The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science

January 31, 2003
The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science By ROBERT L. PARK

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is investing close to a million dollars in an obscure Russian scientist's antigravity machine, although it has failed every test and would violate the most fundamental laws of nature. The Patent and Trademark Office recently issued Patent 6,362,718 for a physically impossible motionless electromagnetic generator, which is supposed to snatch free energy from a vacuum. And major power companies have sunk tens of millions of dollars into a scheme to produce energy by putting hydrogen atoms into a state below their ground state, a feat equivalent to mounting an expedition to explore the region south of the South Pole.
There is, alas, no scientific claim so preposterous that a scientist cannot be found to vouch for it. And many such claims end up in a court of law after they have cost some gullible person or corporation a lot of money. How are juries to evaluate them?
Before 1993, court cases that hinged on the validity of scientific claims were usually decided simply by which expert witness the jury found more credible. Expert testimony often consisted of tortured theoretical speculation with little or no supporting evidence. Jurors were bamboozled by technical gibberish they could not hope to follow, delivered by experts whose credentials they could not evaluate.
In 1993, however, with the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. the situation began change. The case involved Bendectin, the only morning-sickness medication ever approved by the Food and Drug Administration. It had been used by millions of women, and more than 30 published studies had found no evidence that it caused birth defects. Yet eight so-called experts were willing to testify, in exchange for a fee from the Daubert family, that Bendectin might indeed cause birth defects.
In ruling that such testimony was not credible because of lack of supporting evidence, the court instructed federal judges to serve as supporting evidence, the court instructed federal judges to serve as "gatekeepers," screening juries from testimony based on scientific nonsense. Recognizing that judges are not scientists, the court invited judges to experiment with ways to fulfill their gatekeeper responsibility.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer encouraged trial judges to appoint independent experts to help them. He noted that courts can turn to scientific organizations, like the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to identify neutral experts who could preview questionable scientific testimony and advise a judge on whether a jury should be exposed to it. Judges are still concerned about meeting their responsibilities under the Daubert decision, and a group of them asked me how to recognize questionable scientific claims. What are the warning signs?
I have identified seven indicators that a scientific claim lies well outside the bounds of rational scientific discourse. Of course, they are only warning signs -- even a claim with several of the signs could be legitimate.
1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media. The integrity of science rests on the willingness of scientists to expose new ideas and findings to the scrutiny of other scientists. Thus, scientists expect their colleagues to reveal new findings to them initially. An attempt to bypass peer review by taking a new result directly to the media, and thence to the public, suggests that the work is unlikely to stand up to close examination by other scientists.
One notorious example is the claim made in 1989 by two chemists from the University of Utah, B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, that they had discovered cold fusion -- a way to produce nuclear fusion without expensive equipment. Scientists did not learn of the claim until they read reports of a news conference. Moreover, the announcement dealt largely with the economic potential of the discovery and was devoid of the sort of details that might have enabled other scientists to judge the strength of the claim or to repeat the experiment. (Ian Wilmut's announcement that he had successfully cloned a sheep was just as public as Pons and Fleischmann's claim, but in the case of cloning, abundant scientific details allowed scientists to judge the work's validity.)
Some scientific claims avoid even the scrutiny of reporters by appearing in paid commercial advertisements. A health-food appearing in paid commercial advertisements. A health-food company marketed a dietary supplement called Vitamin O in fullpage newspaper ads. Vitamin O turned out to be ordinary saltwater.
2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work. The idea is that the establishment will presumably stop at nothing to suppress discoveries that might shift the balance of wealth and power in society. Often, the discoverer describes mainstream science as part of a larger conspiracy that includes industry and government. Claims that the oil companies are frustrating the invention of an automobile that runs on water, for instance, are a sure sign that the idea of such a car is baloney. In the case of cold fusion, Pons and Fleischmann blamed their cold reception on physicists who were protecting their own research in hot fusion.
3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection. Alas, there is never a clear photograph of a flying saucer, or the Loch Ness monster. All scientific measurements must contend with some level of background noise or statistical fluctuation. But if the signal-to-noise ratio cannot be improved, even in principle, the effect is probably not real and the work is not science.
Thousands of published papers in para-psychology, for example, claim to report verified instances of telepathy, psychokinesis, or precognition. But those effects show up only in tortured analyses of statistics. The researchers can find no way to boost the signal, which suggests that it isn't really there.
4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal. If modern science has learned anything in the past century, it is to distrust anecdotal evidence. Because anecdotes have a very strong emotional impact, they serve to keep superstitious beliefs alive in an age of science. The most important discovery of modern medicine is not vaccines or antibiotics, it is the randomized double-blind test, by means of which we know what works and what doesn't. Contrary to the saying, "data" is not the plural of "anecdote."
5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries. There is a persistent myth that hundreds or even thousands of years ago, long before anyone knew that blood circulates throughout the body, or that germs cause disease, our ancestors possessed miraculous remedies that modern science cannot understand. Much of what is termed "alternative medicine" cannot understand. Much of what is termed "alternative medicine" is part of that myth.
Ancient folk wisdom, rediscovered or repackaged, is unlikely to match the output of modern scientific laboratories.
6. The discoverer has worked in isolation. The image of a lone genius who struggles in secrecy in an attic laboratory and ends up making a revolutionary breakthrough is a staple of Hollywood's science-fiction films, but it is hard to find examples in real life. Scientific breakthroughs nowadays are almost always syntheses of
the work of many scientists.
7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation. A new law of nature, invoked to explain some extraordinary result, must not conflict with what is already known. If we must change existing laws of nature or propose new laws to account for an observation, it is almost certainly wrong. I began this list of warning signs to help federal judges detect scientific nonsense. But as I finished the list, I realized that in our increasingly technological society, spotting voodoo science is a skill that every citizen should develop.

Robert L. Park is a professor of physics at the University of Maryland at College Park and the director of public information for the American Physical Society. He is the author of Voodoo Science:
The Road From Foolishness to Fraud (Oxford University Press, 2002).
http://chronicle.com/ Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49,
Issue 21, Page B20
Copyright 2009.

UFology pseudoscience lab

This is a paper I had to write for my Understanding Science Class at Weber. It's not so formal as my other masters classes and it's definelty not written in APA. I guess that might just mean it's more readable.

-Laura

UFology

The extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) claims that some UFO sightings are alien spacecraft. “A sub-set of the ETH, the Staging Hypothesis, prevalent up until the 1980s, speculated that extraterrestrials have "stage-managed" encounters as a deliberate policy to "educate" humanity.” Ufologists Wilhelm Reich and Jerome Eden have the hypothesis that UFOs and UFO passengers, or at least some of them, are hostile. They claim that the waste product of the UFO engines is what they call "Deadly Orgone," which ruins the atmosphere, dries it out, and is one cause, if not the most important cause, of the development of deserts. Eden, like other researchers, attributes the Cattle mutilations to aliens. They claims that aliens abduct persons, manipulate their feelings and thoughts, and cause military aircraft to crash or disappear, but they do not make open contact to government or military. They also claim that aliens try to "educate" mankind in the way that the human beings develop a spiritual attitude towards aliens and UFOs, hoping that the aliens arrive as the saviors for the big problems of mankind and earth, when, in fact, their agenda involves exploiting Earth's natural resources and destroying its water and atmosphere. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ufology) In general, Ufologists claim that alien life exists, has made visits to Earth, and continues to make visits to Earth.

Most UFO websites will provide physical evidence in the form of electro-magnetic effects, vehicle interference cases (where a car or other vehicle's performance is disrupted), physical trace cases (“Usually these involve a landing trace, such as depressed grass or soil, but also burned or broken vegetation, residues, and more exotic traces” (www.ufoevidence.org/topics/physicaltracecases.htm), physiological effects, and radar cases/readings. Other than “physical” evidence, a majority of Ufologist's beliefs and theory seems to be based on accounts of people.

The Ufologists from ufoevidence.org claim that Dr. Edgar Mitchell, an astronaut from the Apollo 14 mission, is now claiming that UFOs do exist, the government knows about it, and they're hiding it from ordinary citizens. Ufologists from ufoevidence.org utilize an appeal to authority, specifically pointing out Dr. Mitchell's qualifications, and use those qualifications as “proof” of the validity of Ufologist claims. The interview states, “Dr Mitchell, who has a Bachelor of Science degree in aeronautical engineering and a Doctor of Science degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics claimed Roswell was real and similar alien visits continue to be investigated.”

As Robert L. Park states in The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science, “The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.” Ufologists claim that governments know the truth about UFO's and aliens, but are doing their best to keep the truth from the public. (http://www.ufoevidence.org/topics/Government.htm) Ufologists play on the natural human tendency to question authority by seeding distrust in government as a means to validate their own claims. Ufologists use both appeal to authority, and in contrast, encourage a distrust of authority, as arguments for UFO/alien existence.

When I was much younger I was camping in my grandparents back yard for the night. I was alone, stargazing, and I noticed that when I was in my tent some of the stars looked elliptical and larger than other stars and then when I stuck my head out of the tent the ellipses disappeared. I convinced myself that these ellipses were UFO/aliens, and that they could see me if I stuck my head out of the tent. For quite some time I was paralyzed with fear, unwilling to stick my head out of the tent door, even though I had to use the bathroom very badly. Finally my bladder could take no more and I rushed out of my tent. When I looked up and saw the stars a thought came to me- those ellipses I saw in my tent might not be UFO's, but merely a result of the netting at the roof of my tent distorting the appearance of the stars. When I returned to my tent I felt rather foolish, realizing that I had allowed my being alone at night to make me paranoid enough to think something with a simple explanation could be something entirely different.

UFOlogists take verifiable information and events, like optical phenomena (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_phenomenon), and milk extraordinary conclusions from them. Just like I combined an ordinary optical allusion (tent netting/stars) with ordinary human psychology (fear, isolation, paranoia) and concluded that aliens were above me and could see me. Take away human fleeting emotions and thoughts, and you are left with simple, everyday events.

Ufology is a pseudoscience; it includes several of Park's “indicators” of pseudoscience, including, a focus on a powerful establishment trying to suppress the work, limited detection, evidence is anecdotal, past evidence is used as a support for modern validity (ufoevidence.org/topics/general-ancientastronauts.htm), and new laws of nature must be made to explain observation (hyper.net/ufo/summary.html). Personally I do believe that unexplainable things can and do happen all the time. However Ufology appears to be more of a exploitation, intentional or otherwise, of human psychology, as opposed to anything valid or really extraordinary.

As a human and citizen it is important to recognize something as a pseudoscience so that one does not get caught in a mental, emotional, time-consuming or financial trap. As an educator it is important to teach students about the differences between fact and fiction, reliability and folly. The objective of science should be to find the answers to questions about how things really are. Science shouldn't be about how things appear to be, or seem to be, but as they really are. As a science instructor, teaching students how to discern between reality and appearances can help them not only in their science studies, but with every aspect of their lives.