The New York Times is strange: it’s one of the few papers left that has a weekly science section (and a good one), but over on the opinion pages you can read endless paeans to religion and the beneficial effects of faith, as well as criticisms of atheism and science itself.
Two days ago, the Times ran a particularly invidious critique of modern science: “The enigma of Chinese medicine.” The author is Stephen T. Asma, a professor of philosophy at Columbia College here in Chicago. His Wikipedia page says he’s a Buddhist, and he’s written a number of books about that religion/philosophy and other issues. Asam’s piece was brought to my attention by a friend who added, “The NY Times will publish anything by a philosopher who sneers at science.”
As far as I can construe Asma’s piece—and it seems a bit muddled—it appears to be a subtle denigration of Western science-based medicine and a call for us to try other forms of healing, including acupuncture, feng shui, and even turtle blood. Now many modern medicines have come from folk remedies—quinine, for instance, came from observing that native Peruvians used the bark of the cinchona tree, which contains that alkaloid, to cure malaria. But this doesn’t mean that every type of “folk healing” is efficacious, or should be pursued by sufferers. And any folk remedy adopted as a general treatment should be vetted via blind testing with placebos. For that’s the only way to determine whether it works.
But Asma’s piece doesn’t really say that stuff. Instead, it contains a number of questionable statements. I’ll try to be brief, but will probably fail.
The piece begins when Asma describes catching a cold in Beijing. His Chinese wife recommended that he drink a concoction of turtle blood and grain alcohol (they slit the turtle’s throat in front of him). He said he felt better that day and the cold subsided, but so what? Can turtle blood really kill viruses? Or was it a placebo effect: one that cost the life of an innocent turtle? Or, most likely, the cold was waning naturally.
That got Asma thinking that this kind of alternative medicine deserves serious consideration—and also about the supposed problems with science-based “Western” medicine:
Many Westerners will scoff at the very idea that turtle blood could have medicinal effects. But at least some of those same people will quaff a tree-bark tincture or put on an eggplant compress recommended by Dr. Oz to treat skin cancer. We are all living in the vast gray area between leech-bleeding and antibiotics. Alternative medicine has exploded in recent years, reawakening a philosophical problem that epistemologists call the “demarcation problem.”
I’m dubious about those eggplant compresses, but we know from scientific study that cinchona bark does work against malaria. I see no reason not to test promising folk remedies with scientific methods before we gain confidence in them. But what about that demarcation problem?
Asma criticizes the criteria used to demarcate science from pseudoscience, like Popper’s “falsifiability” criterion (one, by the way, that I think is quite good). Asma implies, in fact, that astrology can actually be validated via science, ignoring the fact that astrology has been shown to be useless in predicting personality traits:
The contemporary philosopher of science Larry Laudan claims that philosophers have failed to give credible criteria for demarcating science from pseudoscience. Even falsifiability, the benchmark for positivist science, rules out many of the legitimate theoretical claims of cutting-edge physics, and rules in many wacky claims, like astrology — if the proponents are clever about which observations corroborate their predictions. Moreover, historians of science since Thomas Kuhn have pointed out that legitimate science rarely abandons a theory the moment falsifying observations come in, preferring instead (sometimes for decades) to chalk up counter evidence to experimental error. The Austrian philosopher Paul Feyerabend even gave up altogether on a so-called scientific method, arguing that science is not a special technique for producing truth but a flawed species of regular human reasoning (loaded with error, bias and rhetorical persuasion). And finally, increased rationality doesn’t always decrease credulity.
Not so fast! The “claims of cutting-edge physics”, like string theory, are not accepted as valid hypotheses precisely because they have not been shown to be falsifiable. That is, nobody’s figured out a way to test string theory using real-word observations. That’s why, while it’s intriguing and the subject of a lot of study, it’s still controversial. As for his notion that astrology passes Popper’s tests, Asma admits that this works only if you tweak or distort the data. So how does that invalidate Popper?
Finally, yes, scientists are loath to abandon theories that have passed many tests, but eventually, when theories become so weak or are subsumed by more general ones, or when findings prove to be false, they’re abandoned. Look how quickly the faster-than-light neutrino finding was ditched when it was investigated and found to be due to loose wiring. Darwin dispelled the idea of creationism among thinking people within a decade after publishing The Origin.
The demarcation problem exists only if you adopt remedies that haven’t been tested, or have been shown not to work, like laetrile as a cancer cure. All Asma is doing in the excerpt above is dissing science: emphasizing flaws, bias, error, and rhetoric, but failing to mention both its self-correcting nature and the fact that it’s given us results.
In the end, science is validated by those results, and Asma’s implications that the scientific method is flawed, or that scientists cling desperately to false theories, are simply ways for him to denigrate an approach that has produced enormous progress. If scientific methods weren’t applied to medicines, we’d still be back in the era of turtle blood, spells, and shamans. Which would Asma prefer if he could rely on only one? Increasing rationality may not always decrease credulity, but it’s the only way we know to better understand the universe. Or does Asma have another way to decrease credulity?
Asma then goes on to tout acupuncture and feng shui, saying that they can have beneficial effects. And perhaps they can, but are those effects placebo effects? As far as I know, and I may be wrong, scientific tests of acupuncture, using “placebos” in which needles are placed in spots theoretically not be connected to maladies, have shown it to be at best a placebo. And so, I suspect, is feng shui. Asma notes that he bought his apartment in China partly on the basis of a realtor’s assurance that the place had “positive qi energy,” and that he feels better when his desk faces the doorway rather than away from it. But of course when his desk faces the doorway he can see a creek!
To his credit, Asma admits that the benefits of feng shui may be placebo effects. I’ve long thought that doctors should study placebos more, because if you can get beneficial effects without the side effects of more dangerous medicines, that’s worth knowing. Studies of placebo effects—including sham surgery on knees!—have shown that they can work (as in the case of antidepressants) with nearly the efficacy of “real” drugs. (That doesn’t hold, by the way, for antibiotics!) But the effects of placebos must be studied using the methods of modern science. There’s no “demarcation problem” here: psychology can affect well-being and perhaps healing, but we won’t know that without the proper blind tests.
Sadly, Asma then goes off the rails, implying that Darwin’s theory of evolution wasn’t solid science because it “didn’t correspond to the experimental method of the falsifiability model.” Bollocks! Has Asma even read Darwin carefully? In The Origin and other books, Darwin is constantly testing his theories against alternatives, and the alternatives (e.g., creationism) against evolution. The chapters on biogeography and embryology, for example, show how observed facts are consistent with “descent and modification,” and not with creationism. There are innumerable observations that could falsify evolution, too, and Darwin mentions those (one would be a consistent failure of artificial selection to change wild plants and animals).
Since Darwin, evolutionary biology has generated many verified predictions, like the discovery of feathered dinosaurs as the ancestors of birds. Asma implies that evolution is “less observable” than other scientific phenomena, and although evolution is widely accepted, it’s not accepted through observation. But Darwin did, of course, do experiments, like placing plant seeds in seawater to see if they could survive ocean journeys to colonize islands (they could). And read about his cute experiments with earthworms.
Observation and experiment are not the only way to establish scientific truth. We haven’t seen the Higgs boson or the electron, either, but they’ve led to enough verified predictions that we can regard their existence as scientific truths. We can’t do experiments on stars, but we have a damn good idea how stars evolve, and that comes from observation, reason, and extrapolation.
But neither solid observation nor experimentation validate the supposed “energy” behind qi. If that exists, let its advocates make predictions that we can test. Put blindfolded people in various positions, and see if the “energy-propitious” locations give those subjects more well being.
I can’t resist quoting the following paragraph, in which Asma, while drawing a distinction between evolution and qi, equates evolution with natural selection. That’s not only wrong, but Asma’s characterization is incomplete even as a description of natural selection. Don’t they have scientists to vet this kind of stuff?
Darwinism only posits three major ingredients for evolution; offspring vary from their parents and siblings, offspring resemble their parents more than non-kin, and more offspring are born than can survive in their environment. Each of these facts is easily observable and when you put them together you get adaptive evolution of populations. No additional metaphysical force, like qi, is being posited.
Those are the ingredients for selection only if you add that those organisms that can survive carry heritable variations facilitating that survival (actually, the key trait is not survival but reproduction). And, not to defend qi, but one can still test whether metaphysical forces can have effects. ESP, intercessory prayer, and the like, have all been falsified, though they’re supposedly based on metaphysical forces. Contrary to the claims of faitheists and believers, one can test the supernatural.
Actually, I’m not sure whether Asma even knows what point he’s trying to make, except “let a hundred remedies blossom”. Well, in the sense that we should study things that might be efficacious, even if they’re folk remedies or metaphysical contentions, I agree with him. But he could have said that in a couple of paragraphs instead of in a long essay that comes off as being anti-science.
His confusion is instantiated in the final paragraph:
It seems entirely reasonable to believe in the effectiveness of T.C.M. and still have grave doubts about qi. In other words, it is possible for people to practice a kind of “accidental medicine” — in the sense that symptoms might be alleviated even when their causes are misdiagnosed (it happens all the time in Western medicine, too). Acupuncture, turtle blood, and many similar therapies are not superstitious, but may be morsels of practical folk wisdom. The causal theory that’s concocted to explain the practical successes of treatment is not terribly important or interesting to the poor schlub who’s thrown out his back or taken ill.
Ultimately, one can be skeptical of both qi and a sacrosanct scientific method, but still be a devotee of fallible pragmatic truth. In the end, most of us are gamblers about health treatments. We play as many options as we can; a little acupuncture, a little ibuprofen, a little turtle’s blood. Throw enough cards (or remedies), and eventually some odds will go your way. Is that superstition or wisdom?
The first sentence of the second paragraph is deeply confused. A “sacrosanct scientific method” is in fact the only way to be sure that any remedy works, even as a placebo. It’s the only way to find out the “fallible pragmatic truth”, which I interpret as a pompous synonym for “scientific truth.” By playing off qi against the “sacrosanct scientific method”—I’m sure the word “sacrosanct” is pejorative here—Asma implies that folk/spiritual medicine is, in principle, distinct from science.
It’s not. What is in opposition is the efficacy of remedies tested scientifically versus claims for other remedies that haven’t been tested using that “sacrosanct scientific method”.
As for me, I’m no gambler. When I have a cold, I don’t drink turtle’s blood or resort to acupuncture, but just rest and stay hydrated. (Pain relievers don’t help.) I don’t even take zinc lozenges, reported to shorten the duration of colds, as the results of those studies are mixed.
It’s not wise to gamble with your health, and Asma’s advice to “play as many options as you can” may in fact be dangerous. Should we undergo psychic surgery, or seek phony cancer cures in Mexico? After all, we should “play as any options as we can.”
