Recently in nature of science Category

 That's a question that many science blog-posts examine, implicitly if not explicitly. I do it here (quite a lot, recently!) when writing about various pseudo-scientific claims, & the same goes on over at Sciblogs NZ. It's an interesting question that sometimes receives rather slick, glib answers.

Over at Science-Based Medicine, Kimball Atwood has written a particularly good discussion around the 'what is science?' question, including an explanation of why many of those glib answers are based on a mis-characterisation, or a mis-understanding, of the nature of science. 

(I really enjoyed reading it. But now - I must get back to revising my study guides!)

I joined Facebook about a year ago - primarily to access the NZIBO pages, but subsequently I found I quite enjoyed keeping up with what friends & family are up to. More recently I've added 'entities' like ScienceAlert, & through that particular link I've just found an excellent series of short videos on critical thinking. With the new NZ school year coming up, I thought it might be good to share them more widely.

So, here we go :-)

 The other day my friend Renee sent through this link, & her thoughts. "This article (& website) set my woo-ometer off big time," she said. The article's entitled Scientists cure cancer, but no one takes notice, and begins thusly:

Canadian researchers find a simple cure for cancer, but major pharmaceutical companies are not interested. Researchers at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada, have cured cancer last week, yet there is a little ripple in the news or on TV.

 This week I've found myself becoming quite frustrated with the way alternative 'therapies' are being presented in the NZ Herald. Two of the three described to date are - as described - essentially massage therapies (as Michael Edmonds has noted here) & hardly need the overlay of pseudoscientific claims (unless, perhaps, to gain wider acceptability?). The third, so-called hirudotherapy, has the potential to do real harm - as Siouxsie and I have both pointed out - and lacks any evidence for several of its claims. And I'm left wondering why the journalists concerned don't appear to be querying any of the claims made for & about these various modalities.

Which leads me to think that Steve Novella's BS** detector needs to be very widely read & discussed. There's a full article about this in last September's The Skeptic magazine, but the key points are summarised below. Useful in science classrooms - heck, in any classroom! - and in newsrooms as well. As Steve notes, "raising the red flag or activating your BS detector doesn't mean it's going to be BS in the end", but what follows is a a list of questions that we should all ask when presented with a new claim where we can't be sure whether or not it's actually legit:

• How extraordinary are the claims?
• How many different conditions are claimed to be treated by one modality?
• What is the mechanism?
• What is the plausibility?
• Is the treatment generally accepted or promoted by a single individual or group?
• Are there claims for a conspiracy of suppression?

It would be a useful 'nature of science' classroom exercise to revisit the Herald's articles with these questions in mind.

** BS = bovine excrement

Steve Novella (2011) The BS Detector. The Skeptic 31(3):11-15 (the magazine of the Australian Skeptics, www.skeptics.com.au)

This morning's Herald ran an article on 'alternative therapies' - New Zealanders' beliefs about their effectiveness, & a Herald reporter's experience of one such 'therapy'. (Apparently there will be more to come over the next few days.) The article presented some results from a recent UMR research poll - as it was provided 'exclusively to the Herald' I wasn't able to read the whole thing - which apparently show that around 75% of those surveyed believe that arnica reduces bruising (which it may well do, provided we're talking therapeutic & not homeopathic concentrations), while 51% believe that homeopathy has been scientifically proven. Sigh. (The article also cited a 2008 Massey University study, which I wrote about at the time it came out.)

So I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised to read on & find that the reporter who tried hirudotherapy (ie blood-letting using medicinal leeches) didn't actually question any of the claims made for this particular treatment modality.

Over at this post by Seth Mnookin** in the new HuffPo science section (like Orac I will be rather interested to see how this section pans out), a commenter with the 'nym Seeking Clarity remarked:

What our mainstream science education curricula apparently fails to adequately teach is why the process of science tends to produce information of relatively high reliability and why this process is such useful compensation for human limitations.

We are instead taught to recite the requisite repertoire of science fact and vocabulary that may be useful to science majors but which (divorced from its epistemological context) is experienced by average students as irrelevant to their own lives. 

As a result, the findings of science are seen as one of any number of engines of opinion. The public often misses the role of carefully and collaboratively vetted empirical corroboration as a basis of confidence.

Therefore the relative tentativeness, incompleteness, and internal controversies that characterise the products and the community of science can be mistaken for weakness in contrast to those persons who unhesitatingly and appealingly claim to have access to conclusive truths.

I've reproduced the comment here as it's very relevant to discussions I've had with colleagues & fellow science bloggers about the voluminous quantities of pseudoscience circulating on the internet & also available through the media (some of the latter masquerades as 'entertainment' but some - Ancient Aliens for example - is presented with a seemingly straight face). There seems to be a huge demand for this sort of stuff, as witnessed by the number of websites offering up kitty-litter as a cure-all (not that they come out & call zeolite 'kitty-litter'), or the 'miracle mineral supplement' (knock back bleach & it will cure your ills), or detox foot-pads, or... the supply seems endless, & that's not even counting the more 'mainstream' things like homeopathy.

People do tend to seek certainty in their lives, & as the comment above notes, scientists simply can't give absolute certainty. But that's often not understood, & it may well make the 'alternatives' seem that much more attractive. Hopefully the implementation of the 2007 science curriculum will help to redress that, at least with current & future students. But at the same time we do need to address the sheer volume of information (aka facts) that students must learn; in my opinion that discussion is long overdue!

** which is an excellent commentary  on the importance of & need for vaccination - & for responsible science journalism.

 I was reading Andy Lewis's Quackometer blog while eating lunch & came across a reference to a homepathic preparation of Tyrannosaurus rex. Hoho, I thought, you are joking; please pull the other one. And then (being of curious persuasion & also it was still lunchtime) I decided to check it out.

But no, it turns out that this 'product' is actually on offer - for all sorts of mind-related issues if this site is to be believed. If you'd rather shop around you can also find it here (although I apparently don't have permission to access the specific information about the remedy), or here, or read about 'case studies' here.

Now, over on the syndicated version of this post, at Sciblogs, a supporter of homeopathy invited me to keep an open mind about the issue. Unfortunately the use of such an item does require the asking of critical questions; it does not mean simply taking claims at face value. And what we have here is a bunch of claims that you can buy 'remedies' that at one time have had a passing acquaintance of a bit of Tyrannosaurus rex. And that those 'remedies' actually do some good. (None of the sites I visited provided any clinical evidence of this.)

Let's leave aside the issue of why someone, somewhere, might take it into their head that a preparation of long-dead dinosaur might be a useful addition to the homeopathic pharmacopeia, and assuming that the original solution (prior to dilution well past Avogadro's number) did actually involve fossil remains, I do have a couple of questions.

Do those offering this concoction really really think that it once included actual T.rex? Because the chemical composition of a T.rex fossil is going to be significantly different from that of the once-living animal. (While one recent find seems to have included some organic material, this is not going to be readily available to all comers.)

And - where did they get their original sample from? (A question one could also ask of those claiming to sell homeopathic plutonium. No, really.) Because there aren't exactly a lot of T.rex fossils lying around for the taking: around 30 specimens in total. (Although I suppose they could have purchased teeth over the internet. But would teeth do something different from the rest of the animal???)

I rather feel that it's not me that needs to be opening the mind's doors...

Via one of Orac's commenters I happened on a webpage of this name. The page's author is a hypnotherapist who describes his work as involving taking patients into their past lives ('regressions') and future lives ('progressions'). Hence, I suppose, the 'time travel'. 

And these supposed time travellers seem to be very advanced: 

Time travel will be discovered in approximately the year 3050 by a man named Taatos. He is the Hermes of ancient Egypt and the very first chrononaut (time traveler). Prior to his actually traveling back in time, holographic images were sent into the past. This is why the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, etc. described "visions" by their oracles, soothsayers and psychics.

The following post is an article that I originally wrote for the New Zealand Science Teacher journal (the official journal of the New Zealand Association of Science Educators), and is reproduced here by kind permission of the editor.

We live in a time when science features large in our lives, probably more so than ever before. It is  important that people have at least some understanding of how science works, not least so that they can make informed decisions when aspects of science impinge on them. Yet pseudoscience seems to be on the increase. While some argue that we simply ignore it, I suggest we use pseudoscience to help teach the nature of science (and I recommend Jane Young's excellent book, The uncertainty of it all: understanding the nature of science,(2010) as a resource).

The New Zealand Curriculum (MoE, 2007) makes it clear that there's more to studying science than simply accumulating facts: Science is a way of investigating, understanding, and explaining our natural, physical world and the wider Universe. It involves generating and testing ideas, gathering evidence – including by making observations, carrying out investigations and modeling, and communicating and debating with others – in order to develop scientific knowledge, understanding and explanations (p28). In other words, studying science also involves learning about the nature of science: that it is a process as much as, or more than, a set of facts. Pseudoscience offers a lens through which to approach this.

Over at Orac's place, one of his commenters mentioned the therapeutic use of didgeridoos for various health issues. Surely this is a joke, I thought - but no: it seems that didgeridoo sound therapy is indeed alive and well...