Posts Tagged ‘evidence’
“The spirit of inquiry and the courage to challenge the status quo are at the heart of scientific progress”*…
Adam Mastroianni on the challenges– and opportunities– facing science…
Randomized-controlled trials only caught on about 80 years ago, and whenever I think about that, I have to sit down and catch my breath for a while. The thing everybody agrees is the “gold standard” of evidence, the thing the FDA requires before it will legally allow you to sell a drug—that thing is younger than my grandparents.
There are a few records of things that kind of look like randomized-controlled trials throughout history, but people didn’t really appreciate the importance of RCTs until 1948, when the British Medical Research Council published a trial on streptomycin for tuberculosis. Humans have possessed the methods of randomization for thousands of years—dice, coins, the casting of lots—and we’ve been trying to cure diseases for as long as we’ve been human. Why did it take us so long to put them together?
I think the answer is: first, we had to stop trusting Zeus.
To us, coin flips are random (“Heads: I go first. Tails: you go first.”). But to an ancient human, coin flips aren’t random at all—they reveal the will of the gods (“Heads: Zeus wants me to go first. Tails: Zeus wants you to go first”). In the Bible, for instance, people are always casting lots to figure out what God wants them to do: which goat to kill, who should get each tract of land, when to start a genocide, etc.
This is, of course, a big problem for running RCTs. If you think that the outcome of a coin flip is meaningful rather than meaningless, you can’t use it to produce two equivalent groups, and you can’t study the impact of doing something to one group and not the other. You can only run a ZCT—a Zeus controlled trial.
It’s easy to see how technology can lead to scientific discoveries. Make microscope -> discover mitochondria.
Clearly, though, sometimes those technologies get invented entirely inside our heads. Stop trusting Zeus -> develop RCTs.
Which raises the question: what mental technologies haven’t we invented yet? What brain switches are just waiting to be flipped?…
On reinvigorating science: “Declining trust in Zeus is a technology,” from @a_m_mastroianni.
Apposite to an issue he raises: “Citation cartels help some mathematicians—and their universities—climb the rankings,” from @ScienceMagazine.
[Image above: source]
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As we deliberate on discovery, we might send micro-biological birthday greetings to a woman who modeled the attitude and behavior that Mastroianni suggests: Ruth Sager; she was born on this date in 1918. A pioneering geneticist, she had, in effect, two careers.
In the 1950s and 1960s, she pioneered the field of cytoplasmic genetics by discovering transmission of genetic traits through chloroplast DNA, the first known example of genetics not involving the cell nucleus. She identified a second set of genes were found outside of the cell’s nucleus, which, even though they were nonchrosomomal, also influenced inherited characteristics. The academic community did not acknowledge the significance of her contribution until after the second wave of feminism in the 1970s.
Then, in the early 1970s, she moved into cancer genetics (with a specific focus on breast cancer); she proposed and investigated the roles of tumor suppressor genes. She identified over 100 potential tumor suppressor genes, developed cell culture methods to study normal and cancerous human and other mammalian cells in the laboratory, and pioneered the research into “expression genetics,” the study of altered gene expression.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”*…
We live in ontologically challenged times, what some call a “metacrisis“:… but then we humans mostly always have. Peter Kauffman reviews an important new book, Carlos Eire‘s They Flew, that explores our capacity to believe the unbelievable…
This past July, the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center (NORC) and the Associated Press published the results of a May 2023 poll. Of the 1,680 American adults whom they interviewed (a representative sampling of the population at large), 69 percent said they believe in angels, 69 percent said they believe in heaven, 58 percent believe in hell, 56 percent in the existence of the devil, and 50 percent that spirits from the dead can communicate with the living. Reincarnation? The power of prayer? Astrology? Karma? Yoga as a spiritual practice? The idea that spiritual energy can be rooted in physical objects? Just six percent of us believe in none of these things. With this poll’s margin of error at plus or minus four points and other national polls over the years indicating much the same thing, it’s safe to say that 90 percent of all Americans today believe in something supernatural.
There is so much that is urgent for us to learn from what the social sciences call the dynamics of belief. Belief in things that come without any ostensible proof or evidence—that presidential elections are stolen, that horse tranquilizers cure COVID-19—is a root cause of the epistemic chaos that we find ourselves in today. How timely, then, for this extraordinary new history of belief to appear, even if the author seems to be focusing on the 16th and 17th centuries. And what a time that was. One accomplished British historian of the period, Keith Thomas, tells us, in his 1971 study Religion and the Decline of Magic, that most people back then were, by our contemporary standards anyway, “exceedingly liable to pain, sickness, and premature death”—also to poverty, “sudden disaster,” and “utter despair.” There was, understandably, a concomitant preoccupation, among the general public and elites alike, with the explanation and the relief of human misfortune; devil’s curses and God’s possible antidotes thus played a supersized role, especially before the so-called Age of Reason and Enlightenment learning started to take hold. The natural world of that time, Carlos Eire tells us, “constantly pulsated with the possibility of the miraculous.” It’s a patch of human history that seems very long ago. Yet today, under the existential terrors of climate change, a global pandemic rivaling the medieval plagues, and media that bombards us with news of one catastrophe after another, yesteryear has a familiar ring.
Eire is a master storyteller…
What the past can teach us about our troubled present: “Trances, Ecstasies, Raptures, and Levitations: On Carlos Eire’s ‘They Flew’,” from @pbkauf in @LAReviewofBooks.
Apposite: “This Simple Philosophical Puzzle Shows How Difficult It Is to Know Something” (read to the end).
* The Red Queen, to Alice, in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass
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As we ponder pondering the imponderable, we might recall that today is the Feast of Saint Nicholas (in Eastern Christian countries using the old church Calendar). It celebrates Saint Nicholas of Myra, an early Christian bishop, who attended the First Council of Nicaea; because of the many miracles attributed to his intercession, he is also known as Nicholas the Wonderworker. His legendary habit of secret gift-giving gave rise to the traditional model of Santa Claus (“Saint Nick”) through Sinterklaas.
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