates are firing back. The latest exchange was initiated by a group of 34 Australian physicians who are campaigning against pseudoscience in medicine. This is something that should not be controversial, but amazingly there is a large number of practitioners (although a minority) that stand  up to defend pseudoscience in medicine. They report:

Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the University of New South Wales John Dwyer says some courses previously offered at Southern Cross were more “magic” than science.
“We were off to a bad start with Southern Cross University when their founding Professor of Health and Nursing was teaching for years Healing Touch therapy; quite extraordinary nonsense.”

Good for him and his colleagues – we need more professionals who are not afraid to point out that the CAM emperor has no clothes.

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Perhaps the weak link in the effectiveness of vaccines is public acceptance. Individual vaccine types vary in terms of their effectiveness, but all are reasonably effective and very safe. Vaccines are, in my opinion, one of the “home runs” of modern medicine – scientists hit upon a way to marshal our own immune systems to make us resistant or even completely immune to certain infectious diseases. The result has been a dramatic decrease in diseases that used to plague humanity, and the complete eradication of one (smallpox).

It is ironic that the greatest barrier to the effectiveness of the vaccine program is public acceptance. Part of the problem is that very high acceptance is needed in order to achieve what is called “herd immunity” – where there is sufficient protection in the population that an infected individual will likely not cause an outbreak.

In the US the numbers are pretty good, and have remained so even through the recent increase in the anti-vaccine movement. About 68% of children complete the full routine vaccination series. Many of the individual vaccines have compliance rates in the 90s (MMR, for example, was 92.1% in 2008). The level required for herd immunity varies, but it is generally around 85-90%.

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Here we go again. Over the past few years there have been a number of cases in which a crank, quack, or charlatan has attempted to silence legitimate criticism of their claims and behavior by threatening legal action, either shutting down their site through the ISP or suing for libel. I guess they feel that a lone blogger would be easy to intimidate. They are not part of a large media outlet with lawyers on the payroll to defend them. Defending against even a frivolous suit can be ruinous to a lone blogger.

The goal, however, is not to really sue but to threaten the blogger into silence. It is intellectual thuggery, meant to defend a charlatan who cannot defend themselves with science and evidence.

However, it is not accurate to describe bloggers who expose charlatans as “lone” – they are part of an informal web of science and skeptical bloggers who are all trying to expose fraud and pseudoscience. When one of us is threatened we have banded together to create what is knows as the Streisand effect – try to silence one blogger and a hundred voices will rise up, having the exact opposite effect that you intend.

Recently a person calling himself Marc Stephens wrote a very threatening letter to Andy Lewis who wrote a critical post about the cancer clinic of Stanislaw Burzynski called The False Hope of the Burzynki Clinic. Stephens tried to make the letter sound legal and official, even though he does not appear to be a lawyer. The letter says, in part:

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Umm….Yes. Yes it does.

This is one of those stories that immediately makes me think that there must be a deeper issue that the press is missing. Recently the European Food Safety Authority was asked to evaluate and approve the following statement:

“Regular consumption of significant amounts of water can reduce the risk of development of dehydration and of concomitant decrease of performance.”

After three years of investigation the EFSA concluded:

The Panel considers that the proposed claim does not comply with the requirements for a disease risk reduction claim pursuant to Article 14 of Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006

This decision has been immediately and widely criticized as absurd – the EFSA is saying that water does not prevent dehydration. It’s surreal. It right out of Brazil, a dark comedic dystopian totalitarian nightmare. Or perhaps it’s just abject stupidity.

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