The Triumph of Science over science

February the 17^th, 2017 marks the 417^th anniversary of the death of Giordano Bruno. I know that many of my ardent readers are still trying to get over that.

Giordano Bruno's rather angelic looking Senior picture

Aristotle taught that the Earth is the center of the Universe. His proclamation cemented this idea into Western thought for almost 2,000 years. This is just one of the many examples of things that Aristotle said that mere observation would readily demonstrate to be just flat out wrong. Aristotle did lower-case science by decree. His attitude was that if reality disagrees with what he says, then reality is wrong.

Giordano Bruno challenged the idea of geocentricity (Earth being the center of all things) by proclaiming the heretical notion that the Earth travels around the Sun, rather than the other way around. He also proclaimed that the stars are just Suns like our own, but are just really darn far away. And (get this) Bruno said that those distant suns might have planets of their own, complete with living beings.

His challenge to conventional thought didn’t go over so well. He was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1600.

My attempts at marketing BBQ sauce have not proven successful

If Pew or Gallup were to do a poll asking people about Bruno, I’m gonna take a wild guess that most people would identify him as a pro wrestling promoter. Even if one were to restrict the poll to the scientifical and intellectual cream of the crop (which is to say, those people who regularly read my blog posts) I am gonna take another wild guess that a pretty small percentage would recognize the name Giordano Bruno. Yes, even the seven of you dear readers who have read more than one of my blogposts might say “who?”

But I should add that Bruno does have a crater on the Moon named after him. Kind of a small consolation what with his untimely death and all. I doubt if I ever get that honor. But if I do, I promise to look surprised.

Giordano Bruno, the lunar pimple

Some historians of science see Bruno as a martyr to the cause of Science. Perhaps he was killed for refusing to recant his beliefs about the universe?  But, perhaps not. I didn’t mention that he said quite a few nasty things about religion. More pointedly, he questioned some of the core beliefs of Christianity. The tamest of these was that the Bible is all about morals and stuff like that, and shouldn’t be treated like a textbook on astronomy. I’m not gonna get into all the other stuff that rankled the leaders of the church. Suffice it to say that his pontifications on religion were likely enough for the Inquisitors to get out their book of matches.

I think that explanation for his martyrdom is quite likely, but I’m going to make a different argument about why I don’t think Bruno was a martyr for Science. I argue that what he did wasn't Science. Bruno had some brilliant hypotheses that were way ahead of his time, but he didn’t do a lot of testing of those hypotheses. Testing of hypotheses is at the crux of Science. 

Copernicus

Bruno was not the first person to talk about the Earth revolving around the Sun. Aristarchus of Samos proposed this in 270 BC. An astronomer from India by the name of Aryabhata claimed this around 400 AD. The first person in “modern” times to make such a claim was Nicholas of Cusa in the early 1400’s. This time period was the start of the Renaissance, when people started questioning the dogma that Aristotle had left us with. (Note the forming of a theme here concerning Artistotle.)

Show of hands… Who remembers Aristarchus or Aryvhata? Anyone? Who remembers sending out Nicholas-of-Cusa-Day cards? He was the guy who updated the Alfonsine astronomical tables? Yeah, I didn’t think you remembered him either.

This is not one of the Alfonsine Tables

How about another Nick… Nicolaus Copernicus? Ahhh… now I am seeing some name recognition. I think a lot of people who paid attention in Science class will at least vaguely remember the name. Something to do with the Solar System and planets and stuff? Yup. That’s the guy. A few people reading this may actually remember some self-proclaimed math guy who blogged about Copernicus.

Copernicus was a true Scientist, with a capital S. Aristotle and Giordano Bruno and Nicholas of Cusa? They were all scientists of the lower case variety. They were pontificators. They had an interest in Science, and pontificated about it. They had great intuition. With the exception of Aristotle, their intuition often proved correct. (Yet another subtle jab at Aristotle.)

But they weren’t capital S Scientists in that they didn’t follow the scientific method. They got the first part of the method: observe some junk and hypothesize about an explanation. Then they went forth and pontificated on their hypotheses. That might be lower case s science, but it’s not upper case S Science.

Copernicus took it to the next step. He also pondered on the possibility of a Solar System with the Sun at the center, but he went out and found data. In this case, it was largely data about the positions of the planets that was consolidated a zillion years ago by Ptolemy. Copernicus demonstrated in his posthumous book (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, 1543) that “the Earth and the Planets travel around the Sun, and the Moon travels around the Earth” provided a simple explanation that fit the data.

This was how Science is supposed to work. It's all about data and hypothesis testing. When observations contradict a theory, the theory doesn't get all defensive and call the data a loser. The theory is rejected. And when a hypothesis arises that is simpler but provides as good of an explanation of the data, the older hypothesis is moved to the side. 

By the way, Copernicus also has his own crater on the Moon and one on Mars. Two heavenly spots for vacation homes.

Copernicus' summer home is the large complex in the center of the crater

As a side note… I have a big pile of files on my computer that contain books that I almost finished writing, one of which is a history of science. In order to find what I had previously written about Copernicus, I used a program to search my computer that is ironically named Copernic. True story. Good program, by the way.

A few more Scientists

It can also be said that Ptolemy (around 200 AD) did some Science. He started with a hypothesis, Aristotle’s geocentric universe, collected a lot of data, and found a mathematical explanation of the data. This is the way Science is supposed to work.

But much to the detriment of Western thought, Ptolemy went through gyrations (quite literally Spirographic gyrations) to describe the various motions in terms of Aristotle’s geocentric universe. He built an overly complicated model based on the assumption that Aristotle's tweets about the Universe were infallible, but I would still argue that Ptolemy was doing capital S Science, what with all the hypothesis testing and real data stuff.

Ptolemy's explanation of the course of the planets 

(I want to point something out here, just to make sure I haven’t been too subtle. Aristotle is the bad guy in this blog post. I also heard that he has small hands.)

Galileo also did capital S Science. You will likely remember Galileo for doing a bunch of stuff with pendulums and rolling balls down inclines. You might also remember that bit about when his press agent told everyone that he leaned over and dropped some balls onto a tower of pizzas. Don't always believe press agents! But I want to point out some Science of his that did not get as much press.

Galileo had heard of Copernicus’ work. He was taken by the idea of a heliocentric solar system. When he came upon the first telescope in 1609, he anxiously built one, and pointed it to the skies to look for evidence. He used the telescope to observe many things that the Roman Catholic church did not want to hear: the moon has craters (and was not perfect), the Sun had spots (and was not perfect), the planet Venus has phases (so it must rotate around the Sun), and Jupiter has bodies revolving around it (rather than all bodies revolving around the Earth). These ideas all went against the accepted doctrine of the time.

This was capital S Science, where observational data trumps hypotheses.

All great Scientists have beards. I have a beard. Draw your own false syllogisms.

And by golly, did the whole Inquisition crowd get ticked off when Galileo published Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems! Galileo wasn’t invited to a barbecue like Bruno was, but he was put under permanent house arrest. I am happy to report that the Catholic church quickly reversed this. It took them a mere 325 years to pardon Galileo.

Ironically, this guy who discovered the craters on the Moon -- Galileo -- doesn’t have a single crater named after him. All the rest of his gang got one. The injustice! All he got was "a large, dark surface feature" on Ganymede, one of Jupiter's moons. If ever there was an example of Stigler's law of eponymy, Galileo's craters are it.

Johannes Kepler is another guy who did capital S Science. He looked at data on the positions of Mars and deduced that the orbit of Mars around the Sun is elliptical. He also developed some laws regarding the speed that planets move around the Sun. Data and theory going hand-in-hand. Capital S Science.

Does Kepler have a lunar crater to call his own? Ya, you betcha. And the obligatory second one on Mars, and then gobs of other stuff in outer space.

Kepler has a whole lotta astronomical stuff named after him!

How about Isaac Newton? No question about it, he did some capital S Science, in a large and bolded font. Newton took Kepler’s laws and had the Greatest Synthesis of All Science – he determined that Kepler’s laws were a consequence of the inverse square law of gravity, and vice versa. In other words, a simple rule about the relationship between distance and gravity replaced Ptolemy's Spirograph set as an explanation of how the celestial bodies move. And he invented calculus just to figger that out! Data begets a simple theory to explain a whole lotta stuff. Science don’t get no better’n that.

Newton got a crater on the Moon, and also one on Mars, just like Copernicus and Kepler. It's a shame though, that he didn't get a few asteroids and exo-planets. Newton doesn't even have is very own disambiguation page on Wikipedia like Kepler.

The triumph

This story has a happy ending. In the end, Science has triumphed over some smarty-pants guy who spouted off about a lot of bogus stuff that he just made up. Granted, it wasn't so happy along the way for some of the courageous people who challenged alternative facts with gosh darn real facts. But in the end, we wound up with Science that truly explains how the world really is. And there are no craters (that I know of) that are named after Aristotle.

Let us hope that we have the wisdom to let facts and data guide our course in the future.

Silly-opathy

What is homeopathy?

Homeopathy is a bit like the old "hair of the dog that bit you". If I have a headache, I should be treated with something that gives me a headache. That something will be highly diluted, so as not to kill me - which is a good thing. This sort of treatment will muster my body's own resources to combat whatever is ailing me.

Homeopathic cure for a hangover?

Homeopathetic claims

Here are some of the claims about homeopathy that I found on the internet:

Homeopathy is a safe, gentle, and natural system of healing that works with your body to relieve symptoms, restore itself, and improve your overall health.
http://www.nationalcenterforhomeopathy.org/

Homeopathy is extremely effective. ...
Homeopathy is completely safe. ...
Homeopathy is natural...
Homeopathy works in harmony with your immune system, unlike some conventional medicines which suppress the immune system...
Homeopathic remedies are not addictive...
Homeopathy is holistic...
https://abchomeopathy.com/homeopathy.htm

One of the ways homeopathy works is by helping to balance your body’s energy, or chi as it’s called in traditional Chinese medicine. This energy is circulated through your body along specific meridians, and when this circulation gets disrupted -- something you can test for using electrodermal screening -- illness can result.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/07/24/ever-wonder-why-homeopathy-works.aspx

Homeopathy is holistic because it treats the person as a whole, rather than focusing on a diseased part or a labeled sickness.  Homeopathy is natural because its remedies are produced according to the U.S. FDA-recognized Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia of the United States from natural sources, whether vegetable, mineral, or animal in nature.
http://homeopathyusa.org/homeopathic-medicine.html

Homeopathy is probably the most difficult medical discipline to master because it is based on the pure observation of nature, and the strict application of a natural law.  All symptoms (physical, mental or emotional) need to be considered for an accurate prescription to be given. The goal of the homeopath is to recognize, through the unique expression of their patients’ symptoms, the pattern of disturbed energy and identify the correct homeopathic medicine (remedy) that is most ‘similar’ to them.
http://greensquarecenter.com/therapies/homeopathy/

I noticed a funny thing on these sites. These websites never come right out and make specific claims about which ailments might be best treated by homeopathy. They tell a bit about what homeopathy is, and maybe some of the history. But they are very reluctant to say "good for a sore throat", or "if your doctor has diagnosed you with..."

The British Homeopathic Association is one of the few sites that makes claims, albeit indirect claims. They provide a list of 75 papers where homeopathy has been tested on various conditions. These are valid research papers in respected journals According to this web page, homeopathy is effective at treating brain injuries, bronchitis, childhood diarrhea, the common cold, depression, fatigue, fibromyalgia, hay fever, post-operative ileus, immune function, influenza, insomnia, low back pain, post-operative oedema, otis media, perennial allergic rhinitis, plantar fasciitis, post-operative wound healing, postpartum bleeding, premenstrual syndrome, psoriasis, radiodermatitis, renal failure, rheumatic diseases, seborrhoeic dermatitis, sepsis, sinusitis, snoring, sports injury, stomatitis, tracheal secretions, upper respiratory tract infections, uraemic pruritus, varicose veins, and vertigo.

Wow! How could anyone possibly be skeptical after that?

What is Science?

Medical treatment is a tricky thing. Symptoms are not always clear cut, so diagnosis is not simple. People sometimes fail to respond to proper treatment, and sometime spontaneously recover despite lack of treatment. Measuring the effects of medications is a statistical thing, and as we know, seven out of five people have difficulty with statistics.

Science is not hearsay or anecdotal. Testimonials are appropriate for revival meetings, but not for science. Good medical research relies on the idea of randomized, controlled trials.

The typical design of a medical experiment starts by recruiting a bunch of volunteers who have all been diagnosed with a certain condition, the more the merrier. Ten is not such a big group. A hundred? Not bad. A thousand? Yeah... that would be good. If you have too few, then you run the chance of falling into the "maybe it worked, but it might just be the roll of the die" zone.

Some studies will administer the same test treatment to all the volunteers and then see how they fare. These studies have a name. They are called "inconclusive". As compelling as the results may seem, you can never tell whether the volunteers got better because of the treatment or in spite of the treatment.

It is important, therefor, to run studies that compare one potential treatment against another treatment. Half of the volunteers get treatment A, while the other half get treatment B. Often times, the "other treatment" is "no treatment", but humans are tough to work with. They generally have some belief in medicine, and their brain and body can team up to enhance recovery even when the pill is nothing more than a placebo (sugar pill). To make for a level playing field of "treatment A" versus "no treatment", the volunteers are not allowed to know whether they are getting a real medicine or a sugar pill. This is one half of the double blind.

The other half of a double blind experiment is that the people doing the caregiving -- the ones administering the medicines, taking in the volunteer's data, or otherwise interacting with the volunteers -- must also be kept in the dark about who is taking a medicine and who is taking a placebo.

Illustration of the double blind test

Assigning volunteers to treatment groups is another delicate matter. When I have run randomized trials, I generally try to get all the attractive young brunette ladies in whatever group I will be involved with. For some reason, I don't get invited to run all that many drug trials. Volunteers are generally assigned to the groups at random, although the significance of a trial can be improved by selecting treatments in a quasi-random manner. For example, the computer may be told to randomize in such a way that the treatment groups all have roughly the same number of people between the ages of 60 and 70.

At the end, we wind up with a statistical question: How statistically significant is the difference between the results in the two groups? Even if the treatment being tested has absolutely no effect on the body, there is a 50% chance that it will outperform the placebo. But if the treatment way outperforms the placebo, then we can be pretty sure that there is something going on. Statistics allows us to put a number on "way outperforms".

Here comes the tough part. Human bodies, illness, treatment... these things have a lot of variability. If you run a drug trial with just a handful of people, the luck of the draw could easily tell you that the same drug is fabulous, ineffective, or lethal. So, to be effective, we need large studies before we can be confident that a treatment is effective.

Sometimes, it is possible to bring together a large number of smaller studies and form a firm conclusion. If one study with ten people says the drug is helpful, well, that's not that exciting. If there are ten studies out there that all came to that conclusion, then the evidence is a bit more convincing. They call this meta-analysis.

Meta-analysis is a bit tricky, though. First, it's complicated by the fact the the ten studies were probably all run just a little different, so it's hard to combine the results. More importantly, however, is publication bias. If a researcher does a small study and the results are kinda blah, there is a tendency for no one to get all that excited about publishing it. So, the studies that actually make it into the journals are biased toward optimism.

Those are the rules for doing science.

How does homeopathy hold up?

I took a look at the list of research papers provided by the British Homeopathic Association. For almost all of them, they gave links to the Pubmed abstracts. I consider this good scholarship. Good for you guys. Below I have quotes from the "Conclusion" sections of the four studies that investigated the effectiveness of homeopathy for treating childhood diarrhea.  (I added the bold type.)

Study 1: The results from these studies confirm that individualized homeopathic treatment decreases the duration of acute childhood diarrhea and suggest that larger sample sizes be used in future homeopathic research to ensure adequate statistical power.

Study 2: The statistically significant decrease in the duration of diarrhea in the treatment group suggests that homeopathic treatment might be useful in acute childhood diarrhea. Further study of this treatment deserves consideration.

Study 3: These results are consistent with the finding from the previous study that individualized homeopathic treatment decreases the duration of diarrhea and number of stools in children with acute childhood diarrhea.

Study 4: The homeopathic combination therapy tested in this study did not significantly reduce the duration or severity of acute diarrhea in Honduran children.

My summary: One provided negative results. Three provided positive results, with two of these clearly saying that the question is still open. Overall, this is favorable, but please bear two things in mind. First, these are the four studies that actually got published. Who knows how many studies were performed and subsequently discarded because the results were uninteresting?

The second thing to bear in mind... I will add one additional quote from Study 3, which was the most positive of the four: "The mean number of stools per day over the entire 5-day treatment period was 3.2 for the treatment group and 4.5 for the placebo group." Hmmmm... If I were to stop at Walgreen's to pick up some loperamide for my ummm... unappealing symptoms, and if the ummm... frequency of unpopular symptoms dropped from 4.5 occurrences a day all the way down to 3.2, would I recommend loperamide to a friend? I think not. There is a difference between "statistical significance" and "practical significance".


I did a little study of my own, wandering around Pubmed looking for meta-studies on homeopathy. I found six such studies.

Overall, the literature concerning a total of 83 original studies suggests that homeopathy may have significant effects in some conditions, ... A larger number of observational studies and of clinical trials -- conducted in a methodologically correct manner without altering the treatment setting-- are needed before sure conclusions concerning the application of homeopathy for specific diseases can be drawn.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21622275/

The evidence demonstrates that in some conditions homeopathy shows significant promise, ... A general weakness of evidence derives from lack of independent confirmation of reported trials and from presence of conflicting results, ...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17173103

When account was taken for these biases in the analysis, there was weak evidence for a specific effect of homoeopathic remedies, but strong evidence for specific effects of conventional interventions. This finding is compatible with the notion that the clinical effects of homoeopathy are placebo effects.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16125589

There is some evidence that homeopathic treatments are more effective than placebo; however, the strength of this evidence is low because of the low methodological quality of the trials. Studies of high methodological quality were more likely to be negative than the lower quality studies. Further high quality studies are needed to confirm these results.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10853874

The central question of whether homeopathic medicines in high dilutions can provoke effects in healthy volunteers has not yet been definitively answered, because of methodological weaknesses of the reports.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17227742

Placebo effects in RCTs [Randomized Clinical Trials] on classical homeopathy did not appear to be larger than placebo effects in conventional medicine.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20129180

Based on this, I am inclined to go along with what the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine has to say about homeopathy:
Most rigorous clinical trials and systematic analyses of the research on homeopathy have concluded that there is little evidence to support homeopathy as an effective treatment for any specific condition... A number of the key concepts of homeopathy are not consistent with fundamental concepts of chemistry and physics.

But, but, but...

It worked for my cousin's neighbor

I'm glad to hear that your cousin's neighbor improved. But, there is a possibility that your cousin's neighbor might have recovered without the treatment. And what about your other cousin's boss who got the same treatment and grew a third foot?

It's not a chemical, it's natural

Hydrogen dioxide, sodium chloride, l-trytophan, and disaccharides are all chemicals, so therefor, they are harmful. These are are better known as water, table salt, that protein in turkey that supposedly makes you sleepy, and certain sugars, like sucrose. All matter is a chemical. Rather than tell me again that homeopathic remedies re not chemicals, please just paste a sign on your forehead that says "I don't understand chemistry".

By the way, rattlesnake venom, arsenic, stinging nettles, radon gas... these are all natural, so they must be good for you?

It's holistic, so it's better

There is something appealing about a doctor who considers your whole condition, rather than primarily looking at a biopsy of your liver. But I will repeat a quote from one of the homeopathy sites mentioned above: "Homeopathy is probably the most difficult medical discipline to master because it is based on the pure observation of nature, and the strict application of a natural law."

"Science has been wrong on a lot of things"

I have heard this argument quite a bit. It is used to prove that there are martians, that aluminum foil hats keep the CIA from reading your brain, and that dinosaurs roamed the Earth just a few years before Ronald Reagan was born.

Let me flesh out the argument a bit. I think the complete train of through goes something like this: "Science has said that homeopathy is ineffective, but Science has been wrong in the past. That means that there is a chance that Science could be wrong on it's condemnation of homeopathy. Therefor, it is certain that homeopathy works."

I followed that argument right up until the last little bit. And I might add,, one of the wonderful things about science is that it does evolve. When reality disagrees with Science, Science is adapted to resolve the conflict.

Conspiracy theory

Homeopathy would be proven if the major drug companies weren't colluding to squash all funding, and if medical journals would allow the research to be published.

The second part of this is just plain not true. A Pubmed search on the word "homeopathy" gets 4,850 hits.

As to the first part, homeopathy is currently big business. I could not find a single consistent number, but according to one source, there are 4,000 businesses accounting for $360M in annual income. Another source says that “U.S consumer sales of Homeopathic treatments reached $870 million in 2009, growing 10% over the previous year.” A third source gives a much larger number for the worldwide market: "In dollars the world homoeopathy market according to ASSOCHAM is $5.35 billion."

I'm not going to quibble about hundreds of millions versus billions of dollars. The important thing is that, by all accounts, there is a huge market potential. If the technique could be proven to the point where it was accepted by insurance companies, then the potential is astronomical. I am probably not the first person to ponder the fact that investment in some good science could make someone a lot of money. Well, if it panned out.

"Not consistent with fundamental concepts of chemistry and physics"

I'm going to go back to a comment from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Where does homeopathy run afoul of established science?

The difficulty comes from the fact that homeopathic remedies are highly diluted dilutions of highly diluted dilutions, which are then highly diluted by highly diluting them again and again. The active ingredient is first diluted in water or alcohol to one part in a hundred. The result of this is then diluted again to one part in a hundred, and then again, and again, and yet again. This dilution may be performed as few as 6 times, but preferably 30 times.

Excuse me... We start out with a finite number of molecules. After one dilution we have 100 times fewer. After two dilutions, that number goes down to 10,000. After three dilutions, the number of molecules is reduced by a factor of a million. After somewhere around 12 dilutions, we have about one molecule left.

After a few more dilutions - for good measure - it would be awfully hard for a lab with 18 million dollars worth of analytical equipment, a staff of 43 PhDs, and a couple of cages of lab rats to tell the difference between a tablet for angina and a tablet for morning sickness. So... how is my body is gonna be able to tell the difference?

The homeopathicists have heard this one before, so they have a ready response. There may not be any molecules of belladonna extract left, but the belladonna has left it's "memory" in the water.

Ok. Sorry. I just got off the bus. Homeopathic memories in the water are able to cause a profound effect on the human body, but to date we have not been able to invent an instrument of test procedure that is sensitive enough to see these "memories"?

Even in the unlikely event that there is something like a memory that gets imprinted in the distilled water, any drop of distilled water must also have the imprint of the millions of different molecules that it has come into contact with.

One can certainly argue that many medications work for reasons that we don't understand. But homeopathy goes a step beyond just benign ignorance. Any scientific explanation of homeopathy must start by inventing a new branch of physics that has a powerful effect on the body, but for some reason has evaded our detection up until this point. 

My assessment

Send me a check for $100 and I will send you my remedy for whatever ails you. Just to warn you, my cure will likely involve painting your toenails orange and dancing naked around a spruce true under a full moon while singing a certain Van Morrison song. For $1000, you might coerce me to join you. I'll bring along the KFC to sacrifice.