[escepticos] Dos libros, y dos críticas (en ingles)

[Francisco Perfectti <fperfect@...>]

Han aparecido dos libros que quizás sean de interés para algunos miembros de la
corrala:

*The Undergrowth of Science: Delusion, Self-deception and Human Frailty
by Walter Gratzer
Oxford University Press: 2000. 338 pp. £18.99, $27.50

*Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud
by Robert L. Park
Oxford University Press: 2000. 240 pp. £18.99, $25

Adjunto los comentarios que han aparecido en Nature

Saludos


====================================
Now you see it, now you don't
DOUGLAS R. O. MORRISON
Douglas R. O. Morrison is an honorary staff member of CERN, CH-1211 Geneva 23,
Switzerland.


The Undergrowth of Science: Delusion, Self-deception and Human Frailty
by Walter Gratzer
Oxford University Press: 2000. 338 pp. £18.99, $27.50

It came as a shock to many when Richard Feynman reviewed a subject that was
backed by two opposing theories, each with strong experimental support, and
concluded that the only answer was that one of the experiments must be wrong. He
was right, as usual, but for those educated in the Rutherford tradition of
believing that experiments are the true basis of science, this was almost a
heresy. We are accustomed to theories being wild hypotheses, but not physical
experiments! Once one accepts this possibility, however, false results can be
found to occur fairly frequently and we should take them into account.

The first person to study what happens when a scientist declares a wrong result,
and others follow him, was Irving Langmuir, who, in a famous lecture, gave it
the name 'pathological science'. He described cases such as N-rays, 'discovered'
by a respected physicist, René Blondlot. N-rays collapsed after a single
dramatic episode when the physicist Robert W. Wood visited Blondlot and was
present when, with incredible accuracy, he measured the dispersion of the rays
by a prism. When, in the darkened room, Wood removed the prism, Blondlot's
measurements were unaffected. Wood published and effectively killed N-rays.
Thanks to Langmuir, if one wants to hint that a series of results may be wrong
despite confirmatory publications, a mention of N-rays gives the connecting
clue.

When Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons published evidence for cold fusion and
their findings were then supported by independent scientists, we talked of
Langmuir and pathological science. But this time there was no Robert Wood to
strike the killer blow. If only Dick Feynman had lived longer and been able to
use his wit on cold fusion.

Walter Gratzer has written a book describing many examples of pathological
science. He is a good writer and holds the reader's attention well. The first
part of the book takes the major case studies given in Langmuir's lecture, and
expands on them using hindsight. He adds several other examples, including the
more recent case of cold fusion. But his strongest criticisms are of the medical
profession, which he knows best. It seems incredible that a doctor or group of
doctors could believe in a treatment and carry it out for many years without
people remarking that it was not acting as a cure but was instead killing many
patients.

One example is ptosis, which means 'dropped organs'. Operations on the kidney
began around 1883 and the death rate from removing a dropped kidney was about
50%. Later operations sewed the kidney to the abdominal wall. Many thousands of
these useless operations were performed over some 50 years, to correct a
condition that caused no deaths. Removing the colon was recommended at one time
despite the 18% death rate of the operation. Gratzer also describes and attacks
homeopathy, although this is still popular, particularly in France.

The second half of the book extends these essentially scientific case studies to
the influence of politics and racial prejudice on science. The deadful story of
how Trofim Lysenko destroyed genetics in the Soviet Union is well known but
worth re-reading. Gratzer also describes how the same procedure of having
well-organized meetings at which possible opponents of the establishment are
denounced and then removed, was prepared for a group of physicists. Just before
the first such meeting, in 1949, Igor Kurchatov, the father of the Soviet atom
bomb, saved them by declaring to Lavrenti Beria, head of the secret police, that
quantum mechanics and relativity theories were essential for developing an atom
bomb. According to Gratzer, Beria consulted Stalin, who, speaking of the
physicists, declared: "Leave them in peace; we can always shoot them all later."

The important lesson is that science is universal, and when it is viewed as
Soviet science or Aryan science, disaster can often be the outcome. The science
of eugenics, literally 'good birth', assumed that all human characteristics,
intellectual and moral as well as physical, were inherited, and hence people of
'inferior' races or those with hereditary diseases should be controlled.

The concept of Aryan science started long before Hitler came to power and was
based on the principle that the Aryans were a superior race. The Nazi government
first applied these ideas to its own people, and some 300,000 people considered
physically or mentally inferior were sterilized between 1933 and 1939. After
1936, killings by doctors in hospitals and asylums began. In 1939 euthanasia was
legalized to replace sterilization, and finally, no fewer than 70,000 patients
in institutions were secretly killed. Later, this belief in racial superiority
led to the killing of millions of Jews, Poles, gypsies and others in
concentration camps.

Eugenics started in Britain in 1869 and quickly spread to the United States,
where eugenic measures such as marriage laws preventing unsuitable unions were
introduced. Compulsory sterilization followed in many states, starting with
Indiana in 1907 and lasting well into the sixties. Other countries followed
suit. In Sweden, compulsory sterilization became legal in 1934, and over the
next 30 years about 1% of the population ? 63,000 Swedes ? were sterilized for
reasons of race or social undesirability. Eugenics is now almost dead, but
racial discrimination is alive, although usually bearing other names, such as
'ethnic cleansing'. The fight against eugenics continues.

Gratzer writes as a historian, and so his book lacks the charm of personal
involvement found in Langmuir's contributions ? Langmuir played the part of
Robert Wood by demonstrating to experimental physicists Bergen Davis and Arthur
Barnes that they were counting imaginary scintillations. Gratzer could have
discussed cold fusion in more depth, as this controversy continues today. In
fact, the true believers held a meeting in Italy last May which was sponsored by
the three main Italian official research organizations.

For a wrong result to be believed and for the idea to spread, the reputation of
the people involved is very important. Bob Park, the author of a somewhat
similar book, Voodoo Science, says that, no matter how crazy the claim, it is
always possible to find a physicist with a PhD to support it. Reading Gratzer's
book, one is tempted to say that there is a 50% chance that a Nobel laureate
will support the claim.

Interestingly, Gratzer shows that scientists who make bad errors tend to be
treated kindly by their
colleagues. This is probably because the profession believes in self-regulation,
and possibly also because there is a feeling of 'there but for the grace of God,
go I'.

What will be the next example of pathological science, for there are surely many
more still to come? Possibly it will be something we all desire ? a new energy
source, life on Mars. I would recommend Gratzer's book as a tool to help us
recognize it sooner and fight it effectively.

=========================================
=========================================
Varieties of silly experience
N. DAVID MERMIN
N. David Mermin is in the Department of Physics, Cornell University, Clark Hall,
Ithaca, New York 14853-2501, USA.

Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud
by Robert L. Park
Oxford University Press: 2000. 240 pp. £18.99, $25
Or how to keep your head when all around are losing theirs.

Since the mid-1980s Bob Park, professor of physics at the University of Maryland
and director of the Washington office of the American Physical Society, has
produced a weekly newsletter, What's New (14 years' worth of which are available
online at http://www.aps.org/WN/ ). His primary focus is on the surrealistic
drama endlessly taking place at the interface between government and science.
Park's acid views on the insight and judgement that some of America's
distinguished leaders bring to bear on the uses and support of science bring his
audience of physicists both delight (for his wit) and despair (over the
occasions for that wit). Nor is his interest in the public misunderstanding of
science limited to the corridors of power. Wacky encounters with science by
amateurs, entrepreneurs, journalists, and even apparently bona fide
practitioners, are all fair game. The delight he induces in his sponsors is
apparently not entirely unalloyed, for since March 1994, his remarks have
concluded with this carefully negotiated disclaimer: "Note: Opinions are the
author's and are not necessarily shared by the APS, but they should be."

Voodoo Science is a loosely interwoven, fascinating compendium of tales of human
folly, presented in the same engaging style readers of What's New have come to
enjoy and admire. Although I found the hopping back and forth between examples
somewhat disconcerting, page by page the book is a source of great pleasure.
Park is a superb storyteller, he writes gracefully with energy and charm, and
the varieties of silliness he chronicles are fascinating. Most scientists will
enjoy the book immensely.

But scientists are not the audience Park wants to reach. "I will, of course, be
delighted if scientists read my book and find it entertaining, but it wasn't
written for them." His hope is to educate those who "choose scientific beliefs
the same way they choose to be Methodists, or Democrats, or Chicago Cubs fans
... What can we tell [such] people that will help them to judge which claims are
science and which are voodoo?"

Park offers such readers an intermingling of cautionary tales and pronouncements
on the nature of scientific knowledge. The tales, which are too anecdotal and
judgemental to be called case studies, leave few stones unturned, and although
some fairly unsavoury specimens come scuttling out, some scientists may also be
disconcerted to find him kicking rather close to home. Among his targets are
perpetual-motion machines, homeopathy, cold fusion (which surfaces throughout
the book, somewhat misleadingly, even in a chapter on perpetual motion), denials
that human activity is affecting the Earth's climate, the International Space
Station ("a make-work welfare program for the aerospace industry"), alleged
benefits of wearing lots of magnets, extrasensory perception, the Office of
Alternative Medicine at the US National Institutes of Health, precognition,
scientists who celebrate the strangeness of science, power lines said to cause
cancer, the reduction of crime by mass transcendental meditation, Ronald
Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, gravity shields, official secrecy, touch
therapy, Biosphere II, unidentified flying objects, vitamin O, and invocations
of quantum mechanics to account for just about any New Age notion you like.

Discoursing more generally on the nature of scientific knowledge, Park divides
its misuses, which he collectively terms "voodoo science", into pathological
science (in which hopes of fame or fortune lead you into fooling yourself about
what you have actually accomplished), fraudulent science (in which you become
aware of your self-deception but try to cover your tracks), junk science (in
which you devise arguments that, although not necessarily incorrect, are
designed to deceive or befuddle others, such as jurists or legislators),
pseudoscience (which is grounded in superstition or political or religious
conviction), and ? later in the book ? unimportant science (whatever has been
proposed to date as a justification for building the Space Station).

He also offers an offbeat theory of good science as an "antidote" to a
genetically determined mechanism for generating belief that would constantly
drive us down wrong paths if left unchecked. Skating perilously close to junk
science himself, Park maintains that superstition originates when "the chemical
messengers of emotion cause the thalamus to bypass the sensory cortex and route
the information directly to the amygdala".

Less idiosyncratically, he also explains the role of the placebo effect in
alternative medicine, the mischief-generating power of a generalized form of
Pascal's wager (your pet idea may be grossly improbable but if it's right the
pay-off would be so great that you must press on), and the Texas sharpshooter
fallacy (shooting at the barn and then drawing a target around the hole).

I suspect Park will be most effective with those of his intended readers who
can't tell science from religion, politics or baseball, with his many stories of
human folly and preposterous claims. These are particularly compelling when he
allows the absurdities to speak for themselves with a minimum of interpretive
intervention. But when he starts invoking laws of physics I wonder why he
expects them to carry more weight with such readers than appeals to the Ten
Commandments, Magna Carta or Three Strikes and You're Out.

I found the book weakest when Park discourses on the nature of good science.
Although it is easy enough to grasp the absurdity of most of his voodoo
examples, drawing up a set of general principles cleanly dividing science from
its voodoo manifestations is not as straightforward a business as Park
implicitly suggests. How to assess the validity of scientific claims in courts
of law, for example, is a notoriously vexing issue. Park cites approvingly the
idea of "allowing evidence based on scientifically valid principles to be
admitted even if it does not represent a scientific consensus".

Although acknowledging that this gives "judges little guidance in how to decide
whether or not evidence is [so] based", Park has nothing illuminating to say
about the subtle and important question of why "scientifically valid principles"
can often lead to the kinds of diametrically opposed positions that do contend
in the absence of a "scientific consensus".

Like Irving Langmuir's famous 1953 lecture on "pathological science", Voodoo
Science is a work that most scientists will applaud because of its wonderfully
entertaining histories of deception and self-deception, but that many
historians, philosophers or sociologists of science will dismiss as
oversimplified and naive in its general pronouncements on the nature of science.
In spite of this absence of consensus, I would say that both judgements are
correct.





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Francisco Perfectti        fperfect en goliat.ugr.es