A few years ago, I met a Yoga master in my town, a soft-spoken and lanky man in his seventies. On his persuasion, I attended his Yoga sessions for a few weeks. I think I paid no attention to what the old man was lecturing before every session began mostly attended by people above 50 with health problems ranging from diabetes to hypertension. But I could barely turn my attention away from his sermon on one occasion when he started speaking about 'Kundalini'. His refrain was that Kundalini (which he translated as libidinal energy) could be awakened by rigorous Yogic meditation by creating a vacuum inside the body through 'sushumna nadi' (which he described was a channel in the spine that could be visualised only in yogic meditation).
From the rapt attention that he was getting from his audience, one can easily recongnise that most of those sitting cross-legged in front of him were vulnerable to superstitious and paranormal beliefs and ideas. Is there something in us humans that makes us all easily gullible when we are confronted by weird beliefs that have no scientific basis? Why do even smart people often fall prey to modern forms of superstitions such as psychic connection, naturopathy, homoeopathy, herbal de-toxification, Reiki, life force, negative energy, positive energy, chiropractice, biofeedback, organic food...?
There is no dearth of miracles in religious mythology and religions inspire the masses not with sophisticated doctrines of theology but by appealing to their gullibility about miracles. Jesus Christ is believed to have walked on water without any props, turned water into wine and Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven in a night journey known as Mi'raj. Those miracles happened long time back. In our own times, Sai Baba continues to bring out holy ash out of nowhere and politicians in India continue to consult astrologers, albeit secretly. Even as science has brought us progress which alleviated many of our problems and improved our health and increased our life expectancy, we still tend to rubbish science and scientific spirit and run after remedies and ideas unsupported by empirical evidence so dear to science. People drive cars, fly in planes and use mobile phones - things developed from technology based on science. But they are equally susceptible to irrationality as they simply turn to pseudosciences for relief, relaxation, wellness and happiness. Isn't it a a paradox and a mystery?
I am surprised when I find even educated people passionately defending Homoeopathy when I tell them it is a pseudoscience as it violates fundamental laws of science. When I asked one ardent advocate of Homoeopathy if he could prove any claimed pharmacological effectiveness of highly diluted Homoeopathic drugs, his response was weirder: that their pharmacological properties could not be tested in conventional labs exposed the limitation of those labs! In fact, he was admitting that the Homoeopathic substance, if tested in the labs, could not be distinguished from water, but he was not willing to abandon his belief, supported by his personal anecdotal 'evidence' and personal testimonies, that there was something in it which science could not understand.
Our vulnerablity to superstitions and our passion for paranormal things seem to stem from the human legacy of an inclination for finding easy and satisfying answers to what we feel as the unknown and the ungraspable. For example, we tend to attribute it to a psychic connection when we dream of someone and later comes to know that he dies at around that time. This legacy is the breeding ground where pseudosciences grow and perpetuate. For a rational person, a pseudoscience is easily distinguishable from science since the former is an idea that claims to be scientific though unsupported by any empirical evidence, however cleverly it uses scientific-sounding language to describe how it works.
Pseudosciences are unbelievably popular in areas of health care and they often appear as complementary and alternative medical systems that thrive without any scientific hypothesis or experimental data. The so-called health benefits of these systems are often accepted uncritically and these pseudoscientific practices will thrive as long we are driven by credulity. As Brian Dunning, the author of Skeptoid: Critical Analysis of Pop Phenomena says, human beings are naturally predisposed to be excited about any new weird stuff because we love the unexplained. His 40-minute video presentation Here Be Dragons identifies the 'red flags' that will help us identify pseudosciences.
Practioners of pseudosciences, according to Dunning, often use authoritative imagery (such as a lab coat, celebrity endorsement, certification from institutes and academies) to lend an appearance of credibility to their claims or invoke ancient wisdom (in the case of Chinese acupunture, Indian Ayurveda or Japanese Reiki) or appeal to our confirmation bias (our tendencies to remember events that coincide with our beliefs and ignore those that don't) or play on our inclination to confuse causation and correlation (we can say that eating rice causes black hair since people who eat lot of rice have black hair) or offer red herrings (often irrelevant piece of information that distracts from the topic, a tendency often found in conspiracy theories) or lay out proof by verbosity by offering huge volume of information, more claims and allegations on more subjects about more people and ideas than a person can ever possibly responds to or talk about mystic energy (using scientific word energy out of context) or allege suppression by authority (accusing the mainstream science of suppressing their claims and proofs) or brag that their products are all natural or attempt to secure ideological support (meaning political or religious backing).
Coming back to the question why we humans who are otherwise smart and intelligent are credulous when it comes to weird and supernatural beliefs Common argument is that they have placebo effects. Richard Dawkins, however, gives a Darwinian explanation to people's vulnerability to believe in things that are false such as religious faiths. He argues in The God Delusion that our propensity to believe in religion may be a by-product of our tendency to believe and obey our parents that natural selection has built in children's brains for survival benefits. The flip side of trusting obedience, according to Dawkins, is slavish gullibility: "The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses."
The new age superstitions are mind viruses that can infect the minds of even intelligent people because our vulnerability to such bizarre ideas and religious beliefs are by-products of our childhood credulity and deference to authority, which are cognitive mechanisms or adaptations such as romantic love, attachment and empathy that have evolved for purposes of survival. Evolutionary psychiatrist Andy Thomson develops this concept to explain the human susceptibility to belief in supernatural things. In his recent lecture Why We Believe in God, he says that human mind, an integrated collection of problem-solving devices, has evolved over deep time. Our vulnerability to supernatural things, according to him, is a by-product of our ancient childhood adaptation for credulity just as our craving for fatty food and sweets, for example, are by-products of our ancient adaptations for fat and sugar crucial for our survival.
In most people, credulity often goes hand in hand with a distrust for science and it achievements and argue that science does not know everything. No scientist has ever said that science knows everything and if science knows everything science looses its purpose. But the advocates of pseudoscience often accuse science of engaging in a conspiracy to suppress their findings. This argument is very vocal among Homoeopathic practitioners when they say that big pharmaceutical companies are suppressing the truths about Homoeopathy's efficacy because they (the pharmaceutical companies) are making huge profit. This argument cannot be more silly. Instead of indulging in the expensive conspiracy of suppressing the 'truths' about Homoeopathy drugs, these pharmaceutical companies can easily pocket hefty profit by making very inexpensive Homoeopathy drugs that are nothing but heavily diluted solutions on sugar pills.
As Dawkins says in his documentary Enemies of Reason, today a war is being fought against reason and medical advances are challenged with irrational beliefs. "A third of us now spend over 1.6 billion pounds a year on superstitious alternative remedies which, as far as the evidence can show, don't work." Another industry that is built upon celebrity endorsement and uncritical acceptance is organic food. It is a two-billion pound industry. A recent research by British scientists shows that organic food gives no extra nutritional benefits over the ordinary cheaper foodstuff. The whole idea of organic farming is nonsense, but many intelligent people are enamoured of the extra health benefits offered by organic food. The quantity of animal manure, the human waste and the plant residue required for organic farming is so huge that we have to cut down millions of acres of forests in the world.
Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution that revolutionised food production in the 1960, debunks in an interview in 2000 the very concept of organic farming as ridiculous: "At the present time, approximately 80 million tons of nitrogen nutrients are utilised each year. If you tried to produce this nitrogen organically, you would require an additional 5 or 6 billion head of cattle to supply the manure. How much wild land would you have to sacrifice just to produce the forage for these cows?" He also figures out that even if we can use all the organic material that we have and get them back on the soil, we can't feed more than four billion people.
Such debunking is necessary when when pseudosciences take advantage of people's gullibility. That requires a rational and sceptical world view.
There is no dearth of miracles in religious mythology and religions inspire the masses not with sophisticated doctrines of theology but by appealing to their gullibility about miracles. Jesus Christ is believed to have walked on water without any props, turned water into wine and Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven in a night journey known as Mi'raj. Those miracles happened long time back. In our own times, Sai Baba continues to bring out holy ash out of nowhere and politicians in India continue to consult astrologers, albeit secretly. Even as science has brought us progress which alleviated many of our problems and improved our health and increased our life expectancy, we still tend to rubbish science and scientific spirit and run after remedies and ideas unsupported by empirical evidence so dear to science. People drive cars, fly in planes and use mobile phones - things developed from technology based on science. But they are equally susceptible to irrationality as they simply turn to pseudosciences for relief, relaxation, wellness and happiness. Isn't it a a paradox and a mystery?
I am surprised when I find even educated people passionately defending Homoeopathy when I tell them it is a pseudoscience as it violates fundamental laws of science. When I asked one ardent advocate of Homoeopathy if he could prove any claimed pharmacological effectiveness of highly diluted Homoeopathic drugs, his response was weirder: that their pharmacological properties could not be tested in conventional labs exposed the limitation of those labs! In fact, he was admitting that the Homoeopathic substance, if tested in the labs, could not be distinguished from water, but he was not willing to abandon his belief, supported by his personal anecdotal 'evidence' and personal testimonies, that there was something in it which science could not understand.
Our vulnerablity to superstitions and our passion for paranormal things seem to stem from the human legacy of an inclination for finding easy and satisfying answers to what we feel as the unknown and the ungraspable. For example, we tend to attribute it to a psychic connection when we dream of someone and later comes to know that he dies at around that time. This legacy is the breeding ground where pseudosciences grow and perpetuate. For a rational person, a pseudoscience is easily distinguishable from science since the former is an idea that claims to be scientific though unsupported by any empirical evidence, however cleverly it uses scientific-sounding language to describe how it works.
Pseudosciences are unbelievably popular in areas of health care and they often appear as complementary and alternative medical systems that thrive without any scientific hypothesis or experimental data. The so-called health benefits of these systems are often accepted uncritically and these pseudoscientific practices will thrive as long we are driven by credulity. As Brian Dunning, the author of Skeptoid: Critical Analysis of Pop Phenomena says, human beings are naturally predisposed to be excited about any new weird stuff because we love the unexplained. His 40-minute video presentation Here Be Dragons identifies the 'red flags' that will help us identify pseudosciences.
Practioners of pseudosciences, according to Dunning, often use authoritative imagery (such as a lab coat, celebrity endorsement, certification from institutes and academies) to lend an appearance of credibility to their claims or invoke ancient wisdom (in the case of Chinese acupunture, Indian Ayurveda or Japanese Reiki) or appeal to our confirmation bias (our tendencies to remember events that coincide with our beliefs and ignore those that don't) or play on our inclination to confuse causation and correlation (we can say that eating rice causes black hair since people who eat lot of rice have black hair) or offer red herrings (often irrelevant piece of information that distracts from the topic, a tendency often found in conspiracy theories) or lay out proof by verbosity by offering huge volume of information, more claims and allegations on more subjects about more people and ideas than a person can ever possibly responds to or talk about mystic energy (using scientific word energy out of context) or allege suppression by authority (accusing the mainstream science of suppressing their claims and proofs) or brag that their products are all natural or attempt to secure ideological support (meaning political or religious backing).
Coming back to the question why we humans who are otherwise smart and intelligent are credulous when it comes to weird and supernatural beliefs Common argument is that they have placebo effects. Richard Dawkins, however, gives a Darwinian explanation to people's vulnerability to believe in things that are false such as religious faiths. He argues in The God Delusion that our propensity to believe in religion may be a by-product of our tendency to believe and obey our parents that natural selection has built in children's brains for survival benefits. The flip side of trusting obedience, according to Dawkins, is slavish gullibility: "The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses."
The new age superstitions are mind viruses that can infect the minds of even intelligent people because our vulnerability to such bizarre ideas and religious beliefs are by-products of our childhood credulity and deference to authority, which are cognitive mechanisms or adaptations such as romantic love, attachment and empathy that have evolved for purposes of survival. Evolutionary psychiatrist Andy Thomson develops this concept to explain the human susceptibility to belief in supernatural things. In his recent lecture Why We Believe in God, he says that human mind, an integrated collection of problem-solving devices, has evolved over deep time. Our vulnerability to supernatural things, according to him, is a by-product of our ancient childhood adaptation for credulity just as our craving for fatty food and sweets, for example, are by-products of our ancient adaptations for fat and sugar crucial for our survival.
In most people, credulity often goes hand in hand with a distrust for science and it achievements and argue that science does not know everything. No scientist has ever said that science knows everything and if science knows everything science looses its purpose. But the advocates of pseudoscience often accuse science of engaging in a conspiracy to suppress their findings. This argument is very vocal among Homoeopathic practitioners when they say that big pharmaceutical companies are suppressing the truths about Homoeopathy's efficacy because they (the pharmaceutical companies) are making huge profit. This argument cannot be more silly. Instead of indulging in the expensive conspiracy of suppressing the 'truths' about Homoeopathy drugs, these pharmaceutical companies can easily pocket hefty profit by making very inexpensive Homoeopathy drugs that are nothing but heavily diluted solutions on sugar pills.
As Dawkins says in his documentary Enemies of Reason, today a war is being fought against reason and medical advances are challenged with irrational beliefs. "A third of us now spend over 1.6 billion pounds a year on superstitious alternative remedies which, as far as the evidence can show, don't work." Another industry that is built upon celebrity endorsement and uncritical acceptance is organic food. It is a two-billion pound industry. A recent research by British scientists shows that organic food gives no extra nutritional benefits over the ordinary cheaper foodstuff. The whole idea of organic farming is nonsense, but many intelligent people are enamoured of the extra health benefits offered by organic food. The quantity of animal manure, the human waste and the plant residue required for organic farming is so huge that we have to cut down millions of acres of forests in the world.
Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution that revolutionised food production in the 1960, debunks in an interview in 2000 the very concept of organic farming as ridiculous: "At the present time, approximately 80 million tons of nitrogen nutrients are utilised each year. If you tried to produce this nitrogen organically, you would require an additional 5 or 6 billion head of cattle to supply the manure. How much wild land would you have to sacrifice just to produce the forage for these cows?" He also figures out that even if we can use all the organic material that we have and get them back on the soil, we can't feed more than four billion people.
Such debunking is necessary when when pseudosciences take advantage of people's gullibility. That requires a rational and sceptical world view.
3 comments:
I quote from your piece. "A recent research by British scientists shows that organic food gives no extra nutritional benefits over the ordinary cheaper foodstuff. The whole idea of organic farming is nonsense, but many intelligent people are enamoured of the extra health benefits offered by organic food. The quantity of animal manure, the human waste and the plant residue required for organic farming is so huge that we have to cut down millions of acres of forests in the world."
What makes you trust this gentleman? In order to understand the world of research, one must first understand the world of capitalism and business. They are so tightly interwoven that it is almost wheels within wheels.
Organic food is nothing but use of natural means of growing food. There is absolutely no truth in the statement "cutting down millions of acres of trees."
All renewables (solar energy, wind energy, biomass based energy) are all distributed and totally fragmented. Hence it can never evebr be centralised. So, how the heck can a global Giant like Monsanto (which owns 90% of all GMO-based seeds and fertiliser companies in the world) control billions of acres of land mass, the resulting biomass, human waste, solar and wind energy?
They can't.They know it. Hence this whole tale of organic being "a novel concept" and all that crap.
Just as we ask why do rational human beings fall prey to such stories of "organic being good", we should instead ask ourselves, "is the way we are going resulting in the good of most, plants and animals included?"
The answer is obvious...we have already lost two islands in the sunderbands and they have had to relocate them.
So it is not a battle of rationale and the irrational people. It is the battle of our (we humans) knowledge versus the knowledge of the universe. And clearly, there is a mismatch.
Just as one homoeopathy doctor did not have an answer and appeared totally illogical and unintelligent, one can point to several and not one "allopathic" doctors who nothing short of murderers. Who know as little of the working of the human body and its interrelatedness as the uneducated and illiterate man on the street.
It all boils to only one thing. The extent to which we are connected to ourselves, deeply and not superficially. Then you do things instinctively and lo and behold they naturally turn out right.
Latha
Recently I listened to a cryptic commentary on the prestigious National Geographic channel. The anchor deadpanned - Visit the maldives within the next FIVE years - You may not be able to visit this beautiful country after tha. The Maldives will be submerged under water and thus will be wiped off from the map of planet earth.
Some other 'prophesies' have already come about, as FG has rightly pointed out. Our neighbouring island nation Srilanka is doomed - half the country will be submerged in the sea in the next decade or so.
Global Warming is not very far away from our lives. We are witness to the intransigencies of nature, which are obviously the results of man's 'autocratic' rule of the planet. If we wait till the floods reach our doorsteps, it might be too late.
Organic Farming may sound elitist and fashionable, but that may not be the case. The Indian Independence Movement was also an elitist and 'imported' idea, but it is a fact that the elite of this country who were at the helm of the movement.
And anyhow Organic Farming does not come under pseudosciences.
Those who practise Modern Medicine, whom FG sarcastically calls 'allopaths', a term not in use, is that branch of science which has revealed to the world the changes that are taking place on our planet. And other planets as well. The crack in the Ozone Layer and Global Warming - all these are scientifically researched and documented realities, much as anyone may argue for or against it.
I have no much knowledge about Organic Farming, so I shall refrain from making any comments on the same.
If one or a hundred or more 'allopaths' misdiagnose or treat patients wrongly, the fault lies not with Modern Medicine, but with the 'allopaths' themselves. Either he has not learnt his lessons properly or has not understood Hippocrates oath.
Modern Medicine is the ONLY scientific educational system in the world wherein the curriculum is absolutely the same. That is to say that a course in Medicine is the same throughout the world, regardless of the language, state or country. The quality of teaching, medical equipments, hospital facilities and practical exposure to various diseases may vary from institute to institute, from state to another state, and from country to country.
And come on, one cannot compare a so called 'allopath', who has undergone a rigorous six year term in all aspects of the human body, ( I am told that a medical student has to dissect a minimum of three hundred human bodies in the first one and a half years, and attend to three hundred and fifty deliveries in the final year and as many number of surgeries), to a homeopath, who has no knowledge whatsoever of the inner workings of a human body.
That is why there are no 'Homeopathic' levels of Blood Pressure, Glucose or Cholesterol. All these are findings of Modern Medicine, which relies only on scientific knowledge. That it keeps changing just goes to show the vibrancy of scientific rationale.
Allopaths can be cutthroat, or even murderers as FG claims, but they cannot be termed pseudos or quacks - they have a whole system in place to fall back on - and to look forward to, instead of barking up the same tree.
Post a Comment