Should We Always ‘Follow the Science’?
This not an invitation to trash the planet, by the way.
One of the many reasons I fled journalism to sell my soul in comms was due to the stupefying effect of having to write stories with headlines like, ‘No amount of alcohol is good for you, says science’ — as if science were one body of infallible thought. It isn’t, obviously, or else life would be a good deal more straightforward. But it seems we might have forgotten that. So let us take a short refresher course in ‘the science’.
The common view (common enough for politicians to repeat it un-ironically) is that science is synonymous with knowledge, which is forgivable: it is after all, what the Latin word scientia literally means. Hence to ‘follow the science’ is to make decisions based on hard facts. Certainly, the best science yields facts; but those facts are always framed by a context. They are, then, part of the truth, not the whole truth, which can only come into focus when we approach a problem from different angles, if you like. The finding that ‘drinking coffee reduces the risk of heart disease’ will have been drawn from a study that took place under specific conditions, involving a certain amount of coffee and a specific population. Whether this statement is true may be contingent on the health of the individual, his genetic predispositions, his lifestyle, or other factors not accounted for in the original research. The question we must ask, then, is: Under what conditions are scientific claims true and under what conditions are they false? That is what a good scientist would do.
The best science yields facts; but those facts are always framed by a context.
But there is also bad science, and neither we nor the mass media are very good at distinguishing between the good and bad. Consider the Andrew Wakefield fiasco. In 1998, his ‘research’ into the non-existent link between the MMR vaccine and autism was published in The Lancet. The study was later thoroughly discredited due to serious procedural errors, undisclosed financial conflicts of interest, and ethical violations. In 2004, ten of Wakefield’s co-authors retracted the study’s interpretation, and in 2010, The Lancet finally retracted the paper. Wakefield was struck off the UK medical register for his role in the scandal. But not before persuading countless parents opted not to give their children a small, painless jab that prevented them from contracting highly contagious diseases can cause hearing loss, encephalitis, meningitis, heart problems, and worse. It is worth reading a widely cited study by John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine and statistics at Stanford. Among his findings were that the more fashionable a field, the poorer the quality of the science; that the greater the financial incentives involved, the less likely the discoveries were to be true; and that scientists pursued extreme claims and extreme refutations of claims because they drew more attention from the public. His article is titled — fittingly — ‘Why most published research findings are false’.
The Wakefield scandal took place some time ago (even if its consequences are still painfully felt). But today, highly unscientific claims can take hold and gain widespread acceptance more quickly — so quickly they are soon considered settled fact. I was amused to learn that some time ago Bessel van der Kolk, author of the wildly successful The Body Keeps the Score, wrote an article defending discredited repressed memory theory titled — wait for it — ‘The Body Keeps the Score’. It turns out van der Kolk also gave evidence in a number of repressed memory cases that, according to one experienced journalist who covered the repressed memory fiasco, put innocent people in jail. No wonder that in her interesting book Bad Therapy, the Wall Street Journal columnist Abigail Shrier claims van der Kolk simply repacked repressed memory theory for a new generation. ‘There’s no evidence that even survivors of the worst traumas hold memories implicitly or that those memories can be stored outside of the central nervous system,’ Shrier writes, citing a 2005 study by Richard McNally.
Abigail Shrier claims van der Kolk simply repacked repressed memory theory for a new generation.
So are we too gullible, or too cynical? The problem, I suggest, is that we do not understand what science is, so we do not know what to believe. At times, scientific studies are not sufficiently scientific—that is, not approached in the right spirit of scepticism and rigour. At other times, mere speculation is clothed in the language of science, or financial incentives all but guarantee a specific finding (‘fat is bad for us’ being a famous example). Even if we are dealing with robust science, we make the mistake of thinking science is the whole truth of a given matter (it is always worth remembering that science cannot prove scientifically that is the best means of knowing something: that is an assumption.) And other times we think our untutored intuitions are a better guide to questions of which we have little practical experience, as in the case of those who deny the existence of global warming.
What science can tell us, writes Iain McGilchrist, ‘is pure gold’. And so it is. But sometimes what is called science is nothing of the sort, and in all events, science cannot tell us everything. It has nothing to say on morality, or the existence of God. And talking of God, I quote Nassim Nicholas Taleb: ‘There is a religious belief in the unconditional power of organised science, one that has replaced unconditional religious belief in organised religion.’ What I am calling for, I suppose, is greater respect for the truth, in all its complexity.
