Re: Suppression, Censorship and Dogmatism in Science
Quintal
http://www.suppressedscience.net/skepticism.html
Some notes on Skepticism
Many who loudly advertise themselves as skeptics are actually
disbelievers. Properly, a skeptic is a nonbeliever, a person who
refuses to jump to conclusions based on inconclusive evidence. A
disbeliever, on the other hand, is characterized by an a priori belief
that a certain idea is wrong and will not be swayed by any amount of
empirical evidence to the contrary. Since disbelievers usually fancy
themselves skeptics, I will follow Truzzi and call them
pseudoskeptics, and their opinions pseudoskepticism.
Organized (Pseudo-)Skepticism
The more belligerent pseudoskeptics have their own organizations and
publications. In Germany, there is an organization called the
Gesellschaft zur wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von
Parawissenschaften e.V., or GWUP, ( "society for the scientific
evaluation of parasciences") which publishes a magazine called Der
Skeptiker ("the Skeptic"). In the United States, there is the
so-called "Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the
Paranormal", or short, CSICOP. The name suggests a serious, unbiased
institute or think tank whose mission is to advance human knowledge by
sorting out true anomalous discoveries from erroneous or fraudulent
ones. Indeed, that was what some of the original members of CSICOP
envisioned when they founded the organization in 1976. But in the very
same year, CSICOP faced an internal crisis, a power struggle between
the genuine skeptics and the disbelieving pseudoskeptics that was to
tilt the balance in favor of the latter.
At issue was the Mars Effect, an extraordinary claim made by French
statistician and psychologist Michel Gauquelin. Gauquelin had
discovered an apparent statistical correlation between the position of
Mars in the sky with the odds of becoming a sports champion, producing
a genuine piece of empirical evidence that astrology might not be
nonsense after all. This dismayed the pseudoskeptics, who until them
had been comfortable dismissing astrology on purely theoretical
grounds and were unwilling to even entertain the hypothesis that
Gauquelin's analysis might be correct. In 1976, in an attempt to make
this embarrassment go away once and for all, Harvard professor of
biostatistics and CSICOP fellow Marvin Zelen proposed a simplified
version of the original Gauquelin study which he subsequently
performed with the assistance of CSICOP chairman and professor of
philosophy Paul Kurtz and George Abell, a UCLA astronomer. In order to
get the result they wanted, the trio had to commit a total of six
statistical blunders, which are discussed in detail in the article The
True Disbelievers: Mars Effect Drives Skeptics to Irrationality by
former CSICOP fellow Richard Kammann. Proper analysis showed that the
new study actually supported the Gauquelin effect.
But Kurtz and his fellow pseudoskeptics had never been interested in
performing proper science. Their minds had been made up long before
the study was performed, and they adamantly refused to admit their
mistake in public. This lead to the resignation of many fair-minded
CSICOP members, among them Richard Kammann and co-founder Marcello
Truzzi. Truzzi wrote about his experience in Reflections On The
Reception Of Unconventional Claims In Science:
Originally I was invited to be a co-chairman of CSICOP by Paul Kurtz.
I helped to write the bylaws and edited their journal. I found myself
attacked by the Committee members and board, who considered me to be
too soft on the paranormalists. My position was not to treat
protoscientists as adversaries, but to look to the best of them and
ask them for their best scientific evidence. I found that the
Committee was much more interested in attacking the most publicly
visible claimants such as the "National Enquirer". The major interest
of the Committee was not inquiry but to serve as an advocacy body, a
public relations group for scientific orthodoxy. The Committee has
made many mistakes. My main objection to the Committee, and the reason
I chose to leave it, was that it was taking the public position that
it represented the scientific community, serving as gatekeepers on
maverick claims, whereas I felt they were simply unqualified to act as
judge and jury when they were simply lawyers.
After the true skeptics had been purged from the committee, CSICOP and
its magazine, the Skeptical Inquirer, degenerated into little more
than a propaganda outlet for the systematic ridicule of anything
unconventional. Led by a small, but highly aggressive group of
fundamentalist pseudoskeptics such as chairman and humanist
philosopher Paul Kurtz, science writer and magician Martin Gardner and
magician James Randi, CSICOP sees science not as a dispassionate,
objective search for the truth, whatever it might be, but as holy war
of the ideology of materialism against "a rising tide of
irrationality, superstition and nonsense". Kurtz and his fellows are
fundamentalist materialists. They hold the nonexistence of paranormal
phenomena as an article of faith, and they cling to that belief just
as fervently and irrationally as a devout catholic believes in the
Virgin Mary. They are fighting a no holds barred war against belief in
the paranormal, and they see genuine research into such matters as a
mortal threat to their belief system. Since genuine scientific study
has the danger that the desired outcome is not guaranteed, CSICOP
wisely no longer conducts scientific research of its own (such would
be a waste of time and money for an entity that already has all the
answers), and instead largely relies on the misrepresentation or
intentional omission of existing research and the ad-hominem - smear,
slander and ridicule.
Eugene Mallove, editor of Infinite Energy Magazine, relates the
following telling episode in issue 23, 1999 of his magazine:
On the morning of July 14, 1998, I called Skeptical Inquirer's editor,
Kendrick Frazier, to ask him, among other things, what research or
literature search he had done on cold fusion. He rebuffed me, saying
that he was too busy to talk, because he was on deadline on an
editorial project. We spoke briefly; he was transparently irritated.
He said, "I know who you are." He said that he did not want to talk to
me because, "We would have diametrically opposed views." I said, "Oh,
what research have you done to come to your conclusions about cold
fusion." I had thought that the careful investigation of
"diametrically opposed views" was part of the work of CSICOP. Perhaps
I was mistaken. Frazier said, "I'm not an investigator, I'm an
editor." The conversation ended with Frazier stating that he had
nothing further to say.
The entire article is available online: CSICOP: "Science Cops" at War
with Cold Fusion.
Even though it is largely run by scientific lay people, and its
practices are anathema to true science, CSICOP has enjoyed the support
of a number of highly prestigious scientists such as Stephen Jay
Gould, the late Carl Sagan, Glenn T. Seaborg, Leon Lederman and Murray
Gell-Mann. This support has enabled it to project an image of
scientific authority to the opinion shapers in the media and the
general public.
For a detailed study of pseudo-skepticism in general, and CSICOP in
particular, I refer the reader to George P. Hansen's article CSICOP
and the Skeptics: An Overview (published in the Journal of the
American Society for Psychical Research), in which CSICOP's history,
goals, tactics and membership structure are discussed in some detail.
In his conclusions, Hansen finds that
CSICOP’s message has often been well received, particularly among
scientific leaders. The growth of CSICOP, the circulation figures of
"SI", and the academic credentials of its readership prove that there
is wide interest in the paranormal among the most highly educated
members of our society. Many readers of "SI" undoubtedly assume that
CSICOP presents the best available scientific evidence. The readers
are rarely told of the existence of refereed scientific journals that
cover parapsychology. The effect of CSICOP’s activities is to create a
climate of hostility toward the investigation of paranormal claims;
indeed, at one CSICOP conference, the announcement of the closing of
several parapsychology laboratories was greeted with cheers.
The remainder of this text is devoted to a detailed discussion of
pseudoskeptical arguments and debating tactics.
*
If it was true, there is no way that science could have missed
it!
This is a variation of the end of science argument - since
science already knows everything, and does not recognize the
unconventional phenomenon, it cannot be real. Besides being based on a
mere belief - that science has discovered everything there is to know
- this argument ignores the nature of human perception. Even
scientists tend to see only what they want to see, and that is how
phenomena that we find completely obvious today, such as Wegener's
plate tectonics - look how South America fits into Africa! - went
unnoticed for a long time, and were violently opposed when they were
finally pointed out. As Arthur C. Clarke put it:
"It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but
conservative scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they
start with the preconceived idea that what they are investigating is
impossible. When this happens, the most well-informed men become
blinded by their prejudices and are unable to see what lies directly
ahead of them."
True skeptics appreciate that the principal flaw of human
perception - seeing what one wants to see - can afflict conventional
as well as unconventional scientists. Their opinions are moderated by
the humbling realization that today's scientific orthodoxy began as
yesterday's scientific heresy; as the the December 2002 editorial of
Scientific American puts it:
All scientific knowledge is provisional. Everything that science
"knows," even the most mundane facts and long-established theories, is
subject to reexamination as new information comes in.
*
Confusing Assumptions with Findings
Pseudoskeptics like to claim that the assumptions underlying
modern science are empirical facts that science has proved. For
example, the foundational assumption of neuroscience, that the
functioning of the brain (and, therefore, the mind) is explainable in
terms of classical physics as the interaction of neurons, is said to
be a scientific fact that is proved by neuroscience, despite the
embarrassing and long-standing failure of this assumption to explain
the anomaly of consciousness.
In a recent BBC program on homeopathy Walter Stewart (the same
one who was part of the Nature team that visited Benveniste in his
laboratory in 1988) is quoted on the subject of homeophatic dilutions:
Science has through many, many different experiments shown that
when a drug works it's always through the way the molecule interacts
with the body and, so the discovery that there's no molecules means
absolutely there's no effect.
But science has shown no such thing. That the functioning of
biological organisms is reducible to the physical interaction of
molecules is not the result of decades of bio-molecular research, it
is the assumption underlying this research. The fact that homeopathy
confounds that assumption refutes the latter, not the former.
*
"Debate Closed" Mentality
Since Pseudoskeptics have by their nature made up their minds on
any question long before the evidence is in, they are not interested
in participating in what could become an involved, drawn-out debate.
On the contrary, their concern is with preserving their own
understanding of how nature works, so discordant evidence has to be
disposed of as quickly as possible. When sound evidence to that end is
unavailable, anything that sufficiently resembles it will suffice.
Pseudoskeptics like to jump to conclusions quickly - when the
conclusion is their own, preconceived one. Once the pseudoskeptical
community has agreed on an "explanation" that is thought to debunk
claim X, that explanation then becomes enshrined in pseudoskeptical
lore and is repeated ad infinitum and ad nauseam in the
pseudoskeptical literature. Subsequent rebuttals are ignored, as is
new data that support claims X. Examples are legion.
o Gurwich's 1932 discovery of mitogenetic radiation is still
derided by pseudoskeptics as a classical example of "pathological
science" (Irving Langmuir, who coined the term, used it as an
example), even though it has been vindicated by three decades of
biophoton research.
o Pseudoskeptics continue their ridicule of Cold Fusion as a
mistake, even use "cold fusion" as a metaphor to refer to what they
deem pathological science in general, ignoring a full decade of
successful replication of the effect.
o Parapsychology continues to be attacked by the hard-core
pseudoskeptics with criticisms that were addressed and resolved long
ago, leading Radin to remark that
(..) skeptics who continue to repeat the same old
assertions that parapsychology is a pseudoscience, or that there are
no repeatable experiments, are uninformed not only about the state of
parapsychology, but also about the current state of skepticism!
*
Overreaching and Armchair Quarterbacking
Faced with contradictory or inconclusive evidence, the skeptic
will only say that the claim has not been proved at this time, and
give the claimant the benefit of the doubt. The pseudoskeptic will
make the (incorrect) counter-claim that the original claim has been
disproved by the evidence (and usually follow up with generous amounts
of name-calling and other extra-scientific arguments discussed below).
This distinction between simply not accepting a claim and making
a counter-claim is important because it shifts the burden of proof.
The true skeptic does not have to prove anything, because she is
simply unconvinced of the validity of an extraordinary claim.
Pseudoskeptics, on the other hand, making the claim that the
extraordinary phenomenon only appears to be extraordinary, and has a
conventional explanation, have to bear a burden of proof of their own.
Do they? The general answer is no. Most of the professional
pseudoskeptics engage in mere 'armchair quarterbacking', conducting no
research of their own. As far as parapsychology is concerned, Radin
sums this situation up as follows:
The fact that most skeptics do not conduct counter studies to
prove their claims is often ignored. For example, in 1983 the
well-known skeptic Martin Gardner wrote:
How can the public know that for fifty years skeptical
psychologists have been trying their best to replicate classic psi
experiments, and with notable unsuccess [sic]? It is this fact more
than any other that has led to parapsychology's perpetual stagnation.
Positive evidence keeps coming in from a tiny group of enthusiasts,
while negative evidence keeps coming in from a much larger group of
skeptics.
As Honorton points out, "Gardner does not attempt to document
this assertion, nor could he. It is pure fiction. Look for the
skeptic's experiments and see what you find." In addition, there is no
"larger group of skeptics." Perhaps ten or fifteen skeptics have
accounted for the vast bulk of the published criticisms.
*
Assuming False Scientific Authority
Many high-profile pseudoskeptics pass judgement based on
scientific expertise they don't have. James Randi, for example, shares
the following tirade in a July 13, 2001 commentary on his web site:
Just so that you can see how pseudoscience and ignorance have
taken over the Internet merchandising business, I suggest that you
visit www.hydrateforlife.com and try to follow the totally false and
misleading pitch that the vendors make for this product,
magically-prepared "Penta" water that will "hydrate" your body
miraculously. A grade-school education will equip you to recognize the
falsity of this claim, but it's obvious that the purveyors are cashing
in on ignorance and carelessness. Just read this as an example of pure
techno-claptrap:
Normally, the water you drink is in large clusters of H20 [sic]
molecules. That's because its [sic] been affected by air, heat, and
modern civilization. PentaTM is water that, through physics, has been
reduced to its purest state in nature — smaller clusters of H2O [sic]
molecules. These smaller clusters move through your body more quickly
than other water, penetrating your cell membranes more easily. This
means PentaTM is absorbed into your system faster and more completely.
When you drink PentaTM, you're drinking the essence of water. You get
hydrated faster, more efficiently, and more completely than with any
other water on earth.
Folks, water is water. It's burned hydrogen, no more, no less.
The molecules of H2O — not "H2O" as these quacks write — do not
"cluster," under any influence of the dreadful "air, heat, and modern
civilization" that you're cautioned to fear. True, water exhibits
surface tension, and the molecules do "line up" to an extent, though
almost any foreign substance in there disturbs this effect —
soap/detergent "wets" it readily. But water molecules in "clusters"?
No way! The illustrations you see here are totally wrong and
fictitious. There's no such thing as "essence of water," by any
stretch of scientific reasoning, or imagination. This is total,
unmitigated nonsense, a pack of lies designed to swindle and cheat, to
steal money, and to rob the consumer. And "through physics" has
nothing to do with it. I await objections to the above statements.
There will be none, because the sellers of "Penta" know they're lying,
they do it purposefully, and they know they can get away with it
because of the incredible inertia of the Federal agencies that should
be protecting us against such deception and thievery. Those agencies
just can't do the job, and they bumble about endlessly while the
public continues to pay through the nose. But notice: the Penta
people, on their web page, beneath a family picture of the founders,
clearly assert that: At first, [the Penta engineers] tested Penta on
plants. They discovered that test seeds would germinate in half the
time as the control seeds. Bingo! Hallelujah! We have the means for a
test! A simple, inexpensive, clearly demonstrative, test! Such a
demonstration would clearly establish the claim these folks are
making. Ah, but will PentaTM apply for the million-dollar prize? Dear
reader, with your experience of Tice, DKL, Quadro, Josephson, Edward,
and all the parade of others who have declined to be tested, I think
that you expect, as I do, that PentaTM will apply as promptly as
Sylvia Browne did. The PentaTM page advises us to "Penta-hydrate — be
fluid." Translation: "Believe this — be stupid."
Randi could not be more wrong. Water is not simply "water-
burned hydrogen, no more no less". It is a highly anomalous substance,
and its fundamental properties are still the subject of basic
research. Admittedly, the claims made for "Penta-Water" are
scientifically extravagant. But can they be dismissed out of hand?
Contrary to what Randi asserts with such rhetoric force and finality,
water clusters are discussed in the peer-reviewed scientific
literature. The interested reader may want to visit Martin Chaplin's
web site for an overview of scientific work on water clustering.
Chaplin is not a stage magician, but a Professor of Applied Science at
South Bank University, London and holds a degree in chemistry. He is
also an active researcher in the field of water clustering, and
concludes that
(..) there is a sufficient and broad evidential base for it's
existence [the existence of the icosahedral water cluster], including
the ability to explain all the 'anomalous' properties of water.
The existence of scientific evidence for water clusters does of
course not imply that "Penta" and similar products have any merit, but
it does caution against outright dismissal of these kinds of product.
Randi's sweeping negative statements betray lack of knowledge on the
subject and qualify him as a blundering pseudo-scientist. His petty,
adolescent criticism of a simple typographic inaccuracy on the
"Hydrate for Life" web site and his use of ridicule (he asserts that
"Penta" is "magically-prepared" and works "miraculously" while the
manufacturer simply states that the process is "proprietary") support
that impression. And yet, Randi rhetorically assumes an air of
scientific authority, even infallibility.
Pseudoskeptic Michael Shermer makes the following ignorant
argument in "Baloney Detection" (Scientific American 11/2001, p. 36):
The biggest problem with the cold fusion debacle, for instance,
was not that Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischman were wrong. It was
that they announced their spectacular discovery at a press conference
before other laboratories verified it. Worse, when cold fusion was not
replicated, they continued to cling to their claim. Outside
verification is crucial to good science.
The argument against "science by press conference" is a good
one, but it would be more credible if Shermer applied it to accepted
science too. A prime example is Robert Gallo's announcement of the
discovery of the "probable cause of AIDS" in a press conference in
1984 that preceeded publication of his research in Science and secured
a political commitment to his alleged facts before critical scientific
discussion could take place.
What makes Shermer's argument ignorant is his use of cold fusion
as an example. Real scientists who have actually studied the evidence
for cold fusion have come to very different conclusions. In February
2002, the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center of the United State
Navy in San Diego released a 310 page report titled Thermal and
Nuclear Aspects of the Pd/D2O System that discusses the overwhelming
experimental evidence that the cold fusion effect indeed exists. Dr.
Frank E. Gordon, the head of the center's Navigation and Applied
Sciences Department, writes in the foreword:
We do not know if Cold Fusion will be the answer to future
energy needs, but we do know the existence of Cold Fusion phenomenon
through repeated observations by scientists throughout the world. It
is time that this phenomenon be investigated so that we can reap
whatever benefits accrue from additional scientific understanding. It
is time for government funding organizations to invest in this
research.
Yet Shermer, a psychologist by trade, feels called upon to pass
summary negative judgment on this field of research.
*
Double Standards of Acceptable Proof and Ad-Hoc Hypotheses
(...)
Kevin Andrws
read lately: "The Holistic Mystics" by Gary Lee. Many people, who regard
themselves as skeptical have fully caved in to all-natural and holistic
hallucinations. So, Gary Lee looks at Evidently, Mr. Lee is a former
acupuncturist and recovering mystic. He looks at a seldom discussed
relationship about that fact that how most people that are mystical tend
toward holistic thinking. Like what I see here, a worthwhile read.