Skeptico

Distant From Science

Reader Kate sent me a link to the HuffPo article by Srinivasan Pillay, The Science of Distant Healing, that everyone’s talking about this week.  Apparently a study showed remote “intention” could act as a therapeutic intervention.  I originally wasn’t going to bother with this, as the article was in my view rather confused and poorly written, and several skeptics in the comments seemed to be doing a pretty good job of taking it apart already anyway.  And then on Friday both Orac and Steven Novella wrote posts critical of the article.  But then I got a hold of the full study, and a little light went off in my head that told me I had something to add even to what those two luminaries had written.

First, I’ll do what Pillay didn’t do, and link to the abstract.  I managed to click on the Elsevier link in the abstract and obtain a temporary log on ID to read the study.  It’s entitled “Compassionate Intention As a Therapeutic Intervention by Partners of Cancer Patients: Effects of Distant Intention on the Patients' Autonomic Nervous System”.  An odd title since the authors clearly state in the study, “we did not test for distant healing” (more on that below).

The study supposedly measured the effects of intention on the autonomic nervous system of a human "sender" and distant "receiver".  Well, not really.  What they actually measured were changes in skin conductance level, or as Pillay wrote, “a measure of the ability of sweat to conduct electricity”.  PAL called that “measurements from glorified Scientology E-meters”.  Ouch!  No illnesses being cured then (as they admitted – see above).  The paired senders and receivers were divided into three groups:

1. Trained in directing intention, one person in each pair had cancer
2. Untrained in directing intention, one person in each pair had cancer
3. Untrained in directing intention, neither person in each pair had cancer

In group 1 and 2, the healthy person directed intention at the sick person.  In group 3, a healthy person directed intention at another healthy person.  Members of group 3 were not randomly selected – they were (obviously) non-randomly allocated to the group with no cancer.  And yet, group 3 was claimed to be the “control group”.  However, all three groups were instructed to direct intention – ie, even the “control group” directed intention.  This is important when you consider the hypothesis being tested, which was:

The principal hypothesis was that the sender's DHI [distant healing intention] directed toward the distant, isolated receiver would cause the receiver's autonomic nervous system to become activated.  A secondary analysis explored whether the factors of motivation and training modulated the postulated effect.

To test the principal hypothesis you obviously need a control group which is not sending intention, to compare with the intention group.  Otherwise, how do you know if the intention had any effect?  But there was no group without directed intention, which means there was no  control group to test the actual principal hypothesis the authors of the study specifically said they were testing.  So what were the results?  Did the receiver's autonomic nervous systems become activated, and did training and motivation make a difference?  Take a look at Figure 6 from the study, and the note under it, and see what you think:

Figure 6   Comparison of sender and receiver effect sizes (per epoch) measured at stimulus offset (with ±2 standard error confidence intervals) for all sessions, motivated sessions (trained group and wait group combined), and trained, wait, and control groups separately. EDA, electrodermal activity.

You’ll note there is no significant difference between the receivers in the different groups.  (The senders differ, but then they knew they were sending.)  The receivers all register an effect, but since there is no control group to compare these results with, these data tell you nothing about the principal hypothesis.  Again I say, you need a control group to test this hypothesis, and they didn’t have one.  There was no significant difference between the trained / untrained groups or between the motivated (ie including sick people) / unmotivated groups.  So the secondary hypothesis failed.

So, end of story. Study failed, yes?  Write it off, study something new next time?  Well, no of course not.  Not with woo.  The study authors weren’t satisfied with that.  Here, Steven Novella noticed something I initially missed.  It was this, from the abstract:

Planned differences in skin conductance among the three groups were not significant, but a post hoc analysis showed that peak deviations were largest and most sustained in the trained group, followed by more moderate effects in the wait group, and still smaller effects in the control group

Translation: the study didn’t show what we wanted it to show (clearly – see Figure 6), so we data mined it to find something we could say was an effect.  So what did they find with this bit of ad hoc activity?  They produced several other graphs, of which (to keep it simple) I will reproduce just Figure 7:

Figure 7   Normalized comparison of receiver skin conductance levels in the three groups. EDA, electrodermal activity.

What they want you to look at is the difference between the three groups during the “intention” period.  Group 1 (the “trained” group), showed the largest increase during the ten second burst of “intention”.  (See the timescale on the bottom – seconds 0 to 10 is when the intention is being directed.)  OK, but what I want you to notice is the 5 seconds before the intention (-5 to 0 on the bottom axis).  The normalized EDA is actually higher for one group (group 2 – the “wait” group), when no intention is being directed at all!  So for those not trained, it appears distant healing effects are higher when the sender does nothing.  Even with group 1 (“trained”), the “doing nothing” period has a higher measurement than roughly 50% of the “sending intention” period.  Then it struck me what we are missing – we are missing readings from all the “doing  nothing” periods – since the intention sessions were all 10 seconds long, and the non-intention sessions were from five to 40 seconds long, we are talking about probably 60-75% of the total time.  Was the EDA measurement higher or lower during those periods?  Were there other peaks in EDA during those periods?  They don’t say.

And I’m pretty sure they didn’t even look.  Tucked away just before the “results” section of the report, they state this:

To avoid multiple testing problems, the preplanned hypothesis examined the normalized deviation only at stimulus offset.

I’ve read that section about ten times now, and the only sensible interpretation of that sentence is that they only looked at EDA changes during the intention sending sessions – they didn’t look at them during the non-intention sending periods (unintentional periods?).  This sounds like the sharpshooter fallacy – shooting a load of bullets at the side of a barn and then painting a target where most of the bullets landed.  But they ignored the larger clusters of bullets fired at different times.

Why This Is Significant

The study’s lead author is Dean Radin.  Radin has a history of fitting statistical anomalies to temporal events, while ignoring the same anomalies that occur at other times that he doesn’t want you to know about.  An example would be Radin’s interpretation of the now defunct (correction - it's still going) Global Consciousness Project’s (GCP) output from a series of random number generators – data that supposedly showed global consciousness spiked at certain major global events.  If you want to see how credulous Radin can be, and/or how determined he is to find a correlation whether one exists or not (you decide), read this account by Claus Larsen, who attended a talk by Dean Radin in 2002:

Radin gave several examples of how GCP had detected "global consciousness". One was the day O.J. Simpson was acquitted of double-murder. We were shown a graph where - no doubt about that - the data formed a nice ascending curve in the minutes after the pre-show started, with cameras basically waiting for the verdict to be read. And yes, there was a nice, ascending curve in the minutes after the verdict was read.

However, about half an hour before the verdict, there was a similar curve ascending for no apparent reason. Radin's quick explanation before moving on to the next slide?

"I don't know what happened there."

It was not to be the last time we heard that answer.

Does that remind you a little of figure 7 above, and does it make you ask what happened during the “no intention” periods?  It should. 

And then there was 9/11:

Another serious problem with the September 11 result was that during the days before the attacks, there were several instances of the [random number generators] picking up data that showed the same fluctuation as on September 11th. When I asked Radin what had happened on those days, the answer was:

"I don't know."

I then asked him - and I'll admit that I was a bit flabbergasted - why on earth he hadn't gone back to see if similar "global events" had happened there since he got the same fluctuations. He answered that it would be "shoe-horning" - fitting the data to the result.

Checking your hypothesis against seemingly contradictory data is "shoe-horning"?

For once, I was speechless.

Did Radin check to see if there were similar fluctuations in the data in the “down” periods of this recent study?  I don’t know, but we know for a fact from the above that Radin has selected data to fit his hypothesis in the past, and so I’m not going to trust him not to have done it this time.  We know he performed some additional manipulation on the data, as Orac also noticed from the study:

To reduce the potential biasing effects of movement artifacts, all data were visually inspected, and SCL epochs with artifacts were eliminated from further consideration (artifacts were identified by [Dean Radin], who was not blind to each epoch's underlying condition).

So Radin admits he un-blinded the study and eliminated data he didn’t like. 

Throughout this post I avoided any personal attacks on Radin’s (or Pillay’s) credibility, and concentrated instead on the actual study.  However, when considering a study that claims a statistical effect like this (and the study authors admit the size of the observed effects were very small), on such frankly dubious grounds, it is relevant to consider where the author has in the past ignored contradictory data when forming conclusions.  Clearly he has in the past, and he may well have done so here.  The most generous conclusion I can draw about this study would be that it would  need to be replicated by  independent experimenters before I would even consider that there might be some basis in what it  is claiming.  (Randi’s $1 million test, anyone?)  A more realistic interpretation is that Radin has been known to select data that fits his hypothesis and ignore that which doesn’t, and so there’s no reason to think that hasn’t happened here.  Radin even admits he un-blinded the study to eliminate some data he didn’t like.  Add the fact that there was no control group, the null hypotheses were not even rejected, and the only interesting thing they found required some (admitted by the authors) post hoc rationalization, and there really isn’t much left worth looking at.

The study ends with the words “This study is dedicated to Elisabeth Targ.”  That would be the Elizabeth Targ whose study of intercessory prayer was also fraudulently un-blinded so it could report a success when in reality it had failed.  And this study is dedicated to her?  I couldn’t have put it better myself.

I Claim My Government Cash

The Telegraph is reporting Psychics given £4,500 government funding to teach people to communicate with the dead. 

Paul and Deborah Rees, who are both self-styled mediums, have been awarded the cash under the Government's Want2Work job creation scheme.

The couple, from Bridgend, south Wales, will use it to instruct people on how to contact friends and relatives "on the other side".

Critics are astonished that the award was approved by the Department of Work and Pensions bureaucrats, and now the Welsh Assembly has launched an investigation.

The mediums themselves confess to being "surprised" at securing the grant. But they insist that the "mere £4,500" of public money will be put to good use at their centre, the Accolade Academy of Psychic and Mediumistic Studies.

The psychics themselves were "surprised" at securing the grant?  Well, they can’t be very good psychics then, can they?  I have to say, I’m not that surprised at anything that happens when the government is involved.  Remember how two years ago UK Ministry of Defence spent £18,000 ($35,000) on experiments to discover if psychic powers exist?  And don’t forget how the US government wasted $20 million on Stargate.  Against that, £4,500 is small change.  But hey, if the UK government is throwing money at this, perhaps I can get in on the act.  I already have a proven method to make it appear you are communicating with the dead.  It’s a list of proven techniques that includes a handy bingo card to make it more fun.  Where do I apply for my cash?

I can’t believe we got money for this crap

Feng Shui Hooey

From this thread at JREF I learned of a recent post at a blog called Fengshui Forward (“We aim to gather fellow Chinese Metaphysics enthusiatics to discuss and promote Chinese 5 arts”), entitled United we stand, Divided we fall!.  The author, ken, is bothered by the Penn & Teller Bullshit episode on Feng Shui – the one where each of the three Feng Shui experts comes up with completely different recommended colors and arrangements of furniture at the exact same house.  Unfortunately ken has completely missed the point of the P&T program, and criticisms of Feng Shui in general:

It is very easy to discredit a practice like Feng Shui because Metaphysics is defined by Wikipedia as “investigates principles of reality transcending those of any particular science”. 

No, that’s not how to discredit Feng Shui, although I agree it is  easy to discredit.  P&T discredit Feng Shui not by reference to a definition in Wikipedia (which would be an absurd way to do it anyway), but by simply showing that three so called “experts”, all using the exact same “science”, come up with completely different recommendations for the same problem.  Let’s face it – they can’t all be right.  The fact that they’re all different just demonstrates to any rational person that it’s nonsense.  How would you tell which of the recommendations was right and which wrong?  If Feng Shui had any actual real effect then it ought to be possible to tell by testing.  But according to ken, you can’t test Feng Shui:

Feng Shui is not superstitious.  It merely looks superstitious because it is beyond science and hence science cannot explain it and neither can humans.  How do you expect a kid to explain the action of his parents?  Since Feng Shui transcends science, one cannot get a satisfactory explanation of Feng Shui using scientific principles.

“Beyond science”?  Science is just an organized way of testing hypotheses against reality.  The phrase “beyond science” just means “can’t be tested to see if it works”.  But why not?  If it has any real effect surely that effect must be measurable (ie it is testable).  If it’s effects really aren’t measurable, then what is the difference between Feng Shui and something that doesn’t exist?  (Clearly, nothing.)  In reality, what ken means by “beyond science”, is “can be tested to see if it works – we just won’t admit it doesn’t”.  This is just science doesn't know everything combined with an appeal to other ways of knowing – a smokescreen to hide the fact that Feng Shui is made up nonsense that has very little correspondence with reality.

The lack of any basis Feng Shui has in reality is hilariously (and unintentionally) exposed in ken’s appeal for unity among fellow woomeisters:

If even Feng Shui enthuasiasts (sic) and practitioners can be going all out to discredit someone with the same beliefs, what more outsiders who are like Penn & Teller?  Sometimes I wish fellow enthusiasts in Chinese Metaphysics wisen (sic) up and not be the proverbial “divided loose grains of sand”.  If we help each other in this interest group or profession, Chinese Metaphysics & Feng Shui as a whole stands to gain.  We as enthusiasts and practitioner of the same field stand to gain too.  After all, one famous Chinese saying by the victimized Cao Zhi in the Romance of the 3 Kingdom goes “Why cannibalize one that is of the same family?”

How can we help each other?  By treating fellow practitioners and enthusiasts as allies and suggest areas of weakness as points to consider for improvement.  By not treating fellow practitioners and enthusiasts as rivals and going all out to attack one perceived point of fallible practice or advocate.

Translation: “don’t criticize someone else’s woo even if it makes no sense, because they might criticize your woo for making no sense.”  Of course, in actual science, scientists do criticize each other.  It’s only by criticizing and dismissing weak ideas, that the good ones can flourish.  But then with actual science, they have a way to determine what is real and what isn’t – they look at evidence.  This is of course a problem for woo such as Feng Shui, since with no evidence and no way of testing it (it transcends science, remember), there is no way to determine what is real and what isn’t.  Consequently woomeisters such as ken have no option but to accept uncritically everyone else’s woo.  And that’s the problem (one of them, anyway) with woo.  With no rational way of testing your hypothesis against reality, you are in freefall – you have to believe in everything.  Ken really is in danger of being so open minded that his brains will fall out.  If they haven’t already.

Casey Luskin's Junk Logic

Casey Luskin has a post up on the Disco-Tute’s blog, entitled Nature Paper Shows "Junk-RNA" Going the Same Direction as "Junk-DNA".  He’s read a paper in Nature that he thinks shows that junk DNA and junk RNA, may not be junk.  This is an interesting point, since junk DNA is often given as evidence of unguided evolution, rather than purposeful design.  And you know that’s his point because his post ends with:

As an ID proponent, I'm still waiting for Darwinists to let go of their precious "junk" arguments for blind evolution and common descent and learn the lesson that you can't assume that if we don't yet see function for a biomolecule, then it's probably just "junk."

To which I would reply, as an evolution proponent, I'm still waiting for IDists to let go of their precious "irreducible complexity" arguments for design, and learn that if we don't yet see see every step of how an irreducible complex entity evolved, we can't assume that it must have been designed.  Yes, Luskin was in effect calling evolutionists on an argument from ignorance fallacy – if we don’t know what it is then it’s junk.  Pretty funny considering ID is nothing but an argument from ignorance.

Of course Tu quoque is a fallacy too.  Unfortunately for Luskin though, evolutionists rely on more than just, “we don't yet see function therefore it’s junk”.  Luskin is wrong in his interpretation of the Nature paper, as Larry Moran explains.  First, let’s go back to see what Luskin wrote on the subject.  Quoting the Nature paper, he writes:

The article makes an extremely important point: "Strictly speaking, the absence of evolutionary conservation cannot prove the absence of function."

But Luskin has been quote mining.  Larry Moran quotes a larger part of the Nature paper.  Read this – note that the first sentence below is the only bit that Luskin quoted; he omitted the sentences that followed immediately afterwards:

Strictly speaking, the absence of evolutionary conservation cannot prove the absence of function. But, the markedly low rate of conservation seen in the current catalogues of large non-coding transcripts (<5% of cases) is unprecedented and would require that each mammalian clade evolves its own distinct repertoire of non-coding transcripts. Instead, the data suggest that the current catalogues may consist largely of transcriptional noise, with a minority of bona fide functional lincRNAs hidden amid this background.  [My bold.]

Now, whether you agree with that or not, you have to admit that the Nature paper simply does not say what Luskin quoted mined it to make it appear to say.  It actually states the opposite, namely that 95% of the transcribed sequences are not conserved (and therefore are unlikely to have function). 

So we have poor understanding of logical fallacies, and quote mining, from the ID camp.  In other words, nothing new.

Skeptics’ Circle

The Skeptics’ Circle has just been posted at the skeptic’s field guide.

Secret Write Off

File this one under, if I made this up you wouldn’t believe it.

I was reading “The Secret” promoter Joe Vitale’s recent blog post What To Do When the Law of Attraction Doesn’t Work, and it struck me how his blog posts all seem to have the same format:

Short sentences.

All starting on a new line.

Have you noticed that many are questions?

That he then answers.

When you read his answers, are they in the form of rhetorical questions?

When he writes these rhetorical questions, why are they in blockquotes when he’s not actually quoting someone?

He repeats mantras, such as:

LOA is always working.

LOA is a law like gravity.

- that have been debunked before.

And makes grandiose claims, such as:

I’m a neurometaphysician. I created the field of neurometaphysics. This goes beyond neuroscience, which is the study of how your nervous system affects your life. Neurometaphysics is the science of how your thoughts create your life.

It struck me that his posts are all so similar in both style and content, they could have been written by a computer.  Of course, that would be ridiculous.  Except it’s not.  Announcing: Dr. Joe Vitale's Hypnotic Writing Wizard!:

This amazing breakthrough new software almost magically helps you write sales letters, ads, news releases, articles, speeches and entire books easily, effortlessly and even hypnotically - Guaranteed!

[All bold in original.]

So now you know.  That’s how he does it.  A computer writes his copy.  And you can write just like Joe for a mere $99 ($277 with “Swipe File”).  Or I guess you could just want it really badly and it would appear for free (your mileage may vary). 

Hey Joe, I don’t need a “writing wizard” to write my posts - with this kind of classic comedy from you, my posts just write themselves.

Hat tip to Cosmic Connie for emailing me the two Joe Vitale links.

Fake Experts

In my recent post on global warming denial, I included a list of denier tactics, of which # 3 was “fake experts”.  Right on cue, I can report that today is the start of the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change" – the “world’s largest-ever gathering of global warming skeptics”.  Their list of speakers claims:

More than 70 of the world’s elite scientists, economists and others specializing in climate issues will confront the subject of global warming.

Grist is less than impressed with the speakers, and debunks the idea that many of them are actual experts in the subject:

So, Heartland says to the unsuspecting, the experts are all coming to this event, and they all say there is nothing to worry about. That actually makes the whole charade pretty easy to unmask.

We don't have to examine every particular scientific or pseudo-scientific argument that will be advanced during the conference (that's been done repeatedly), because the whole thrust of this conference is about who is attending, not what they are saying.

Click the Grist link for an examination of the main speakers.  You may not be surprised to learn that most of them are clearly in the “fake expert” category – people mostly with credentials, but not in climate science.  Exceptions to the “wrong credentials” list would be Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer, who are both actual climate scientists.  Well, fair enough, but a couple of qualified contrarians is hardly “70 of the world’s elite scientists”.  In any case, it seems these two may not be totally in the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) isn’t happening camp anyway:

While these two legitimate climate scientists express doubt about the dangers of climate change, they both acknowledge that the world is warming and that it is due to human activity, primarily greenhouse gas emissions. Actually, this puts them at odds with most of their fellow panelists.

I have to say, that was news to me.  I haven’t really been following Lindzen’s work recently. 

Incidentally, if you scroll down the list of speakers, you’ll see that our old friend Joanne Nova is there.  Talk about fake experts.  Her bit is entitled “The Great Global Fawning: How Science Journalists Pay Homage to Non-Science and Un-Reason”.  Imagine having paid money to listen to that. 

And for those determined to misunderstand anything written on this subject (and you know who you are), the above is not ad hominem – is is merely a rebuttal to the “more than 70 of the world’s elite scientists” appeal to authority claimed by the conference. 

While writing on this subject, a quick response to “the IPCC is a political organization” ad hominem, favorite dismissal if the IPCC by the AGW skeptics.  Here is a list of all 619 authors Working Group I of the recent IPCC report.  This group's section covers the scientific basis, and lays the foundation for the rest of the report.  Included are links to the authors’ personal homepages, a link to a Google Scholar search for their research, citation counts, degree information, Wikipedia links, affiliations and notes about declarations or petitions they have signed.  Hat tip for this to A Few things Ill Considered.  And again, for those determined to misunderstand anything written on this subject (and you still know who you are), this list is not an appeal to authority, I present it merely to debunk the “the IPCC is a political organization” ad hominem canard.

Designed To Confuse

Someone called rbullock posted a classic piece or poor reasoning at The ID Report.  It's entitled Darwinists on Design: Jumping to Confusions.  Get a load of this and guess where it’s going (no prizes):

What if you were lied to all your life that a square was a circle? Oh yes, you were told, it's natural to have contrary thoughts, but you must not be deceived by appearances; those things that look like squares are not. They are merely apparent squares. And in reality, you are politely informed, they not only are circles, they must be, because an all encompassing Theory of Circumfusion requires them to be, and you must believe the Theory of Circumfusion. And what if you did? Despite all that was in you; despite what you instinctively and empirically knew, what if you believed? What if?

Imagine that you really bought the lie. You began to see reality not as circles and squares, but as circles and the illusion of squares. And suppose over time you trained yourself, through constant reminder that what you see as squares are not squares, but circles; you actually saw only circles.

Well, that would be pretty silly.  We have a very clear definition of a square: “a regular polygon with four equal sides and four equal angles (90 degree angles, or right angles)”.  Anyone claiming a square was a circle could easily be shown to be wrong.  More importantly, a group of independent observers could all pick out the squares from a series of squares and circles, with 100% accuracy, using the standard square definition.  But rbullock doesn’t care about this.  You know where he’s going:

The problem for Darwinists lies with the term "design". The term best describes everything we see in nature, but, insist Darwinists, it simply cannot be; The Theory will not allow it. Never mind what your eyes see, never mind what your hands touch, never mind what your ears hear, you must, as atheist co-discoverer of DNA Francis Crick insists biologist do, constantly remind yourself that what you see was not designed but evolved.

He is saying living organisms are the (designed) squares that Darwinists are insisting are circles (not designed).  Yes, it’s an argument by analogy.  Except it doesn’t work because IDists have never been able to define how to tell if something is designed (the way a square is defined), other than “it looks designed”.  What they really mean is “it’s complex”.  But we know complex organisms can evolve.

He does have a point though.  Well, almost.  I cringe when people (and I think I’ve heard even Dawkins do this) refer to “design” in nature.  “Design” in my view has to have an element of intent – some conceptualization of the thing before it is built.  Evolution is very clearly how something comes into being without pre-planning.  By an accidental mutation that is then (ie after it exists) selected for.  Apparently someone else agrees with me, although rbullock misses the point:

The latest gift of Darwinian absurdity came in the pages of the gloriously serious-sounding Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolutionary Research where Columbia University's W.J. Bock surrendered to an Orwellian coward's solution: simply eliminate the troublesome "D" word altogether. Rather than have biologists distracted repeating the mantra, "it is not designed, it is not designed, it is not designed," Bock's solution is to remove even the "concept of design" from all "biological explanations". Design is "inappropriate" in biology, according to Bock, and "should not be used in evolutionary theory."

I agree with Bock’s suggestion because it is correct.  "Orwellian" is misinformation or the denial of truth – in fact, exactly what rbullock is doing.  Eliminating the “D word” actually makes the description more accurate.

Biology can continue to operate (as it does, truth be told) in terms of design, and because there is no English word for "apparently-designed-yet-actually-unintelligently-caused" with respect to observed objects

Yes there is.  The word is “evolved”. 

Adesignists, including Darwinists who believe in God and theistic evolutionists (there is no practical difference) risk embarrassing themselves talking about God for one reason: to keep the confusion alive regarding the Darwin-busting fact of design in nature. Confusion is the ally of a wrong worldview, and those who deny design in biology, particularly for fear of the "connotations" of a designer, must rely on silly thoughts about God and dice as they spin their worldview in a whirlwind of illogic and ever-growing deception.

No, evolutionists talk about god because they know the IDist’s true motivation is to teach their religious myths as though they were science.  And talking about design that is not there helps them in their dishonest endeavor.  We should stop talking about design in nature.  Evolution is how life got built.  There is no evidence that there was any forward planning or conceptualization in advance (design) at all.