Category / Science

by crmayes

Pete Evans may sneer at medical science, but sneering back is a bad idea.

Writing in The Saturday Paper, Martin McKenzie-Murray describes celebrity chef Pete Evans as “sneering” at the importance of medical qualifications and that the “medical industry is corrupt”. Evans continues,

What do you need a qualification for to talk common sense? Why do you have to study something that is outdated, that is industry-backed, that is biased, that is not getting the results? That would be insane to study something that you’re gonna waste your time with? That’s just crazy.

McKenzie-Murray is quick to dismiss Evans and describes his interview as “a pathetic performance”. There is much to criticise Evans for. But these are good questions.

What gives someone authority to tell others what to do in relation to their body and health? How is medical and nutrition science produced? What are we to make of the way this knowledge and advice seems to shift over time? Do scandals of corruption and bias in one area of scientific research taint other areas?

These are the kinds of questions philosophy of science and science and technology studies deals with. In fact, Ray Moynihan, research fellow at Bond University, has addressed similar questions in his occasional health column for The Saturday Paper.

As I was writing this I received an email for a conference at Georgetown University that is exploring the question “Does Industry Influence Medical Discourse?” Presenters are asking some of the very questions Evans is asking about the basis of authority, knowledge production, and different conceptions of evidence.

One presenter, philosopher and bioethicist Carl Elliott has spent much of his career critiquing the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on medical practice and research. To be sure, Elliott and other scholars are not drawing the same conclusions as Evans, but nor do they conclude that “everything is ok” in the world of modern medicine.

One only needs to glance at the newspapers (or Retraction Watch) to realise that medicine and scientific research is not a straight-forward or innocent enterprise. Recent examples include a “fake doctor” practicing in NSW with fraudulent qualifications, sugar industry influence on dietary recommendations, or Dr Anna O. Szust – the scientist who doesn’t exist but was able to get appointed as an editor to over 50 academic journals.

These examples of fraud and misconduct are extreme. The point is not that these examples discredit medicine or science, but that they raise questions about the social and commercial contexts in which science is produced and medicine is practiced.

Yet, even when there is no misconduct, there are questions about the results of science when it is “done right”. As I’ve addressed elsewhere, STS and philosophy of science shows that the “inside” of science is a messy, value-laden, emergent, trialled-and-eroded, accidentally-collective network enterprise that bears little resemblance to the smooth, authoritative discursive claims on the “outside.” This is not to say that science is a hoax and one opinion is as good as another. But there are questions about science worth asking.

Evans draws the wrong conclusion that medical and scientific knowledge is fake and can’t be trusted. But he is asking the right questions about how it is produced, who counts as an authority and what does it mean to be qualified. There aren’t always straight-forward answers to these questions. To double-down by saying “trust the experts, you’re a fool like Trump” only serves to entrench polarised and isolated camps.

As Rachel Ankeny said in an interview about Evans and the critical response from the Australian Medical Association and others

“They need to engage with the community — not just those who are pro-science — but the whole community,”

“It’s not about saying you’re a ‘whack job’ and shouldn’t be listened to,”

Instead of sneering back at people who question science – vaccinations, climate change or nutrition – it would be more productive to acknowledge the significance of their questions and provide ways of thinking that avoid the Scylla of scientism and Charybdis of pseudo or anti-science.

by crmayes

Science, Predictions & Optimism

IMAG0071About seven years ago I bought A Treasury of Science from Vinnies for about $2. It is an old beaten anthology from 1943 of influential scientific texts from Newton, Franklin, Einstein, Huxley, Jenner etc.

The final section of the book looks at Man’s Future. I have never read the book, but last week I had a flick through it and thought Kirley F. Mather’s essay The Future of Man as an Inhabitant of the Earth (1940) looked interesting. The optimism (or hubris) of the essay jars with the current mood and scientific evidence.

All the evidence combines to lead us unmistakably to the conclusion that for many scores, if not hundreds of millions of years to come, the earth will continue to be comfortably habitable abode for creatures like ourselves.
Surface temperatures of the earth, the most important item in any consideration of its long-range habitability, are determined by the receipt of solar energy distributed through atmospheric agencies…Minor changes in climate will doubtless occur as they have in the last few thousand years.

Leaving aside the Australian Government and others who think everything will be fine for “hundreds of millions of years”, today there is a fear that over the next 50 years habitability of the earth will dramatically change.

Of course, this doesn’t justify simplistic dissmissals of science – “they got it wrong then so they can get it wrong now”. But that in the space of 75 years the paradigms and frameworks through which we understand ourselves and our relation to the environment dramatically shift. Such that we could uncharitably accuse Mather naivety, as people 75 years hence may, with greater justification, accuse us of being slow to react.

by crmayes

E.O. Wilson, Eusociality & the Limits of Science

While a post-doc at Penn State (2011-13), renowned sociobiologist E.O. Wilson gave a lecture on eusociality – an understanding of the evolution of social cooperation and alturism among insects, such as ants, through: i) cooperative care of offspring; ii) overlapping generations within a colony of adults; and iii) a division of labour into reproductive and non-reproductive groups. Wilson extends these observations to human interactions and evolution.

To explain the link to human sociality, Wilson used Paul Gauguin’s “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” According to Wilson, Gauguin’s three questions are the central questions of religion and philosophy. However neither is equipped to answer them.

Paul_Gauguin_-_D'ou_venons-nous

“Paul Gauguin – D’ou venons-nous” by Paul Gauguin – Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Wilson asserts that religions do not have the necessary scientific understanding of the universe. And since the decline of logical positivism, philosophy has “scattered in a kind of intellectual diaspora and into those areas not yet colonized by science”. Not afraid of a non-sequitur, Wilson concludes – “by default therefore, the solution to the great riddle, if it has an answer, has been left to science”.

Wilson claims that eusociality and evolutionary biology provide the best answer to Gauguin’s questions. Rather than address the veracity and usefulness of Wilson’s eusociality, I want to focus on the type of answer that Wilson’s eusociality is and whether it address Gauguin’s questions.

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