Before we fully draw a line under the previous blog entries on the news item about cancer and fate (initial post, first follow up, second follow up), I came across an interesting blog post about this very subject.

On a blog post titled “Bad Science: Fated to Get Cancer?” (which is well worth reading) the following conclusions are drawn:

Conclusion:

These kinds of studies may lead to confusing results. We can go back and forth on this all day depending on our interpretation, but ultimately it is the experiment and conclusions drawn are flawed from the get-go. We need to be cautious of our source of information and not let these press releases do more damage than good when their results are not scientifically sound.

* A note on “fate”: Simply because something is unknown, does not mean it is due to fate or chance. There are many phenomena that we do not quite understand completely and tumorigenesis is one of them. Many things that used to be considered fate or luck now have scientific explanations. Take, for instance, the people who can have repeated unprotected sexual intercourse with an HIV+ partner without acquiring the virus (akin to not developing cancer despite smoking). An uninformed observer would say that these people are not fated to get AIDS. However, in reality, these many of these people are descendants from survivors of the Bubonic Plague in Europe. The disease selected for a genetic polymorphism that made some people resistant to viral infection and this allele remains today. I suspect that the susceptibility of some people (the 10) over others (the 89) will soon become clear in time with a biologic rational rather than pure fate.

Hopefully this will be the last of it. We are all right 🙂

Should peoples opinions (or more accurately opinion polls) be a valid method of deciding what is, or isn’t good science? Is science, or the scientific method, something which can be validated by debate?

On Pharyngula, there is an interesting post (as always), titled “Ken Ham is still getting his PR for free” which has the following extract (from a blog entry on an ID supporting museum):

“Mocking publicity is free publicity,” Looy [curator] said. Besides, U.S. media have been more respectful, mindful perhaps of a 2006 Gallup Poll showing almost half of Americans believe that humans did not evolve, but were created by God in their present form within the last 10,000 years.

Now creationist nonsense aside, the bit which intrigues me is the assumption that because almost half Americans believe something it must be valid. This is a recurring theme where ever bad science, creationism and the like try to get publicity.

There are routinely requests for the likes of Richard Dawkins to attend public debates about Evolution vs Intelligent Design and the same thing happens in other areas (vaccinations springs immediately to mind, but there are lots more).

Now, what scientific purpose can be achieved by having two people trying to score points of each other in front of a lay audience? More importantly, the side with the better speaker will win, independently of the quality of their science. If someone has an excellent trial lawyer arguing that (for example) gravity doesn’t exist while a stereotypical physics professor tries to argue it does there is good reason to assume the audience will walk away thinking Gravity does not exist.

Yet it would still exist.

“Science” (for want of a better term) is independent of public opinion. The Popperian scientific method requires repeatability and falsifiability as the hall marks of “good science” not simply being “believed” in. It constantly amazes me that people will assume that simply because lots of people believe in something which is wrong, it must be right.