August 29, 2011
To be posted on nobabies.net
Michael Shermer
Scientific American
415 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10017-1111
Dear Michael Shermer:
I was pleased by your recent article. (Michael Shermer What is Pseudoscience? SCIENTIFIC AMERICA vol. 305 no. 3 September, 2011 page 92) I had come to dread reading your column. Honestly I had thought, “This is no quest for truth. This is a cardboard cutout of a person ranting dogma.” [ed. note: I had aready posted this letter when the copy I had mailed to him was returned, so I immediatley emailed the letter. I was happy to receive a prompt and courteous reply in which Dr. Shermer mildly inquired just when he had sounded like a cardboard cutout. I looked through my records and found no such article by him. So I retract the statement and deeply apologize. The following remarks on how much I liked this recent article, however, stand. 9/14/2011]
That I cannot say about your most recent. It is reflection from a real person. I have never known anybody to accomplish that change before. [ed. note: assuming any change was desirable of course.] Well done.
Having offered my admiration, I hate to quibble with your definition of true science, but I shall. You offer a sort of a check lest. Does the idea
?
If none of the above, then it is not science. So here is a theory. If you take 1,000 human beings and let their numbers rise and stay above 1,000 for 10 generations – fertility permitting – you will have a profound fertility crash. The evidence is in an article taken from a study of Iceland genealogies. (An Association Between Kinship And Fertility of Human Couples. Agnar Helgason, Snaebjoern Palsson, Daniel F. Guobjartsson, Pordur Kristjansson and Karl Stefanson, SCIENCE vol. 329 8 February 2008 page 813)
The theory antedates the publication. Indeed I had been begging people to do such a study without any effect. When the study was completed I felt vindicated, although the study itself does not predict such a profound and abrupt drop as I have other evidence for.
Had I been heeded, then I should claim to be a scientist by your definition. If indeed I was heeded, if I was influential in making it happen, nobody has so far let me know. So let us assume that I had no influence.
In that case what I have done is, by your definition, pseudoscience. But it might be science and I not know.
Consider a person who decides to study the effect of memory suppressing drugs on woodpeckers. So he puts a woodpecker into his Skinner box and the bird proceeds to destroy the mechanism. It would be very expensive to build a sufficiently robust device that could stand up to the woodpecker, so he uses pigeons instead. I would say he was doing real science even though he had no impact and made no contribution.
The thing is that your definition comes only after the fact. So I shall probably stick with the falsifiability definition: it is science only if it is liable to disproof but has not yet been disproved. (Everything gets disproved eventually. Yes, I know that’s not falsifiable. So let’s say the half life of a scientific “fact” is thirty years.) I pass according to that definition, even if Freud, string theory, studies of consciousness, grand economic models (Ouch. I have one. My economic model is that when there are no longer any people, nothing will be worth anything on the market.), and notions of intelligent extraterrestrials all fail.
But I acknowledge your authentic attempt to come to grips with a difficult subject, and as such I found it valuable, maybe even paradigm changing.
Sincerely,
M. Linton Herbert MD
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