Can You Trust the Truth?

Some high-profile scientists are making a startling assertion: Science isn’t really science at all. All too often it is more like a combination of voodoo statistics, snake-oil salesmanship and big business.

The implication is that much of what people think they know, is wrong. Claims repeated over and over in textbooks are actually unprovable. Even our understanding of basic fundamentals such as the law of gravity is now being questioned, if you can believe it.

How is this possible? There is a vast, widespread, endemic problem within the scientific community, says the New Yorker. Even the scientific method—the foundation of all science—may be part of the problem.

Before you accuse me of being a liberal with a global-warming agenda, or an anti-evolution creationist on a rant, these are not my conclusions. They are recent findings of leading scientists published in peer-reviewed journals and most recently in Newsweek, the New Yorker and the Atlantic.

“It’s as if our facts [are] losing their truth,” reports the New Yorker’s Jonah Lehrer.

One of the fundamental defining characteristics separating science from opinion, rule from coincidence, fact from fiction, is replicability—whether or not the results can be reproduced. Yet according to experts, the lack of replicability is like a viral disease infesting whole disciplines of science today.

This should be startling.

In science, if you can’t replicate it, then you don’t understand it. It therefore isn’t science—it is guesswork. Accidents and happenstance happen all the time—but science is supposed to separate wheat from chaff. Now, however, the threshing instrument appears to be malfunctioning.

If we can’t trust science, the implications go far beyond anthropogenic global warming and the creation/evolution debate. And it is about more than just whether or not you can trust the recommendations of your well-intentioned doctor.

Ever since the world emerged from the Middle Ages, science has been held up as a beacon of light in a dark world—a messiah. The rigors of science and the scientific method claimed to remove the elements of politics, human bias and mythology. Cold, hard facts reigned supreme. Discovery and truth, backed by provable results, promised to eliminate society’s problems. Given enough knowledge and information, nothing seemed insurmountable.

In essence, science replaced God as the world’s religion.

What will people do if science is shown to be just as prone to perpetuating error as Roman Catholic Europe during the dark ages? What will be left to believe in?

Unfortunately, the scientific community—even science itself—seems to be in regression. The world threatens to move back toward a darker time when opinions as opposed to fact dominated the mainstream.

For people, it ultimately gets down to whether or not you can trust what the “experts” tell you. It is the age-old question: What is truth? And who has it?

In the medical industry especially, this answer is of paramount importance.

Out of all industries, most people would expect medicine to be based on hard scientific evidence. After all, people’s lives are on the line. Yet, almost 200 years after doctors stopped prescribing leech treatments, medicine remains a cauldron filled to the brim with popular treatments that have been debunked by evidence.

In 2005, Johan Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University, published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that is now attracting uncomfortable questions. He examined the 45 most-cited clinical-research studies in three major medical journals to see if their findings stood up to the test of time. These were all “gold standard”-type studies of medical evidence that had major impact on the medical industry. What he found shocked him. Of the studies that had later been put to the test of replication (in some cases long after the results had been incorporated into the mainstream), a whopping 41 percent were seriously downgraded in effect—or directly contradicted.

If a third to a half of the most highly trusted medical research can’t be trusted, where does that leave the whole industry?

Dr. David Eddy, a heart-surgeon-turned-mathematician and health-care economist, says the whole field desperately needs an “evidence-based medicine” revolution.

According to Dr. Eddy, only 15 percent of physicians’ decisions are supported by solid evidence. Other doctors and health-care-quality experts who have endorsed Eddy’s work say the percentage of medical treatments that have been proven effective is shockingly low, citing figures between 20 and 25 percent.

Stated another way, you must take the benefits of 75 to 80 percent of any medications, surgeries or treatments your doctor recommends on faith alone, because there is no solid proof showing their effectiveness. In fact, most drugs have negative side effects, so the treatments being prescribed will likely actually harm you in another way—possibly even more seriously.

And as the New Yorker brings out, when the subject is fashionable, the lack of evidence is even worse.

For example, studies linking genes to everything from hypertension and schizophrenia to proclivity to commit crime have become mainstream—and represent big money. But when Ioannidis and doctors at other colleges scrutinized 432 of these recent genetic studies, only a single one was found to be consistently replicable!

Only 0.23 percent passed the replication test—which defines a study as science as opposed to witch doctory. The vast majority of these “scientific” studies had serious flaws that should have been noticed, Ioannidis said. Yet they were published in highly esteemed, “peer reviewed” journals.

The “peer review” status is clearly overrated.

In the past two months alone, studies have shown that although statins (drugs like Lipitor and Crestor) are marketed as preventative medicine, there is no good evidence that they help people who have no history of heart disease. Vitamin D blood testing has also been shown to be pointless in determining bone health. These are big announcements that affect millions of people. Drug companies made $20 billion last year off statins—half of which was unnecessary, according to Newsweek.

The list of disproven truths goes on and on. Hormone replacement reduces the risk of heart disease in postmenopausal women—no longer true. Anti-depressants such as Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil can fix depression—not so. Do cell phones cause brain cancer? According to peer-reviewed studies the answer is no—and then yes. Does taking an aspirin a day save your life like the first studies showed, or cut it short as the subsequent ones found?

The truth of course is that none of these “truths” were true in the first place. They were scientific errors accepted as truth by the whole medical community.

“People are being hurt and even dying” because of false medical claims published in peer-reviewed journals, says Ioannidis.

Sadly, even when findings are refuted by more rigorous studies, the truth is often buried. According to Ioannidis, positive trials that show a treatment is effective take about a year to get published, but negative trials take an extra two to four years to make it into the journals: “Negative results sit in a file drawer, or the trial keeps going in hopes the results turn positive.”

Yet the problem of bad science goes far beyond just the medical industry.

In physics, selective reporting is also tarnishing reputations, reports Jonah Lehrer. In 1909, Robert Millikan first “accurately” measured the charge of an electron. His findings helped him win a Nobel Prize. For the next several decades, scientists found results that differed from Millikan’s, but since his was the accepted published number, scientists industry-wide massaged their results until they conformed to Millikan’s work.

“Why didn’t they discover that the new number was higher right away?” asked Richard Feynman at Caltech’s 1974 commencement ceremonies. “It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan’s value, they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that.”

It is a natural tendency of people: to want to conform—even if it means going out of their way to find excuses to do so. It is human nature. No one likes to have their work critiqued. And as non-conformers have found out, challenging the prevailing dogma is the easiest way to find your work lost in the dustbin of obscurity.

This has contributed to what Duke psychologist Joseph Banks Rhine called the “decline effect.” It is a curious phenomena plaguing everything from ecology to economics. Documented and published effects seem to become less measurable over time. When scientists try to replicate the results, mysteriously the findings tend to become less and less pronounced (often fading to statistical irrelevance) as the enthusiasm for the big discovery dulls over the years.

For example, biologists have long argued that the asymmetrical appearance of an organism is linked to the amount of mutation in its genes. The New Yorker reports that in 1991 a Danish scientist found that female barn swallows were far more likely to mate with males with long symmetrical feathers. This was presented as evidence that swallows were using symmetry to determine the quality of male genes.

The findings set off a frenzy of similar-type research. It hardly mattered what scientists observed—hairs on bugs, birds—there was barely a dissenting study. Over the years, the theory was applied to humans too. Apparently women preferred the smell of symmetrical men. Women had better sex with partners that were symmetrical. Women thought symmetrical men were better dancers.

Then the theory began to break down. The dissenting opinions began to get published. More and more studies found no correlation with symmetry. Worse, when scientists tried to replicate the findings of previous studies, many found no effect at all. And even in those studies that showed a positive correlation between symmetry and mating, the strength of the effect shrank by 80 percent!

What is going on? How could so many scientists, ostensibly using the most rigorous methods and statistical analysis, be producing so many results that later can’t be replicated?

Michael Jennions, a biologist at the Australian National University, admits that the findings are troublesome. “This is a very sensitive issue for scientists,” he says. “You know, we’re supposed to be dealing with hard facts, the stuff that is supposed to stand the test of time. But when you see these trends you become a little more skeptical of things.”

Some scientists aren’t helping the integrity of the field either. After the New Yorker highlighted these problems within the science industry, one scientist (from Wayne State Medical School) wrote in criticizing him for publicly exposing the scientific evidence epidemic:

Creationism and skepticism of climate change are popularly held opinions; Lehrer’s closing words play into the hands of those who want to deny evolution, global warming, and other realities. I fear that those who wish to persuade Americans that science is just one more pressure group, and that the scientific method is a matter of opinion, will be eager to use his conclusion to advance their cause.

But bringing truth to the masses should not be withheld by an academic elite. Much of the benefit of the Scientific Revolution was that it brought truths to millions of people previously shackled by pagan religious dogma.

Unfortunately, today we have a system that incentivizes error. Scientists are paid to produce results. Research money is contingent on making discoveries. Careers depend upon producing a stream of positive research. Drug makers only make a profit when they have products that claim to fix things. Journals mostly print the amazing and interesting breakthroughs, which tend to be the ones that are more susceptible to error. Textbooks enshrine the error.

The whole system is startlingly prone to perpetuating and masking error.

If the scientific community cannot find a better way to produce reliable results—results that can be observed, measured, tested and reproduced, it risks being relegated to a religion of faith.

Public trust in science—one of the pillars of modern society—is entering untested waters.

What can be done to fix this problem? Scientists propose more rigor, or more stringent statistical analysis. Better test designs are suggested by some. Others want a better review process, one that also caters more to studies that show negative results.

All these things might be good, but they miss the most fundamental, basic cause of the breakdown of science today.

According to Ioannidis, if people just stopped expecting scientists to be right it would go a long way to solving many of the problems. In science, being wrong is okay as long as you openly admit it as opposed to trying to disguise it as success.

As Ioannidis hinted at, the only way science will be able to truly solve its problems is by fixing the scientists. Like every other person on Earth, scientists are subject to human nature—the pulls of the flesh: envy, vanity, greed, selfishness, self-righteousness, etc. It is natural not to want to be wrong. And all too easy to emphasize the data that conforms to your ideas and reject that which does not. Unless human nature can be changed, error, purposeful or not, will continue to produce “truths” that will later have to be embarrassingly rejected.

If the scientific community is to rehabilitate its image, it needs to begin by being honest about the truth.

Unfortunately, science is becoming almost as discredited as religion. The archives of the world’s science journals have become more like junk drawers filled with amazing discoveries but cluttered with biased, incorrect and even fraudulent lies hiding under the tattered veneer of “truth.”

What is truth? And where can it be found? For the answer on where to look, read Mystery of the Ages by Herbert W. Armstrong.