Epigenetics continues to be just freaking nuts

boing
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Notice that the system you favor for review in science exhibits no functionality for evaluating new ideas which might deviate from established theory. You’ve created a system for slowing innovation in science. This is called “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”.

You seem to realize that we can do better, but you fail to advocate that we actually try to do so. And then you vaguely criticize those of us who are not afraid of new ideas in science as “swallowing every bit of fringe science that ends up on the Internet.” That’s not accurate, for there is a huge difference between learning about something and buying into it. The self-transforming mindset – something you really need to learn about – is able to hold contradictions, and this is vital for learning any large, complex idea since we must be able to hold contradictions long enough to figure out what we believe.

See http://postimg.org/image/kxiu57ihd/ and http://postimg.org/image/yfv3z6lfl/. These come from the book, Immunity to Change.

Your online advocacy of this approach is really quite harmful to the larger endeavor of science, for it invites people to adopt an approach to science which lacks any mechanism for change in belief. Yet, science is not just a collection of facts; it’s also a process of tracking down better models. Such change would be highly improbable in the absence of any mechanism to encourage it to happen.

Deferring to peer review invites people to refuse to learn worldviews which they then criticize. This creates an incredible amount of noise on the Internet; it should be clear that critique should only originate from knowledge. The only way to figure out which ideas are good is to actually learn about them. In fact, open-mindedness has traditionally been considered a value involved in thinking like a scientist.

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The problem is when people start thinking epigenetics explains evolution or is an alternative to natural selection. It doesn’t, as by definition the modifications only persist a generation or two. So there’s been a bit of backlash about epigenetics from evolutionary biologists. But that doesn’t mean that epigenetics isn’t an important new subfield of biology.

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Arik tre’ac te kek! Avidan!

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Too late…
Articles/Theories like “How Your Thoughts Can Cause or Cure Cancer” (via epigenetics) are all too common.

Epigenetics: It doesn’t mean what quacks think it means « Science-Based Medicine

Edit: previously, they would have used “observer” BS from Quantum Mechanics to justify “Happy Thoughts” therapy

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Not true. First of all, peer review applies to purely observational and experimental studies which will be taken seriously regardless of established theory. There’s nothing about peer review that would eliminate anomalous observational or experimental results. For studies dealing with purely empirical results peer review will address possible methodological shortcomings – which is exactly what we want to do with anomalous data: see if there are explanations for it that the researchers hadn’t considered. A perfect example was the “superluminous” neutrinos.

Second of all, new theories are proposed all the time and new theories necessarily “deviate from established theory.” That’s exactly the point of proposing a new theory.

Not true. First of all, I haven’t created anything in this context. Second of all, peer review isn’t a “system for slowing innovation in science” – it’s a system for slowing the spread of bullshit through science.

Science can only progress or innovate when it is building on reliable data. If you don’t have a filtering process (or if your filtering process isn’t selective enough) you end up trying to generate theories to explain observations and data that aren’t actually true in the first place. You end up with theories that predict garbage because you accepted the garbage as legitimate in the first place.

Pure ad hominem bullshit. You seem to be taking the fact that I disagree with you about scientific methodology very personally. I said something in general about swallowing every bit of fringe science that ends up on the internet; why would you take that as directed at you in particular? Could you please try to get your ego out of the way and make this about the ideas instead of about the people involved?

More ad hominem nonsense. You don’t know anything about me so how do you plan to support these assertions about me personally? About you don’t bother and stick to the ideas instead of trying to make this personal?

And of course, besides being ad hominem and unsupported it’s false. I’m always willing to listen to new explanations and theories. I think they’re interesting.

The problem is that we can’t take every idea we hear seriously so where do we draw the line?

And yet most scientists seem to agree that peer review is a worthwhile institution that helps to ensure that scientific studies yield useful results. Open-mindedness is important: so many scientific discoveries have been serendipitous that it only makes sense for scientists to try to be aware of results that confound their expectations. So many modern scientific theories are so wildly counterintuitive that they would have been missed by anyone with a truly closed mind.

What you keep missing here despite it having been stated pretty clearly already is that once you’ve done all the open-minded navel gazing you still have to make judgments about what is and isn’t most likely to be true given the evidence at hand. That’s where peer review comes in. It’s a filtering process. Open-mindedness is required to generate ideas but you also need to eliminate ideas that aren’t working out so well. That’s where adversarial peer review comes in.

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But note in your first post here, you don’t present the strange consequences of electrostatic fields as a possibility for open minds to consider. You present them as a decided fact somehow ignored by our terrible science reporting despite its great consequences.

This is why it’s very difficult to take your ideas about dogmatism in peer review and how to fix them seriously. There are some real problems with it, but when it comes to overturning well-supported ideas and accepting new ones you don’t seem to care for any standard of evidence beyond “well, some guys say they found something.”

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This is not how self-transforming mindsets work. They keep all worldviews in mind as they interpret data, and they switch between them at will. Convergence is not always necessary. In fact, some disciplines of science are simply far too speculative, even to this day, to warrant it.

Change in belief in science should never be an afterthought for our systems of scientific discourse. If you take a close look at physics education research, you’ll observe that change in belief is actually fundamental to learning itself. Peer review is important, but it is simply a subset of the larger system of discourse, which is also tasked with communicating new ideas in science.

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Epigenetics is not lamarckianism, in that as far as I understand it, the effects only persist for a few generations unless reinforced again, and there is not any actual change in the genetic code involved.

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Wow. Your obsession with crackpot pseudoscience extends across many disciplines, none of which you’re qualified to have an opinion on. More amazingly, according to you, it seems like there’s not a single field of science in which the actual truth is not being suppressed by an enormous conspiracy. I can tell you, from personal experience, that I know a lot of scientists, in a lot of fields, well enough to be pretty damn sure they aren’t part of a giant global conspiracy (in some of those, fields, I’d have to be in on it, too.) Of course, you’ve got to take my word for it that I’m not just an agent of this conspiracy. Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!

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When I google “self-transforming mindset” I get a bunch of self-help stuff. You want to give me some actual reasons to take this stuff seriously?

How does one “keep all worldviews in mind” let alone “switch between them at will”? How does one even identify “all worldviews” in the first place let alone keep them all in mind given the fact that there aren’t any obvious a priori limits on the number or content of the set of “all worldviews”?

First of all, I completely agree that some disciplines of science are too speculative to eliminate all the proposed theories. Psychology is a great example. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t do a little filtering even when it comes to psychology. Freudian psychoanalysis, for example, can probably be pretty much chucked as anything but a canonic example of pseudoscience. Behavioralism as a paradigm had its day of producing quality experimental work but it’s not a workable theory any more given what has been discovered about neuroscience and genetics. And so on. There’s still no “GUT” of how the mind works but there’s enough evidence to eliminate some possibilities. This is a good thing as it lets researchers devote their time, attention, and resources to the more promising possibilities out there.

However, what you’re calling “convergence” is actually a central pillar of the scientific mindset and a very important part of the progress of science. The terms “consilience” and “synthesis” can also be used in this context. The idea is that we all share one world and that the one world has a definite way of operating regardless of the opinions of the observer. This idea is exactly what makes multiple lines of independent evidence converging on one explanation the gold standard of scientific argumentation.

Ultimately, the best possible argument for any scientific theory is that the predictions of that theory are consistent with the predictions of “adjacent” theories. For example, chemistry and quantum electrodynamics are “adjacent” theories developed independently but which make the same predictions. The fact that they are consistent with each other despite being derived independently is a fantastic argument for both theories: how unlikely is it that these two independent theories would make the same predictions if one or both of the theories was seriously flawed? Another example is Darwinian evolution and genetics. Darwin predicted the existence of something like DNA and ever since its inception genetics has reached back to provide evidence for Darwinian evolution.

So what you call “convergence” is actually a very important part of scientific argumentation. While there are some fields that are still speculative enough to admit many competing theories, history has already demonstrated the utility of converging on the most productive theories when such an undertaking becomes possible.

Note that Thomas Kuhn actually differentiated between a sort of proto-science where there is no dominant paradigm and mature science where there is a dominant paradigm. Although your suggestions are rather antithetical to Kuhn’s ideas since Kuhn thought scientists are already doing a fantastic job of doing science (though he didn’t think they understood why they were so effective).

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Actually, I think your online advocacy against peer review is quite harmful to the larger endeavor of science. There are already plenty of mechanisms for change in belief – this has been demonstrated time and again by the history of science wherein dogmatic adherence to successful theories has been overcome by better evidence for better theories. However, the model of science that you seem to advocate (without ever explicitly describing) is, as far as I can tell, completely unproven. And you don’t seem to work as a scientist or to have been trained as a scientist.

Let me try an analogy. Suppose I drive down to a mechanic and get a tuneup. Then I drive over to a daycare center where I’m going to pick up my child. I leave the car idling and when I get back one of the caretakers from the daycare center is there listening to the motor. He says without a trace of doubt in his mind: “I think there’s a problem with your car. Open it up and I can probably fix it for you real quick.” What do you think I should do? It’s certainly possible this person who is unlikely to have nearly as much experience or expertise with motor vehicles knows something the mechanic doesn’t. It’s even possible that the mechanic is trying to scam me and this person is being legitimately helpful. But if I gamble that either of those are the case, the stakes are a car that I presumably just paid to have fixed. I have to choose whether or not to pop the hood. What should I do? Personally, I would assume the mechanic knows her business and the daycare center guy knows his business and not allow the latter to work on my car.

On the other hand, absurd post hoc and ad hoc theories can be generated ad infinitum by people who don’t know nearly as much as they think they do. This also creates an incredible amount of noise on the internet – more than your example does I would estimate. Someone who wants reliable information on a phenomenon that has already been researched scientifically don’t necessarily have the time, attention, energy, or resources to read, comprehend, and comprehensively critique every single wrong theory on the internet pertaining to the phenomenon they wish to study. Demanding that scientists consider every theory and not eliminate the least promising while emphasizing the most promising is simply unrealistic and unproductive.

In short, I disagree with you that science would be much improved by putting Time Cube on equal footing with general relativity. There needs to be some mechanism in place by which scientists can arrive at something approximating consensus that Time Cube is a bunch of incoherent nonsense that is not supported by any evidence whereas general relativity is a coherent, predictive theory that is consistent with almost all data we have on the phenomena of gravitation and space-time.

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Dude, your comments change completely after I already respond to them.

That sounds a little different from a couple minutes ago when you were accusing me of harming science by suggesting that peer review serves an important function in scientific research.

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Actually, the most consequential finding of the physics education research community, based upon the force concept inventory test, has been that traditional science education has fundamentally failed to facilitate changes in belief from peoples’ intuition. The fact that changes in belief do indeed tend to happen sporadically for entire cultures over the course of decades does not at all help modern people to deal with the incredibly rapid rate of discovery which is typical of modern science. There is no precedent for what is happening today, and we should not be looking to the past to formulate our expectations on this important point. After all, if you look at immunity-to-change research (see Harvard researchers Kegan and Lahey), you will learn that subject-object interviews done in two separate studies demonstrate that less than 1% of the population is capable of actually altering their own beliefs in light of evidence (self-transformational mindset).

Rather than talking about hypotheticals, let’s look at what actual studies say about change in belief from actual traditional physics courses. From the paper titled “Force Concept Inventory” at http://modelinginstruction.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/FCI-TPT.pdf …

Every student begins physics with a well-established system of commonsense beliefs about how the physical world works derived from years of personal experience. Over the last decade, physics education research has established that these beliefs play a dominant role in introductory physics. Instruction that does not take them into account is almost totally ineffective, at least for the majority of students.

Specifically, it has been established that (1) commonsense beliefs about motion and force are incompatible with Newtonian concepts in most respects, (2) conventional physics instruction produces little change in these beliefs, and (3) this result is independent of the instructor and the mode of instruction. The implications could not be more serious. Since the students have evidently not learned the most basic Newtonian concepts, they must have failed to comprehend most of the material in the course. They have been forced to cope with the subject by rote memorization of isolated fragments and by carrying out meaningless tasks. No wonder so many are repelled! The few who are successful have become so by their own devices, the course and the teacher having supplied only the opportunity and perhaps inspiration.

If you look carefully at what the force concept inventory research is telling us, it is saying very plainly that the fundamental problem we face today in science education and communication pertains to supporting changes in belief. The immunity to change research supports their thesis, and from a completely different line of investigation.

Peer review serves an important purpose, but it offers us little-to-no support in formulating new beliefs in science. What we can say about peer review is that it is only relevant to the domain of a particular worldview (the model-level of discourse). Any discussion which involves competing worldviews in science will fall outside of peer review’s scope. And to be clear, that is not some small percentage of the total set of scientific conversations we might have; it’s actually a significant chunk.

I realize that it has become trendy amongst even incredibly prestigious university science professors to completely ignore the ominous data we’ve seen coming out of physics education research journals for about three decades now, but the public shouldn’t necessarily repeat that horrible mistake. It stands to reason that if less than 1% of the population has apparently learned how to alter their own beliefs, based upon evidence, then chances are that we are spending too much time talking about the merits of older theories. It very plainly suggests that there are good ideas out there which demand our attention, but which are not getting it for the simple reason that people have not figured out how to assimilate new findings in science.

The FCI indicates very, very serious problems in how we ALL think about science today, for the simple reason that we’ve all basically been trained in more-or-less the same manner – which research is now indicating is definitively flawed.

For more info on the FCI, see the MindShift article at | KQED | News, Radio, Podcasts, TV | Public Media for Northern California. This should be required reading for anybody who has even a cursory interest in science today.

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But they are hella interesting and will definitely lead to a lot more research as other scientists attempt to replicate them

I’d be waiting until the data are actually published.

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I’m just giving you the ‘like’ because you knew to use “data are”.

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I could see evolution developing a mechanism that would pass on valuable fear-responses to offspring. Why not?

I can confirm that theory: my mother screamed like a banshee the first time I made to cross the busy road in front of our house.

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Somatic gene therapy. Not yet perfected in humans, but it’s clearly possible.

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Are we arguing about basic scientific education or about scientific research? While I completely agree with the conclusions of that study as they pertain to science education in secondary school – in fact, I’d say they apply to all subjects in US secondary schools – I don’t see that the same criticisms apply to physics research wherein the participants have already demonstrated their ability to alter their beliefs, at least in the case of Newtonian mechanics (and much moreso in relativity and QM).

But scientific research and science education and communication are very different animals. While obviously it would be best to help give everyone the tools they need to facilitate altering their beliefs to accommodate new information that doesn’t necessarily say anything about what actual physicists need to do their actual job. That’s what I’ve been discussing all along, clearly, as “peer review” doesn’t even apply directly to science education before college and only tangentially to science communication.

I’m still not seeing why I should take your pronouncements on what should be “required reading” as credible but I’ll give it a read. I tend to think you’ve not only failed to make your case but quietly shifted the goalposts. After all, we started off by arguing whether peer review should play any part in assessing the credibility of scientific data and now you’re arguing to me about science education.

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Pics or it didn’t happen.

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After all, we started off by arguing whether peer review should play any part in assessing the credibility of scientific data and now you’re arguing to me about science education

Actually – and this is important – we started with me posting an unexpected observation which has been made in a number of laboratories, to which you replied …

I would this with a very high dose of skepticism…

Miracle seeds produced over a decade ago that everyone mysteriously stopped working on because they were too good and would destroy the fertilizer industry? And wheat that was harvestable after four weeks instead of seven months, and no one has ever heard of this except a few Germans?

It sounds like great material for a thriller, but you have to ask why this isn’t in any peer-reviewed journals. Is the fertilizer industry even more all-powerful and secret than the oil industry?

It’s not clear to me that you actually did any actual search through any peer review literature, but the problem here is that you have suggested that people should expect to see support for the idea in peer review literature if it is something worthy of peoples’ attention.

In other words, you’re suggesting that peer review is an effective process for vetting anomalous observations in science, and that since – we are presuming – there is no peer review on the subject, then the public should not spend any time talking about it.

The problem here is that you are treating the public as though they lack any actual role in the process of science. In this view, it would seem that the public is a vessel to be filled with knowledge generated by scientists. Whatever scientists say that they want or believe, the public should simply accept the opinions of the peer reviewers without adding their own critical component to this process, based upon their own set of values.

That turns out to be a very risky proposition, because if you were to look into the way in which we train scientists today, you’d find that scientists are increasingly being taught to fit into organizations. They are not being taught to think like independent mavericks who can, like a lone wolf, come to some conclusion which is distinct from the larger professional community. Jeff Schmidt shows in good detail in his book Disciplined Minds that science training is largely a process of professionalization, whereby scientists are implicitly taught to work in a disciplined manner on problems which are assigned to them. The set of values we teach scientists today is very different from the Tesla-like ideal which the public has come to associate with thinking like a scientist.

So, when you suggest that the public has no independent role in science, what you are actually doing is subtle, and yet also potentially very dangerous. You’ve skipped over all of the important details associated with how we train scientists today to be disciplined thinkers and you’ve skipped over three decades of physics education research which suggests that very large majorities of the public actually exhibit enormous difficulty revising belief in light of new evidence. This has led you to simply assume that professional specialist scientists are necessarily acting in the public’s behalf, and furthermore, that if there was reason to believe in a new theory published within peer review, that the public would simply assimilate that new theory without any apparent difficulty.

And to make matters worse, you’ve invoked notions of a conspiracy to suggest that it is actually preposterous to believe that professional scientists wouldn’t be acting in the public interest. What I’m trying to do here is to convince you to take a much deeper look at what you’re actually doing here, for you’re actually – presumably unintentionally – spreading myths about how science works today.

Professional scientists are today trained to act on the behalf of whatever organization they end up working for. This is an important part of what it means to be “professional”. This set of values is taught from the start of the graduate program. If it weren’t the case, then our largest organizations which rely upon scientific research wouldn’t properly function. This need is inherent to industry’s needs, and it demands that the public adopt a unique role in the larger process of science, in terms of skepticism and critical thinking, because this process of professionalization can also exhibit incredible – perhaps even a dominant – influence upon the formation of consensus. Nobody should be assuming that academia is somehow free of these values which are today widely taught within our graduate programs for industry’s sake. The graduate students’ allegiance simply shifts if they happen to get a job which transitions them from academia to scientist working for industry.

If you actually dug into the story here, you’d see that all of this theory about values and professionalization is indeed apparent in this particular story (try searching on “Ebner Effect” …). We need not invoke any conspiracies, and we’d be wise not to. It’s already explained why this technology was originally abandoned: Because the Swiss pharmaceutical group which discovered it realized that if it was productized, it would undermine their pre-existing line of products. And so, we’ve had to wait until the children of those scientists decided to promote these findings, as they noticed that there was public value here which their professionalized parents simply abandoned.

A lot of people today like to imagine that they can just focus upon the technical details associated with science – the peer reviewed wikipedia-listed factual content of science – and act as if there are no human factors that go into science – as if science is this purified, idealized process, as glorified in some black-and-white promotional video created by Monsanto about the amazing benefits of chemistry. But, in doing so, they permit themselves to formulate very simplistic ideas about how science actually works. Those details about how we train scientists – normally hidden behind closed doors, but occasionally revealed by whistleblowers like Jeff Schmidt – do indeed matter. We really need to pay attention to everything which is happening, on all levels, in order to make meaningful decisions about what to pay attention to. Peer review can never fully substitute for that, and we should never settle for it as our only guide.