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Here is a recap of the stories that appeared last week at Science-Based Medicine, a multi-author skeptical blog that separates the science from the woo in medicine.  

An antivaccine tale of two legal actions (David Gorski) http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/an-antivaccine-tale-of-two-legal-actions/ Andrew Wakefield recently filed an ill-advised libel lawsuit in Texas against the British Medical Journal. In another lawsuit in the UK, a judge reversed the decision of the General Medical Council and reinstated Wakefield’s co-author John Walker-Smith, using the questionable rationale that he didn’t realize he was engaged in research. Contrary to what anti-vaccine advocates would like to believe, those lawsuits have no bearing on Wakefield’s conduct or the validity of his study.  

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We've just passed a JREF milestone that should be noted. Twenty-six years ago, we exposed the televangelist Peter Popoff as a blatant fake.  I and my team -- Banachek, Alec Jason, and others discovered that the "reverend" was using a concealed radio receiver to obtain data about those in his audience who were there seeking healing.  Popoff's wife had obtained personal data from the unsuspecting victims who believed that the preacher was in touch with God, and that they would be able to throw away their crutches and return home walking straight again...

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Scientific research is difficult to do well, and people are flawed and biased. As Carl Sagan noted, science is not just an ideal abstraction, but is very much a human endeavor, and as such is messy and imperfect. Nature itself is random and quirky and doesn’t always cooperate with our desires to penetrate its secrets.  

The power of science as a tool for understanding the world comes largely from the fact that it is self corrective – it doesn’t always get it right the first time, but it has the potential to fix any mistakes and get it right eventually. Part of this self-corrective power comes from the humble replication – scientists repeating the work of other scientists to see if they get the same results. If a certain result represents a real effect in the world, it should generally replicate, no matter who is doing the experiment. If the result represents some methodological error, or was just a chance result, then it will not consistently show up in replication.

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In becoming a science-based person, I can imagine a process that involves three tiers. First, you decide that you are going to get your information from reputable sources like scientific journals and then decide that any other claims that you find should have a similar backing. Second, pushing past the veneer of scientific legitimacy, you decide to look into the claims for yourself. This involves not only getting your information from sources based on scientific journal articles, for example, but also going through the study yourself to determine whether it is a “good” study. Lastly, after having navigated scientific sources for some time, you are able to evaluate claims base on methodologies and procedures that you would expect the offered evidence to have if it were indeed credible. Because most of us are not scientists and find it hard to invest in the education it would require to reside comfortably in the third tier, I will try to offer some help with the second.

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Even though James Randi has kept a busy speaking schedule all over the world lately, traveling from Canada to Colorado to Los Angeles and many other places, he has still found time in recent weeks to speak in and around his home state of Florida.

  1. The Dowsing Delusion Is Still With Us
  2. It Never Stops...
  3. Last Week At Science-Based Medicine
  4. Magic Water