When The Religious and Ignorant Try To Grok Research

Few things irritate me more than the functionally illiterate passing judgement on science that they obviously do not understand.

One of my favourite fun reads lately has been a blog called Pharyngula, written by a Minnesota biologist named P.Z. Meyers. Mostly, I enjoy his writing for its editorializing - the man's tongue is downright acidic with what he considers idiocy.

The topic of the day was Embryonic Stem Cell research, and in particular the amazingly irrational arguments that keep getting put forth to stop research on embryonic stem cells by the so-called "pro-life" crowd. (which I'm beginning to think is in fact the "pro-ignorance" crowd)

Somewhere in the comments on Meyer's blog, a commenter/troll by the name of "Jason" wrote something to the effect of Embryonic Stem Cell Research is the modern equivalent of Alchemists trying to turn lead into gold. A little further digging turned up a second blog this genius has started to "expose" all of the things he thinks PZ Meyers has screwed up. Most of it is inanely childish, but the odd rant almost manages to stay on topic.

Two things got me writing about this - one "Jason" doesn't have comments turned on for his little "PZ Meyers Exposed" echo chamber, and second, his little analogy annoyed me to no end.

Research is an ambiguous field. We spend time and effort digging into a line of thought that we think will turn up some specific result. Sometimes, the researcher actually had a pretty good idea of what they'd find and the results reflect that, other times, they don't. In modern times, an excellent example is Aspirin - a basic analgesic used initially to relieve headache pain, but has come to be used as a low grade blood thinner, and is known to have other properties that we do not yet fully comprehend. In other words, we set out to find a pain killer, and found something with many more properties.

The half-baked analogy of saying that ESCR (Embryonic Stem Cell Research) is as futile as the oft-sought goal of Alchemy to transmute lead into gold is an utter farce. It starts from the false assumption that researchers know what they are going to find when they start out. It is a rare day indeed when the researcher "finds" what they set out to find. Robert Boyle was an alchemist, and if weren't for his pursuit of alchemy, he might never have written "The Skeptical Chemist", the book that ultimately became the foundation of modern chemistry.

Did the often discussed pursuit of turning "lead-into-gold" prove fruitful? Yes, just not in the way people like Robert Fludd expected. I'm sure that Boyle didn't set out to found modern chemistry, instead his inquiries as an alchemist simply led him to write a book which became a foundation document. I doubt that he himself would have guessed at the time he published it that "The Skeptical Chemist" would have been as important as it turned out to be.

The argument that ECSR has yet to produce the kind of results that Adult Stem Cell Research has, and therefore ECSR is somehow an invalid path of inquiry is inherently false. First, legislation in the United States has severely limited ECSR activity, making the likelihood of useful results much smaller. Second, the actual applications of any results are ambiguous. It's like arguing that the study of the human genome is fruitless because it has not turned up the gene that causes left-handedness. The objective may have been to find that gene in the first place, but the end result was instead an overall map of the genome itself. While the results are perhaps not what we expected, that knowledge can be applied in other ways that we had not expected. It is foolish indeed for us to assume that because we don't know the outcomes of a path of inquiry that we should not pursue it.

[Update 20/07/06 14:10]
I was just following up on the comments thread on the original post that spawned this thing, and found this gem of irrelevance from "jason": {A friend of mine shares that name - fortunately he's much, much smarter}

But just to share some thoughts:

Do you all consider the people who oppose medical testing on animals to be against all medical testing? By your logic (or lack thereof), you must. If not, you're hypocrites.

Do you, like me, consider the Nazis' experiments on Jews to be wrong? According to the Nazis, the Jews weren't human - they were animals. Who's going to step up and claim that the Nazis were wrong - that it was a black and white issue (since you're so fond of inventing "grey areas")? And if you oppose these tests on the Jews, wouldn't that make you - by your own [il]logic - against any and all medical tests?

Jeepers, not only has Godwin's Law been demonstrated, he's also pulled the classic right-wing sneer routine of "it's really you that has the problem".

Ignoring the bogus suggestion that stem cell research bears even the slightest resemblance to the activities of Josef Mengele and others of the 3rd Reich, let's just dissect "jason"'s arguments a little:

1) Assertion: You must believe that people who oppose medical testing on animals are opposed to all medical testing, otherwise you are being a hypocrite.

Response: Bullshit. Once again we encounter the lovely broad brush approach to arguments. Apparently, in "jason"'s bubble, you must be all-or-nothing on subjects.

2) Assertion: If you disagreed with Nazi experiments on Jews in WWII, you must be opposed to all medical testing.

Response: Again, bullshit. Yes, the Nazis claimed that Jewish people were animals, but the observational evidence available at the time clearly refutes that assertion. Second, Nazi treatment of anybody is hardly a measurement that I would use to measure logical consistency.

This one has a secondary, unstated, assertion in it - namely that Embryonic Stem Cells come from a fully actualized human being. They don't - the come from an early stage called a Blastocyst. If you will - a blob of cells with the potential to become a viable fetus in the womb. It should be noted that the Blastocyst contains both the cells that will form the fetus, as well as the placenta - should it succeed in bonding with the uterine wall.

Once again, we get to behold the spectacle of argument by wilfull ignorance being put forth. The facts and evidence don't matter to these people - nor do they intelligibly engage the actual issues involved. Anything that contradicts their position does not get listened to.
[/Update]