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Pseudoscience
of Animals and Plants
A Teacher's Guide to Non-Scientific Beliefs
by
John Richard Schrock
PREPOSTEROUS
PLANTS
Your
grandparents would have laughed at the idea of playing music
to your houseplants to help them grow. However, with the
publication of the best-selling The Secret Life of Plants
in 1973 by Tompkins and Bird, a substantial number of Americans
embraced some botanical nonsense and much of it still lingers
in our public domain. People who would never give credence
to UFO’s were easily won over to the unlikely claim that
plants can detect when you approach with a razor and herbicide
on your mind, or that plants will grow to please you, or
that humans and plants have force fields and auras! “Do
you sing to your plant” will more likely draw a sober reply
than an incredulous chuckle. Acceptance of this plant mysticism
was high because the “Secret Life” book purported to report
a wide array of solid “scientific experiments,” thus making
this one of the most elaborate modern cases of pseudoscience
known. Some assertions and possible teacher strategies
follow:
“Whether
awake or asleep, we ought to never allow ourselves to be
persuaded of the truth of anything unless on the evidence
of our reason. And it must be noted that I say of our reason,
and not of our imagination or our senses.”
-Rene
Descartes
TWENTY
“SCIENCE ATTITUDES”
. .
. modified from Bronowski (1978), Diederich (1967), and
Whaley & Surratt (1967).
1.
Empiricism. Simply said, a scientist prefers to
“look and see.” You do not argue about whether it is raining
outside--just stick a hand out the window. Underlying this
is the belief that there is one real world following constant
rules in nature, and that we can probe that real world and
build our understanding–it will not change on us. Nor does
the real world depend upon our understanding–we do not “vote”
on science.
2.
Determinism. “Cause-and-effect” underlie everything.
In simple mechanisms, an action causes a reaction, and effects
do not occur without causes. This does not mean that some
processes are not random or chaotic. But a causative agent
does not alone produce one effect today and another effect
tomorrow.
3.
A belief that problems have solutions. Major problems
have been tackled in the past, from the Manhattan Project
to sending man to the moon. Other problems such as pollution,
war, poverty, and ignorance are seen as having real causes
and are therefore solvable–perhaps not easily, but possible.
4.
Parsimony. Prefer the simple explanation to the
complex: when both the complex earth-centered system with
epicycles and the simple Copernican sun-centered system
explain apparent planetary motion, we chose the simpler.
5.
Scientific manipulation. Any idea, even though it
may be simple and conform to apparent observations, must
usually be confirmed by work that teases out the possibility
that the effects are caused by other factors.
6.
Skepticism. Nearly all statements make assumptions
of prior conditions. A scientist often reaches a dead end
in research and has to go back and determine if all of the
assumptions made are true to how the world operates.
7.
Precision. Scientists are impatient with vague statements:
A virus causes disease? How many viruses are needed to
infect? Are any hosts immune to the virus? Scientists
are very exact and very “picky.”
8.
Respect for paradigms. A paradigm is our overall
understanding about how the world works. Does a new concept
“fit” with our overall understanding or does it fail to
weave in with our broad knowledge of the world. If it doesn't
fit, it is “bothersome” and the scientist goes to work to
find out if the new concept is flawed or if the paradigm
must now be altered.
9.
A respect for power of theoretical structure. Diederich
describes how a scientist is unlikely to adopt the attitude:
“That is all right in theory but it won't work in practice.”
He notes that theory is “all right” only if it does work
in practice. Indeed the rightness of the theory is in the
end what the scientist is working toward; no science facts
are accumulated at random. (This is an understanding that
many science fair students must learn!)
10.
Willingness to change an opinion. When Harold Urey,
author of one textbook theory on the origin of the moon's
surface, examined the moon rocks bought back from the Apollo
mission, he immediately recognized this theory did not fit
the hard facts laying before him. “I’ve been wrong!” he
proclaimed without any thought of defending the theory he
had supported for decades.
11.
Loyalty to reality. Dr. Urey above did not convert
to just any new idea, but accepted a model that matched
reality better. He would never have considered holding
to an old conclusion just because it was associated with
his name.
12.
Aversion to superstition and an automatic preference
for scientific explanation. No scientist can know all
of the experimental evidence underlying current science
concepts and therefore must adopt some views without understanding
their basis. A scientist rejects superstition and prefers
science paradigms out of an appreciation for the power of
reality-based knowledge.
13.
A thirst for knowledge, an “intellectual drive.”
Scientists are addicted puzzle-solvers. The little piece
of the puzzle that doesn’t fit is the most interesting.
However, as Diederich notes, scientists are willing to live
with incompleteness rather than “. . . fill the gaps with
off-hand explanations.”
14.
Suspended judgment. Again Diederich describes: “A
scientist tries hard not to form an opinion on a given issue
until he has investigated it, because it is so hard to give
up opinions already formed, and they tend to make us find
the facts that support the opinions . . . There must be,
however, a willingness to act on the best hypothesis that
one has time or opportunity to form.”
15.
Awareness of assumptions. Diederich describes how
a good scientist starts by defining terms, making all assumptions
very clear, and reducing necessary assumptions to the smallest
number possible. Often we want scientists to make broad
statements about a complex world. But usually scientists
are very specific about what they “know” or will say with
some certainty: “When these conditions hold true, the usual
outcome is such-and-such.”
16.
Ability to separate fundamental concepts from the irrelevant
or unimportant. Some young science students get bogged
down in observations and data that are of little importance
to the concept they want to investigate.
17.
Respect for quantification and appreciation of mathematics
as a language of science. Many of nature's relationships
are best revealed by patterns and mathematical relationships
when reality is counted or measured; and this beauty often
remains hidden without this tool.
18.
An appreciation of probabilities and statistics.
Correlations do not prove cause-and-effect, but some pseudoscience
arises when a chance occurrence is taken as “proof.” Individuals
who insist on an all-or-none world and who have little experience
with statistics will have difficulty understanding the concept
of an event occurring by chance.
19.
An understanding that all knowledge has tolerance limits.
All careful analyses of the world reveal values that scatter
at least slightly around an average point; a human's core
body temperature is about so many degrees and objects fall
with a certain rate of acceleration, but there is some variation.
There is no absolute certainty.
20.
Empathy for the human condition. Contrary to popular
belief, there is a value system in science, and it is based
on humans being the only organisms that can “imagine” things
that are not triggered by stimuli present at the immediate
time in their environment; we are, therefore, the only creatures
to “look” back to our past and plan forward to our future.
This is why when you read a moving book, you imagine yourself
in the position of another person and you think “I know
what the author means and feels.” Practices that ignore
this empathy and resultant value for human life produce
inaccurate science. (See Bronowski for more examples of
this controversial “scientific attitude.”)
In
1966, a researcher named Backster connected a plant to a
polygraph and reported that plants responded to his intent
to damage the plant. He reported that electrodes that usually
measure galvanic skin response in humans were tracing a
response to his decision to burn a leaf with a match before
he reached for the book of matches! The plant was obviously
reacting to his thoughts, he concluded.
-Do
polygraphs really indicate people’s thoughts when used as
“lie detectors” aside from their use here?
-How
“big” were the experimental results on the chart compared
to random “noise”?
-Were
the results repeatable? Were readings the same when the
same experimenter repeated identical runs? Do other experimenters
get the same readings as well?
-Is
this proof for a cause-and-effect connection between a person’s
thoughts and the plant’s purported reaction?
Backster
demonstrated to a Yale group that a plant’s galvanometer
response changes just before a spider scampers away from
the researcher, and proclaimed “. . . each of the spider’s
decisions to escape was being picked up by the plant, causing
a reaction in the leaf.”
-Do
spiders actually “decide” to escape just like humans consciously
“decide” to act?
-Why
would a plant respond to spider “thoughts” and not to the
myriad decisions of the people in the room working the experiment?
When
many researchers could not detect any galvanometer responses
by plants, Backster “realized” that plants could be put
into a faint by humans.
-Is
this really evidence for this?
-Can
we accept results as scientific if they only work for some
people?
Backster
measured the reactions of plants to his killing of brine
shrimp in boiling water; they reacted “. . . in a ratio
that was 5 to 1 against the possibility of chance.”
-Is
5-to-1 against the possibility of chance a “significant”
indication that something didn't happen by chance?
. .
. and so the book goes on and on reporting fabulous claims.
Next
Section:
- water dousing with willow or other
y-shaped plant roots or branches
- breeding extinct mammoths
from frozen mammoth egg cells
- the "hundredth monkey
phenomenon"
- animals out-of-range
- extinct critters
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