What better way to start the morning than with some bad science. And what better place to find bad science than the Independnent. According to this article, scientists have shown that the old wives tales about having too many hot baths reduces male fertility is possibly true. However when you read what the research actually found such a conclusion is far removed from the reality of the research.
Apparently, in a three-year pilot involving 11 men, they found that when the group stopped being exposed to so-called "wet heat" five of the 11 men began showing significant increases in active sperm count. From this the conclusion has been drawn that hot baths makes your little swimmers swim less.
The problem though is that the conclusion is an inductive one. They have not shown that reduced fertility is caused by hot baths, they have simply discovered that less than fifty percent of their sample started becoming fertile after stopping hot baths. They have leapt to the inductive conclusion that hot water was the causal factor, when there could have been any number of external causes for the increase.
Bad science is, these days, quite popular. It's especially popular amongst those that are following "Kuhnian paradigms" within scientific communities. Climate Change zealotry is such an example, where results that do not fit the paradigm get dismissed out of hand. However, in the case of climate change science this is often, as I mentioned over the weekend, due to politics rather than scientific refutation. How many times do we hear the argument that a scientist is "working for oil companies" as a rebuttal of their work rather than scientific refutation?
Incidentally, we also often hear that those that question climate change are "flat earthers", ironically it is actually the ones that throw that charge around who are guilty of such intellectual tomfoolery. Flat earth theory was based upon an ad populum argument, much as we are told, quite openly, that climate change is when we hear the word "consensus" thrown around.
Just to clarify though before someone throw the accusation of "climate change denial" at me, my criticism is a philosophical about the terms of reference for the discussion on the subject, not whether either side is right or wrong.
11 comments:
Clarify all you like , at heart you are a denier. Honestly Dizzy don`t you want us to go back to a population of 1,000,000 , dispense with technolgy and wear medieval bodkins.
I know I do :)
Can anybody tell me if 'Hot Dinners' are a good or bad thing in this context?
Newmania you're wrong. They may indeed turn out to be right about man's impact on the planet. What IO dislike is the manner in which bad science mixed with politics has muddied the debate and meant that anyone finding refutations is dismissed. That is bad for knowledge as a whole I think.
And no I don't want to go back to medieval times, but I don't think you do either.
WIth a bigger cohort, their results would be more defensible; it would be very unlikely, from a cohort of 1000 who stopped taking baths, that there was another common factor that occurred at the same time (not impossible, but such is the nature of studying humans). Better still with a control group, of course.
Also, I would say that most of the research into climate change is good science that is written up in papers with appropriate descriptions of the uncertainties if read by another expert in the field; that is how science is generally done. The way that it's used by various political parties and, indeed, politically motivated scientists, from both sides of the debate, is what really isn't scientific.
I am of a somewhat mixed mind on it, myself. There is a clear scientific causal explanation for which CO2 emissions and other human factors would, in fact, change climate. The complexity of the system, however, probably precludes ever having certainty and furthermore, there can be diminishing returns on further money spent on research even while, if they are right, the problem gets worse and harder to moderate. Holding out for certainty probably means waiting forever but, in the meantime, the world turns.
Not coincidentally, I wrote a blog post on this some time back. If I am allowed to gratuitously link my own blog, a link will appear below.
http://thecrossedpond.com/?p=21
I agree about the certainty thing, and on the matter of bad science I am tending to refer to the manner in which the debate on climate change is framed around the politics of the issue.
Yeah, the public debate is weird. The public's rather lamentable understanding of science and how science works, plus their general reverence for people with PhDs (not that I'm complaining, mind) means that there is a sort of arms race of seedy populism. Added to the fact that the only way to get anything into the public consciousness is to shout really loud and we don't exactly have a forum for reasoned debate, even by the relatively low standards of public debate when both sides have a lot at stake.
Bloody PhDs! For the record I don;t hold you in reverence, although in fairness you are only marginally less right than me on most things.
Frankly, I think it's long past time that Blair banned people without PhDs in science subjects from the internerd altogether.
And by 'science subjects' I mean 'physics with an allowance for mathematicians'.
Having looked at the Independent article, I think the statement that it is 'bad science' would be apparent to anyone with a scientific background (but Indie journalists). The sample was of only 11 men, and less than half showed the stated effect, so hardly conclusive. I also note that the research was done at the University of California but published in the Journal of the Brazilian Society or Urology, not exactly a mainstream journal. I suspect this research paper was rejected by many journals before finding one that would publish it.
The scientists are fighting back with Sense About Science.
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