Skepticblog

Last September the OPERA collaboration in Italy announced that they had detected neutrinos apparently traveling faster than the speed of light. In their experimental setup the neutrinos arrived about 60 nanoseconds ahead of what the speed of light would have produced. The first persons to be skeptical of this result were the researchers themselves. They understood that this result is at odds with perhaps the most confirmed theories in all of science – Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity. According to relativity theory nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. This is not a practical limitation, it is inherent to the fabric of the universe.

Every now and then a lab somewhere claims to have broken this law of relativity, but in every case (so far) it seems that they simply made an experimental error or interpreted their results incorrectly. This ultimate speed limit seems to be as solid a law of physics as the conservation of energy, and experiments that seem to break this law suffer the same fate as those who believe they have invented a perpetual motion or free energy machine.

This claim, however, was different because the scientists exhaustively searched for any possible source of error they could think of and eliminated it, and the 60 nanosecond discrepancy persisted. Only when they did everything they could to disprove their results did they announce them to the world – still with the proper caution that was due. They essentially asked the rest of the scientific community to help them find the source of the error, while tentatively saying that if their results are true, wouldn’t that be interesting.

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A century and a half ago scientists knew very little about how life works, at least compared to what we know today. They knew little about the organelles that make up each living cells, the biochemical pathways involved in living processes, and knew absolutely nothing about genetics (which didn’t even exist yet as a discipline). It was in this context of relative ignorance that Charles Darwin proposed his particular theory of evolution and presented his argument for common descent and natural selection. The notion of evolution and common descent predates Darwin – scientists before him noticed a pattern in the sequence of fossils appearing in successive geological layers. Life seemed to be changing over geological time, with species in younger layers seeming to be derived from species in older layers.

Darwin added to that that basic observation his extensive personal observations of nature – that there is actually a great deal of variation within species, and that many species on the Galapagos seem to be derived from related species on the mainland, but changed to adapt to various niches on the islands. Still, evolution through natural selection was a remarkable hypothesis, but little more than a hypothesis. It is perhaps a good thing that there was so much left to discover about basic biology when evolution was proposed, for that created the opportunity to test this crazy theory.

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Online surveys are worthless. That is, they are worthless as a source of information about popular belief and opinions. Yet many people still find them compelling, and so they can be useful as a way of driving traffic to your website. I guess that’s why they persist.

A recent poll about teaching complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in Australian universities has become a matter of unnecessary controversy. Asher Moses wrote an article complaining about the fact that the survey seems to have been “gamed”, in an article: Vote on alternative medicine falls victim to dark arts of the internet. In the article he seems to miss the two real points about the poll – surveys are not reliable, and it’s fallacious to use them as an argument from popularity anyway. He writes:

Voting progressed steadily at first but on Tuesday votes began rising from about 125,000 to more than 877,000 by the time voting closed on Thursday. The end result was 70 per cent no, 30 per cent yes. The number of votes in the poll was about eight times more than the number of online readers of the story, a clear indicator that the poll had been gamed.

Moses talks in the article about how easy it is to “game” an online survey, but that is not the real issue. Most surveys are probably not hacked, as indicated above it is easy to detect such manipulation. Rather, there is a problem inherent with polls and surveys. The only reference to this issue in the article is acknowledgement that the survey was not “scientific” – but what does that mean, exactly?

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Recently the Centers for Disease Control published the results of a fairly comprehensive study of what some call Morgellons disease (which Brian also blogged about last week). This is a controversial entity  – not so much within scientific circles, but because of an active group of proponents. The claims that Morgellons is a distinct pathophysiological disease, and the recent study, raise some basic questions: How do we establish that a diagnosis really exists? How are psychogenic disorders diagnosed?  These are a serious and complex questions in medicine.

First we have to recognize that the term “diagnosis” refers to various types of entities. A diagnosis is a label that we use to describe the signs, symptoms, natural history, and possible biological causes that we observe in more than one patient. There has to be some recurrent pattern, and that is what we are labeling. The term “disease” is similar, but more specific, referring to a specific pathophysiological entity – a specific malfunction or dysfunction of some biological process. For example, myasthenia gravis is a specific disease in which the immune system creates antibodies that attack the acetylcholine receptors on muscle cells, inhibiting muscle contraction and causing weakness and fatigue. In fact MG can be divided into several subtypes, depending on the presence and type of antibodies detected. It is a very specific pathophysiological entity, and diagnosis and treatment flows from our understanding of the disease process.

We do not always understand the details of what causes a specific medical entity, however. Often we start with a syndrome – a constellation of signs, symptoms, and natural history that occurs in more than one patient. It then may take years or decades to sort out the causes or causes of the syndrome, subtypes, prognosis and treatments. Knowledge of the cause is also not black or white. There are layers of depth and detail to our knowledge of various syndromes and diseases. We may know that a disease is an infectious disease, but not know much about the organism. Or we may know what body tissue is being affected and how that results in the symptoms, but not what is causing the damage.

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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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