Ginkgo biloba: How psuedoscience becomes science

Ginkgo biloba is a species of plant that has been used in traditional Eastern medicine for thousands of years for memory enhancement and to treat dementia. Until recently, it has been largely ignored by modern medicine as one of hundreds of herbal medicines that have no real, verifiable benefit. It was largely considered to a pseudo-medicinal plant that was used by the "natural medicine" crowd that largely reject science-based medicine. That is not entirely the case any more, thanks to the careful work of a group of researchers that decided to test its effects while maintaining the rigorous standards set forth in the medical and scientific community.

Pierre Le Bars and his colleagues wanted to test if Ginkgo biloba could be used to safely treat symptoms of dementia in patients with Alzheimer's, so they set forth on creating a rather standard, time-tested experimental design -- a placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized trial with a fairly large sample size (309). Great care was taken to control extraneous variables and prevent bias, which is exactly what makes this such a good study.

Since Le Bars and company only wanted to test for the effects of Ginkgo biloba on patients' symptoms of dementia, they only selected patients with no other serious medical problems. This is an important control that helped the scientists make sure that no other condition was either negatively or positively affecting the patients' symptoms. Le Bars and his colleagues also controlled for the placebo effect, which is a phenomenon that causes some people to have either perceived or real improvement in a medical condition even though the treatment has no real pharmacological effect. They did this by giving part of the sample a placebo (a sham medicine containing no active ingredients) whilst telling the patients they are receiving Ginkgo biloba. This group is known as the control group, while the group that actually receives the Ginkgo biloba is known as the experimental group. This allows the researchers to compare the two groups. Ginkgo biloba could only be said to have a real benefit to these patients if it performs significantly better than the placebo. If it works equally well, than taking Ginkgo biloba could be said to be no better for dementia than taking sugar pills.

Le Bars and the other researchers were also aware that they had to be careful not to allow bias to slip into the study and skew the results. To do this, they implied a tried-and-true technique: they double-blinded the study. Blinding a study simply means that you keep which group is getting the placebo and which is getting the real thing a secret to the patients. This prevents the patients who are getting the placebo from knowing, therefore allowing the placebo effect to work. Double-blinding a study means that both the patients and those administering the treatment don't know which is placebo and which is not. This prevents the researchers from either consciously or subconsciously giving away any hints to the patients, and is further protection from bias. Le Bars, et al. also prevented bias by utilizing standardized tests for dementia that were applied in a consistently-controlled manner. So, this study was set up in a fashion that made it all-but-impossible to influence one way or the other, as neither the researchers nor the patients had a clue who was getting the real thing and measurements were taken in the exact same manner every single time.

The fact that 309 subjects were used in this study also adds to its validity, because one cannot perform meaningful statistical analysis on a small sampling of subjects. With a small sample size there is more of a chance that outliers will skew the results, there is less certainty that the selected individuals represent the general population, and there is more of a chance that extraneous variables enter into play in a significant role.

So, what did Le Bars and his crew find? Astonishingly, what was at the time most often dismissed as a bogus remedy actually was found to have a significant effect on patients already suffering from dementia. By the end of the 52-week study, the experimental group fared much better than the control group. In fact, the control group continued to decline while the experimental group's symptoms actually improved over the year. What was once pseudoscience is actually being taken seriously in the scientific community now because of this evidence. That doesn't mean it's all over, though. Other scientists are still having a bit of trouble replicating the study, and studies that investigated Ginkgo biloba's effects on preventing the onset of dementia have come up empty handed. Clearly, more work needs to be done, but the important part of the story is that this natural remedy is being taken seriously by the scientific community because people playing by the rules of science found something very interesting. This is predominantly because the scientific community, as well as the mind of the individual scientist, is primed to change its views when new, credible evidence is presented.

The Study:

Le Bars, P.L., M.M. Katz, N. Berman, T.M. Itil, A.M. Freedman, and A.F. Schatzberg. 1997. A placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized trial of an extract of Ginkgo biloba for dementia. North American EGb Study Group. The Journal of the American Medical Association 278(16):1327-1332. (PDF)

Is God a Nihilist?

Plenty of apologists, such as William Lane Craig, believe that atheism leads towards nihilism, which can be defined as a philosophy that asserts existence and life are without any meaning whatsoever. This is presumably due to the belief that since God created humans for a purpose, that gives our life meaning. From this view, however, I fail to see how the argument doesn't apply to God, as well.

God was not created for any purpose because, well, he wasn't created. He has existed always; He's the last link in the causal chain. This means, that by this argument, God's existence must have no purpose, and assuming that God is a reasonable fellow, he should accept the philosophy of nihilism. If this be the case, we can also see that the purpose that God created us for is arbitrary and absurd, thus we must also accept nihilism even in a theistic world.

Any argument against this, seems to me, to also be favorable to the argument in favor of non-theistic arguments against nihilism as well, which negates any arguments against atheism that apply the false assumption that meaning can only exist with God. Suppose God creates his own purpose. Well, suppose that man creates his own, much like Sartre and other existentialists suggest. Suppose God is just innately endowed with meaning. Well, again, suppose that man, either through inheritance of certain traits or the influence of the environment, is endowed with certain innate drives that give his life meaning. Nothing, as far as I can see, can save only God from nihilism.

Physicalism and the Mind

Physicalism can most accurately be defined as the metaphysical thesis that everything is either physical or "supervenes" on the physical (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). In simpler terms, one can say that it is the idea that everything that exists can be described either as a physical thing (i.e. matter or energy) or a consequence of the interaction of physical things. I happen to be a tentative physicalist. It's my working assumption, although I don't claim to be even remotely certain, and I'm very doubtful that we could ever come to know that something non-physical exists or not. I guess one could say that I am a physicalist in the sense that matter and energy (and the things that supervene upon them) are the only things I believe to exist, as opposed to believing that matter and energy are the only things that exist.

Explaining consciousness is perhaps one of the greatest challenges to a physicalist at this point, which is one of the major contentions that opponents of physicalism have against the principle. Being a tentative physicalist, I really only feel the need to demonstrate that it is possible for physicalism to account for consciousness as opposed to verifying the thesis. That, along with the application of Occam's Razor, is enough to maintain my skepticism of claims to anything not supervenient to the physical. I fully admit that neurology is much, much too young a field to really help verify that physicalism does account for the mind, and thus will refrain from any arguments about how brain functions correlate quite well to mental states. I assume that both physicalists and its opponents accept this as a matter of fact, so I don't believe it to be of any use to argue on this point.

So, there are really only two questions to be answered here. First, how do physicalists suppose that mental states arise from physical phenomena? and second, is it possible? Here, I'll only be answering the first (for now).

Physicalists most often suppose that the mind is a product of complex interactions happening within the neural network of the brain. The neural network of the brain, of course, is purely physical. Neurons are made of atoms, and neural networks are essentially large collections of neurons that interact with each other through chemo-electrical connections. This, according to the physicalist, is enough to account for the phenomenon that we call the mind. One may assert that the mind, or certain aspects of the mind, have no physical properties and thus clearly cannot be physical, but this, in my opinion, doesn't take into account the idea of supervenience.

Physicalists rarely assert that the mind is a physical object, but instead assert that it supervenes on the physical. This idea of supervenience seems a little complicated, but it really is quite simple. To say that a set of properties (A) supervenes on another set (B), it simply means that a difference in A-properties requires there to be a difference in B-properties, or that a similarity in B-properties require similarities in A-properties (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). It's important to stress that for something to supervene on another thing, they must not only be correlated but must also be causally linked (a change in B must cause a change in A). So, the physicalist believes that if two minds are different in a particular way, the two brains must be different in a particular way; and if two minds are similar in a particular manner, then the two brains must be similar in a particular manner; and that the similarities and differences of different minds are solely caused by similarities and differences within the brain.

The mind can then be described as a complex pattern that arises from interactions within the neural network of the brain. The staggering complexity of the brain is thought to create processes that don't seem to be able to be pinned down to any particular simple physical interaction, not much unlike how a school of fish seems to behave in a fashion that goes well beyond the relatively simple behaviors of any particular fish. And, just as it seems as though the behavior of fish in large groups tend to cause the movements of the school as a whole, it is thought that the operations of the physical components of the brain tend to cause mental operations to occur. These mental operations aren't "physical" in the most concrete sense of the word (they aren't physical objects), but they are not non-physical either. They instead is supervenient or consequent of the physical, or a process of the physical.

An Attempt at Political Satire

These are just a few satirical takes on popular political slogans.

"Don't Tread on Me"

In a 2010 poll, only 16% of Tea Party members supported gay marriage and over half believe that too much has been made of the problems facing black people in recent years.

"Yes We Can"

Obama completely followed through on only five of his top 25 campaign promises as rated by PolitiFact.com.

"Pro-Life"

 31% of the American population are both pro-life and pro-death penalty (Gallup 2010).

"God Bless America"

This one's pretty much self-explanatory. 

"One Man, One Woman"

Same-sex or other "non-traditional" marriages are often regarded as immoral by conservative Christians for "Biblical" reasons. The Bible, however, contains multiple examples of marriages that differ from the "one man, one woman" tradition (Skeptic's Annotated Bible).

Why Science Education is Failing

Science education can effectively be described as an endeavor to correct preconceived misconceptions that students have about scientific ideas and replace them with scientifically accurate explanations while encouraging scientific thinking. Every student is informed by past experiences that relate to various scientific topics, but many of those experiences are intuitively interpreted in a manner that doesn't agree with a current scientific understanding of the subject. It's the educator's job to facilitate a transition between these intuitive models of the world to a scientific one. Frustratingly, however, it seems like the more informal past experience learners have in a particular area of study, the harder the misconceptions are to correct. This is evidenced in the fact that some of the most prevalent misconceptions that science learners have throughout their education relate to such things as seasons, vision and the properties of light, and photosynthesis (things we come into contact with on a regular basis). Most importantly, there is a considerable amount of evidence to suggest that these misconceptions are, for the most part, going uncorrected throughout elementary, secondary, and higher education. Clearly, something is fundamentally wrong with how we are teaching science in this country.

Are we closer to the Sun in summer or winter? If you step back from a mirror, do you see more of yourself? (I couldn't believe the answer to this one until I tested it.) From where does a seed, weighing a few grams, gain the mass that it acquires to become a tree that weighs tons? These questions are answered incorrectly by a surprising number of Harvard graduates, not to mention the middle schoolers that are, according to curriculum content standards, supposed to know the answers (see resources linked below). This demonstrates a profound problem with science education in this country, and that is that teachers often fail to take the students' preconceived notions into account before they teach them. Traditional science education is taught like most other subjects are traditionally taught -- students are treated like empty vessels that teachers act as pitchers that fill the students with knowledge. But, students are not empty vessels. They have past experiences, and they have put together their own explanations of those past experiences. Obviously, those explanations are not necessarily based upon rational thought and scientific inquiry, but instead are more likely to be based upon intuition. Teaching learners as if they are blank slates is problematic because it is like trying to construct a building upon a bad foundation. The traditional approach fails in two key areas, first by not taking into account the students' prior knowledge and second by not taking into account how students learn. When you realize that science been taught like this in America for decades upon decades, it's rather unsurprising that scientific illiteracy is rampant in the US.

The problem is so ingrained in science education in America today that it seems that nothing short of radical reform will do the trick. Future science teachers need to essentially teach in the opposite manner that traditional teachers teach. We've all experienced a traditional science classroom. You're lectured at for several class periods, and then you (ideally) perform a lab that seeks to confirm what you've already "learned" during lecture. Not only does this obviously not work, but it is actually counter-productive, robbing students of actually learning through hands-on experience. If a student is told what result they ought to get in an experiment, laboratory exercises become little more than following a recipe. When someone follows a recipe, the only thing they learn how to do is get the correct end result. Little to no higher order thinking or problem solving is going on in the heads of learners. The traditional "confirmatory" approach does little but encourage students to practice their rote memorization skills and follow directions properly, which is not even close to learning actual science.

Instead, the curriculum should be structured in a manner that encourages students to actually involve themselves in active inquiry about the content. Lessons should be taught in a way that enables the instructor to diagnose misconceptions in order to address them in a direct manner later on. Students should always have access to hands-on activities that not only give them meaningful experiential input but guide them in a way that keeps their minds on the task of learning the concepts ("hands-on/minds-on" as opposed to just "hands-on"). And, most importantly, teachers should, as much as possible without causing undue frustration, confusion, or time-management problems, step back into a facilitating role and let the students learn themselves instead of feeding them the answers. This constructivist approach to science education is radically different than the traditional approach to teaching, but it seems to me to be absolutely necessary given the problems we have seen arise within the education system. I'm skeptical that any real solutions can come from the top-down (every attempt made in the past has largely been a failure and have tended to make things worse), but this is the sort of thing that can easily come from the bottom-up, from teachers and professors of education.


Important Resources:

• A Private Universe (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 1987) - A video documentary on education research for grade 5-12.
• Minds of Our Own (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 1997) - A video documentary on education and learning for K-12 educators and parents.
• Private Universe Project in Science (Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 2011) - A nine-part workshop derived from work pioneered in Project STAR and is an extension of its award winning video, A Private Universe, complete with full bibliography and research citations.

What Is the Root of All Evil?

Whether it's Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, or Dan Barker, most prominent atheists portray themselves in a very anti-theistic manner. That is, not only do they disagree with the various claims made by theists, but they see theism itself as something dangerous and worth opposing directly. They see religion as a primary producer of evil in the world, and something that the world would obviously be better without. But, I think this view is a bit myopic. It demonstrates an obvious failure to peel back the layers and investigate the true root of the problem.

Now, let me be clear -- people do do evil things in the name of religion, and I believe that, as a global civilization, we would do better without it. But, getting rid of religion wouldn't be the panacea that many claim it to be, because religion, especially organized religion, is but a mere manifestation of the real problem. Organized religion is just a product of dogmatic, orthodox thinking, and that's the real root of most evil in this world.

Anywhere where people don't think for themselves, but instead rely on authoritarian or populist viewpoints to draw their thoughts for them, mass ignorance and injustice are likely to follow. This has been demonstrated throughout history time and time again, manifesting itself as a maxim in both secular and sectarian forms. When the Church had an authoritarian influence over much of medieval Europe, there were witch-hunts, inquisitions, crusades, serfdom, oppression, perpetual ignorance, and wide-spread superstition. The typical life was short, miserable, and terrifying. When the various totalitarian regimes asserted their authority over Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, China, and Cambodia, among others, in the 20th Century, much the same happened. The people of those countries were extraordinary unlucky that they were under such authoritarian rule in a time when technology was available that made it relatively easy to kill and oppress millions and wage war on a grand scale.

Clearly, if we can learn anything from what happened under the rule of ardent secularists like Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot, it's that the belief in God isn't really the problem. It goes deeper than that. It's not really the beliefs themselves that cause the danger, it's the belief that said beliefs cannot and should not be questioned. How much of a problem would the belief in witchcraft or communism be, if they could be actively questioned by individuals without fear of reprisal? The answer to that question is simple -- look at Western society today. No one is being burned at the stake; no one is promoting the collectivization of business and agriculture (at least no one that is being taken seriously). Why? Because not only do we know that witches don't pose any threat, and that communism simply doesn't work well, but we can also express those truths with no fear. It's the simple fact that we have the ability assess the evidence for ourselves and the freedom to express our honest opinion of them that protects us from the evils of dogmatism and orthodoxy.

This is not to say that we can now relax and let our guard down. On the contrary, we should certainly continue to push the limits of free expression. Freedom requires vigilance and an active participation in being free. It's not out of the question that we can sink back down to the depths of a thoughtless devotion to an idea. You must at least tread to keep afloat, having a thought of your own from time to time, but why not swim with fervency to the shore, walk out of the water, and don't look back?

The Logical Implications of "God as Being Itself."

The conceptualization of God as 'Being Itself' was, to my knowledge, first proposed by theologian Paul Tillich in the early 20th Century. It has been brought to my knowledge by a thoughtful blogger, discussant, and professional theologian with the pseudonym Metacrock (metacrock.blogspot.com). If you can get through his posts (sorry, Meta, your writing style is a bit... difficult), you'll find that they are extremely intelligent in nature and they actually pose even greater challenges to non-believers than the arguments of more well-known Christian apologists. His conception of God is fairly unique and has required substantial thought for me to comprehend it in a manner that enables me to write about it.

When it is said that God is defined as "Being Itself," it is meant in opposition to the idea that God is actually a being, that is a distinct entity that is what Metacrock refers to as "the big man in the sky" concept of God. So, according to Tillich and by extension Meta, God is not a being. But, if God is not a being, what exactly is He? How can a definition of God be meaningful without being a being? These questions seem to me to be serious problems of this view, especially to professed Christians like Metacrock, who hold onto the idea of a personal God.

First, we must understand the difference between entities and properties. An entity is "a thing with a distinct and independent existence," whereas a property is "an attribute, quality, or characteristic of something" (New Oxford American Dictionary). They are related in the sense that entities have properties and if something has properties, it is an entity. Properties are not entities, and entities are not properties, although we are required to define entities by their properties. This is a very important concept to grasp, because many times the syntax of a sentence does not make this distinction for us. Take, for example, the sentence, "The sky is blue." Most every English speaking person would understand what is being conveyed by this sentence. What it truly means is that the sky has the property of being blue. But, it could be interpreted incorrectly as "The sky and blue are synonyms." This, of course, is incorrect, and there is a category error involved in the logic behind the statement. "The sky" is an entity, whereas "blue" is a property. They cannot be the same thing.

The distinction between the conceptualization of God as "a being" and God as "Being Itself" is that the former treats God as a specific entity and the latter treats God as a specific property. A being is a type of entity, namely an animate one. The concept of God as "a being" holds that God is an entity with whatever properties the conceptualizer claims God to have. It is worth mentioning that this concept is not limited to the view that God is a "big man in the sky," as God doesn't need to be thought of as a being with a physical body or even a spatial existence. It just requires us to view God as a thing with properties. The concept that God is "Being Itself," however, does just the opposite — requiring us to view God as a essential property of all things as opposed to a thing itself.

"Being Itself" is an essential property of all entities. It, to the best of my understanding, can be defined as the property of existing. All entities must exist, by definition, and therefore, all entities have the property of existing. This makes the logical necessity of God seem self-evident, as the following syllogism demonstrates:

1. God is the property of existing.
2. Entities exist.
3. Therefore, God is.

The very fact that anything exists is enough to demonstrate that this conceptualization of God is factually true. If God is "Being Itself," then God is, although I'd struggle to say that God exists, and I would also say that it's nothing more than defining God into being by removing any meaningfulness of the word, much like the concept that "God is love" does. 

First, there is an inherent confusion when declaring that a property exists. What is really more correct is to say that an entity exists that has that property. Thus, if God is Being Itself (the property of existing), then it's not really correct to say that God exists, but instead it is more correct to say that all things which exist share the property known as God. 

Second, the idea that God is a property as opposed to an entity leads one to realize that God cannot have properties. Only entities have properties. God cannot be conscious or personal any more than the property "blue" can be salty. Properties cannot have properties, but instead can only be or not be the case in relation to an entity. Therefore, despite the fact that "God as Being Itself" must be, it cannot do anything other than be, and thus any real meaning behind the word is eliminated. This concept of God ultimately leads one to hold that God nothing more than an impersonal, unconscious, purposeless, emotionless, uncaring, albeit necessary state of affairs. So, where the concept of "God as a being" is meaningful, but is not supported by either logical necessity or empirical evidence, the concept of "God as Being Itself" is supported by logical necessity, but is devoid of all relevant meaning. This seems to be a prevailing theme in theology — a complete inability to have your cake and eat it too.