Cigarettes Don't Cause Cancer. "Cigarette-Science" Tells Us So

Credit: Lady Grey

The non-tobacconists have constructed a complicated and massive program to brainwash you into thinking that cigarette smoking will give you cancer and other horrible diseases. This pernicious plot has happened because the "scientists" who work for the non-tobacconists are trying to make sure they get lots of grant money to keep studying the so-called problem. If you are a smoker and you feel uncomfortable with this state of affairs, don't worry. You can choose to believe in "cigarette-science".

We, the practitioners of "cigarette-science", know right from the start that cigarettes can't cause cancer, and we carefully design our reports and our scientific experiments to prove this. And we are very good at showing that the so-called "science" of the non-tobacconists is faulty because one of their researchers twenty years ago said "we aren't totally sure that cigarettes are the sole cause of cancer". And there was a spelling error on one of the graphs they published fifteen years ago.

Best of all, we can prove we are right because we are great debaters, especially when we face off against a non-tobacconist in a room full of smokers. Those non-tobacconists keep trying to produce "facts" and "evidence", but we know how to "play the room", er, excuse me, "speak to the true believers". Our smoking friends want to believe that smoking cigarettes won't kill them. They need to hear that smoking cigarettes won't kill them. So we can never lose.

People hate ambiguity. They like firm statements like "cigarettes don't cause cancer" and hate the uncertainty inherent in a statement like "the available evidence strongly suggests a link between smoking and cancer".

Your blog author steps back and takes a deep breath (of fresh clean air):

Yes, of course I am talking about "creation-science" and the essentially useless "debate" that took place last night between creationist Ken Ham, and Bill Nye, the "Science Guy". I didn't watch it, not because I have a closed mind about such things, but because I have been studying and following the tactics of the creation-science community for the last twenty-five years, and I have seen in person the tactics used by them in debates (oh, and I was teaching a class last night. On science). I'm hearing that Bill did okay from those who have a scientific background, but I have no doubt that Ken Ham is celebrating his "victory", just as he has done with every other "debate" he has ever had. The problem with the whole concept is that debates aren't science. They are carnival side-shows. The debates are often held in churches and in front of audiences of religious believers who aren't about to listen to facts or evidence. They are there to see their champion slay the dragon of secular science.

Science is the pursuit of knowledge about the physical Universe, and the methodology of science is to achieve that knowledge in the most objective way possible. Ideally, people solve a problem or a mystery by gathering all the relevant evidence, analyze the evidence, and proposing as many hypotheses (plausible explanations) as they can to explain the mystery. They then set up experiments to test each hypothesis and hopefully eliminate those that cannot work as an explanation. When a specific hypothesis withstands all experimental challenges while all other hypotheses have been eliminated, it may be elevated to the level of being a scientific fact or theory. Atomic theory, plate tectonics theory, and evolutionary theory have reached this level of confirmation, along with many others.

Young Earth creationism starts with the conclusion ("the Earth was created 6,000 years ago") and uses the words of science to try and prove this conclusion. To put it succinctly, no. Science does not and cannot work this way. One cannot identify the person you want to convict of a crime and then garner only the evidence that he is the perpetrator. One cannot decide that vaccines cause autism, and then only collect anecdotal evidence to prove one's case. One cannot decide that the profits of the tobacco industry are more important than the health of smokers and set out to "scientifically" prove the lack of a link between cigarettes and cancer. And companies cannot decide that the profits of the fossil fuels industry are more important than the health of the planet and thus sow "scientific" doubt about global warming and climate change.

Or can they?

The "Other" California: Havin' Fun With Sasquatch

An exploration of the Klamath Mountains of California is not complete without a discussion of...well, let me mention a field trip story. The punchline isn't very exciting, but here goes.

We take a field studies trip to the Cascades every other September. To split up some of the long drives, we leave on a Thursday afternoon and drive to a state park on the Sacramento River near Red Bluff. We usually arrive about 9:30 at night, at which point we roll out our sleeping bags and get a good night's sleep before really starting our class the next morning. Sometimes we have complications. One time we arrived to find the entire campground occupied by a convention of ultra-libertarian, almost-militia type folks having a barter fair. We had to barter with a very drunk organizer who was suspicious that we were members of the federal guvmit to negotiate out a little corner of the campground for ourselves. We had kind of a nervous evening.

Another year we had a different problem: we arrived and the entire campground was closed for renovations! I wasn't quite prepared for this, and we headed north on the highway looking for another place to stay. It took us a couple of wrong turns looking for a non-existent camp along the Sacramento River ("it's on the map, dangit!"), but finally around midnight we found a KOA that was willing to take in 30 weary travelers on short notice (and for a price). It was nice of them to put up with us, but it was an unremarkable place except for the men's bathroom. It had a giant diagram on the wall of all the Sasquatch sightings in northern California! We were in Bigfoot Country!

A discussion of Bigfoot is going to carry us into fringe territory along with UFO's, Lemurians, Atlantis, ghosts and who knows what, but at least Bigfoot is regarded as "fun". No one seems to think that they are plotting to take over the human race, or that they are attacking and eating people (apparently president Theodore Roosevelt provided the only exception).

So why won't biologists and other scientists accept the existence of Sasquatch? After all, there have been hundreds, maybe thousands of reported sightings, along with dozens of photos and footprints, especially since 1958 when tracks were found around the equipment at a logging camp (tracks made by the company owner to scare away vandals). We live in a visual society...why aren't photos enough?

I've been having fun reading some discussions lately about whether Yosemite's Half Dome can be seen from the floor of the Central Valley in California. The main evidence lies in a dozen or so photographs that have been posted on the internet by different individuals (including me). The interesting aspect of the discussion has been the many skeptics who insist that Half Dome absolutely cannot be seen from the valley, and who charge that the photos are an elaborate photographic hoax. So...a few people say it CAN be seen and offer a few grainy photographs, versus expert photographers and hikers who clearly know that it CAN'T. Isn't this the same situation that we have with Sasquatch?

Not really equivalent at all. Despite any arguments and calculations that can be offered by detractors, all one has to do is go to the right spot on an unusually clear day in the Central Valley, and there it is. Half Dome isn't going anywhere, and confirmation is easily achieved.

On the other hand, if Bigfoot-Sasquatch were an actual living species, the implications would be staggering. A second hominid species, a large one, living in North America alongside humans would be an astounding discovery. How did it evolve? How closely related is it to Homo sapiens? How can it have escaped discovery despite the intense development of the western states and the intense logging activity in the places where the species lives? And if the existence of the creature were to be in some way confirmed, what are the legal ramifications? Endangered Species Act? Would they be placed on reservations? (yes, that question is an indictment about government attitudes about First Nation/Native American people). In a word, it would be extraordinary.

So here is the problem: there isn't a shred of physical evidence that Bigfoot exists that can be subjected to any kind of scientific scrutiny: there are no bones, either recent or ancient, no droppings, no nesting/bedding sites, no artifacts, no bodies, no fur. Wildlife biologists will happily admit they were wrong when the physical evidence appears, but in a century of searching, nothing has emerged.

And consider something else: motivation. When we were accused (in a good-natured way, I hope) of being hoaxers in the Half Dome affair, I would have to respond: what do we have to gain? No one is going to pay us thousands of dollars for a grainy, slightly out-of-focus picture of Half Dome (not that I would turn down an offer!). But if I said I had a genuine picture of a Sasquatch (and I were a talented photo-manipulator; see the photo above!), I could potentially earn a fair amount of publicity and cash, even if the photo is later revealed to be retouched (the picture above is real, dangit, I swear it with my fingers crossed!).

Could Sasquatch really exist? Of course. But it is extremely unlikely. The evidence to confirm the existence of Bigfoot would have to be overwhelming. A century ago, a German meteorologist named Alfred Wegener said that continents had been drifting about the planet. Scientists were unconvinced by his evidence, which involved rock similarities, fossil similarites, and paleoclimate similarities. It was good scientific data, but geologists were able to offer alternative explanations that did not require movement of continents. It wasn't until new discoveries in the 1950's and 1960's in unexpected disciplines like paleomagnetism, and new technology became available that revealed details of the ocean floors that Wegener's hypothesis was accepted. In the process, the idea grew into a much more encompassing theory called plate tectonics (make no mistake: a theory is accepted scientific fact; it is hypotheses that are unconfirmed potential explanations). The fact that his hypothesis came to be accepted doesn't mean that any fringe science is automatically true. Scientists in all disciplines pretty much have to be skeptics by nature, and fringe ideas must meet the same exacting standards of evidence that any other hypotheses must meet.

A Plea to Science Writers: Scientists Don't Believe in Their Research..

Kim at All My Faults are Stress Related thinks we need some new geologic metaphors. Her blog post resulted in a real melange of great suggestions. I like the idea, but I would add that I believe we also have a need for new words for describing to the general public the findings of science. What's my problem? The fact that many a story about a scientific discovery begins with the statement "scientists believe...."

Scientists believe that amphibians evolved from...
Scientists believe in global warming...
Scientists believe that an earthquake is overdue on the San Andreas...
Scientists believe that continents were once joined in a single giant landmass...
Scientists believe that smoking cigarettes is a major cause of cancer...
Scientists believe that the rocks of the Grand Canyon are millions of years old...

How should we describe theories and well-grounded scientific principles? What words should we be using?

Scientists have evidence that....
Scientists have found that...
Scientists now know that...
Scientists have long known that...
Scientists discovered long ago that...

Or leave "scientists" out of it. What's wrong with a straightforward declarative statement of fact?

Marsupials originally evolved in China...
Pangaea was built by the collisions of a number of continents...
The schists in the bottom of the Grand Canyon are 1.7 billion years old

Are the findings you are describing tentative? Is there actually some doubt or are there some competing ideas? That is not a problem, most cutting-edge scientific research is tentative. But not subject to belief. How about:

The researchers are of the opinion that...
The evidence is suggests that...
But other researchers have presented evidence that...
...but other alternative hypotheses are still valid

Like it or not, the word believe has many meanings, but in today's society (American, anyway), it has religious connotations, and is opinion-based in usage. We like our facts boiled down into polls that we can pick and choose from, like food from a buffet line. If a scientific finding is uncomfortable to us, or challenges our assumptions, we can choose not to believe it. Science writing should not feed into that.

I've had a beef with the misuse of theory in journalism before. Some previous thoughts along these lines can be found here...

What do you think?

The definition of believe, from Merriam Webster online:

intransitive verb

1 a : to have a firm religious faith b : to accept as true, genuine, or real

2 : to have a firm conviction as to the goodness, efficacy, or ability of something

3 : to hold an opinion : think

transitive verb

1 a : to consider to be true or honest

b : to accept the word or evidence of

2 : to hold as an opinion : suppose

What's Wrong With This Picture? A Short Rant

(slight paraphrase)

"We have to do this the scientific way

Observe....

Theorize...

Try and prove it....."

I was grading papers tonight. Given that I fall asleep easily while doing this means that I need distractions, so I was watching an old episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the first season episode "Home Soil" the good doctor Beverly Crusher delivered this stunner of a statement about "science". As much as Star Trek was a half-decent attempt at good science fiction (don't ask a physicist, maybe), the statement above represents the kind of television/movie silliness that science teachers have fought against for decades: a fundamental misunderstanding of how we gain knowledge in an objective manner.

The term "theory" has been misused for a long time, I suppose because it is harder to get actors to say "hypothesis" in a convincing manner. And to get the science right means cluttering up a crisp script where everything has to happen in the 47 minutes or so that isn't commercials in an hour-long broadcast (and yes, I know all about 47 and Star Trek). How many times have you heard someone say that an explanation is "just a theory"? Or, "here's my theory about why something happened the way it did". These statements only work when the word "theory" is replaced by "hypothesis".

Theories, on the other hand, are models that are accepted and understood by scientists as to the way the universe works: atoms are theoretical; so is gravity. And evolution. We don't "believe" in atoms or evolution, we accept them on the basis of years of research and exploration. And the world and universe behave exactly as if these phenomena are in operation. One can choose not to believe in gravity, but trip over a rock and you will land on your face anyway.

In any case, the Creation-Science/Intelligent Design movements use a method much like that at the start of the post: Decide upon the truth, and garner all the evidence that supports this truth. You can try to call this approach "science", but it is not science.

So, to assist the Star Trek writers, here is Beverly Crusher's statement, updated to reflect the way things work in scientific research. Sorry I'm 20 years too late for this episode...

"We have to do this the scientific way...."

"Observe the phenomena, collect evidence and organize all the data, formulate as many possible explanations (hypotheses) as we can, and design tests that can disprove our hypotheses. If one explanation is finally supported by the evidence and cannot be disproven, we will accept the explanation and act accordingly, knowing even then that our explanation could be disproven if new evidence emerges".

Sorry script-writers, science is sometimes hard to jam into a sentence (and this, among many reasons, is why I am not writing scripts for a living). I welcome any of my readers to try to make this more succinct. But I wish Hollywood would try a bit harder; it would be better for us all.

Thus endeth a short mini-rant...

The Media Gets One Right

I was pleased to see that one of the internet news sources got something right. In an article about global warming deniers (http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/02/27/global_warming_deniers/), Joseph Romm catches the very essence of why science works. He mentions a Wall Street Journal article that asserts that "scientists are human; they do not wait for proof. Many devote their professional lives to seeking evidence for hypotheses, especially well-funded hypotheses, they've chosen to believe.", and then hits the nail on the head with the following:

How sad that the WSJ and CNBC have so little conception of what science really is, especially since scientific advances drive so much of the economy. If that's what Jenkins thinks science is, one would assume he is equally skeptical of flossing, antibiotics and even boarding an airplane.

(Note to WSJ: One reason science works is that a lot of scientists devote their whole lives to overturning whatever is the current hypothesis -- if it can be overturned. That's how you become famous and remembered by history, like Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin and Einstein.)

In fact, science doesn't work by consensus of opinion. Science is in many respects the exact opposite of decision by consensus. General opinion at one point might have been that the sun goes around the Earth, or that time was an absolute quantity, but scientific theory supported by observations overturned that flawed worldview.

Kudos to Salon and Dr. Romm...