From my blog on the subject of this issue of StAR

Click on the above link to see the whole cartoon which chronicles the autism immunization link from start to finish.

Coincidentally, I have a piece in St. Austin Review this month (which I already mentioned below) and the theme is Science vs. Scientism.

The idea that science is something pure and incorruptible and can be referred to as a point of ABSOLUTE knowledge is rapidly disappearing, particularly under the aegis of “the decline effect,” something being exposed in multiple places (the ones I’ve read most recently are from a 2005 issue of Slate and The New Yorker, the latter proving to be the better article in many ways).

The Slate article, using a prayer study, relates the unreliability of “peer review,” through the idea of scientific fraud and chicanery, of which it seems that the autism-vaccine link is the prime example. (I’m going to avoid the subject of scientifically experimenting on prayer–and just say, though shalt not test the Lord your God, and leave it at that. I’m going for something else at the moment.)

Yet, Jonah Leherer in The New Yorker plumbs a bit deeper, and finds something far more complex and infinitely more interesting: the decline effect in results (the tendency of strong results to lose strength over time) is far more prevalent than the conceit of scientific method allows.

Using multiple examples, you can discover studies taken to be axiomatic in fields as broad ranging as physics, psychology, and zoology that turn out to be anything but axiomatic. Initial studies that seemed to have no obvious flaws and had significant power, become nearly impossible to reproduce. What happens is, because they are considered axiomatic, they are used and re-used as unquestioned truths to form the basis of any number of arguments and further studies; the ideas become entrenched, in other words, and you immediately have a situation where opposing information seems a) maximally counterintuitive and b) destined to swim upstream.

There are statistical explanations, such as regression to the mean, and the idea of “power” in a study–yet this prevalent decline effect is not even partially explained by these phenomenon as often the decline is sharper than one would see in these statistical phenomena, as they are defined.

Heisenberg may have been able to tell you this with a shrug, but it seems that the subjectivity of the researcher is nearly unavoidable and the desire of the researcher is also present in the results. This idea has been around for awhile, known as confirmation bias, the tendency of researchers to record and observe data that confirms their hypothesis and selectively discard or simply ignore contradictory data, both consciously and unconsciously.

This reminds me of a particular moment as an undergraduate philosophy major, when I, black-turtlnecked, chain smoking Camel Lights, over-caffeinated, hopped up on nicotine, discovered with some Philosophy pals over 3AM cheese fries with gravy that we could identify and deconstruct the bias of each of our professors in a few sentences. What now? we thought. We immediately order more cheese fries and lit up our cigarettes and while we waited for them arrived we decided to turn our existential crisis into a new version of Plato’s Academy and not go to class anymore. That’s the problem with teaching deconstruction. You only have to teach it for a few classes before your students turn it on you and find YOU irrelevant. In my case, irrelevant or not, I realized my scholarship might evaporate if I continued my epistemological rebellion and I returned to class to be indoctrinated by a Calvinist, a Buddhist, and a Marxist Socialist that semester. Even biased information was better than having to abandon part-time work in the computer lab and get a full-time job.

It would be easy to throw up one’s hands and become rather nihilistic here–it’s all relative and everything is opinion! Let’s go get some cheese fries and to heck with everything!

Rather, when I no longer eat cheese fries and gravy and get a good night’s sleep regularly, and only smoke lightly, (though I still caffeinate) it seems that “science” has its place, but that place may be a rather more humble one than we are accustomed to putting it in. It in no ways implies, however that the place it DOES hold is irrelevant or inconsequential. It’s a case of our Enlightenment Karma running over our Scientific Dogma, but perhaps we can pay the vet her price and stop short of euthanizing the dog.

For must of my graduate studies I’ve worked in bridging the “two cultures,” science and the humanities, because I don’t think they are supposed to be divided and I think both fields have become impoverished through the division. Often, my impulse is mistaken as a form of positivism; by which I mean, my humanities colleagues believe that I’m introducing scientific evidence to give weight to my work and place a higher truth claim on it in comparison to my peers.

It never occurs to people, however, that it really is quite the opposite impulse; that I think applying science to the humanities makes the science stronger, in that it matches DESCRIPTIONS of human experience to the most human of experiences we can think of: religious and aesthetic experience (and I really think the latter is a subset of the former). Scientific knowledge turned itself into an EXPLANATION when it is, at its best, a form of fine, highly attuned description. Further, it has become corrupted in the mad drive to turn all scientific study into functional, practical, and BANKABLE results immediately. When applied to the arts it isn’t really all that bankable, as most of us with PhDs in the Humanities will tell you, morosely, usually over a drink or two. While depressing to our pocket book and career prospects, there is something pure in that, I think.

I like describing–I like describing BOTH Bernini’s “Ecstacy of St. Theresa” and what happens to the person encountering it, at phenomenal, sensory, and even NEURONAL levels, because I think the patterns there are comprehensible and wonderful, and as Benoit Mandelbrot taught us through the marvel of the fractal, these patterns are self-similar. The smallest part of human experience contains inside of it, a description of all reality. The same way one cell has DNA with a script for our entire physical person. However, what is very hard to communicate is that I have in no way reduced either the work or the encounter TO that description. It doesn’t explain it. We need something else for that. It comes down to, essentially–the most unbelievable accident of randomness (which is hardly ever truly random, thank you again, Dr. Mandelbrot), or…

Something else.