Patterns and meaning

I remember a couple of years ago noticing something odd.  While eating breakfast on work days, I'd finish, and always give a quick glance up at the digital clock that sits on the counter.  Three times in a row, the clock said 6:19.

I know there's a perfectly rational explanation; I'm a complete creature of habit, and I do the same series of actions in the same order every single work morning, so the fact that I finished breakfast three days in a row at exactly the same time only points up the fact that I need to relax a little.  But once I noticed the (seeming) pattern, I kept checking each morning.  And there were other days when I finished at exactly 6:19.  After a few weeks of this, it was becoming a bit of an obsession.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So being a rationalist, as well as needing a hobby, I started to keep track.  And very quickly a few things became obvious:

1. I almost always finish breakfast (and check the clock) between 6:16 and 6:22.
2. 6:19 is the exact middle of that range, so it would be understandable if that time occurred more often.
3. Even considering #2, 6:19 turned out to be no more likely than other times.  The distribution was, within that six minute range, fairly random.

So I had fallen for dart-thrower's bias, the perfectly natural human tendency to notice the unusual, and to give it more weight in our attention and memory.  The point is, once you start noticing this stuff, you're more likely to notice it again, and to overestimate the number of times such coincidences occur.

The whole thing comes up because of a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia called, "Every Time This Happens, an Angel Reveals Itself!"  I'm not going to recommend your going to the site, because it's pretty obviously clickbait, but I thought the content was interesting from the standpoint of our determination that the patterns we notice mean something.

The site is an attempt to convince us that when we see certain numbers over and over, it's an angel attempting to give us a message.  If you notice the number 1212, for example, this is an angel encouraging us to "release our fears and apprehensions, and get on with pursuing our passions and purpose... [asking you to] stay on a positive path and to use your natural skills, talents, and abilities to their utmost for the benefit of yourself and others."

Which is good advice without all of the woo-woo trappings.

Some numbers apparently appeal not only to our desire for meaningful patterns, but for being special.  If you see 999 everywhere, "you are amongst an elite few... 999 is sometimes confrontative, and literally means, 'Get to work on your priorities.  Now.  No more procrastinating, no more excuses or worries.  Get to work now."

Since a lot of the "angel numbers" involve repeated digits, I had to check to see what 666 means.  I was hoping it would say something like, "If you see 666, you are about to be dragged screaming into the maw of hell."

But no.  666 apparently is "a sign from the angels that it's time to wake up to your higher spiritual truth."  Which is not only boring, but sounds like it could come from a talk by Deepak Chopra.

So the whole thing turns out to be interesting mostly from the standpoint of our desperation to impose some sense on the chaos of life.  Because face it; a lot of what does happen is simply random noise, a conclusion that is a bit of a downer.  I suspect that many religions give solace precisely because they ascribe meaning to everything; the bible, after all, says that even a sparrow doesn't fall from the sky without the hand of god being involved.

Me, I think it's more likely that a lot of stuff (including birds dying) happens for no particularly identifiable or relevant reason.  Science can explain at least some of the proximal causes, but as far as ultimate causes?  I think we're thrown back on the not very satisfying non-explanation of the universe simply being a chaotic place.  I understand the appeal of it all having meaning and purpose, but it seems to me that most of what occurs is no more interesting than my finishing breakfast at 6:19.

Disc world

My younger son came for a visit this weekend, and predictably, our lunchtime conversation ventured out into the ether.

We were talking about various kinds of woo-woo stuff, and Nathan said, "You know, I think the one that bothers me the most is the whole Flat-Earth thing.  All woo-woo ideas require you to ignore evidence, but that one raises ignoring evidence to an art form."

I asked him what he was thinking about, and he said, "Have you ever heard of 'zetetic astronomy?'"  I hadn't.  Nathan told me that it was the brainchild of one Samuel Rowbotham, a 19th century British crank to whom we largely owe the fact that the flat Earth model is still around.  Rowbotham did the lecture circuit in the mid-to-late 1800s, talking about his idea that the Earth was a flat disk centered at the North Pole, with a ring of icy mountains (which we spherical-Earth sheeple call "Antarctica") around the edge.  All of the astronomical objects we see, up to and including the Sun and the Moon, are actually hovering a few hundred miles off the ground, doing peculiar little loops for reasons that physics is unable to explain.

Rowbotham was a master of the Gish Gallop -- a debating technique (named after young-Earth creationist Duane Gish) that involves drowning your opponents with a machine-gun delivery of trivial questions and straw men so quickly that they can't possibly address them all, meaning they come off looking like they've lost the argument.  A reporter for the Leeds Times said about Rowbotham in 1864, "One thing he did demonstrate was that scientific dabblers unused to platform advocacy are unable to cope with a man, a charlatan if you will (but clever and thoroughly up in his theory), thoroughly alive to the weakness of his opponents."

One of Rowbotham's acolytes, Lady Elizabeth Blount, founded the "Universal Zetetic Society" to spread his ideas, and the whole thing was given momentum when the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church of Zion, Illinois threw their support behind Rowbotham's ideas and began to use their radio show to broadcast information about it.  In 1956, The Universal Zetetic Society renamed themselves the "Flat Earth Society" -- prompted, apparently, by the fact that no one could actually pin down what the hell "zetetic" means -- and they continue to plague us, lo unto this very day.

Of course, back in Rowbotham's day, there wasn't as much hard evidence to go on, so I have at least a little more sympathy for the 19th century's Flat Earthers.  Today, though -- the amount of twisted rationalization you have to go through to buy any of it is breathtaking.  Take, for example, this gem, that appeared yesterday over at the r/conspiratard subreddit:

Remarkably, their math is pretty close to spot-on -- the distance between a sphere the size of the Earth and a tangent line, over a distance of 102.4 miles, is just shy of 7,000 feet.  But how do we know that the bridge doesn't curve that much?

Two ways, apparently:  (1) we have a photograph of a four or five mile long stretch of the bridge, and it sure looks straight to us; and (2) it just doesn't.  Stop asking questions.

All of their arguments boil down to this sort of thing.  How do Flat Earthers explain the Coriolis effect, the fictitious "force" that comes from our reference frame being fixed to a spinning sphere, and which causes cyclones to turn counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern?

They don't.  A direct quote:  "The Coriolis effect has nothing to do with the shape of the Earth."  End of discussion.  Seasons?  Caused by a shift in the movement of the Sun across the disk, not by the axial tilt of the Earth.  Photographs of a spherical Earth taken from space?  Optical illusions and/or deliberate misinformation from NASA.

Despite there being anti-science viewpoints that have a much bigger impact on human health, safety, and progress than the Flat Earthers -- the anti-vaxxers, anti-GMOers, and the radical fringe of most religions come to mind -- the Flat Earthers seem to be uniquely resistant even to acknowledging the issues.  They simply ignore them into nonexistence.

So I understand where Nathan was coming from when he said, "I'd rather debate a young-Earth creationist than a Flat Earther."  Me, though -- I'd rather not debate either one.  There comes a point where the only reason you keep hitting your head against the wall is that it feels so good when you stop.

Tut tut

Yesterday we heard about how some oddly-shaped markings on Pluto are evidence of an extraterrestrial base, or possibly the home of intelligent fungus-creatures, as hath been prophesied in the writings of H. P. Lovecraft.  Today, we find out that...

... King Tutankhamun was half-alien.

The whole thing comes up because of a cool archaeological discovery, that a dagger found in the hoard buried with King Tut had a blade forged from a meteorite.  The paper describing the research, written by Daniela Cornelli et al. and published last week in Meteoritics and Planetary Science, had the following to say:

Scholars have long discussed the introduction and spread of iron metallurgy in different civilizations.  The sporadic use of iron has been reported in the Eastern Mediterranean area from the late Neolithic period to the Bronze Age.  Despite the rare existence of smelted iron, it is generally assumed that early iron objects were produced from meteoritic iron.  Nevertheless, the methods of working the metal, its use, and diffusion are contentious issues compromised by lack of detailed analysis.  Since its discovery in 1925, the meteoritic origin of the iron dagger blade from the sarcophagus of the ancient Egyptian King Tutankhamun (14th C. BCE) has been the subject of debate and previous analyses yielded controversial results.  We show that the composition of the blade (Fe plus 10.8 wt% Ni and 0.58 wt% Co), accurately determined through portable x-ray fluorescence spectrometry, strongly supports its meteoritic origin.  In agreement with recent results of metallographic analysis of ancient iron artifacts from Gerzeh, our study confirms that ancient Egyptians attributed great value to meteoritic iron for the production of precious objects.  Moreover, the high manufacturing quality of Tutankhamun's dagger blade, in comparison with other simple-shaped meteoritic iron artifacts, suggests a significant mastery of ironworking in Tutankhamun's time.

Which is pretty darn cool.  The dagger is gorgeous, too:

But of course, "cool archaeological discovery" isn't enough for some people.  The fact that King Tutankhamun had a dagger made from a meteorite (or at least was buried with one) has to mean that the Boy King himself had ancestry from outer space.

Tut's father was the oddball King Akhenaten, who attempted to abolish the national polytheistic religion and replace it with a more-or-less monotheistic worship of the Sun ("Aten"), with predictable results.  The road to popularity does not come from a political figure saying, "You all need to change what you believe right now."  (In fact, the only time I've ever heard of a state religion being decided by decree, peacefully, was the Christianization of Iceland in the year 1,000 C.E., in which the people let the leaders decide if they were going to follow the Christian god or the old Norse gods.  The leaders decided on Christianity, and the entire nation submitted to baptism without a drop of blood shed.)

Be that as it may, Akhenaten was an odd dude.  In depictions of him -- those that survived the wholesale re-conversion of Egypt to the old polytheistic religion at his death -- he is even a strange-looking fellow, with a long, thin face, skinny arms, and a pot belly.  So it's not to be wondered at that the aliens-and-spaceships cadre decided that he couldn't possibly be human.

Pharaoh Akhenaten [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So we have the following appearing over at the wonderful site Ancient UFO:

One of the most interesting characteristics of Akhenaten, is that he is always depicted with a long, elongated skull.  Most Egyptian scholars have attributed this to artistic style peculiar to his reign.  Surely though, it is more likely that he actually had an enlarged cranium?  Artistic depictions of Akhenaten, usually show him with an elongated head, wide hips and a round belly.  It has been suggested by researchers that these features are attributed to a disorder called Froehlich’s Syndrome.  This disorder is typified by an elongated face and an androgynous figure...  [But] could this be because Akhenaten was perhaps actually extraterrestrial?

And now, they say, we have the clincher; a dagger whose blade came from outer space.

The problem is, the dagger was made from a meteorite.  I.e., a piece of space rock that struck the Earth.  The ancient Egyptians didn't have to go out into space to mine it, or anything.  The fact that they used meteoritic iron just means they were clever about using stuff they found, not that they were aliens.  King Tut's having a dagger with a blade made from a meteorite doesn't mean that he was half-alien any more than my possession of a t-shirt made in China makes me Chinese.

Of course, the problem is the usual one; the woo-woos in question had already decided that Akhenaten was an alien, so the dagger was just one more bit of confirmation bias in their favor.  So my saying all of this certainly won't stop the speculation.  Look for a highly scientific documentary on Tutankhamun's alien ancestry to show up on the This Really Isn't History Channel soon.

Polygons on Pluto

When NASA's New Horizons probe made a flyby of Pluto last summer, it sent back remarkably detailed photographs of this strange frozen dwarf planet, so distant that even one of the fastest man-made vehicles took nine years to get there.  Naturally, it's taken scientists a while to explain what the photographs contained, given our prior lack of knowledge of Pluto's composition.

One of the most curious features noticed were more-or-less straight-sided "polygons" in a region called "Sputnik Planum."  There's no doubting that the pattern is peculiar:

[image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

And of course, all it takes is "peculiar observation" added to "scientists haven't explained this yet" to send the woo-woos of the world off into a dizzying spiral of completely loony speculation.

Here are a few suggestions as to what the "polygons" might be:

• the rubble-strewn walls of an ancient alien city
• a secret base on Pluto designed (possibly with alien help) by NASA.  If you buy this one, then New Horizons was not a research mission, but was going to reestablish contact with people who are already there
• evidence that Pluto is actually the fabled planet Nibiru
• the encampments of a hostile force from another solar system

Apropos of the last one, it didn't take long for someone to remember that Pluto has been identified as the site of H. P. Lovecraft's world "Yuggoth," home to sentient fungus-beings who are able to switch personalities with human beings and keep our consciousness stored in what amount to high-tech tin cans.

So okay.  Let's start with the fact that H. P. Lovecraft's story "The Whisperer in Darkness" is labeled "fiction."  As far as the rest of the hypotheses (I hate to dignify them with that name), allow me simply to say that if I were looking for a place to build a base, Pluto would not be my first choice.  For one thing, I hate cold weather, and Pluto's average surface temperature is -229 C.  Plus, it doesn't appear to have much of an atmosphere, and I kind of like going outside without putting on a space suit.

Additionally, we just got word a couple of days ago from actual scientists (i.e. people who prefer evidence and logic than talking out of their asses) that they now have a good working explanation for the polygons.  Planetary astronomers Andrew J. Dombard and Sean O'Hara of the University of Illinois have proposed that the pattern can be explained by vigorous convection -- what we are seeing are the tops of Rayleigh--Bénard convection cells, which occur when a fluid is heated from below.  (This is what causes the pattern you observe if you carefully add cream to hot coffee without stirring.)

"Evidence suggests this could be a roiling sea of volatile nitrogen ice," Purdue planetary scientist Jay Melosh explained.  "Imagine oatmeal boiling on the stove; it doesn't produce one bubble for the entire pot as the heated oatmeal rises to the surface and the cooler oatmeal is pushed down into the depths, this happens in small sections across the pot, creating a quilted pattern on the surface similar to what we see on Pluto.  Of course, on Pluto this is not a fast process; the overturn within each unit happens at a rate of maybe two centimeters per year."

So once again, we have a cool explanation of an odd natural pattern, without any recourse to aliens, conspiracies, Nibiru, or Yuggoth.  All of which reminds me of the wonderful quote from Tim Minchin: "Throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be... not magic."

Admissions of idiocy

Can I suggest that now, in the midst of the Information Age, there are certain questions you might ask and arguments you might make that are tantamount to shouting, "Hey, everyone, look at me!  I'm extremely stupid!"

The issue comes up, predictably enough, because of Rush Limbaugh, who felt he had to weigh in on last week's incident at the Cincinnati Zoo.  You probably have heard about it; a child got away from his mother and fell into the gorilla enclosure, and when Harambe the gorilla grabbed the child, zoo workers shot and killed the gorilla.  (The child, fortunately, was unharmed.)

Limbaugh approached the issue in his signature bombastic style.  "There’s no way human beings are going to not be interested in animals," Limbaugh told his listeners.  "Gawking at them.  Out on safari, hunting them...  But we have PETA activists who oppose the capture of animals because they obviously have not read Genesis."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And because apparently that wasn't loony enough, Limbaugh went on to say, "Then we have the evolution crowd who are searching for a missing link.  They think we were originally apes, right?  If we were the original apes, then how come Harambe is still an ape?  And how come he didn’t become one of us?"

Okay.  Two things.  First, an individual animal evolving into a member of a different species does not happen in real life.  You're thinking of Pokémon.  Second, "if we came from apes, why are there still apes?" is as sensible as if I said, "My ancestors came from France.  Why are there still French people?"

So I would vote for the "if we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" question as the first on our list of statements that are equivalent to saying, "I am a complete moron who is incapable of reading a Wikipedia article."  Here are a few others:

• Stating that physicists researching the Big Bang believe that "nothing exploded and then made everything."
• Using non-standard definitions of any of the following: frequency, resonance, vibrations, entanglement, vortex, energy, dimension, harmonics, space-time continuum, fractal, relativity.
• Claiming that radioisotope dating is highly inaccurate, so the estimated age of the Earth is off by a factor of a million.
• Saying, "Scientists have been wrong in the past" as an argument for or against anything.
• Asking why, if evolution is true, we don't ever see a dung beetle morph into a baboon.  (Although I have to admit that this would explain Rush Limbaugh's existence.)
• Stating that atheism is a religion.  (Atheism is a religion in precisely the same fashion as "not collecting stamps" is a hobby.)
• Damn near everything ever written about HAARP and "chemtrails."
• Claiming that quantum physics means that anything is possible, and proves (check any that apply): telepathy, precognition, coincidences, interconnectedness, whatever religion you happen to prefer.
• Saying, "Evolution is just a theory."

There.  That's enough for a start.  I mean, I'm not averse to discussing science, or even speculation and scientific misconceptions, but the above-mentioned have been dealt with so many times, in so many places, that anyone saying them is not only very likely to be stupid, but lazy as well.

So thanks to Rush Limbaugh for once again affording me the opportunity to highlight a particularly annoying form of idiocy.  I suppose I should be glad for people like him; at least they keep Skeptophilia in business.

Suppressing reality

Back in the 1950s, scientists were beginning to identify a causal connection between smoking and lung cancer.  Prior to that, there was an extensive advertising campaign to convince the public that smoking was actually good for your health:

Once the connection between tobacco use and a whole host of ailments became clear, tobacco company executives were quick to see what was happening -- and to launch their own disinformation campaign.  Public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, hired to manage the situation, made their approach clear in documents that have only recently come to light:

We have one essential job -- which can be simply said: Stop public panic…  There is only one problem – confidence, and how to establish it; public assurance, and how to create it...  And, most important, how to free millions of Americans from the guilty fear that is going to arise deep in their biological depths – regardless of any pooh-poohing logic -- every time they light a cigarette.

Industry officials made sure that the consumers viewed them as open and transparent, not to mention caring about their customers' health.  A 1953 public statement from the Tobacco Industry Research Committee included the following disingenuous comment:

We will never produce and market a product shown to be the cause of any serious human ailment…  The Committee will undertake to keep the public informed of such facts as may be developed relating to cigarette smoking and health and other pertinent matters.

Except for the fact that they were doing exactly that -- doing everything in their power to cast doubt upon the research, and actively suppressing the research of scientists who were working in the field.  In 1954, TIRC issued a "Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers:"

Distinguished authorities point out:

1. That medical research of recent years indicates many possible causes of lung cancer.
2. That there is no agreement among the authorities regarding what the cause is.
3. That there is no proof that cigarette smoking is one of the causes.
4. That statistics purporting to link smoking with the disease could apply with equal force to any one of many other aspects of modern life. Indeed the validity of the statistics themselves are questioned by numerous scientists.

Some industry operatives actually thought about trying to turn the crisis into an opportunity.  A researcher at Philip Morris wrote:

Evidence is building up that heavy smoking contributes to lung cancer.  But there could be benefits to any company with the intestinal fortitude to jump on the other side of the fence, admitting that cigarettes are hazardous.  Just look what a wealth of ammunition would be at his disposal to attack the other companies who did not have safe cigarettes.

That three-pronged approach -- discredit the scientists, sow doubt in the minds of ordinary citizens, and portray the industry as caring and concerned -- must be sounding awfully familiar, if you've been reading the news lately.  Because we're seeing the whole scenario play out again, this time with regards to climate change.

The scientists don't agree.  There is no consensus.  Besides, the climate researchers who argue the most vehemently that anthropogenic climate change is happening are probably being paid to say so by eco-wackos like Earth First.  And think about it -- wouldn't it be nice if the world warmed up a little?  Just think, upstate New York would be snow-free.  You could grow palm trees in Maine.  And in any case, doing anything about it would be (choose any that you think apply): (1) economic suicide; (2) disastrous for states that depend on oil, gas, and coal; (3) the cause of massive unemployment; or (4) impossible in any case.

This cynical move by the fossil fuel industry to play on the doubts, fears, and ignorance of the general public is exactly analogous to the strategies of the tobacco industry fifty years ago.  Of course, in the latter case, the facts eventually came out despite their best efforts, along with their role in trying to cover up the correlation.  And now, it's to be hoped that history is once again repeating itself, with the Department of Justice getting involved -- and pursuing an investigation to find out whether industry giants like Exxon-Mobil actively suppressed climate change research, and lied to their investors about the dangers.

Like back in the 1950s, however, the industry has political clout, and there are elected officials whose debt to the corporate world is higher than their ethical standards.  Just last week, five senators -- Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Jeff Sessions, David Vitter, and David Perdue -- signed a letter demanding that the Department of Justice halt their inquiries.  "We write today to demand that the Department of Justice (DoJ) immediately cease its ongoing use of law enforcement resources to stifle private debate on one of the most controversial public issues of our time," the letter states.

The problem is, it's not controversial any more, any more than the connection between tobacco and lung cancer was controversial fifty years ago.  This is a manufactured controversy, with one aim in mind -- providing protection for fossil fuel markets.  The industry, and their mouthpieces in so-called "think tanks" like the Heartland Institute, know full well that what they are doing is affecting global temperatures.  Anyone who can read a scientific paper can no longer claim that the issue is undecided.  What they are doing is denying reality to save their profit margin, damn the cost to the future.

And that future is looking like it's coming awfully soon.  Sea level rise is already taking its toll -- interesting that David Vitter's home state of Louisiana is one of the first places to see the effects, with a coastal island called Isle St. Charles having already lost over 50% of its land area to flooding from rising waters in the Gulf of Mexico.  Its residents have applied for, and received, a $48 million grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development -- not for levees and flood mitigation, but simply to resettle as eco-refugees.

It's to be hoped that the officials in the Department of Justice will respond appropriately to Cruz, Vitter, et al., to wit, with a phrase that ends with "... and the horse you rode in on."  I'm optimistic that just as with the lung cancer deniers back in the 50s, today's climate change deniers will eventually be steamrolled by facts, evidence, and research.  The dangers of tobacco became public too late to save tens of thousands of lives, however -- perhaps we'll wise up sooner this time.

Doubt, experiment, and reproducibility

Yesterday I got a response on a post I did a little over a year ago about research that suggested fundamental differences in firing patterns in the brains of liberals and conservatives.   The study, headed by Darren Schreiber of the University of Exeter, used fMRI technology to look at functionality in people of different political leanings, and found that liberals have greater responsiveness in parts of the brain associated with risk-seeking, and conservatives in areas connected with anxiety and risk aversion.

The response, however, was as pointed as it was short.  It said, "I'm surprised you weren't more skeptical of this study," and provided a link to a criticism of Schreiber's work by Dan Kahan over at the Cultural Cognition Project.  Kahan is highly doubtful of the partisan-brain study, and says so in no uncertain terms:

Before 2009, many fMRI researchers engaged in analyses equivalent to what Vul [a researcher who is critical of the method Schreiber used] describes.  That is, they searched around within unconstrained regions of the brain for correlations with their outcome measures, formed tight “fitting” regressions to the observations, and then sold the results as proof of the mind-blowingly high “predictive” power of their models—without ever testing the models to see if they could in fact predict anything. 

Schreiber et al. did this, too.  As explained, they selected observations of activating “voxels” in the amygdala of Republican subjects precisely because those voxels—as opposed to others that Schreiber et al. then ignored in “further analysis”—were “activating” in the manner that they were searching for in a large expanse of the brain.  They then reported the resulting high correlation between these observed voxel activations and Republican party self-identification as a test for “predicting” subjects’ party affiliations—one that “significantly out-performs the longstanding parental model, correctly predicting 82.9% of the observed choices of party.” 

This is bogus.  Unless one “use[s] an independent dataset” to validate the predictive power of “the selected . . .voxels” detected in this way, Kriegeskorte et al. explain in their Nature Neuroscience paper, no valid inferences can be drawn.  None.

So it appears that  Schreiber et al. were guilty of what James Burke calls "designing an experiment to find the kind of data you reckon you're going to find."  It would be hard to recognize that from the original paper itself without being a neuroscientist, of course.  I fell for Schreiber's research largely because I'm a generalist, making me unqualified to spot errors in highly specific, technical fields.

Interestingly, this comment came hard on the heels of a paper by Monya Baker that appeared last week in Nature called "1,500 Scientists Lift the Lid on Reproducibility."  Baker writes:

More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments.  Those are some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature's survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility in research... 

Data on how much of the scientific literature is reproducible are rare and generally bleak.  The best-known analyses, from psychology and cancer biology, found rates of around 40% and 10%, respectively.  Our survey respondents were more optimistic: 73% said that they think that at least half of the papers in their field can be trusted, with physicists and chemists generally showing the most confidence. 

The results capture a confusing snapshot of attitudes around these issues, says Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland.  “At the current time there is no consensus on what reproducibility is or should be.”

The causes were many and varied.  According to the respondents, the failure to reproduce results derived from issues such as low statistical power to unavailability of method to poor experimental design; worse still, all too often no one bothers even to try to reproduce results because of the pressure to publish one's own work, not check someone else's.  As as result, slipshod research -- and sometimes, outright fraud -- gets into print.

How dire is this?  Two heartening responses described in Baker's paper include the fact that just about all of the scientists polled want more stringent guidelines for reproducibility, and also that work of high visibility is far more likely to be checked and verified prior to publication.  (Sorry, climate change deniers -- you can't use this paper to support your views.)

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What it means, of course, is that science bloggers who aren't scientists themselves -- including, obviously, myself -- have to be careful about cross-checking and verifying what they write, lest they end up spreading around bogus information.  I'm still not completely convinced that Schreiber et al. were as careless as Kahan claims; at the moment, all we have is Kahan's criticism that they were guilty of the multitude of failings described in his article.  But it does reinforce our need to think critically and question what we read -- even if it's in a scientific journal.

And despite all of this, science is still by far our best tool for understanding.  It's not free from error, nor from the completely human failings of duplicity and carelessness.  But compared to other ways of moving toward the truth, it's pretty much the only game there is.