(18)    Tue 13 Jun 95 14:11
By: David Bloomberg
To: All
Re: Re: Sciece Vs. Pseudoscience
St:
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@Date: 13 Jun 95 18:11:35 UTC
 * Original Message Posted via SKEPTIC
 * Date: 12 Jun 95  09:24:39
 * From: David Bloomberg @ 1:2430/2112
 * To: All
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@MSGID: 1:2430/2112 553fcac9
Date:   Wed Jun 07 1995  17:14:00
From:   Tad Cook
Subj:   Science & Pseudoscience
SCI.SKEPTIC                    -------------------------------

Scientists denounce pseudoscience, quackery, magic

(c) 1995 Copyright the News & Observer Publishing Co.
(c) 1995 N.Y. Times News Service


   NEW YORK (Jun 5, 1995 - 18:54 EDT) -- Since at least the time of
Archimedes, the third-century B.C. Greek physicist who was slain by a
Roman soldier, scientists have occasionally had to defend themselves
from forces anathema to rational thought. Once again many scientists
believe their backs are to the wall, and participants at a meeting last
week in New York resolved to start fighting back.

   There is growing danger, many said, that the fabric of reason is
being ripped asunder, and that if scientists and other thinkers continue
to acquiesce in the process, the hobbling of science and its
hand-maidens -- medicine and technology among them -- seems assured.
Moreover, many participants argued, the same cognitive disease
afflicting science in the United States and many other countries could
eventually even unravel democracy, which depends on the capacity of
citizens to reach rational estimates.

   Some 200 worried scientists, doctors, philosophers, educators and
thinkers from around the country convened for a three-day meeting at the
New York Academy of Sciences to exchange views and plot strategy. Held
under the rubric "The Flight from Science and Reason," the meeting was
organized as a call to arms.

   Defenders of scientific methodology were urged to counterattack
against faith healing, astrology, religious fundamentalism and
paranormal charlatanism. But beyond these threats to rational behavior,
participants at the meeting aimed their barbs at "post-modernist"
critics of science who contend that truth in science depends on one's
point of view, not on any absolute content.

   Participants deplored what they see as a growing trend toward the
exploitation of scientific ideas to attack science. They cited the
physics of relativity and quantum mechanics as pillars of 20th-century
thought that are sometimes distorted by critics of science into
arguments that nothing in science is certain and that mystery and magic
have an equal claim to belief.

   At risk is public trust in such scientific tools as statistical
analysis, controlled laboratory and clinical experiments, the rational
analysis of political oratory, and the study of history, anthropology
and every other field dependent on disciplined, rational thought.

   Another weapon increasingly wielded by opponents of science,
participants warned, is the frequent allegation that fraud in scientific
inquiry has become so common that scientists cannot be trusted.

   Dr. David L. Goodstein, a physicist and vice provost of the
California Institute of Technology, said that although fraud existed, it
was not nearly as common as critics of science contended. Goodstein, who
has worked with federal agencies in developing guidelines for defining
misconduct in science, said that from 1980 to 1987 only 26 cases of
misconduct came to light -- involving some three ten-thousandths of 1
percent of all scientists receiving research grants. (All but five of
those cases involved doctors or biologists, Goodstein said.) Excessive
legal constraints on scientists, he asserted, can "endanger the
scientists' right to be wrong," hindering the scientific process.

   Although most medical schools discount the claims of chiropractors,
faith healers and practitioners of "alternative medicine," many medical
schools lack the courage to stand by their convictions, Dr. Gerald
Weissmann, a doctor at the New York University Medical Center, said.
"Silence is easier in politically dangerous times," he said. "Medicine
and science today are being confronted by lunatics, fascists and the
practitioners of bizarre magic."

   Dr. Paul Kurtz, a professor of philosophy at the State University of
New York at Buffalo, contended that post-modernists of both the
political left and right denied that scientific knowledge was possible.
The result, he said, was an "erosion of the cognitive process which may
undermine democracy."

   Americans have become fascinated by angels and "out of body"
experiences, said Dr. Wendy Kaminer of Radcliffe College in Cambridge,
Mass., and seem to be discarding the habit of critical thinking. It is
in this environment that irrational ideas take hold, she said,
asserting, "They tell us, for instance, that there is no death, only
'energy transformation,' and that science, born out of speculation,
cannot help us understand the spiritual world.

   "The dissemination of pseudoscience, including such things as the
fascination with near-death experiences, the growing belief by Americans
-- 34 percent of them -- in reincarnation, and such books as the best
seller 'Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens' by Harvard University's
John E. Mack, are dangerous. They help to break down the standards of
reason, and that can lead to such vicious doctrines as Aryan theories of
race, and Lysenkoism." The term is named after Trofim D. Lysenko, an
agronomist who erroneously believed that acquired characteristics could
be inherited, and nearly destroyed Soviet agriculture.

   Organizers of the meeting acknowledged that it was not structured to
give enemies of science equal time; the latter have ample opportunity to
express their positions on television talk shows, popular books and in
the press, they said.

   Among the writers sharply criticized at the meeting but not present
were Shirley MacLaine, the actress who espouses the certainty of
reincarnation; Mack, the author of the book about alien abductions; Dr.
Sandra Harding of the University of Delaware, who has argued that
"value-free research is a delusion" and has compared traditional methods
of science to "marital rape, the husband as scientist forcing nature to
his wishes;" and Betty J. Eadie and Curtis Taylor, the authors of
"Embraced by the Light," a book about near-death experience.

   But despite their unwillingness to transform the meeting into a
debate, speakers were subjected to some verbal brickbats from a few
hecklers in the audience.

   His fists clenched, Dr. Daniel W. Miller, a Brooklyn psychologist,
stepped to the microphone to denounce one of the panels. "This is not an
objective platform, and I've heard nothing but vituperation from the
scientific power structure trying to reinforce its own image," he said.
"Your medicine and science are based on your presuppositions. I don't
deny the utility of conventional medicine, but you refuse to acknowledge
that alternative therapies may also be useful."

   Miller's business card describes his specialty as "Organic
Process/Past Lives Psychotherapy."

   Just as serious a threat to rational inquiry as paranormal nostrums,
according to several participants, is ethnocentrism and efforts by
various groups to rewrite history in the interest of raising
self-esteem.

   Dr. Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, an anthropologist at Wayne State
University in Pleasant Ridge, Mich., who directs a program to recruit
members of ethnic minority groups into the sciences, assailed what he
said was the distortion of history to enhance ethnic pride.

   "A teaching aid widely distributed among teachers of African-American
studies asserts that African science developed along different and
superior lines," he said, in which the ancient Egyptians -- portrayed as
the ancestors of modern blacks -- supposedly led the way with their
studies of "trans-material causation," remote viewing, astrology and
other forms of magic. Students may leave such courses with the
impression that ancient Egyptian theological mysticism offers a more
accurate view of the world than do the canons of science.

   But other speakers challenged the idea that education should take the
blame for superstition and belief in all that is supernatural or
unreasonable.

   "Take Russia and France," Weissmann said. "Both countries educate
their young people in science far better than we do. But the belief in
magic and the supernatural is certainly more widespread in France and
Russia than it is in the United States."

   Dr. Dudley R. Herschbach of Harvard University, winner of the 1986
Nobel Prize in Chemistry, spoke wistfully about opportunities lost in a
series of documentary programs broadcast recently by the Public
Broadcasting System. Dr. Herschbach and two other Nobel winners, Dr.
Leon M. Lederman and Dr. J. Michael Bishop, were the subjects of these
three programs, called "The Nobel Legacy," broadcast in April and May.

   The three scientists sought to convey to the audience a sense of the
beauty and excitement of scientific inquiry, but in the broadcast
programs, the producers inserted frequent interjections by Dr. Anne
Carson, a professor of classics at Emory and McGill Universities who is
a harsh critic of many of the principles of science.

   "I never met her, and I was sorry I couldn't engage her in a
dialogue," Herschbach said.

   Dr. Saul Green, who for many years was a biochemist at Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute in New York, declared that "it's time
to get nasty -- to launch a crusade against quackery." Patent medicines
that claim to "stimulate the immune system," for example, couch their
advertisements in pseudoscientific terms, he said, that impress buyers
who are educationally ill qualified to detect such fraud.

   Dr. Gerald Holton, a physics professor at Harvard University, warned
that if science did not take some determined steps to protect itself, it
would succumb to the powerful social and political forces arrayed
against it.

   Referring to the government hearings during the Communist-hunting
McCarthy era that deprived Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer of the security
clearances he needed to continue as leader of nuclear weapons research,
Holton said: "Oppenheimer acquiesced in his own destruction. He said
later that during the hearings 'I had very little sense of self.' "

   The lesson, Holton said, is that "the moral authority of science
depends on maintaining a good sense of self, and recognizing the need to
act in self-protection." The need for American scientists to act has
become urgent, he said.


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