I am sitting in an airport right now – traveling makes it very challenging to keep up with my multi-media output. Just getting the SGU out this week will be a challenge (but fear not – it will get out on time). So – I only have time for a short post this morning.

Recently Congressman Henry Waxman introduced a bill that would hold vitamin sellers accountable for the health claims that they make. This would be a sensible change to the current regulations in the US, which essentially amount to a free-for-all with a thin veneer of accountability. Right now there is almost no pre-marketing requirements for the supplement industry.

Thanks to DSHEA, companies (which increasingly include pharmaceutical companies – so forget your homey image of a  mom-and-pop vitamin store) are free to sell vitamins and “supplements” (which can include herbs used as drugs) without any requirement to provide evidence of safety and efficacy. They are even allowed to make pseudo health claims – so-called “structure and function” claims.

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One of the challenges of trying to be scientific, and an honest intellectual, is that judgment is often required in assessing a claim or topic. The problem with relying upon one’s judgment is that it is fraught, even overwhelmed, with personal bias. The “default mode” of human behavior (which means most people do this most of the time) is to construct an elaborate rationalization for what we already believe, and want to believe. The more intelligent we are, the more sophisticated and elaborate our rationalizations – giving more confidence in our conclusions, but not necessarily deserved.

The solution to this problem is to develop a specific intellectual skill set – knowledge of the many and various ways in which we bias our thinking and the constant application of this knowledge to our own beliefs. In other words, we need to be skeptical, especially of ourselves. But not just skeptical in attitude, systematically skeptical of the process of our own thought. But since this is necessarily self-referential (we can bias our assessment of our biases) it is also necessary to check your beliefs and thinking against other people, people with different perspectives – from different backgrounds, areas of expertise, and cultures.

The opposite of this approach is to be insular, to have a self-contained belief system that feeds on itself but which is completely disconnected from logic and reality. Humans seem to have an unfortunate penchant for falling into such self-contained belief systems, cults being the ultimate expression of this tendency. Conspiracy theories are another manifestation.

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Last night Frontline aired a show called The Vaccine Wars. You can watch the full episode online here. Overall, they did a good job of representing the current state of the science, and the anti-scientific nature of the anti-vaccine movement.

The overall theme of the piece was that anti-vaccine parents are irresponsible and go against the science. In fact, their view are immune to science, as they dismiss the evidence which contradicts their position, and constantly shift the goalposts when evidence goes against a link between vaccines and autism.

The piece did cut some corners on details, but probably will only be noticed by someone steeped in the anti-vaccine movement.

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Dr. Larry Dossey, author of The Power of Premonitions, has the audacity to educate us about the scientific method, appropriately enough in perhaps the most prominent anti-scientific venue on the web, the Huffington Post. He starts off with a horrid straw man quoted from Jeremy Rifkin:

The scientific observer is never a participant in the reality he or she observes, but only a voyeur. As for the world he or she observes, it is a cold, uncaring place, devoid of awe, compassion or sense of purpose. Even life itself is made lifeless to better dissect its component parts. We are left with a purely material world, which is quantifiable but without quality … The scientific method is at odds with virtually everything we know about our own nature and the nature of the world. It denies the relational aspect of reality, prohibits participation and makes no room for empathic imagination. Students in effect are asked to become aliens in the world.

This is a Hollywood level cardboard stereotype. It certainly does not resemble what I have experienced as science or scientists. Without getting too much into this side point, Rifkin himself is a controversial figure in the scientific world. He is an economist, not a scientist, and just to give you a flavor of his reputation, Stephen J. Gould once wrote about his work that it was, “a cleverly constructed tract of anti-intellectual propaganda masquerading as scholarship.”

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The anti-vaccine movement, as is probably typical for ideological movements, has natural enemies and allies. Once the notion that mercury in the form of thimerosal in vaccines might be responsible for neurodevelopmental disorders (it’s not) became popular in the anti-vaccine crowd, this made them natural allies with the “mercury-militia” – those who blame environmental mercury for a host of ills. The fact that some anti-vaccinationists seek to provide their children on the autism spectrum with unconventional biological treatments, based on their disproved “toxin” hypothesis, made them natural allies with the alternative medicine community. Both seek freedom from pesky regulation, and rail against the perceived deficiencies of science-based medicine.

Another ideological alliance is brewing – that between the anti-vaccine movement and extreme environmentalists. This post is not a commentary on environmentalism, and please do not take it as such – the purposes and claims of the two movements are quite distinct. But they share a common thread: distrust of scientific experts and government regulators who reassure the public that environmental exposures are safe.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been the most prominent environmentalist to take up the anti-vaccine cause, in several articles and speeches. While he appears to be only a part-time anti-vaccinationist, his celebrity and street cred among environmentalists lend a great deal of weight to his paranoid musings about scientific fraud and government cover ups. It seems he wants to recapitulate the moral clarity that his uncles displayed in the 1960s, defending the little guy against abuses by the powerful and privileged. He is ready to see a conspiracy, and he wants to be the crusader for environmental justice – and if kids are the alleged victims, all the better. His article in the Huffington Post – “Attack on Mothers,” says it all.

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It seems that one criterion to being a practicing homeopath is the requirement to publicly embarrass oneself .  Dana Ullman now regularly does this over at the Huffington Post. Dr. Werner, however, in a single YouTube video, may have won for the most embarrassing homeopathy nonsense of the year.  Her mutilation of Einstein and relativity is self-parody.

Here’s another one from John Benneth – the science of homeopathy. He discusses the latest nonsense about “nanocrystalloids” in homeopathic remedies which emit radio frequencies. This is just empty jargon to jazz up the same false claims of homeopaths that their remedies contain the energy signature or essence of what was diluted in them. But this is not supported by any reputable science.

And here is the recent review by The Parliamentary Science and Technology Select Committee on homeopathy in the UK where Robert Wilson of the British Association of Homeopathic Manufacturers admits that there is no evidence to support the effectiveness of homeopathic remedies, but they sell them anyway.

And now, Amy L. Lansky, PhD, a computer scientist and now homeopathy proponent, writing for Mercola.com (a site that promotes every sort of medicine – as long as it is unscientific), decides to enter the fray for the most embarrassing homeopathy apologetics.  After a bit of whining about persecution, she attacks homeopathy’s critics, referring to a recent editorial by Michael Baum and Edzard Ernst:
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Writing for the Huffington Post, Deepak Chopra and Robert Lanza promote the notion of “biocentrism” – “that an accurate understanding of the world requires putting observers firmly into the equation, and that life may not be the accident of physics and chemistry that evolution suggests.”

This idea is really nothing new – it is a transparent abuse and misunderstanding of modern physics and quantum mechanics in order to insert mysticism into science.

They begin with what is known as the anthropic principle:

Why, for instance, are the laws of nature exactly balanced for life to exist? There are over 200 physical parameters within the solar system and universe so exact that it strains credulity to propose that they are random — even if that is exactly what contemporary physics baldly suggests. These fundamental constants (like the strength of gravity) are not predicted by any theory — all seem to be carefully chosen, often with great precision, to allow for existence of life. Tweak any of them and you never existed.

We currently have no idea why the laws of the universe are the way they are. We also don’t know if they have to be the way they are, or if there are many, perhaps infinite, variations and the universe we know is just one. Is the mass of an electron always the same? Is the gravitational constant different in every universe? Are there even other universes?

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Deepak Chopra, writing for (of course) the Huffington Post, laments about his critics that, “Most of my stinging darts come from skeptics.” So he has decided to attack skeptics and skepticism – a preemptive strike against his critics. Predictably he mangles scientific skepticism, and is content to attack a straw man and then declare victory.

He begins:

Over the years I’ve found that ill-tempered guardians of scientific truth can’t abide speculative thinking. And as the renowned Richard Dawkins has proved, they are also very annoyed by a nuisance named God.

Right of he starts by accusing skeptics of being “ill-tempered” as if we are all cynical curmudgeons. This is an unimaginative ad hominem (Chopra really wracks up the logical fallacies in this post). Many of the skeptics I know are actually quite mild-mannered, even overly nice. Chopra confuses, perhaps, sharp scientific criticism with emotion. This is a common mistake among those who are not adequately familiar with the scientific process – it is a relentless meatgrinder of criticism and does not abide illogic or sloppiness – and that’s a good thing.  Beware of those who confuse scientific analysis and criticism with being mean.

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Deepak Chopra has made a career out of misunderstanding quantum mechanics (QM) – and through his popularity, confusing the public. Like many others, he has found a superficial way in which to interpret quantum mechanics to make is seem as if it is congruent with Eastern metaphysics.

And now he has done it again, in that anti-science rag the Huffington Post. Chopra goes beyond the typical New Age distortion of QM, which is basically the claim that QM is really weird, therefore magic is real. Chopra assumes some very specific, and common, misinterpretations of QM. He writes:

Quantum physics tells us that objects exist in a suspended physical state until observed, when they collapse to just one outcome — we don’t know what happens until we investigate, and our investigation influences that reality. Whether or not certain events may have happened some time ago, may not actually be determined until some time in your future — it may actually be contingent upon actions that have not yet taken place.

Chopra is referring to the wave-particle duality of matter, quantum entanglement, and the uncertainty principle – but he gets them profoundly wrong. First he makes the common mistake of interpreting the collapse of the wave function as being dependent on an observer, which is false. QM states that light, electrons, and all fundamental particles exist not as  discrete point particles, but spread out like a wave. We can only describe the probability that they will be in a specific place at any moment, and that probability is the wave function. Particles, when free from interactions with other matter, actually behave like waves (see the double slit experiments).

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Yes, I know – it’s the Daily Mail. My UK friends tell me this is little more than a rag, not to be taken seriously. But it’s popular enough, and may in fact represent the attitudes of a portion of the public, that sometimes we have to address the claims that are made there. In that way it is like the Huffington Post – a hopeless rag (at least when it comes to science) that sometimes needs a response.

This time the Daily Mail has published an incredible anti-science and anti-intellectual rant by reporter Andrew N Wilson. The article is a discussion of the firing of science adviser, David Nutt, over his recommendations regarding recreational drugs. The Guardian did a decent job of covering the controversy – but also had the moxy to run the headline – “David Nutt Sacked.” Perhaps that does not mean the same thing in the UK as it does in the US – which is hilarious.

There are two issues here – the question of drug policy and how it should be informed by science, and the incredible reaction of Wilson. Interestingly, I find myself siding (just a bit) with Wilson on some points, in that there is a kernel of truth to be had in his screed. Here’s the controversy in a nutt shell. David Nutt produced a report comparing the risks to individuals and society of various substances, including tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and ecstasy. He concluded that the risk from the legal substances far outweighs the risk from the illegal ones.

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