Science vs "Science"

It's got a lot to do with how you get your information, whether you trust science or not. And it's got a lot to do with whether you're exposed to real science or "science."

Like this "science"...



This product has been "proven by science," so we're fools not to buy it! I find that if I'm not watching a Nova or Nature or an episode of anything with Morgan Freeman or Stephen Hawking, most everything else that talks of science on the television is trying to sell me something. Most everything else is "science."

It seems like every beauty product advertisement is using "science" to convince me that I'm butt ugly and that to fix it (or prevent it from worsening) I should give them my perfectly good dollars. It's "science" after all.

I'm kind of stunned that it's legal for for-profits to cry "science" when it's their own study, when they merely asked opinions as evidence for effectiveness, or when they didn't do any studies at all. Science isn't allowed to be so biased. Science is supposed to want to improve your life first and foremost, not con you out of your money.

I'm not just thinking about this today because I've been hibernating this February, plopped in front of the tube, absorbing horrifying beauty ads through my aging, sagging wrinkled face. (I really should take care of it better by smearing money all over it.) I'm thinking about all this right now because of my friend Alice Roberts's nice piece "Childbirth: why I take the scientific approach to having a baby" posted on the Guardian Saturday.

Trends to move childbirth out of the hospital setting have put pressure on mothers and fathers to make decisions about what to do when it's time for theirs. You'd assume that because there's a movement to move things home that it's because some smart, science-minded, compassionate folks have figured out that it's healthier. If you can't stand the draconian and bloated government/insurance mogul-run healthcare system, a movement might feed your existing suspicions or opinions that there could be better ways to have a baby than by blindly following orders that these profit-motivated fascists at hospitals bark at us. 

But why assume that home childbirth folks are any less biased, less vested, less driven by self-interests? I don't know but it just seems so common for people to give rebels the benefit of the doubt more often than tradition, than institutions. (Something about "honest signaling" might have just popped into your mind if you've been trained in evolutionary theory.) What Alice found is that information on, that is, data or evidence for, what's healthiest--home or hospital or otherwise (birthing centers, for example)--is kind of difficult to come by!

For starters, she writes, 

"This is partly because the overall risks of maternal and neonatal death are now very small (about five per 100,000 women die in childbirth and four per 1,000 babies), so large numbers of mums are needed to assess relative risks. Maternity provision differs between countries, so looking at risks in other countries, even in Europe and the US, may not be terribly helpful."

Within that small risk there is a lot of jockeying for your support. So the second reason, she says, that makes it hard to find information is, 

"the politics of birth. It can be quite hard for mums-to-be to access impartial evidence and advice when it seems there are plenty of people wanting to influence your decision in one way or the other. Evangelical advocates of home birth often talk about the importance of women's choice and empowerment, as well as instilling distrust in obstetricians. For me, being empowered to make a decision requires access to good evidence and the freedom to make up my own mind. And whilst "maternal satisfaction" is often put forward as an important factor to be taken into consideration, I want to know what the relative risks are. And if there's not yet enough evidence to assess that – I want to know that too."

You'd think we all do. You'd think we all want to know the answer to "where and how will the risks be lowest for having my baby?" But we don't all hold  the belief that it's our right to know the answer to that, the way Alice knows it is, the way Alice demonstrates that it is. And it's not just an issue about the dissenters and the movements spinning information and evidence so we'll see things their way--a very real problem that Alice walks us through in the article. It's the doctors too.

Since the article's been posted in various places I've seen commenters complain how they asked their doctors for papers and numbers to help them make their birth plans and the doctors wouldn't go there. I've never had to make a birth plan but I've had similar experiences with doctors like when, for example, I asked for non-hormonal birth control options because I saw no reason to continue ingesting the stuff when the risks for long-term use aren't known and I was now married and ready to stop taking the pill. My doctor laughed at my question, laughed when I asked for a diaphragm or anything like it, and tried to convince me without any scientific evidence that the pill was fine to take your whole life.

Do I think medical decisions should lie completely in patients' hands? Of course not. We can't all be doctors. But they've got to be better ambassadors of science. They've got to be the best. They've got to be science.

It can't be up to us to figure it out for ourselves, not just because we shouldn't have to but because some of us are terrible at it when we try. This includes bright young people at my university, one for example who had a whole textbook on reproductive biology to answer this homework essay question: Write the life story of an egg. Because she cited it, I know that instead of using her high quality resource, she went straight to livestrong.com for all of her information.

Because of movements like the anti-vaccinators and all the people without celiac disease who won't eat gluten, it's easy to worry that unscientific trends with birth will dial back mortality rates to medieval ones. Heck, it's tempting to worry that when videos like this get around to some people who love all things PALEO, they will make it so.

No wonder so many of us can't trust climate scientists and evolutionary scientists. When it comes to our health, "science" has an agenda that's not always first and foremost what's best for us. When it comes to our beauty, "science" smells like money. If this is all we know of "science" then I'm less surprised of the push back against biology, ecology, climate, space exploration, etc... that to us scientists seems downright ridiculous.

If we're going to get non-scientists on board with real science, we need to take the word back.

Where are the COPs?

A recent popular book called Bad Science, by British op-ed columnist and physician Ben Goldacre, presents a clear and readable treatment of the way in which poor quality science, intentional misrepresentation, or poor understanding of science on the part of consumers, journalists, companies and even some scientists lead to, well, bad science.

He takes on those who claim that homeopathy works, he discusses controversies like the idea that MMR vaccines are dangerous, and he discusses the way Pharma manipulates and maneuvers with their bottom line rather than fidelity to facts (or society at large) in mind.  He points out ways in which study designs and statistical interpretations can represent, or misrepresent, a causal situation.  It's a good read, and would be especially good for anyone, especially students, in any field of science (including social science as well as genetics, medicine, or public health) to read.

Cost of Opportunity Patrols (COPs)
One of the issues that Goldacre raises has to do not with whether a given bit of science is bad, intentionally or not, but with the consequences.  After all, scientists tend to dismiss much of the criticism leveled at them and at over-claims and the like, by saying that science is a self-correcting process.  Incorrect results, whether dishonest or inadvertent, fail to have influence or mistakes are caught because people try to replicate the results and fail, then have to figure out why.

But that is only a partly good argument, probably doing more service in support of the status quo rather than stronger oversight and stricter standards, than it does to justify tolerance of bad science.  Of course, we can't catch all bad science when it's done, because much of science is far too specialized, costly, and complex for an experiment to be checked or replicated.  Bad results do eventually lose any luster they might have had, but history shows that that can take decades or (in the case of things like alchemy and phlebotomy) centuries.

The issue Goldacre raises is one that we have raised as well, here on MT and elsewhere.  It is this:  for every direction science takes, there is a cost.  That cost can be seen in the form of the lost opportunity to do something else, that might have panned out better.  The lost opportunity isn't just, or perhaps isn't mainly, due to 'bad science', but to the consequences of decisions to invest here rather than there, no matter how honorable and legitimate the science itself is.

We have very little in the way of Cost of Opportunity Patrols, to look out for and identify investments that should be diverted elsewhere, either because it's too costly, too unlikely to have payoff for what the funders expect (e.g., real health improvements), too marginally incremental, or simply that there are more urgent issues that need solving or are more likely to be actually solved in the predictable future.

In reality, such COPs would either not be tolerated, or would be manned (and womanned) by the same people who do the work that needs COPing. Science can be judged best by specialists, but they have to be disinterested, and in these days such people are in limited supply.

Further, suppose the COPs really tried to stop a major direction of science and direct the funds elsewhere.  The same kind of  waste would arise in the new area (because all the same people would flock to it, as happens now whenever something potentially new and fundable arises), often providing rationales that give their interests apparent 'fit' to the new area.  It's a hydra phenomenon.  But can we be blamed?  The problems are that our livelihood is at stake, and we've become so specialized that we can hardly even open a door with a new kind of handle.

Worse, the political opposition to loss of funds by current recipients would make bureaucrats shake in their boots, lest Senators would quietly threaten to curtail their budgets if the change is made, etc.  History shows that bureaucrats back away from real change or rationalize inaction and delay.  So rather than do something different, the pressures are to hyper-hype what you're doing now.

We are investing large amounts of money in genetically related projects like biobanks and GWAS that we and others think ought to be outed by the COPs, because they use a lot of funds for little payoff, relative to what could be gained by focusing on things that really are genetic, until we show that genetic knowledge really can lead to the elimination of such diseases.  Right now, the record is pretty weak in that department, but it should be and could be much better.

The problem is that while peer review is vested-interest review through and through to a great extent, finding better directions to pursue involves both new sets of similar vested interests but, from a scientific viewpoint, true uncertainties.  The riskiest kind of grant to apply for, as everybody knows very well, are the riskiest ideas.  How can we really know that this or that specific new direction would pay off better, per dollar spent, than GWAS or whatever else will?  After all, none are complete busts.

Scientists love to rationalize their low-payoff work by saying that next century will show that our fine insights led to a worldwide transformation.  One example we recently heard is defense of the expense of the Large Hadron Collider (which physicists are already hyping for LHC mega-projects beyond the discovery of the shy Higgs Boson that is expected this year, to keep those bosons spinning).  After all, they say, Maxwell discovered electromagnetism and that led to the transformation of the world by electric power and electronics a century later.  Think of your iPod and microwave oven.  The argument that the money could feed large numbers of children and give them longer, productive lives is just dismissed as if it were irrelevant (is it?).

Of course, there are such examples, and it's understandable that physicists would make use of them.  The same way that NASA justifies its budget in searching for life on Alpha Centauri (or Mars) because the moon project gave us Tang and Teflon and the profits from Apollo 13, The Movie.

Maybe a solid historiographical analysis of the past would give us criteria by which to set the COPs in motion, to know when to stop or cut back on projects that have been around for a while, and shift the investment elsewhere.  Maybe even just shaking up the system so it cannot become entrenched would do that to a useful degree.  Not, of course, as long as faculty salaries depend on grants and universities on grant overhead money.  But this kind of reform would be no different than letting industries thrive or shrivel depending on whether they generate good products that somebody wants, which seems perfectly wonderful in our society today.  Science by contrast really shouldn't be just driven by short-term bottom line, but we clearly see the need of COPs in the sense of things that really do become stodgy, despite excited reviews written to lobby for increased support.

It's easy to complain about limited successes in science, when serious science attacks tough problems that are truly hard to solve--as in genetics and evolution are.  But the more the hype, the more grandiose the promise, and the more the funds, perhaps the more should be the accountability.

Homeopathic beer is totally watered down

Take a beer.

Sorry for the dilution scare.

Make it a great one like La Fin du Monde.

Take away all the beer molecules by diluting it like crazy.

Leave the vibrations behind.

Drink that water and you should have all the healing effects of real beer without all the calories or addictive effects.

It sounds magical.

So if homeopathy really worked wouldn't somebody be selling homeopathic beer at Whole Foods by now?

Of course they would, but it doesn't work. You'd drink the "beer," not get a smidgen of relief from the human condition, and demand your money back. Diluteries all over the country would have to shut down before they knew what happened.

Then why do people still buy piles of homeopathic medicines?

Compared to beer, it's harder to gauge or track the effects of headache pills; if you take a pill for a headache, it's hard to tell if your headache was relieved by the pill or just by your own body over time.  Homeopathic meds can also provide relief as much as placebos can (which can be effective!). So homeopathic medicines for headaches will keep selling and will keep making the people richer who stock the shelves at Whole Foods with water pills.

Sadly, homeopathic beer would never work. Even though beer is just sweet sweet medicine.

Next time James Randi and friends stage an overdose party, maybe they should wash those pills down with some of it. Maybe they already do.

Science run amok?

Yesterday's post on the scientist on autopilot touched on the subject of scientific publishing.  We wanted to follow up on our suggestion that, at least in a technology-driven field like genetics, it might be a problem if scientists are thinking less and publishing more.

We scientists, especially those whose jobs or even salaries depend on grants, have found self-interest (at least in the short term) in a proliferation of data, technologies, and journals (and headline-blaring public media).  They allow us to compete for funds in the current system as it's developed, because they give both the reality and the illusion of prolific productivity.

Several recent pieces in The Guardian have discussed the ethics and economics of modern scientific publishing.  The first was a piece published on Aug 29 by George Monbiot, "Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist", and it reverberated through the internet.

Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won't guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but – wait for it – to academic publishers. Theirs might sound like a fusty and insignificant sector. It is anything but. Of all corporate scams, the racket they run is most urgently in need of referral to the competition authorities.

His point is that the public pays to generate the knowledge, and then must pay to see the results. Accessing even a single article in a journal online if you don't have access through an institution can cost you $30-40 or more.  And, university libraries pay thousands of dollars, sometimes tens of thousands, to subscribe to these journals. 

What we see here is pure rentier capitalism: monopolising a public resource then charging exorbitant fees to use it. Another term for it is economic parasitism. To obtain the knowledge for which we have already paid, we must surrender our feu to the lairds of learning.

The 'solution', open-access journals, is too often exorbitantly expensive for authors (they can charge on the order of $2-3000), which of course is yet another way that the public pays, through grants that pay the publication fees, for science.  And it has done nothing to knock the 'top-notch', or 'high-impact' journals off their monopolistic perches.  The bean counters at universities still reward publication in Nature or Science or Cell over publication in the PLoS journals.  And scientists still turn to the 'top-notch' journals first.  Monbiot heavily criticizes publishers for taking extreme advantage of their monopoly.

The returns are astronomical: in the past financial year, for example, Elsevier's operating profit margin was 36% (£724m on revenues of £2bn). They result from a stranglehold on the market. Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, who have bought up many of their competitors, now publish 42% of journal articles.

They can't be blamed, really, since they're in business to make money.  But we in the profession, not they, have allowed the system to develop in this way.

Monbiot's solutions?

In the short term, governments should refer the academic publishers to their competition watchdogs, and insist that all papers arising from publicly funded research are placed in a free public database. In the longer term, they should work with researchers to cut out the middleman altogether, creating – along the lines proposed by Björn Brembs of Berlin's Freie Universität – a single global archive of academic literature and data. Peer-review would be overseen by an independent body. It could be funded by the library budgets which are currently being diverted into the hands of privateers.

The system is being challenged, as Ben Goldacre writes in his Guardian column, Bad Science. "Digital activist" Aaron Swartz at Harvard's Centre for Ethics has apparently attempted to download millions of archived journal articles, to which he would then allow free access.  He has been "accused of theft of intellectual property on a grand scale."

Totally free access may be ethically appealing, but it's not sustainable.  Someone has to pay to publish science, either the producer or the consumer.  Monbiot would say that the problem is that the publishers charge way too much, as evidenced by their high profit margins.  Indeed, most of the work of publishing a scientific paper is done by unpaid reviewers, with the editing done, unpaid, by the author for the 'privilege' of then paying the publication charges.  Open access, in which the authors pay to publish, might seem to solve the problem of cost to the consumer, but fees are high, and can compromise the integrity of the whole endeavor.  And the scientists will pay the cost from their grants, not their own pockets.

David Colquhoun in a piece in Monday's Guardian comes at the issue from a different angle.  He says that peer review doesn't work very well anymore, given the vast quantity of journals and papers now (he cites this statistic: "an estimated 1.3 million papers in 23,750 journals in 2006"). 

The blame for this sad situation lies with the people who have imposed a publish-or-perish culture, namely research funders and senior people in universities. To have "written" 800 papers is regarded as something to boast about rather than being rather shameful. University PR departments encourage exaggerated claims, and hard-pressed authors go along with them.

The result is an equally vast quantity of poor papers and bad science, and, as he says, the only beneficiaries of the system as it now stands are publishers.  The administrators and grant system can't be blamed, as we allowed this system to develop over the past 40 or so years, because it snuck in gently when money was plentiful and scientists less so.  Once administrators saw the overhead and other score-counting opportunities, they naturally seized on them.  And with exceedingly competitive grant funds, and an unwillingness to be realistic and fund more or less randomly, we pretend to use criteria like publication counts as evidence of quality.

Colquhoun suggests that a solution is for authors to publish their own papers on their websites and open them up for comments, though he believes this is unlikely to work, as Nature tried this a few years ago and it fell flat.  So instead he proposes a quota system:

I'd suggest scientists should limit themselves to an average of two original papers a year. They should also be limited to holding one research grant at a time. Anyone who thought their work necessitated more than this would have to be scrutinised very carefully. It's well known that small research groups give better value than big ones, so that should be the rule.

And then, he says, the papers might actually be read rather than just counted.

There's no question that quality and quantity are conflated, but as long as the pressures on scientists are to bring in overhead (er, to do important research), and to publish -- anything -- rather than on quality, the system isn't going to change. But, quality could be better ensured by making scientists responsible for the claims they make in their grant applications and publications, setting limits on the number of grants a researcher can have, even a lifetime limit, reducing the amount of overhead universities are allowed to charge, or other kinds of caps and limitations.

Also, we can hardly tell, with the proliferation of results, which are going to be important (whatever that means), what of each paper is grain rather than chaff, and which are junk. Here we're not referring to fraud and fabrication. But when we haven't the time or ability to judge the details, how can we judge the actual importance? Replication is one good way, but it can these days rarely be done very convincingly. And how can we recognize the unsung gems hidden in the morass of legitimate, but incremental, if over-claimed, results?

Of course, history decades from now will make some of these judgments. It may not recognize the gems that should have been followed up, however. So there are many things to think about--and that's hard to do in a system that forces us to flood the market and hence systematically takes away the time we have to do that kind of measured reflection.

Large eyes evolved to allow people to see better at higher latitudes? Just so.

People whose ancestors long lived at higher latitudes have larger eyes and larger brains than the rest of us, and a new paper, reported here, tells us why.

People who live at higher latitudes have larger eyes and more processing power in their brains to deal with visual information compared with those living nearer the equator, a study suggests.

"As you move away from the equator, there's less and less light available, so humans have had to evolve bigger and bigger eyes," said Eiluned Pearce from the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, a lead author on the study.

"Their brains also need to be bigger to deal with the extra visual input. Having bigger brains doesn't mean that higher-latitude humans are smarter, it just means they need bigger brains to be able to see well where they live."

This sounds quite plausible, and of course it could well be true.  But, as with most such evolutionary stories, it's easy to come up with competing explanations that may well be just as valid (or invalid).  And it's also easy to find reasons that the proposed explanation could be wrong.  Even the premise that we "had to have" bigger eyes is less than obvious.  Unfortunately, none of these propositions, including the original one, can be tested.  

So, what could be wrong with the big eyes/big brain theory?  First, let's keep in mind that the idea that there's selective pressure for larger eyes means that people with smaller eyes systematically had fewer children than people with larger eyes because they couldn't see well enough.  They were poorer hunters, or fishermen, or stumbled off the ice into the sea, or didn't see predators on time, or squinted unappealingly when they gazed at their beloved -- or whatever.  (And, the authors imply that food and predators are harder to see in the polar climes than in the dense foliage of the tropics -- also rather strange and less than obvious!)

And this in turn implies that those who couldn't see well got no help from those who could, but as far as is known, people who lived in the arctic 10,000 years ago, when, according to this theory, larger eyes were evolving, traveled in small bands of related people who hunted together and shared food.  It's not like, say, malaria as a selective pressure.  It's easy to see how malaria could reduce fitness, and resistance to the disease could raise it.  


But, for the sake of argument, let's imagine that people deprived their kinfolk of food if they couldn't see well enough to hunt it themselves, or that people with bad eyesight (related to the amount of light) couldn't find mates.  Is darkness likely to be a stronger selective force than other forces in the same environment?  There's just as much endless light as there is endless dark at the poles, not to mention the glare of the sun off the snow in winter months, so, why wasn't the need for retinal protection a strong enough selective force to keep eyes small so they would take in less light (e.g., to protect from retinal cancer or cataracts, or just to reduce glare)?  

And, at higher latitudes the landscape is rather barren most of the time, and there is a lot less to see than in the tropics: nothing but snow and sparse vegetation, and much less colorful life to discriminate.

And why waste nutritional needs to service higher energy big-eyes and the energy hungry neurons to support it?

And, if poor eyesight really did lead to lower fitness, near and farsightedness should also have been selected out of our lineage long ago, and optometrists would all be unemployed today.  We'd never even know bad eyesight once existed.  

Of course what it means to 'see well where they live' is something so open-ended that with this in mind one can probably always make up a story.  Large eyes should imply a larger visual cortex and so on  because there are more retinal cells sending messages and more integration among them needing to take place, which doesn't imply higher intelligence (as the authors do clearly say).  But other factors such as the nature of color vision or light sensitivity (fraction of rods in the retina) also would be relevant.  Bigger heads for reasons unrelated to light could lead to bigger eyes.


And so on.  

The fact, which we would have no reason to question, that some species have larger eyes towards the poles may be unexceptionable.  But what if not all species at high latitudes have large eyes?  Then do we cling to the hypothesis about light by making post hoc excuses for the exceptions, or do we give up on our "had to have" assertions?  

The problems are worth raising and the story worth critiquing because it reflects an important problem in evolutionary biology, which is assertions that far outdistance the data.  These kinds of evolutionary arguments are easy to make, crop up all the time, and often make the news. But it's bad science to propose a hypothesis that can't be tested, and then treat it as though it's true, or as though it's a deep new insight (so to speak).  Or to treat it as if it's newsworthy and a big discovery.  And it's bad journalism to report it as if it's true rather than just speculation.