By Steven Novella, MD, Yale School of Medicine
In the Age of Information, differentiating between real science and pseudoscience seems to be simultaneously easier and harder. How can we separate the two and acknowledge a grey area in between?
Is anthropogenic global warming a legitimate science or a pseudoscience, as some claim? What about cryptozoology, the study of unusual creatures unknown to current science, such as Bigfoot, the Lochness Monster, or the Chupacabra? How about string theory, that is held by prominent cosmologists of today, or ESP, psi research? Are these legitimate sciences? Are they on the fringe of science or are they pseudosciences?
What is Pseudoscience?
The term pseudoscience refers to beliefs and practices that claim to be scientific but lack the true method and essence of science. They have the patina of legitimate science, but something has gone wrong.
Pseudoscience goes beyond just making a few errors or a few sloppy practices. The methods are so flawed that the entire endeavor is suspect. The practice doesn’t even warrant the label of legitimate science. In reality, there is not a clean division between pristine science on one end and rank pseudoscience on the other, but a continuum or spectrum between these two extremes.
This is a transcript from the video series Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
The Grey Zone
Many legitimate sciences may incorporate one or more features normally associated with pseudoscience. A well-trained, respected, successful scientist may still make errors in judgment, use poor methodology, and may over-interpret their results. Some pseudoscientists may occasionally get something right. They may use some legitimate or valid scientific methods to promote their ideas and beliefs. In the middle, between these two extremes of science and pseudoscience, there is a fuzzy grey zone, the borderlands between legitimate science and what Carl Sagan has called the “cheap imitation.”
Philosophers call the difficulty in drawing a sharp line between the two ends of the spectrum the “demarcation problem.” However, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t sciences that are mostly legitimate and other practices that are hopelessly pseudoscientific. Remember, that is the false continuum legible fallacy—the denial of two extremes of a continuum simply because there is no sharp demarcation line between the two of them. This fuzziness in the middle does not mean that these two extremes do not exist and that we cannot meaningfully speak about them. The key is to recognize the features of pseudoscience and the features of legitimate science.
Learn more about several specific examples of pseudoscience
Recognizing Pseudosciences
Examining extreme cases of pseudoscience is like a doctor studying an advanced form of a disease. The features will be much more obvious and extreme. They will therefore help a doctor to recognize the more subtle signs and milder forms of the pathology. For this reason, it’s instructive to examine those with belief systems which, while they purport to be scientific, are on the fringe of science, like cold fusion, cryptozoology, and belief in UFOs, for example. Some people may denigrate spending any time on such beliefs because they’re on the fringe and are unusual. But by studying the fringes of science, we will learn a great deal about legitimate science and how to do the best science possible.
In the same way, we can study these extreme pseudosciences and develop a picture of what extreme pseudoscientific pathological features have in common. We also will then see the patterns or the commonality among them. What are the types of cognitive flaws that those practicing pseudosciences tend to make? It is an excellent opportunity for studying the features of what is even sometimes called “pathological science.”
Learn more about how to think about thinking itself
How Pseudoscientists Use Science
In essence, pseudoscientists use the processes of science, superficial processes, or similarities of science to science—to scientifically rationalize a conclusion that they wish to be true, rather than using the methods of science to determine if their belief is true or not. What they have failed to do is make a concerted effort, therefore, to prove their own theories wrong. That should always be the first step of any scientist. When you come up with a new idea or hypothesis, the first step is to do everything possible to disprove your own theory. Find every way possible to conduct an experiment or an observation that can falsify the theory. When the theory or the hypothesis has survived every attempt you can think of to prove it wrong, only then is it reasonable to give it provisional assent, to think this is a theory that may be true. Then, it’s a good idea to check with your colleagues, publish your results in peer-reviewed journals, and see what other scientists believe. Can they think of any methods you missed that could be an alternative to the theory that you have or that could potentially prove it wrong?
Lloyd Pye
The Galileo Process is a common red flag for pseudoscience. In this case, far-reaching claims that overturn entire segments of well-established science are extrapolated from very little research or small bits of evidence.
One example of this “alternative science” is a book written by a researcher named Lloyd Pye called, Everything You Know is Wrong, Book One: Human Origins. This results from this chain reaction of pseudoscientific claims. Pye believes, for example, that there were ancient civilizations unknown to modern archeology, that aliens were somehow involved in human history—even evolution—and that this ties into observations of Big Foot and other humanoid creatures unknown to science. In each case, when he has a specific explanation or a specific claim that conflicts with archeology, paleontology, biology, or even modern physics. He simply dismisses the modern findings of science and replaces them with yet another pseudoscientific belief system—what I called “chain reaction”. By the end of it, you have replaced all of science with an alternative version of reality, or the idea that everything scientists claim must therefore be wrong.
Learn more about the nature of perception
Neal Adams
Another example is the comic book artist turned pseudoscientist, Neal Adams, who is a proponent of the hollow or growing Earth idea. This is the notion that the planet Earth was much smaller in the historical past and has been slowly increasing in size over time, by the generation of new matter. He believes this is true because the continents of the Earth fit together like puzzle pieces. We know that they do fit together to some extent because of plate tectonics, but he thinks they fit together all the way around because at one point in time they were all connected on a small Earth, which later expanded with the oceans filling in the cracks that emerged in between.
However, there are major scientific problems with this theory. Where is this new matter coming from? How is gravity increasing on the Earth? If all of the planets of the solar system were increasing, as he believes, how could their orbits be stable? Each time one of these reasonable scientific objections is raised to this theory, he simply waves his hand and wipes away another discipline of science. “Perhaps it’s magnetism,” he says, “that holds the planets in the orbits and not gravity.” Now, all of gravitation and magnetism has to be rethought to fix this problem with the growing Earth theory. He also adds spontaneous creation of matter from nothing. This is something that simply is unknown to physics.
There is the generation of virtual pairs of particles, but then they immediately annihilate each other. But the creation of new stable matter from nothing would violate the conservation of matter and energy, a very well-established law of physics. His growing Earth hypothesis would also violate much of what we know about from modern geology, plate tectonics, and volcanism, for example. Again, he would overturn virtually all of modern science that touches on his theories, to protect or defend his one idea that he does not want to surrender.
Learn more about the vital role that memories play in critical thinking
D. D. Palmer
You’ll often find pseudoscientists making the hasty generalization logical fallacy basing far-reaching principles on a single piece of, perhaps, unreliable evidence
An excellent example of this is D. D. Palmer, the father of chiropractic. He based the principles of subluxation theory on a single case of the alleged curing of a deaf individual with neck manipulation. He then extrapolated from this all of chiropractic theory, at least the classic theory of subluxation, or the notion that there is a blockage in the flow of some essence or life force that he called innate intelligence. This innate intelligence traveling through the spinal cord and the nerves is what keeps the organs and the parts of the body healthy. The blockage of that flow, therefore, causes illness, disease, and symptoms. He believed that he freed up the flow of this life energy in this patient, enabling them to hear and curing their deafness. At the time though, he was not aware that the nerves that subsume hearing in at no point pass through the neck. So there isn’t any plausibility to the notion that manipulating the neck can relieve the underlying neurological pathways that we need to hear.
Iridology
Another example is the founder of Iridology. Iridology is the notion that the iris of the eyes reflects the health and disease of the whole body. This is based upon a general approach called the homunculus approach to diagnosis, the belief that the entire self is represented in one small part or piece of the body, in this case, the iris of the eye. The founder of Iridology made a single observation of an owl who had broken its wing and he observed that a gold fleck in the owl’s eye went away when the wing was healed. From this single observation, he elaborated on the entire principle of the homunculus-based notion that all diseases and ailments can be diagnosed and even predicted by simply looking at the random colors of the flecks in a patient’s eye. Principles may not be based on just a simple or a single observation, but on a philosophical idea, a philosophy that itself has not been empirically tested or developed as a scientific theory or discipline.
Life Energy
The notion of life energy is a pre-scientific idea, but it forms the basis of many so-called “alternative therapies” like therapeutic touch or Reiki, acupuncture, straight chiropractic, and even homeopathy to some degree. Before having a thorough understanding of all of the physiology, anatomy, biochemistry, and the processes that go to make up a living organism, it was hypothesized that there must be some life energy that gives life to some things while others remain inanimate. In the final analysis, it was really a placeholder, an argument from ignorance, if you will. Whatever we didn’t understand at the time, that’s what life energy did.
Eventually, we were able, however, to explain all the processes of life, at least to a reasonable degree of detail and there simply was nothing left for life energy to do. It was a philosophical idea of how the body works, never supported or tested by science. Now, it’s an obsolete philosophical idea, but it still forms the core principle of many healing modalities.
Learn more about logical fallacies
Hulda Clarke
Another aspect of pseudoscience is that simple answers are often offered to very complex or multi-factorial problems. One example of that is Hulda Clarke. She believed that liver flukes are the cause of all human diseases; therefore, all diseases can be cured by treating this liver fluke. Therefore, she has the cure for all disease, or at least she had before she died.
Common Questions About the Difference Between Science and Pseudoscience
Both pseudoscience and science purport to exalt evidence, yet only science reliably, repeatedly, and rigorously tests hypotheses to discover evidence which either supports or denies the hypothesis. Pseudoscience looks only for evidence that supports the hypothesis.
Although sometimes the line between science and pseudoscience can be hazy, what it ultimately comes down to is that pseudoscientific claims can be shaped to meet just about any outcome. In other words, they cannot be proven true or false, as opposed to a scientific claim.
To avoid articles based on pseudoscience, you should stay away from anything with exaggerated claims or claims that the article or product contains “secret medical knowledge.” Additionally, any reference to esoteric theories is probably pseudoscience.
Examples of pseudoscience include phrenology, homeopathy, full moon lunacy, astrology, and intelligent design.
