7 Laws Of Voodoo Science

[Guest guest]

Here is an interesting article presented in a usenet discussion group.

POINT OF VIEW

The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science

By ROBERT L. PARK

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is investing close to

a million dollars in an obscure Russian scientist's antigravity

machine, although it has failed every test and would violate the most

fundamental laws of nature. The Patent and Trademark Office recently

issued Patent 6,362,718 for a physically impossible motionless

electromagnetic generator, which is supposed to snatch free energy from

a vacuum. And major power companies have sunk tens of millions of

dollars into a scheme to produce energy by putting hydrogen atoms into

a state below their ground state, a feat equivalent to mounting an

expedition to explore the region south of the South Pole.

There is, alas, no scientific claim so preposterous that a scientist

cannot be found to vouch for it. And many such claims end up in a court

of law after they have cost some gullible person or corporation a lot

of money. How are juries to evaluate them?

Before 1993, court cases that hinged on the validity of scientific

claims were usually decided simply by which expert witness the jury

found more credible. Expert testimony often consisted of tortured

theoretical speculation with little or no supporting evidence. Jurors

were bamboozled by technical gibberish they could not hope to follow,

delivered by experts whose credentials they could not evaluate.

In 1993, however, with the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Daubert

v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. the situation began to change. The

case involved Bendectin, the only morning-sickness medication ever

approved by the Food and Drug Administration. It had been used by

millions of women, and more than 30 published studies had found no

evidence that it caused birth defects. Yet eight so-called experts were

willing to testify, in exchange for a fee from the Daubert family, that

Bendectin might indeed cause birth defects.

In ruling that such testimony was not credible because of lack of

supporting evidence, the court instructed federal judges to serve as

" gatekeepers, " screening juries from testimony based on scientific

nonsense. Recognizing that judges are not scientists, the court invited

judges to experiment with ways to fulfill their gatekeeper

responsibility.

Justice G. Breyer encouraged trial judges to appoint

independent experts to help them. He noted that courts can turn to

scientific organizations, like the National Academy of Sciences and the

American Association for the Advancement of Science, to identify

neutral experts who could preview questionable scientific testimony and

advise a judge on whether a jury should be exposed to it. Judges are

still concerned about meeting their responsibilities under the Daubert

decision, and a group of them asked me how to recognize questionable

scientific claims. What are the warning signs?

I have identified seven indicators that a scientific claim lies well

outside the bounds of rational scientific discourse. Of course, they

are only warning signs -- even a claim with several of the signs could

be legitimate.

1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media. The

integrity of science rests on the willingness of scientists to expose

new ideas and findings to the scrutiny of other scientists. Thus,

scientists expect their colleagues to reveal new findings to them

initially. An attempt to bypass peer review by taking a new result

directly to the media, and thence to the public, suggests that the work

is unlikely to stand up to close examination by other scientists.

One notorious example is the claim made in 1989 by two chemists from

the University of Utah, B. Stanley Pons and Fleischmann, that

they had discovered cold fusion -- a way to produce nuclear fusion

without expensive equipment. Scientists did not learn of the claim

until they read reports of a news conference. Moreover, the

announcement dealt largely with the economic potential of the discovery

and was devoid of the sort of details that might have enabled other

scientists to judge the strength of the claim or to repeat the

experiment. (Ian Wilmut's announcement that he had successfully cloned

a sheep was just as public as Pons and Fleischmann's claim, but in the

case of cloning, abundant scientific details allowed scientists to

judge the work's validity.)

Some scientific claims avoid even the scrutiny of reporters by

appearing in paid commercial advertisements. A health-food company

marketed a dietary supplement called Vitamin O in full-page newspaper

ads. Vitamin O turned out to be ordinary saltwater.

2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to

suppress his or her work. The idea is that the establishment will

presumably stop at nothing to suppress discoveries that might shift the

balance of wealth and power in society. Often, the discoverer describes

mainstream science as part of a larger conspiracy that includes

industry and government. Claims that the oil companies are frustrating

the invention of an automobile that runs on water, for instance, are a

sure sign that the idea of such a car is baloney. In the case of cold

fusion, Pons and Fleischmann blamed their cold reception on physicists

who were protecting their own research in hot fusion.

3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of

detection. Alas, there is never a clear photograph of a flying saucer,

or the Loch Ness monster. All scientific measurements must contend with

some level of background noise or statistical fluctuation. But if the

signal-to-noise ratio cannot be improved, even in principle, the effect

is probably not real and the work is not science.

Thousands of published papers in para-psychology, for example, claim to

report verified instances of telepathy, psychokinesis, or precognition.

But those effects show up only in tortured analyses of statistics. The

researchers can find no way to boost the signal, which suggests that it

isn't really there.

4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal. If modern science has learned

anything in the past century, it is to distrust anecdotal evidence.

Because anecdotes have a very strong emotional impact, they serve to

keep superstitious beliefs alive in an age of science. The most

important discovery of modern medicine is not vaccines or antibiotics,

it is the randomized double-blind test, by means of which we know what

works and what doesn't. Contrary to the saying, " data " is not the

plural of " anecdote. "

5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for

centuries. There is a persistent myth that hundreds or even thousands

of years ago, long before anyone knew that blood circulates throughout

the body, or that germs cause disease, our ancestors possessed

miraculous remedies that modern science cannot understand. Much of what

is termed " alternative medicine " is part of that myth.

Ancient folk wisdom, rediscovered or repackaged, is unlikely to match

the output of modern scientific laboratories.

6. The discoverer has worked in isolation. The image of a lone genius

who struggles in secrecy in an attic laboratory and ends up making a

revolutionary breakthrough is a staple of Hollywood's science-fiction

films, but it is hard to find examples in real life. Scientific

breakthroughs nowadays are almost always syntheses of the work of many

scientists.

7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an

observation. A new law of nature, invoked to explain some extraordinary

result, must not conflict with what is already known. If we must change

existing laws of nature or propose new laws to account for an

observation, it is almost certainly wrong.

I began this list of warning signs to help federal judges detect

scientific nonsense. But as I finished the list, I realized that in our

increasingly technological society, spotting voodoo science is a skill

that every citizen should develop.

L. Park is a professor of physics at the University of land

at College Park and the director of public information for the American

Physical Society. He is the author of Voodoo Science: The Road From

Foolishness to Fraud (Oxford University Press, 2002).

--

Hobman

Saskatoon, CANADA