What I learned at Yearly Kos Part II: Science Friday :-)

I have just finished a Ph.D. in genetics and, like pretty much every scientist I know, am horrified by this administration's really just criminal track record when it comes to distorting, manipulating, and ignoring scientific advice.

But it wasn't until Yearly Kos that it sort of crystallized for me: the most important thing I think each of us can do to discredit the pseudoscience that has become the basis for so much policy regarding global warming, evolution, stem cell research, sex education, etc.  

We need to educate people about the great importance of peer review, that last step of the scientific method.  Confused as to what I mean?  Follow me after the fold.

For background purposes, I attended the Science Bloggers' Caucus (chaired by Darksyde himself) on Thursday and then made sure to be up early Friday for the Championing Science panel, where I had an epiphany of sorts.

This is a continuation of a series that I started with Part I: My question for Howard Dean, about the Yearly Kos Black Caucus and my impressions.  As I said earlier, it's impossible to condense everything at Yearly Kos into one diary, and staying true to a sentiment that I share with dday on sharing experiences from the conference, I'm continuing with a topic that is also near and dear to my heart.

(I should add that never before have I been to a conference where I wanted so desperately to go to every single session, or for that matter, any conference where I stayed up till 4AM every night having profound conversations, let alone both.)

I really have to say that the atmosphere at the Science Bloggers' Caucus was palpably worried.  Still, there were some ideas I hadn't heard before.  One person suggested doing science outreach at farmers' markets, which I thought was interesting.  

But overall, there was a very real sense that we are still losing ground against the Republican leadership, and that we have no kind of plan to stop it from happening or to win back the public to the side of sanity.  At the end of the discussion, which had quickly devolved into `how do we argue with people's religious beliefs?' LondonYank stood up and said the most saddening thing of all (I'm paraphrasing): "I am terrified - I cannot even believe that religion came up during this discussion at all; I thought we were here to talk about science, and the fact that we've just spent all this time talking about religion is not something that would happen in other parts of the world."

Well, needless to say, I don't think many of the rest of us were very surprised.  But I'm not going to spend time in this diary talking about science v. religion, because I don't think that's helpful.  BushCo has done everything it can to make science v. religion the argument, because if you can reliably set up religion as being on your side, you tend to win people over, even if you're very, very wrong.  We need to get the fight back on our own terms; let me break it down this way:

BushCo's Not-So-Secret Plan

1.) Convince people that a well-supported scientific argument is flawed, using cherry-picked, made-up, or told-to-you-by-an-oil-company "science" of your own.

2.) Compare the `flawed' argument to your `way better' religious or economic one and ask people if they're going to believe the Godless scientists or be Good Christians.

And we wonder why we've been losing.  If Stage 2 is the symptom then Stage 1 is the cause of the disease.  We need to cut them off at the pass and by that I mean Stage 1.  And we need to hammer hard.  I now think the easiest way to do that is to immediately and forcefully discredit what passes for science with this Republican leadership.  And the best way to do that?

Well, all this time, I figured the way that the Republicans had been getting away with this was with poor science education.  Clearly, the public just didn't understand the scientific method.  Now, however, I...  well, I still really believe that.  But it's more specific than that.  Here's the scientific method in schematic form adapted from Wikipedia, in case you need a refresher (and/or haven't seen this since the 6th grade.) If you'd like a more detailed and very excellent walkthrough, read Darksyde's diary on the subject.

The Scientific Method
   1. Define the question
   2. Gather information and resources needed to intelligently design :-) an experiment
   3. Form hypothesis about what you think is going on
   4. Perform experiment to test your hypothesis and collect data
   5. Analyze data
   6. Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypotheses
   7. Repeat steps 3-6 until you have something worth reporting.
   8. Publish results

(Theories are only formed after many many rounds of this process.  And it's worth mentioning that conflicting hypotheses are not covered up in some great conspiracy, but are published all the time and argued over.)

Now, steps 1-6 are pretty much what you are taught is science by your average high school science fair.  A lot of us, frankly, don't even get that much hands-on science education, and just get the dry textbook version, but hey, you've probably at least seen or heard about steps 1-6 and maybe even 7 once or twice.

What I want to point out is how effectively most people gloss over the importance and the rigor involved in that last step, #8.  What I mean is that most people, I suspect, have very little real appreciation for the importance of peer review.

What is peer review?  It is the vetting process for deciding which scientific findings are valid enough to see the light of day in the scientific community --- and by that I don't mean some person with a hidden agenda decides, but that experts anonymously give criticism about methodology, data analysis and interpretation, and if the findings pass muster, then it gets published.

Step 8 is better represented like this:

8. Publish results

   a. Pick a journal (they are not equally reputable and each covers different topics) that roughly matches the quality and scope of your findings.

   b. Write up your findings in clear, hopefully easy-to-understand format and submit to the journal from a)

   c. The journal sends your article out to typically 2 or 3 other experts in your field

        i. If these experts agree with your methods and conclusions, they probably only request minor changes and you're done with Step 8!

        ii. If they don't think you've done enough to prove your conclusions, the experts may request major revisions and/or more experiments.  After doing this, go to step 8c, part i.

        iii. If they really don't think your conclusions follow from your results, if your methods are seriously questioned, and/or if they don't think your conclusions are within the scope of the journal, they will reject your paper outright.  Go to step 8a.

The point of peer review is to make sure that nothing gets published (i.e. gets attention) that is based on no real proof and/or faulty reasoning.  And to try and remove as much personal bias from the data presentation as possible.  It's a system that works pretty well.  It sucks to have to go back and majorly revise a paper or do more experiments, but it usually results in a better study.  And if you can't get published, then chances are good that your problem isn't with step 8, it's one or more of steps 1-7.

The point I'm trying to make is that the right's `scientific' conclusions never seem to go through this rigorous last step, peer review.  Why?  Well, they could generally never make it through peer review because they never go through the other steps credibly either.

But somehow the findings of the pseudoscientists on the right are touted as though they are real, even when they're paid for and published by Exxon or something, and I think this is where we have to put our foot down.

At the Championing Science panel, General Clark spoke first, but in my mind, Chris Mooney of Seed Magazine stole the show.  He gave such a truly eloquent, fact-filled presentation that I was forced to buy his book (which, um, maybe I should have read before writing this) ,The Republican War on Science, and it was during this speech that I figured all this out.  He put up a picture of the `scientists' the right goes to time and time again for ...fact-like information... and then he put up a list of their stated religious biases - and that's when it hit me.  

These people are quacks and yet our culture is becoming virulently anti-science because people are listening to their tripe like it's totally valid.  If they can't get their creationist, anti-global warming crap published in a real scientific journal then it has no scientific validity.  End of story.

This is an easy metric to exempt us from having to deem pseudoscience as noteworthy even out of a perverted sense of "balance."  We need to get the public to do what the scientific community does and ignore these people altogether.  And we do that by loudly, repeatedly stressing the importance of peer review, i.e. reframing the issue.  My suspicion is that without the pseudoscience to get their foot in the door, the rightwing establishment is not going to be able to drive that wedge between people and their senses nearly as easily.  

And I think we should tone down our tack of always going on the defensive about the merits of the scientific studies.  That implies that they need further defending.  Don't get me wrong; of course it's important to understand the merits of scientific findings, and to explain science to people... But debating science with pseudoscientists, or those who listen to pseudoscientists plays right into their hands, giving them delusions of validity where there really is none.  When you think about it, the argument is not about all the scientific holes in the creationist argument; it's that creationism is not science.

The pseudoscientists aren't really debating the science, you see; it's all a social engineering game of how many people they can convince without having the facts on their side.  But they pretend to debate the science, and it's high time we call them on it.  

In conclusion, what I learned about science at Yearly Kos is that the next time I see some pseudoscience out there masquerading as fact, I will just calmly say to myself or whomever I am talking to:

"If it wasn't published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal then it does not have any scientific validity."

Or just, simply,

"That's not real science."

It's definitely a different tactic than the ones I usually see.  It won't combat the right's attacks on the validity of the scientific method itself.  But I feel like it will be loads more effective, and easier, than endlessly trying to point to the logical fallacies of the pseudoscience.  What do you think?