Laugh anyway. It’s a cartoon illustrating what would happen when a bunch of astrologers wielding homeopathic rays and perpetual motion engines encounter Captain Sagan in a starship armed with Science. The results are a bit brutal, but I guess that’s what happens when fantasy and reality collide.
Several people have sent me messages of despair lately. They’re working in universities which, like every university in the country, is struggling with tight budgets and declining support from the state government, and a citizenry that seems to be a sucker for every pseudoscientific scam some scoundrel will sell, and what is the academic administration doing? They’re joining in the con!
Look here at the University of Maryland School of Medicine: they’ve opened something called the Center for Integrative Medicine, where prospective doctors can go to learn how to gather Qi, or how to relieve back pain by twirling little needles. It’s complete quackery operating under the imprimatur of a respectable university, and I guarantee you it’s better at gathering grant money from the privileged quack corners of our federal grant system than it is at finding any magic Qi.
The University of Michigan Health System is also propping up an Integrative Medicine department. Their big obsession is Anthroposophy, one of the bastard mystic cults spawned in the early years of the 20th century, and yes, it is total loony wackitude. We actually have institutions of higher learning promoting Rudolf Steiner? Madness.
Now if I were truly shortsighted, I could take some joy in the fact that competing universities are scuttling their intellectual credentials with this crap, except that the University of Minnesota is just as bad. We have a Center for Sprituality and Healing that teaches nurses how to diagnose and treat disease by waving their hands over their patients, and brings in speakers like Deepak Chopra and the Dalai Lama to say “Woooooooo” to large audiences. It’s a disgrace and an embarrassment.
One thing Americans can take pride in is the fact that we have a prestigious university system that draws in students from around the world — something that Obama even mentioned in his state of the union address. It is still true, and I can attest to the quality of the faculty at our universities (although I will refrain from jingoism — the United States is not unique in possessing great minds). However, what I also see is rot setting in. Universities are being starved by the government, and they’re abandoning rigor and standards of excellence to pander.
Pay heed. This can’t last. We can’t pretend to be world leaders in science and knowledge while our best schools are turning their back on reason and evidence to sell magic charms and superstition to the populace.
Aaargh, it’s international! Take a look at what the Science Museum in London is doing — whitewashing homeopathy.
This time, for real. I keep promising to tell you how it works, and somehow the explanations always look ridiculous, but finally I found an authoritative video that gives you the specific molecular details.
See? Is everything clear now?
Follow this link to the amusingly bizarre webcomic about homeopathy behind it. I’ll just share with you the story behind the artwork:
So this might seem to make very little sense at all. Fair enough, it’s sort of supposed to. But this did actually happen to me at work — A guy came in to buy some homeopathic tablets, and was quite insistent that I not let them touch the large tub of ice-cream that he was also purchasing. Assuming that it had something to do with astronomically minute quantities of poison that such remedies are reputed to contain (they don’t, by the by — it is entirely water,) I assured him that there was no threat of contamination.
He then proceeded to explain to me, as a primary school teacher would an infant, that homeopathy works due to molecular vibration. Being a mere layman, I will try to explain this process to the best of my limited ability. The water molecules vibrate with the same resonance as the poisons that give them their efficacy. This in turn causes human molecules to vibrate upon ingestion, curing one’s ills. Close contact with the tub of ice-cream will cause the vibrations to shift to the new medium, resulting in an ineffective medicine.
The comic does not explain the specific details of homeopathy — it’s more like an artistic rendering of the spirit of homeopathy. And like all great art, it reveals the deeper truth. In this case, that homeopathy is gullet-gibbering, brain-blitzing insanity that has gone beyond evidence into the realm of childish delusions.
This must have been fun, I wish I’d been there.
Africa is suffering through the global AIDS pandemic — tens of millions are infected with HIV. It’s good that wealthier nations are sending resources to the continent, but do they really need a quack homeopath and chiropractor to travel to Tanzania to treat AIDS with homeopathy?
Wait…there are areas of North Africa where the water shortages are chronic and acute. Maybe she’d be more useful if she went there with her magic vials.
Dara O’Briain and Brian Cox aggravated a great many astrologers when they announced on a UK television program that “astrology is rubbish” and “astrology is nonsense”. The Astrological Association of Great Britain was so incensed that they created a petition demanding that the BBC commit to “making a fair and balanced representation of astrology in the future” — which left me amusedly discombobulated that there is a formal Astrological Association of Great Britain, and that they don’t realize that tossing their whole goofy discipline in the rubbish heap is a fair and balanced representation.
Now we get a whole new level of foolishness, though: Martin Robbins has posted a criticism of the skeptics from a serious historian who doesn’t get it. She demands that we take astrology more seriously and respectfully, and explains that many astrologers are intelligent people who study astronomy (you know, the real science), and are fully aware of concepts like precession and the actual physical arrangements of the stars in the sky, and have quite sophisticated explanations to account for superficial discrepancies like the absence of Ophiuchus from the official list of zodiacal constellations, and that they are right to be annoyed when they are portrayed as unaware of obvious physical phenomena.
This is all true, but stupid.
I’ve had long conversations with Very Serious Astrologers; early in my skeptical career, I spent a fair amount of time engaging them, and I’m familiar with the diverse ways in which their brains work. They were generally engrossed with the behavior of those lights in the sky; if you wanted to know what constellation you could spot on the horizon in the western sky in August, you could ask an astronomer and get a good answer, or you could ask a dedicated astrologer and they’d tell you the same thing, and they were certainly far more reliable sources for that sort of information than I am. I’ve played with some of their software, and it is intricate and elaborate and uses genuine astronomical data that they gather from astronomical databases.
But so what? It’s still all rubbish. There’s more to science than mastering mechanics, there’s this little thing called “understanding” that is absolutely essential. A great piano tuner is not necessarily a good musician, and memorizing the periodic table of the elements does not turn you into a chemist. Imagine a conversation with your mother: “I’m sure your father can fix the electronic ignition system in your Honda, dear…why, he managed to drive from Owatonna to the Mall of America last week, and he only got lost once!” One thing does not have anything to do with the other. Knowing a bunch of solid facts about stars does not justify explanations about magical influences that are antagonistic to known processes and which are built, not on the trustworthy foundation of that data, but on unfounded beliefs in magical influences from distant objects.
This is especially true when that specialized scientific knowledge is used as part of the pseudo-scientific patter marshalled to justify their supernatural explanations. Science is window dressing to modern astrologers; they don’t get to fulminate indignantly by pointing at the astronomy element they’ve incorporated into their delusions when someone points out that their conclusions are all wrong and completely unwarranted. Those don’t matter. Their rationalizations are like ‘sophisticated theology’ — vapor and noise that they make flashier by throwing in a few modern scientific terms.
Rebekah Higgitt wants to claim that astrologers are justified “if they are presented as idiots who don’t understand precession and do nothing but write newspaper horoscopes that cover around a twelfth of the population in one go.” OK. Then we should present them as idiots who don’t have a mechanism for their claimed influences, ignore all the logical arguments and empirical evidence that shows astrology doesn’t work, and abuse astronomy to put up a phony façade of scienciness.
They’re still idiots.
Nah, not really — that work has been independently confirmed many times over. Recently, though, Deepak Chopra has been praising Luc Montagnier, the Nobel prize winning co-discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus, for tumbling down the walls of science — which ought to be enough to condemn the poor guy right there. But I had to take a look at exactly what Montagnier is claiming, and I’m afraid the only thing tumbling is his credibility.
Montagnier claims in several papers that the DNA of pathogenic bacteria emits an electromagnetic signal, and further, that if you dilute that DNA homeopathically so that no DNA is actually present, the water continues to emit that same signal. Further, if you put two vials of homeopathically diluted EMS emitting water next to each other, the signal can move from one to another. And further, only bacteria and viruses pathogenic to humans produce this signal; ordinary E. coli does not. It’s madness piled upon madness.
There is no sensible explanation given for this phenomenon, only some wild-eyed speculation that “water molecules can form long polymers of dipoles associated by hydrogen bonds” that may be “self-maintained by the electromagnetic radiations they are emitting”. More madness!
I’m not going to criticize the paper because it postulates a mysterious mechanism with no coherent physical cause, though. I read the paper and call it crap by virtue of the sloppiness of the work. I disbelieve it, not because I’m predisposed to find it unlikely (although I do), but because it’s an appallingly bad paper.
First, let’s look at the gadget he uses to record these signals.
Awesome, isn’t it? He uses a laptop PC with a Soundblaster audio card for analog to digital signal conversion, plugged into a hifi amplifer, which is in turn hooked up to a coil of copper wire. A vial contain the solution to be tested is dropped into the coil. Un-freaking-believable.
It’s not at all impossible to measure electrical signals with an apparatus like this. I’ve done it myself; when I was a graduate student, I built a fun little gadget which consisted of an electronic circuit board that I etched to create a fine meshwork of thin interdigitating copper lines, on which I would place a larval zebrafish, and with it I could record the action potentials from the Mauthner neuron, a large cell that mediates an escape reflex in the fish. It actually worked reasonably well, but was a bit finicky — the fish had to be oriented just right, there couldn’t be too much water on the plate or it would float away from the contact, and the signals were highly variable in strength. But yes, when an extraordinarily large cell fired off a massive signal (many tens of millivolts!) within a millimeter of the plate, we could pick it up with our apparatus. Of course, it was also wildly sensitive to all kinds of external signals — we’d do our experiments with the apparatus in a Faraday cage, and you could have great fun wiggling your fingers near the plate and picking up all kinds of spurious signals.
So now I look at Montagnier’s apparatus, which looks even more rinky-tink than my old gadget, and what I see is a sensitive noise detector. It’s little more than a fancy small-scale version of a Scientology e-meter, a gadget that picks up on noise in the environment and makes a needle on a dial wiggle.
Now look at the ‘data’ that comes out of it.
Apparently, all a Nobel prize winner can do is raw screen dumps from his PC, and he can get away with publishing that. But look at the raw data on the top — background noise from a cell-free vial on the left, and a massive homeopathic dilution of a Mycoplasma suspension on the right. Woo hoo! How many of you would like to be able to get crap data like that and publish it?
By the way, it’s not just my tiny reduction of the figure that makes the scale invisible. They don’t say anywhere what the magnitude of the EMS is. I suspect they don’t know; they just crank up the amp to the max to get a lot of jangly jitter, and don’t bother to calibrate anything.
There are a couple of other indicators that this is pathological science. They’re looking at a minuscule, variable result that is prone to be picking up all kinds of irrelevant signals, yet nowhere in the entire paper can I find the word “blind”. This is the kind of experiment that demands extreme rigor and care, yet the authors don’t even bother to describe the protocols used. That’s a warning sign.
Another sign is that the paper flits from topic to topic, doing quick superficial experiments with dilutions and crosstalk and chemical treatments. The paper itself is a welter of noise, and is one of the more unprofessional write-ups I’ve ever run across — and remember, I teach undergraduates. They are claiming the existence of a truly remarkable phenomenon. A good scientist would focus on one fundamental observation, the claim that they can record species-specific bacterial signals with their crude apparatus, and nail that one down good and hard and believably. But no. They show off some very poor raw data and then rush off to dilute the experiment a trillion fold and claim to see the same signal. I found the first observation dubious, why are you showing me something even more unlikely?
And finally, another suspicious sign are the dates. This paper was submitted on 3 January 2009, revised on 5 January 2009, and accepted on 6 January 2009. That’s an unbelievable turnaround, especially for a paper with such incredible results, and the revisions must have been trivial to be able to be whipped around in a day. Yet it’s an awful paper that I would have shredded in a sea of red ink if it had come to me. Who reviewed this, the author’s mother? Maybe someone even closer. Guess who the chairman of the editorial board is: Luc Montagnier.
The work does have some historical precedent, though. This is the same nonsense and the same apparatus that Benveniste was peddling. Is there something in the wine in France? I could almost believe this terrible waste of time was done under the influence of a hogshead or two of the cheap stuff.
Montagnier L, Aissa J, Ferris S, Montagnier J-L, Lavallee C (2009) Electromagnetic Signals Are Produced by Aqueous Nanostructures Derived from Bacterial DNA Sequences. Interdiscip Sci Comput Life Sci 1: 81-90.
I told you that maybe talking real fast would be a viable lecture strategy, and here’s Ben Goldacre proving me right!
I will not be at this one…I wouldn’t want you to think I was verging on a state of godlike omnipresence. It should still be fun and informative, and has a good lineup: It’s the Northeast Conference on Science & Skepticism, on 9-10 April in New York City. Of course, it’s not set in the Pacific Northwest, so it does have an inferior venue (NY? Who’s heard of that strange place?), but you’ll learn stuff there anyway.
