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.

"Purchasing lace by the mile." (Zola, 1883): scientific consumerism?

Emile Zola and the origins of Wal-Mart and science commercialism
We have been reading Emile Zola's 1883 novel The Ladies' Paradise, a story about the first department store in Paris, and how it grew and out-competed small traditional shops.  Modeled after the real Bon Marché department store, The Ladies' Paradise offered merchandise at cut-throat low prices.  They could do this by buying their wares in very big lots from suppliers, and turning their stock over very rapidly--in today, out tomorrow.

Bon Marché department store, Paris, est'd mid 1800's; Wikipedia

The mark-up was small, so prices were lower than the other shops could afford, but Ladies' Paradise could thrive by large volume.  Sales pressure, advertising, and the now-familiar tactics of consumerism, by making potential customers feel out-dated or that they really had to have the latest in style.  Get rid of the old stuff, and get with it with the new!  Even if to the ruination of the customers, the Paradise thrived.  Eventually, the pressure was too great to resist: the consumer society was born. 

The high-throughput, scaled-up society is what we live.  It didn't start with them, but we have been Wal-Mart-ed!  Or Home Depot'ed.  Try to find a local hardware store where the clerk actually knows about hardware, or where you can buy just a couple of nails rather than a sealed pack of them!  McD for food, Amazon for anything else.

A tide that started in Europe in the 19th century, mastered by Americans, is irresistible.  Even if something can, or perhaps should be done more slowly, deliberately, on a smaller scale, the high-throughput society is a steamroller that squashes anything that dawdles in its path.

High throughput: science mirrors society
Did we say 'high-throughput'-- and does that ring a bell?  Nobody likes to think of science as just another part of our culture.  We want it to be a stand-aside, objective, look at the world, motivated by curiosity or societal need, perhaps, but not affected by factors other than the search for truth.  It should not be swept up in current culture's fads, emotions, or other motivations (including selfishness).

Of course, that's not the way the real world is.  Today, we are in a rapidly spreading, frenzied world that is trying to 'purchase nucleotides by the mile', almost literally.  Life science has to a very great extent become driven by the Wal-Mart mentality:  a rapid, unexhausted, through-put of new 'data', justified on whatever grounds but essentially to keep the wheels turning, the funds flowing in and the papers flowing out.  These are just as much quick-hitters (with some exceptions, of course) as the fabrics flowing through The Ladies' Paradise.

We continually hear that we 'need' whole genome sequence, that the cost will rapidly reach only $1000 per person--maybe even less!  Meanwhile, since it's not yet that cheap, we do whole-exome sequencing instead, whole copy-number, gene-expression, protein interaction, whatever identification. Quietly and sometimes openly, it is acknowledged that these are very poor substitutes for focused knowledge and experiment, but that we need to do it to keep our labs running until whole genome sequencing becomes cheap enough to do it on everything that moves.  And much that doesn't.

Nothing could reflect the cultural pattern The Ladies' Paradise inaugurated more than this does!  Taking time to think is outre.  There are of course some good reasons for this massive, frantic data-gathering effort, given how much we don't yet understand about genomes and their uses.  But rather than measured, tempered, slower and more deliberate experimentation and observation, we take the fast-food, in and out the door, just-in-time industrial approach.  It's our way of, yes, doing business.

Of course, the System knows very well how to keep us frantically worried about falling behind, about who's getting ahead or published in Nature and Science.  Advertising is certainly a part of this, and the ad industry is expert at bleeding us for whatever we have.  A relevant note is the veritable blizzard of "See our magnificent miracle-gear at our exhibition at the ASHG [American Society of Human Genetics] meetings!" postcards in our mailboxes every day (the meetings are in San Fran this week and we'll be there--not at the commercial hall, though).

Yes, whether it's lace or nucleotides, our culture knows how to turn a buck.