Why skepticism about science and medicine?

My skepticism is not about science and medicine as sources or repositories of objective knowledge and understanding. Skepticism is demanded by the fact that what society learns about science and medicine is mediated by human beings. That brings in a host of reasons for skepticism: human fallibility, individual and institutional self-interest, conflicts of interest, sources of bias and prejudice.

I have never come across a better discussion of the realities about science and its role in society than Richard Lewontin’s words in his book, Biology as Ideology (Anansi Press 1991, HarperPerennial 1992; based on 1990 Massey Lectures, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation):

“Science is a social institution about which there is a great deal of misunderstanding, even among those who are part of it. . . [It is] completely integrated into and influenced by the structure of all our other social institutions. The problems that science deals with, the ideas that it uses in investigating those problems, even the so-called scientific results that come out of scientific investigation, are all deeply influenced by predispositions that derive from the society in which we live. Scientists do not begin life as scientists, after all, but as social beings immersed in a family, a state, a productive structure, and they view nature through a lens that has been molded by their social experience.
. . . science is molded by society because it is a human productive activity that takes time and money, and so is guided by and directed by those forces in the world that have control over money and time. Science uses commodities and is part of the process of commodity production. Science uses money. People earn their living by science, and as a consequence the dominant social and economic forces in society determine to a large extent what science does and how it. does it. More than that, those forces have the power to appropriate from science ideas that are particularly suited to the maintenance and continued prosperity of the social structures of which they are a part. So other social institutions have an input into science both in what is done and how it is thought about, and they take from science concepts and ideas that then support their institutions and make them seem legitimate and natural. . . .
Science serves two functions. First, it provides us with new ways of manipulating the material world . . . . [Second] is the function of explanation” (pp. 3-4). And (p. 5) explaining how the world works also serves as legitimation.

Needed skepticism takes into account that every statement disseminated about science or medicine serves in some way the purpose(s), the agenda(s), of the source or sources of that statement.

So the first thing to ask about any assertion about science or medicine is, why is this statement being made by this particular source?

Statements by pharmaceutical companies, most particularly their advertisements, should never be believed, because, as innumerable observers and investigators have documented, the profit motive has outweighed any concern for the harm that unsafe medications cause even as there is no evidence for definite potential benefit. The best way to decide on whether or not to prescribe or use a drug is by comparing NNT and NNH, the odds on getting benefit compared to the odds of being harmed; but NNT and NNH are never reported by drug companies. For example, there is no evidence whatsoever that HPV vaccination decreases the risk of any cancer; all that has been observed is that the vaccines may decrease genital warts. On the other hand, many individuals have suffered grievous harm from “side” effects of these vaccines (see Holland 2018 in the bibliography cited just below, and the documentary, Sacrificial Virgins. TV ads by Merck, for example in August 2020 on MSNBC, cite the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention as recommending the vaccine not only for girls but also for boys.

For fully documented discussions of the pervasive misdeeds of drug companies, consult the books listed in my periodically updated bibliography, What’s Wrong with Present-Day Medicine.
I recommend particularly Angell 2004, Goldacre 2013, Gøtzsche 2013, Healy 2012, Moynihan, & Cassels 2005. Greene 2007 is a very important but little-cited book describing how numbers and surrogate markers have come to dominate medical practice, to the great harm of patients.

Official reports may be less obviously deceitful than drug company advertisements, but they are no more trustworthy, as argued in detail and with examples in “Official reports are not scientific publications”, chapter 3 in my Dogmatism in Science and Medicine: How Dominant Theories Monopolize Research and Stifle the Search for Truth (McFarland 2012):
“reports from official institutions and organizations . . . are productions by bureaucracies . . . . The actual authors of these reports are technical writers whose duties are just like those of press secretaries, advertising writers, and other public-relations personnel: to put on the actual evidence and conclusions the best possible spin to reinforce the bureaucracy’s viewpoint and emphasize the importance of the bureaucracy’s activities.
Most important: The Executive Summaries, Forewords, Prefaces, and the like may tell a very different story than does the actual evidence in the bulk of the reports. It seems that few if any pundits actually read the whole of such documents. The long public record offers sad evidence that most journalists certainly do not look beyond these summaries into the meat of the reports, given that the media disseminate uncritically so many of the self-serving alarums in those Executive Summaries” (p. 213).

So too with press releases from academic institutions.

As for statements direct from academic and professional experts, recall that, as Lewontin pointed out, “people earn their living by science”. Whenever someone regarded as an expert or authority makes public statements, an important purpose is to enhance the status, prestige, career, profitability, of who is making the statement. This is not to suggest that such statements are made with deliberate dishonesty; but the need to preserve status, as well as the usual illusion that what one believes is actually true, ensures that such statements will be dogmatically one-sided assertions, not judicious assessments of the objective state of knowledge.

Retired academic experts like myself no longer suffer conflicts of interest at a personal or institutional-loyalty level. When we venture critiques of drug companies, official institutions, colleges and universities, and even individual “experts” or former colleagues, we will be usually saying what we genuinely believe to be unvarnished truth. Nevertheless, despite the lack of major obvious conflicts of interest, one should have more grounds than that for believing what we have to say. We may still have an unacknowledged agenda, for instance a desire still to do something useful even as our careers are formally over. Beyond that, of course, like any other human beings, we may simply be wrong, no matter that we ourselves are quite sure that we are right. Freedom from frank, obvious conflicts of interest does not bring with it some superhuman capacity for objectivity let alone omniscience.

In short:
Believe any assertion about science or medicine, from any source, at your peril.
If the matter is of any importance to you, you had best do some investigating of evidence and facts, and comparison of diverse interpretations.

Percentages absolute or relative? Politicizing science

Convalescent plasma reduces the mortality of CoVID-19 by 35%, citizens of the United States were assured in a press conference on 23 August 2020, and the approval of this treatment for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) underscored that this constituted a breakthrough in treating the pandemic disease.

As usual, critical voices ventured to disagree. One physician reported that he had been using this treatment for a considerable length of time and had noted a perhaps marginal, certainly not great benefit for this intervention. Others pointed out that the use of convalescent plasma in general was nothing new.

That “35%” mortality reduction was emphasized a number of times in the televised official announcement. It was only a few days later that we learned that the original data suggested a reduction of mortality to about 8% from 11-12% for presumably comparable patients not so treated. In other words, 3 to 4% of patients may have derived a benefit in terms of decreased mortality.

Indeed, 8 is about 35% less than 11-12. However, a 3.5% reduction in mortality is nothing like a 35% reduction.

This episode illustrates what is quite commonplace as drug companies seek to impress doctors and patients with the wonderful benefits to be derived from their medications: relative effects rather than absolute ones are reported.

This is just one of the many things wrong with present-day practices in medicine, of course; dozens of works describing the dysfunctions are listed in my periodically updated bibliography.

Investigative reporters also revealed and that the FDA’s emergency use approval had come at the behest of the White House. Historians will recall that the whole science of genetics was derailed in the Soviet Union for a generation as Stalin’s administration enshrined as science the pseudoscience invented by Lysenko.

CoVID19, HIV — Enlightenment? Reason based on evidence?

The historian Jon Meacham has quite often described the presidency of Donald Trump as signifying an end to the Enlightenment era that began in the 17^th century, when reason and logic based on evidence began to supersede the authority of monarchs and clerics.

Sadly, though, those being hailed as the voices of reason against Trump over the Coronavirus hysteria cannot be said to represent reason and logic based on evidence.

Those leading the public charge for “science” are Anthony Fauci, Robert Redfield, and Deborah Birx. Yet they continue to uphold and disseminate the mistaken notion that HIV is a deadly, sexually transmitted, virus.

(For those who do not yet know that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, see the bibliography at The Case against HIV; consult my The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory; for a short synopsis, read “Confession of an ‘AIDS denialist’: How I became a crank because we’re being lied to about HIV/AIDS”)

The primary blame for the acceptance of that mistaken notion about “HIV” must rest on the unbridled and unscrupulous ambitions of Robert Gallo (read John Crewdson, Science   Fictions), lent institutional authority by an unwitting Secretary of Health and Human Services. Incompetent statistics at the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention had set the stage (John Lauritsen, ch. 1 in The AIDS War: Propaganda, Profiteering and Genocide from the Medical-Industrial Complex, 1993).

Anthony Fauci and Robert Redfield were enthusiastic acolytes of Gallo from the very beginning (Birx seems to have become involved in HIV/AIDS considerably later). Redfield worked in the Army HIV Research Group in the very earliest days of AIDS. He is one of the co-authors on articles that reported in the mid-1980s that teenage female prospective recruits tested HIV-positive no less frequently than did teenage males, indeed often more frequently. That was clearly at odds with the accepted belief that HIV entered the United States first among gay men in a few large metropolitan areas. It had been this contradiction of the prevailing theory of the origin of HIV that stimulated me to look into what HIV tests were all about. Redfield, it seems, what was not so stimulated; why not? Was he not thinking about what he was finding?

Among the other evidence Redfield published, of course together with others, was that the localities in the United States with the highest prevalence of HIV were, oddly enough, not the areas with the highest prevalence of AIDS; Huh? Surely that should raise the question of whether HIV is the cause of AIDS. It didn’t for Redfield, apparently.

Then too the earliest data from HIV tests, again from the Army HIV Research Group including Redfield, showed black Americans to be more frequently HIV-positive than others by a significant multiple — a racial disparity that the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) has been quite willing to ascribe to stereotypical prejudices about black sexual behavior.
(Full details of the Redfield and associated publications are in The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory).

Later, Redfield claimed to have established heterosexual transmission of HIV through a study that presumed that an HIV-positive spouse could only have contracted HIV from the other spouse (JAMA 253 [1985] 1571-3; among 10 co-authors, Redfield comes first, and Gallo last as director of the lab). The assumption seems without obvious basis, and there also seems no a priori reason to wonder whether a sexually transmitted agent could be transmitted heterosexually — unless of course one harbors strangely homophobic views.

When Redfield was appointed Director of the CDC in 2018, Laurie Garrett reported that he had promoted a vaccine against HIV even after it was shown not to work, and that he holds views about sex that appear to be those of a religious ideologue.

Anthony Fauci, for his part, attempted in 1993 to explain away the often-noted numbers of AIDS patients who were HIV negative by declaring this to be a disease separate from AIDS, namely CD4 T-cell lymphopenia, a condition not much talked of nowadays (“CD4+ T-lymphocytopenia without HIV infection—no lights, no camera, just facts”, New England Journal of Medicine, 328 [1993] 429-31).

The legacy of the HIV blunder includes claiming a viral cause without isolating the postulated virus; using routinely tests that have never been validated because there is no gold standard test in absence of properly isolated virus; diagnosing infection because test results are positive even as the test kits warn explicitly that they are not valid for diagnosis of infection; corrupting the concept of “isolate” to call it isolation when bits of RNA or DNA can be detected by PCR.

After one of my closest friends in Australia had read The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, he remarked that a sad side-effect would be an overall loss of confidence in science. That did not happen; perhaps it will take the long-term damage from the CoVID19 affair to do that.

Meanwhile, given the history and legacy of the HIV blunder, one might be inclined not to believe what Fauci, Redfield, and Birx have to say about viral diseases (or perhaps anything else). Nevertheless, these three prominent representatives of contemporary medical science are being widely hailed for representing authentic science by contrast to Trumpist ignorance.

More later about this in the wider context of illustrating an end to the Enlightenment era.

 

Corona Conumdrums

Something seems wrong about the basis for the current panic over “CoVID-19”.

2019-nCoV, the virus that is said to cause CoVID-19 disease, first appeared in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. Within a few months, it had reached in Britain prime minister Boris Johnson and  Prince Charles (but not his wife) , in Russia the health minister, and in Australia Tom Hanks and his wife . According to the interactive online map at the New York Times, this new virus is now present on all continents and on islands large and small, and according to news reports it had also found its way onto cruise ships and warships.
To have spread so rapidly, it must be effectively carried through the air, on the winds, and perhaps through the oceans, as suggested in the Los Angeles Times.
But if this virus has been so widely distributed for several months, why has it caused serious illness in so few places? And why has the continent of Africa been so little affected (see NYT map)?
This seems more like something endemic, that has been around for a long time, like the normal cold or “flu” viruses say, than like a virus that newly jumped from animal to human only last December in Wuhan.
Isn’t there something wrong with the official story?
Moreover, since the virus appeared all over the globe within a few months, how can social distancing prevent it from spreading further?

 

Science: Sins of Commission and of Omission

What statisticians call a type-I error is a scientific sin of commission, namely, believing something to be true that is actually wrong. A type-II error, dismissing as false something that happens to be true, could be described as a scientific sin of omission since it neglects to acknowledge a truth and thereby makes impossible policies and actions based on that truth.

The history of science is a long record of both types of errors that were progressively corrected, sooner or later; but, so far as we can know, of course, the latest correction may never be the last word, because of the interdependence of superficially different bits of science. If, for instance, general relativity were found to be flawed, or quantum mechanics, then huge swaths of physics, chemistry, and other sciences would undergo major or minor changes. And we cannot know whether general relativity or quantum mechanics are absolutely true, that they are not a type-I error — all we know is that they have worked usefully up to now. Type-II errors may always be hiding in the vast regions of research not being done, or unorthodox claims being ignored or dismissed.

During the era of modern science — that is, since about the 17^th century — type-I errors included such highly consequential and far-reaching dogmas as believing that atoms are indivisible, that they are not composed of smaller units. A socially consequential type-I error in the first quarter of the 20^th century was the belief that future generations would benefit if people with less desirable genetic characteristics were prevented from having children, whereby tens of thousands of Americans were forcibly sterilized as late as late as 1980.

A type-II error during the second half of the 19^th century was the determined belief that claims of alleviating various ailments by electrical or magnetic treatments were nothing but pseudo-scientific scams; but that was corrected in the second half of the 20^th century, when electromagnetic treatment became the standard procedure for curing certain congenital failures of bone growth and for treating certain other bone conditions as well.
Another 19^th-century type-II error was the ignoring of Mendel’s laws of heredity, which were then re-discovered half a century later.
During the first half of the 20^th century, a type-II error was the belief that continents could not have moved around on the globe, something also corrected in the latter part of the 20^th century.

 

Science is held in high regard for its elucidation of a great deal about how the world works, and for many useful applications of that knowledge. But the benefits that society can gain from science are greatly restricted through widespread ignorance of and misunderstanding about the true history of science.

Regarding general social and political history, Santayana’s adage is quite well-known, that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. That is equally true for the history of science. Since the conventional wisdom and the policy makers and so many of the pundits are ignorant of the fact that science routinely commits sins of both commission and omission, social and political policies continue to be made on the basis of so-called scientific consensus that may quite often be unsound.

In Dogmatism in Science and Medicine: How Dominant Theories Monopolize Research and Stifle the Search for Truth (McFarland 2012), evidence is cited from well-qualified and respectable sources that the mainstream consensus is flawed on quite a number of topics. Some of these are of immediate concern only to scholars and researchers, for example about the earliest settlements of the Americas, or the extinction of the dinosaurs, or the mechanism of the sense of smell. Other topics, however, are of immediate public concern, for instance a possible biological basis for schizophrenia, or the cause of Alzheimer’s disease, or the possible dangers from mercury in tooth amalgams, or the efficacy of antidepressant drugs, or the hazards posed by second-hand tobacco smoke; and perhaps above all the unproven but dogmatic belief that human-generated carbon dioxide is the prime cause of global warming and climate change, and the long-held hegemonic belief that HIV causes AIDS.

The topic of cold nuclear fusion is an instance of a possible type-II error, a sin of omission, the mainstream refusal to acknowledge the strong evidence for potentially useful applications of nuclear-atomic transformations that can occur under quite ordinary conditions.

On these, and on quite a few other matters * as well, the progress of science and the well-being of people and of societies are greatly hindered by the widespread ignorance of the fact that science always has been and will continue to be fallible,   committing sins of both omission and of commission that become corrected only at some later time — if at all.

On matters that influence public policies directly, policy-makers would be greatly helped if they could draw on historically well-informed, technically insightful, and above all impartial assessments of the contemporary mainstream consensus. A possible approach to providing such assistance would be the establishing of a Science Court; see chapter 12 in Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed (McFarland 2017).

 

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*    Type-I errors are rife in the misapplications of statistics in medical matters, including the testing and approval of new drugs and vaccines; see the bibliography, What’s Wrong with Present-Day Medicine
      For a number of possible type-II errors, see for instance The Anomalist  and the publications of the Society for Scientific Exploration  and the Gesellschaft für Anomalistik

Aluminum adjuvants, autoimmune diseases, and attempted suppression of the truth

An earlier post (Adjuvants — the poisons hidden in some vaccines) described the danger that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines pose, including that they may indeed be associated with a risk of inducing autism. A recent book, How to End the Autism Epidemic,   underscores that risk and exposes what should be the crippling, disqualifying conflicts of interest of one of the most prominent accepted experts on vaccinations. I had learned about this from a splendidly informative article by Celeste McGovern at Ghost Ship Media (Prescription to end the autism epidemic, 17 September 2018).

It turns out that animals as well as human beings have experienced tangible harm from vaccines containing aluminum adjuvants: in particular, sheep. Celeste McGovern has reported about that in other recent posts:
Spanish sheep study finds vaccine aluminum in lymph nodes more than a year after injection, behavioural changes, 3 November 2018; Vaccines induce bizarre anti-social behaviour in sheep, 6 November 2018; Anatomy of a science study censorship, 20 March 2019.

This last piece describes the attempt to prevent the truth about aluminum adjuvants from becoming public knowledge, by pressuring the publisher, Elsevier, to withdraw an already accepted, peer-reviewed article in one of its journals: “Cognition and behavior in sheep repetitively inoculated with aluminum adjuvant-containing vaccines or aluminum adjuvant only”, by Javier Asína et al., published online in Pharmacological Research before being withdrawn. Fortunately there are   nowadays resources on the Internet that make it more difficult for the censors to do their dirty work. One invaluable resource is the Wayback Machine, which too few people seem to know about. In the present case, a PDF of the Asína et al. article, as accepted and published online as “In Press” in Pharmacological Research, is available at ResearchGate.

Elsevier publishes thousands of scientific and medical journals, including in the past some that were actually advertisements written by and paid for by pharmaceutical companies, presented dishonestly and misleadingly as genuine scientific periodicals: Elsevier published 6 fake journals); Elsevier had a whole division publishing fake medical journals).

Elsevier had also engaged in censorship on earlier occasions, in one case to the extent of emasculating a well respected, independent publication, Medical Hypotheses (see Chapter 3, “A Public Act of Censorship: Elsevier and Medical Hypotheses”, in Dogmatism in Science and Medicine: How Dominant Theories Monopolize Research and Stifle the Search for Truth).

If the shenanigans and cover-ups about aluminum adjuvants make an insufficiently alarming horror story,   please look at yet another article by Celeste McGovern: Poisoned in Slow Motion, 1 October 2018:

“Immune-system disease is sweeping the globe. . . . Autoimmune/inflammatory syndrome induced by adjuvants, or ASIA — a wildly unpredictable inflammatory response to foreign substances injected or inserted into the human body . . . . The medical literature contains hundreds of such cases. . . . [with] vague and sundry symptoms — chronic fatigue, muscle and joint pain, sleep disturbances, cognitive impairment, skin rashes and more . . . that . . . share the common underlying trigger of certain immune signaling pathways. Sometimes this low-grade inflammation can smolder for years only to suddenly incite an overt autoimmune disease. . . . Chronic fatigue syndrome (also known as myalgic encephalitis), once a rare “hypochondriac” disorder, now affects millions of people globally and has been strongly associated with markers of immune system dysfunction. . . . One in thirteen American children has a hyperactive immune system resulting in food allergy,4 and asthma, another chronic inflammatory disease of the immune system, affects 300 million people across the globe.5 Severe neurological disorders like autism (which now affects one in 22 boys in some US states) have soared from virtual nonexistence and are also linked to a damaged immune system.”

[4. Pediatrics, 2011; 128: e9-17
5. Global Initiative for Asthma. Global Strategy for Asthma Management and Prevention. 2008.
6. Eur J Pediatr, 2014; 173: 33-43]

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These particulars offer further illustrations of the general points that I have been making for some time:

⇒  Science and medicine have become dogmatic wielders of authority through being co-opted and in effect bought out by commercial interests. Pharmaceutical companies are perhaps in the forefront of this takeover, but the influence of other industries should not be forgotten, for instance that of Monsanto with its interest in Genetically Modified products; see Dogmatism in Science and Medicine: How Dominant Theories Monopolize Research and Stifle the Search for Truth, Jefferson (NC): McFarland 2012

⇒  Science, research, medicine, are very different things nowadays than they were up to about the middle of the 20th century, and very different from the conventional wisdom about them. Media, policy makers, and the public need an independent, impartial assessment of what science and medicine are said to have established; needed is  a Science Court; see Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed, McFarland, 2017

What everyone ought to know about global warming and climate change: an unbiased review

“What everyone knows” is that burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, a “greenhouse gas” that holds in heat, warming the Earth and causing climate change, with catastrophic consequences if it isn’t stopped soon.

All official agencies, all mainstream scientific groups, say that.

What few people know is that a considerable number of experts and informed observers do not believe this AGW scenario to be correct: AGW = Anthropogenic Global Warming, global warming caused by human actions.

Those dissenting experts point out that actual data on temperature and carbon-dioxide levels, over the life of the Earth but also over the last century, show that carbon dioxide does not cause high global temperature.

But few people, again, can believe that “everyone” could be wrong about this, that “science” could be so dogmatically wrong. To form an opinion as to the relative merits of the official view and of the dissenting experts, therefore requires not only looking at the data but also at how the official view came into bring and how and why it persists. Few people want to take the time and make the effort to wade through huge amounts of writings by opposing advocates to ferret out the genuine facts and legitimate conclusions, which often calls for reading between the lines and being skeptical about everything.

My recent discovery of the Peter Ridd affair had a wonderfully beneficial consequence, learning about the writings of Don Aitkin, an Australian whose academic career included research on social and political matters as well as administrative experience that included heading a university (as Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Canberra). Aitkin spent a decade or more reading and thinking about AGW, and summarized what he learned in a series of blogs. The last in the series, #16,  sums things up and has appropriate links to the earlier ones which concentrate on different aspects of the matter.

This offers a wonderfully convenient way for anyone to become genuinely informed about AGW, and “climate-change denialism”, and incidentally about the interaction between science and public policy. Aitkin is factually reliable and ideologically unbiased, an all-too-rare combination.

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My appreciation of Aitkin’s series on global warming was enhanced when he noted that the hysteria over AGW “bridges the space between science and politics in an almost unprecedented way, though it has some similarities to the ‘eugenics’ issue a hundred years ago”, something that had occurred to me also.

Another Aitkin blog-post, “A good starting position in discussions about ‘climate change’” cites the salient points made by Ben Pile at Climate Resistance:

1. There is good scientific evidence that human activities are influencing the climate. But evidence is not fact, and neither evidence nor fact speak for themselves.
2. The evidence for anthropogenic climate change is neither as strong nor as demanding of action as is widely claimed.
3. Our ability to mitigate, let alone to reverse, any such change through reductions in CO2 emissions is even less certain, and may itself be harmful.
4. The scientific consensus on climate change as widely reported inaccurately reflects the true state of scientific knowledge.
5. How society should proceed in the face of a changing climate is the business of politics not science.
6. Political arguments about climate change are routinely mistaken for scientific ones. Environmentalism uses science as a fig-leaf to hide an embarrassment of blind faith and bad politics.
7. Science is increasingly expected to provide moral certainty in morally uncertain times.
8. The IPCC is principally a political organisation.
9. The current emphasis on mitigation strategies is impeding society’s ability to adapt to a changing climate, whatever its cause.
10. The public remains unconvinced that mitigation is in its best interest. Few people have really bought into Environmentalism, but few people object vehemently to it. Most people are slightly irritated by it.
11. And yet climate change policies go unchallenged by opposition parties.
12. Environmentalism is a political ideology, yet it has never been tested democratically.
13. Widespread disengagement from politics means that politicians have had to seek new ways to connect with the public. Exaggerated environmental concern is merely serving to provide direction for directionless politics.
14. Environmentalism is not the reincarnation of socialism, communism or Marxism. It is being embraced by the old Right and Left alike. Similarly, climate change scepticism is not the exclusive domain of the conservative Right.
15. Environmentalism will be worse for the poor than climate change.
16. Environmentalism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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Aitkin is an Australian, and any connection to Australia always rekindles my appreciation for the sanctuary Australia provided the refuigee Bauers and the excellent public education from which I benefited in elementary school (Picton, NSW), at The Sydney Boys’ High School, and at the University of Sydney (moreover, in those years, at almost no cost to my parents!).
Browsing Aitkin’s writings, I came across an after-dinner speech about “Australian values”  that rings true to my own recollections and also, I think, offers some insights into the similarities and differences between American and Australian life.

What everyone knows is all too often wrong: dinosaur extinction, and much more

“What everyone knows” is all too often wrong, as I pointed out years ago, specifically about science punditry and TED talks and books;  and about climate change;  see also Who guards the guardians? Who guards science?; “Dangerous knowledge”; Dangerous knowledge II: Wrong knowledge about the history of science;  Dangerous knowledge III: Wrong knowledge about science; Dangerous knowledge IV: The vicious cycle of wrong knowledge.

Perhaps the main reason for “everyone” being wrong about so many things is that most of us take our knowledge on most or even all matters on the authority of other people, and those are all too often unwitting or witting false prophets [1]. Very few people ever bother to look for themselves into what the actual evidence is for commonly held beliefs.

I had become interested long ago in what science is and how it works, and my academic work came to focus on the “hard cases”: controversies in science, particularly the roles played by minority views and claims. So I had the time as well as the interest to dig quite deeply into the facts underlying a number of controversies, including controversies that the mainstream asserts not to be controversial. That is how I came to realize, for example, that HIV has never been proven to be the cause of AIDS, indeed has never even been proven to exist [2].

When I have the occasion to encounter someone who parrots HIV=AIDS theory, which “everyone knows”, I like to ask, “How do you know that HIV causes AIDS?”

Almost invariably the answer is, “Everyone knows that”.

Exactly. QED.

Increasingly since the 19^th century, perhaps since about the early-to-middle 19^th century, “science” has become the authority for most people as well as for organizations both private and public [3]. That even includes many scholars and pundits of whom one might expect better: When I had first collated HIV-test data and was giving talks about the failings of HIV/AIDS theory, a sociologist in a Science-Studies program said that I must be wrong because “tens of thousands of papers” had been published in the HIV=AIDS genre.

Until the most recent few decades, science has rarely played the role of false prophet on issues sufficiently salient as to inform public policies and actions; an exception in the first quarter of the 20^th century was when misguided expert opinion about genetics and heredity led to the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of Americans [4].

Nowadays, unfortunately, science has grown so large and unwieldy as to be in many ways dysfunctional [5], so that it has given bad advice on at least two matters of considerable public importance: not only HIV/AIDS [2] but also climate change [6].

In past times and on less prominent issues whose significance rarely matters outside the scientific community itself, “science” has quite typically been wrong before it got things right. The “scientific consensus” at any given time is tentative and temporary; yet, human nature being what it is, the elite proponents of the consensus have always defended their view vigorously, including denigrating and even persecuting fellow scientists who disagree [7].

A case in point is the view that the extinction of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago was caused by the impact on Earth of a large asteroid. A splendid recent article in the Atlantic magazine [9] gives full details of the career gauntlets run by paleontologist Gerta Keller as she has been amassing evidence against the asteroid hypothesis and for the earlier theory that the extinction was brought on by a lengthy episode of recurring intense volcanism — for perhaps 350,000 years, with particularly intense eruptions during the 100,000 or so years that coincide with the extinction. (Calculating the timing of happenings 65 million years ago is unlikely ever to permit accuracy of better than some tens of thousands of years.)

A point that seems powerful to a lay person like myself is that the dinosaur extinction was the fifth major mass extinction indicated by the fossil record, and expert opinion seems to be almost undivided that the first four extinctions had been caused by extremes of volcanic action.

The Atlantic article is also commendably accurate about contemporary science in noting how vigorously the mainstream consensus, the ruling elite, defends its point of view, how unscrupulously at least some members of that elite and their acolytes attack those who dissent; science has become riddled with knowledge monopolies.

Many examples of that sad state of affairs are at hand in a number of other fields [7]: Big-Bang cosmology, amyloid plaque as cause of Alzheimer’s disease, anti-depressant and other prescription drugs, first human settlement of the Americas, nuclear “cold fusion”, dangers of second-hand smoke, plate tectonics (“continental drift”), mechanism of the sense of smell, physiological correlates of schizophrenia, risks from mercury compounds in tooth fillings and in vaccines, possible relation between certain multiple vaccines and autism… .

It is really quite stunning, how many cases there are where “what everyone knows”, namely, the reigning scientific consensus, is questionable in light of the actual evidence, the unquestioned data.

 

That last is a most important thing that everyone does not know but should.

 

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[1]    As an academic Dean once remarked “Saying so, makes it so”, when the sayer is someone in some sort of authority.

[2]    Henry H. Bauer, The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, McFarland 2007; “The Case against HIV”

[3]    David Knight, The Age of Science, Basil Blackwell, 1986

[4]    “Bauer: Could science mislead public policy?”, Roanoke Times, 10 June 2018;

[5]    Henry H. Bauer, Science Is Not What You Think — how it has changed, why we can’t trust it, how it can be fixed (McFarland, 2017)

[6]    For many discussions, with source references, about the politicized nature of this controversy and the fact that the actual observational data do not support the hypothesis of carbon-dioxide-induced global warming (let alone carbon-dioxide-induced climate change), see the articles at https://scimedskeptic.wordpress.com/ that come up when setting “climate change” in the “Search” box.

[7]    The literature on these points is vast. Pertinent sections of reference [5] cover much of this ground and cite many other sources; see also reference [8].

[8]    Henry H. Bauer, Dogmatism in Science and Medicine: How Dominant Theories Monopolize Research and Stifle the Search for Truth, McFarland 2012

[9]    Bianca Bosker, “The nastiest feud in science”, Atlantic, September 2018

21st century science: Group-Thinking Elites and Fanatical Groupies

Science has been a reliable resource for official policies and actions for much of the era of modern science, which is usually regarded as having begun around the 17th century.

It is almost without precedent that a mistaken scientific consensus should lead to undesirable and damaging public actions, yet that is now the case in two instances: the belief that carbon dioxide generated by the burning of fossil fuels is primarily responsible for global warming and climate change; and the belief that HIV is the cause of AIDS.

Both those beliefs gained hegemony during the last two or three decades. That these beliefs are mistaken seems incredible to most people, in part because of the lack of any well known precedent and in part because the nature of science is widely misunderstood; in particular it is not yet widely recognized how much science has changed since the middle of the 20th century.

The circumstances of modern science that conspire to make it possible for mistaken theories to bring misguided public policies have been described in my recent book, Science Is Not What You Think [1]. The salient points are these:

Ø     Science has become dysfunctionally large

Ø     It is hyper-competitive

Ø     It is not effectively self-correcting

Ø     It is at the mercy of multiple external interests and influences.

A similar analysis was offered by Judson [2]. That title reflects the book’s opening theme of the prevalence of fraud in modern science (as well as in contemporary culture). It assigns blame to the huge expansion in the number of scientists and the crisis that the world of science faces as it finds itself in something of a steady-state so far as resources are concerned, after a period of some three centuries of largely unfitted expansion: about 80% of all the scientists who have ever lived are extant today; US federal expenditure on R&D increased 4-fold (inflation-adjusted!) from 1953 to 2002, and US industry increased its R&D spending by a factor of 26 over that period! Judson also notes the quintessential work of John Ziman explicating the significance of the change from continual expansion to what Ziman called a dynamic steady-state [3].

Remarkably enough, President Eisenhower had foreseen this possibility and warned against it in his farewell address to the nation: “in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite”. The proponents of human-caused-climate-changer theory and of HIV/AIDS theory are examples of such elites.

A crucial factor is that elites, like all other groups, may be dysfunctionally affected by the phenomenon of Groupthink.

Janis [4] showed in detail several decades ago how that phenomenon of Groupthink had produced disastrously bad policy actions by the United States. The same phenomenon of Groupthink can cause bad things to happen in other social sectors than the government. Recently, Booker [5] has shown how Groupthink has been responsible for creating the worldwide belief, shibboleth, cliché, that humankind’s use of fossil fuels is causing global warming and climate change through the release of carbon dioxide.

Commonly held ideas about science do not envisage the possibility that a scientific consensus could bring misguided policies and actions on a global scale. What most people know — think they know — about science is that its conclusions are based on solid evidence, and that the scientific method safeguards against getting things wrong, and that science that has been primarily responsible for civilization’s advances over the last few centuries.

Those things that most people know are also largely mistaken [1, 6]. Science is a human activity and is subject to all the frailties and fallibilities of any human activity. The scientific method and the way in which it is popularly described does not accurately portray how science is actually done.

While much of the intellectual progress in understanding how the world works does indeed stand to the credit of science, what remains to be commonly realized is that since about the middle of the 20th century, science has become too big for its own good. The huge expansion of scientific activity since the Second World War has changed science in crucial ways. The number of people engaged in scientific activity has far outstripped the available resources, leading to hyper-competition and associated sloppiness and outright dishonesty. Scientists nowadays are in no way exceptional individuals, people doing scientific work are as common as are teachers, doctors, or engineers. It is in this environment that Groupthink has become significantly and damagingly important.

Booker [5] described this in relation to the hysteria over the use of fossil fuels. A comparable situation concerns the belief that HIV is the cause of AIDS [7]. The overall similarities in these two cases are that a quite small number of researchers arrived initially at more or less tentative conclusions; but those conclusions seemed of such great import to society at large that they were immediately seized upon and broadcast by the media as breaking news. Political actors become involved, accepting those conclusions quickly became politically correct, and those who then questioned and now question the conclusions are vigorously opposed, often maligned as unscientific and motivated by non-scientific agendas.

 

At any rate, contemporary science has become a group activity rather than an activity of independent intellectual entrepreneurs, and it is in this environment that Groupthink affects the elites in any given field — the acknowledged leading researchers whose influence is entrenched by editors and administrators and other bureaucrats inside and outside the scientific community.

A concomitant phenomenon is that of fanatical groupies. Concerning both human-caused climate change and the theory that HIV causes AIDS, there are quite large social groups that have taken up the cause with fanatical vigor and that attack quite unscrupulously anyone who differs from the conventional wisdom. These groupies are chiefly people with little or no scientific background, or whose scientific ambitions are unrequited (which includes students). As with activist groups in general, groupie organizations are often supported by (and indeed often founded by) commercial or political interests. Non-profit organizations which purportedly represent patients and other concerned citizens and which campaign for funds to fight against cancer, multiple sclerosis, etc., are usually funded by Big Pharma, as are HIV/AIDS activist groups.

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[1]  Henry H. Bauer, Science Is Not What You Think — how it has changed, why we can’t trust it, how it can be fixed, McFarland 2017

[2] Horace Freeland Judson, The Great Betrayal, Harcourt 2004

[3]  John Ziman, Prometheus Bound, Cambridge University Press 1994

[4]  I. L. Janis, Victims of Groupthink, 1972; Groupthink, 1982, Houghton Mifflin.

[5]  Christopher Booker, GLOBAL WARMING: A case study in groupthink, Global Warming Policy Foundation, Report 28; Human-caused global warming as Groupthink

[6]  Henry H. Bauer, Scientific Literacy and Myth of the Scientific Method, University of Illinois Press 1992

[7]  Henry H. Bauer, The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, McFarland 2007

Denialism and pseudo-science

Nowadays, questioning whether HIV causes AIDS, or whether carbon dioxide causes global warming, is often deplored and attacked as “denialism” or pseudo-science. Yet questioning those theories is perfectly good, normal science.

Science is many things, including a human activity, an institution, an authority, but most centrally science means knowledge and understanding. Pseudo-science correspondingly means false claims dressed up as though they were reliable, genuine science. Denialism means refusing to believe what is unquestionably known to be true.

Knowledge means facts; understanding means theories or interpretations; and an essential adjunct to both is methodology, the means by which facts can be gathered.

There is an important connection not only between methods and facts but also between facts and theories: Un-interpreted facts carry no meaning. They are made meaningful only when connected to a conceptual framework, which is inevitably subjective. That is typically illustrated by diagrams where the facts consist of black and white lines and areas whose meaning depends on interpretations by the viewer. Different observers offer different interpretations.

The meanings of these facts — black-and-white lines and areas — are supplied by the viewer:
A young lady with extravagant hair treatment facing left — OR an old crone looking downwards;
A duck facing left OR a rabbit facing right;
Twin black profiles looking at one another OR a white vase.

In science, researchers often differ over the interpretation of the evidence: the facts are not disputed but different theories are offered to explain them.

At any rate, in considering what science can tell us we need to consider the three facets of science: facts, methods, and theories [1]. Normal scientific activity is guided by established theories and applies established methods to enlarge the range of factual knowledge.
Every now and again, something unconventional and unforeseen turns up in one of those three facets of science. It might be a new interpretation of existing facts, as in the theory of relativity; or it may be the application of a novel method as in radio-astronomy; or it may be the observation of previously unsuspected happenings, facts, for instance that atoms are not eternally stable and sometimes decompose spontaneously. When something of that sort happens, it is often referred to later as having been a scientific revolution, overturning what had been taken for granted in one facet of science while remaining content with what has been taken for granted in the other two facets.
The progress of science can be viewed as revolutions in facts, or in method followed by the gaining of possibly revolutionary facts, followed eventually by minor or major revisions of theory. Over a sufficiently long time — say, the several centuries of modern (post-17^th-century) science — the impression by hindsight is of continual accumulation of facts and improvement of methods; the periodic changes in theoretical perspective are all that tends to be remembered by other than specialist historians of science.

(from “Why minority views should be listened to”)

The history of science also records episodes in which researchers proposed something novel simultaneously in two facets of science, for example when Gregor Mendel applied simple arithmetic to observations of plant breeding, an unprecedented methodology in biology that thereby uncovered entirely new facts. Another example might be the suggestion by Alfred Wegener in the early decades of the 20^th century that the Earth’s continents must have moved, since the flora and fauna and geological formations are so alike on continents that are now far apart; making comparisons across oceans was an entirely novel methodology, and there was no theory to accommodate the possibility of continents moving. Episodes of that sort, where two of the three facets of science are unorthodox, have been labeled “premature science” by Gunther Stent [2]; the scientific community did not accept these suggestions for periods of several decades, until something more conventional showed that those unorthodox proposals had been sound.

When claims are made that do not fit with established theory or established methods or established facts, then those claims are typically dismissed out of hand and labeled pseudo-science. For example, claims of the existence of Loch Ness “monsters” involve unorthodox facts obtained by methods that are unorthodox in biology, namely eyewitness accounts, sonar echoes, photographs, and films, instead of the established way of certifying the existence of a species through the examination of an actual specimen; and the theory of evolution and the accepted fossil record have no place for the sort of creature that eyewitnesses describe.

In recent years it has it has been quite common see dissent from established scientific theories referred to as “denialism”. The connotation of that term “denialism” is not only that something is wrong but that it is reprehensibly wrong, that those who question the established view should know better, that it would be damaging to pay attention to them; moreover that denying (for example) that HIV causes AIDS is as morally distasteful as denying the fact of the Holocaust in which millions of Jews, Gypsies, and others were killed.

As Google N-grams for “denialism” indicate, until the last couple of decades, “denialism” meant to deny historical facts of genocide or something like it:

In the 1930s, “denialism” was applied to the refusal to acknowledge the millions of deaths in the Soviet Union caused by enforcement of collectivized agriculture and associated political purges, for example the 1932-33 Ukraine famine [3]. Holocaust denial was prominent for a while around 1970 but then faded away from mention in books until it re-appeared in the late 1980s [4]. But soon “denialism” directed at questioning of HIV/AIDS theory and the theory of carbon-dioxide-induced global warming swamped all other applications of the term:

This recent usage of “denialism” is consciously and specifically intended to arouse the moral outrage associated with denial of genocides, as admitted (for example) by the South African jurist Edwin Cameron [5]. But those genocides are facts, proved beyond doubt by the records of deaths as well as remains and various artefacts at concentration camps. By contrast, so-called “AIDS denialism” and so-called “climate-change denialism” or “global warming denialism” are the questioning or disputing of theories, not facts.

That questioning, moreover, is perfectly consonant with normal science:
⇒⇒   On the matter of whether HIV causes AIDS, dissidents do not question anything about established methods of virology, and they do not claim that HIV tests do not measure proteins, antibodies, and bits of genetic material; they merely assert that the results of HIV tests do not fit the theory that HIV is an infectious agent, and they assert that the methods used in HIV AIDS research are not sound methods for studying viruses since they have not been verified against experiments with authentic pure HIV virions derived directly from HIV+ individuals or from AIDS patients (The Case against HIV).
⇒⇒   On the matter of whether the liberation of carbon dioxide and by the burning of fossil fuels is the primary cause of global warming and climate change (AGW, Anthropogenic Global Warming and climate change [ACC]), those who question that theory do not question the facts about amounts of carbon dioxide present over time and they do not question the changes that have taken place in temperatures; they merely point out that the known and accepted facts show that there have been periods of time during which carbon-dioxide levels were very high while temperatures were very low, and that during several periods when carbon-dioxide levels were increasing the Earth’s temperature was not increasing or perhaps even cooling [6]. Furthermore, those who question AGW point out that the prime evidence offered for the theory is no evidence at all, merely the outputs of computer models that are supposed to take into account all the important variables — even as it is obvious that they do not do that, since those computer models do not provide an accurate record of the actual temperature changes that have been observed over many centuries.

Denialism means to deny something that is unquestionably true, but theories, interpretations, can never be known to be unquestionably true. Labeling as denialists those who question whether HIV causes AIDS, or those who question whether human-caused generation of carbon dioxide is the prime cause of global warming and climate change, is an attempt to finesse having to properly demonstrate the validity of those theories. Another attempt at such evasion is the oft-heard assertion that there is an “overwhelming consensus” on those matters. As Michael Crichton put it:
the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. . . . Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc². Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way [7].

When the assertion of consensus does not suffice, then the ad hominem tactic of crying “denialism” is invoked: the last refuge of intellectual scoundrels who cannot prove their case by evidence and logic.

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[1]    I first suggested this in “Velikovsky and the Loch Ness Monster: Attempts at demarcation in two controversies”, in a symposium on “The Demarcation between Science and Pseudo-Science” (ed. Rachel Laudan), published as Working Papers of the Center for the Study of Science in Society (VPI&SU), 2 (#1, April 1983) 87-106. The idea was developed further in The Enigma of Loch Ness: Making Sense of a Mystery (University of Illinois Press, 1986/88; reprint, Wipf & Stock, 2012; pp. 152-3); see also Science or Pseudoscience: Magnetic Healing, Psychic Phenomena, and Other Heterodoxies (University of Illinois Press, 2001); Science Is Not What You Think (McFarland, 2017)
[2]    Gunther Stent, “Prematurity and uniqueness in scientific discovery”, Scientific American, December 1972, pp. 84–93
[3]    Described as the Holodomor
[4]    Holocaust Denial Timeline
[5]    Edwin Cameron, Witness to AIDS, I. B. Tauris, 2005; see book review in Journal of Scientific Exploration, 20 (2006) 436-444
[6]    Climate-change facts: Temperature is not determined by carbon dioxide
[7]    Michael Crichton,  “Aliens cause global warming”, Caltech Michelin Lecture, 17 January 2003