I just watched Derren Brown’s new show – ‘Derren Investigates’ (available on 4oD for a month) where he, in this episode, investigates a teaching method that allegedly allows the blind to see. I shan’t go into too much detail about the method that was, unsurprisingly, rebuked as complete fallacy. It basically involves using energy gathered from the urogenitary system (i.e. one’s crotch) and using it to power a ‘computer’ inside one’s head to visualise the non-material world (where do I sign up!?). This system is taught to vulnerable and often desperate people who pay hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of Euros to the teachers of the method.
The reason it concerned me is not so much the unfairness of extorting money (whether intentionally or not) for a phoney system but the fact that they tried to suggest it was scientifically rigorous. Many people throughout the word use the word science (and derivatives thereof) completely incorrectly. People mistake ‘science’, which should refer to the scientific method, with the scientific community or current theories or simply a rejection of the supernatural. The fact is, that although these things are often associated and interlinked with the scientific method they are very much secondary to it and therefore to reject the scientific method based on those things is wrong.
The scientific method, to oversimplify it slightly, is to prove something by experiment where the experiment can be repeated under the same conditions to produce the same result. There are many people who reject ‘science’ and therefore this method outright. It is of course a great shame for those people but at the end of the day there is little that can be done to convince them otherwise. The far more worrying phenomenon is pseudoscience. That is, people who believe that they are doing things scientifically when they are clearly not.
A famous case of this is the creationism vs evolution debate where creationists tried (and indeed are still trying) to force creationism to be taught as a scientific theory. It is somewhat disconcerting to know that some people believe that the world is only a few thousand years old and that God created it in 7 days but really that is down to the individual and although whole swathes of children are being educated in this way it is nothing new. What are really worrying are the people who think that ‘intelligent design’ is a scientific theory. It cannot be proven with experiment and certainly one could not repeat an experiment based on ID. To call it ‘science’ gives it credibility that it doesn’t deserve and that is really worrying.
The reason pseudoscience is more of a problem than non-science is because people believe that what they think/believe/do is logical and/or reasonable and therefore can justify doing it. Of course, people who practise non scientific things also believe this but once you have convinced someone of the merits of the scientific method they can easily see the flaws in non-science. Pseudoscience hides behind a veil of supposed logic which makes it far easier to sell (often literally) to people who often do not know any better.