Book Review: Denialsim (part 1)
I generally like to read books that teach me something new. But in this case my motivation was primarily to augment my fodder for calling stupid people stupid. It delivered.The premise of the book is pretty well summarized in the subtitle. Specter's stance is that while science might lead to some negative consequences, the positives always outweigh the negatives. Personally I wouldn't enshrine science quite as definitively as Specter does, but for the most part his arguments were poignant.
The material warrants more than a single post, so I'll start with the first few chapters.
Ch1. - Vioxx and the Fear of Science - Here Specter walks through the case of the pain medication Vioxx, showing the dark side of the pharmaceutical industry as they hid/ignored evidence of potential dangers to those prone to heart disease and stroke. Then he takes an interesting turn and shows how the doctor who helped get the drug off the market wishes that it were still available because for many (mostly those with arthritis) no other pain killer before or since has ever been more effective. If Merck would've simply been forthcoming with the evidence, doctors could've avoided prescribing Vioxx to high risk patients and millions of others could've enjoyed the benefits.
Main point: sometimes science is exploited, this leads people to be suspicious of it, yet science tries to help people and generally succeeds
Ch2 - Vaccines and the Great Denial - We've been over this a bit, so I'll try to keep it short. Specter gives many startling statistics about diminishing vaccination rates, the overwhelming evidence that there is no link between vaccines and autism, and an insightful observation that those opposing vaccinations haven't seen the devastation of measles, polio, small pox, etc. so they simply focus on the risks of the side effects of inoculation rather than the risks of the diseases they prevent.
Favorite passage:
When confronted with data from the Centers for Disease Control that seemed to prvode scientific refutation of her claims (that her son became autistic as a result of the MMR vaccine), (Jenny) McCarthy responded, "My science is named Evan {her son} and he's at home. That's my science." McCarthy says that she "fixed" Evan by changing his diet, and recommends that other "warrior moms" do the same.
Yikes.
Ch 3 - The Organic Fetish - This was the most interesting and enraging chapter for me. The author admits that he often buys organic because it's often fresher and tastes better, but the advantages stop there. I hadn't really looked into this much, but I thought that organic meant (among other things) no pesticides. Nope, it just means no synthetic (ie scientifically developed, more effective) pesticides. Bottom line: organic food takes more land, water (likely our most important resource), and pesticides to produce and has no more nutritional value than non-organic (inorganic?) foods. Sounds like a luxury those serious about feeding the world's hungry should abhor.
More disturbing than those who think they are helping to save the world by shopping at Whole Foods is the fact that many countries around the world completely reject genetically engineered food. Specter notes that, "In 2002, 2.4 million Zambians faced starvation. Nevertheless the government rejected as "poison" tons of genetically engineered grain offered by the World Food Program."
He also addresses the ridiculous obsession with natural:
"Natural" does not mean good, or safe, or healthy, or wholesome. It never did. In fact, legally, it means nothing at all. Mercury, lead, and asbestos are natural, and so are viruses, E. coli, and salmonella...Other than mosquitoes, the two substances responsible for more deaths on this planet than any other are water and "natural" food.
What is frustrating to me is that many of those taken up in such movements sincerely want to help the world, yet their misguided actions too often do the opposite.
More later.
Comments
-Theresa
My problem with being "pro-science" is that people always use "science" as a debate ender, usually to hide or obscure some moral problem that actually merits debate and has little to actually do with science. Maybe embryo destructive research is moral, maybe not. Science has little to do with it. Plenty of bad things (like eugenics) were done in the name of science. Not that the science was bad, just that the knowledge was used immorally.
Speaking of organic food: the one that really bothers me is irradiation. Here's a process that would make food much safer, has no side effects, and no effect on taste, but, because someone got it in his head that it was unnatural, basically no one irradiates food any more.
@ Ryan: Science is amoral, but are scientists? I like the irradiated food example. I was once teaching about the electromagnetic spectrum, explaining that everything from radio waves to visible light to microwaves is technically a form a radiation, when a student asked if that meant there was leftover radiation in food that we cooked in our microwaves. I assured him that there was not (though come to think of it I guess there is infrared radiation aka heat left in the food), but he didn't seem to believe me. "If it was exposed to radiation, you can't be sure that some isn't still in there," he reasoned.
He didn't seem at all worried about the fact that the lights in the room and the people around him were bathing him in radiation. People have strange relationships with their food.
We've been over some of this before, but I don't really view any human pursuit as purely amoral, though people in all arenas claim just that. I was listening to the Solicitor General the other day saying that her previous politics (she was a rather active liberal) didn't matter, that her job now was to argue for the government on the merits of each case. Supreme court justices often claim the same objectivity. Then how come it's about as easy to predict a judicial vote as it is a congressional one?
Maybe we need to get back to our "logic" discussion. I'm not convinced that these variances are purely the result of differing initial assumptions. I see logic as paradigmatic; you choose your paradigm and then what follows is reasonable in that logic structure.
So back to science. Scientific consensus is basically a group of people (scientists) who agree to work within the same paradigm. Traditionally experimentation has guided these decisions, which is what has made science so successful and why Specter (and I) see much of the population as irrational, but that is not always the case. Black holes, string theory, and climate change to some extent have been difficult to test in the lab, which makes these topics particularly sticky (well not black holes so much anymore).
Where I differ from Specter is that I view science more as technology (finding the best fit for a given situation) rather than proving an irrefutable truth. That "best fit" is always subjective to some degree even in the tightest experiment. But people who reject the value of what science does contribute are quite crazy.
The "best fit" you talk about to me would be the scientific theory covering the shadow areas. we have certain observed phenomenon which can be explained by a theory. If theory fails to explain all observations, we discard it or modify it.
But we also have the lighted areas. These consist of certain principles or facts which we have discovered and which we have verified through scientific method and which really are not up for debate. For example, we understand the principles or computer engineering well enough to build computers and make them work. Same with cars. Same with bridges. Not that there aren't ways to make these scientific achievements better. Just that certain knowledge has been obtained which makes these advances possible and repeatable.
Scientists certainly are motivated to pursue discoveries for reasons that are both moral and immoral, but their achievements are not necessarily colored by their motives. Astrophysicist A is driven by pursuit of glory, which is immoral. But his discoveries still advance our understanding of the universe, and that knowledge is not immoral as a result.
Certainly there are times when the exercise of the scientific method itself should not be implored. Nazi experiments on humans were clearly immoral. In these cases I view science like a gun. The gun itself is amoral, but the way the gun is used can be moral or immoral. Using a gun to defend yourself from a home invader is moral; using a gun to steal is immoral.
Perhaps there are some realms of scientific knowledge that can serve no moral purpose, and so those realms of knowledge are immoral, but I can't think of any.