denialism
April 2, 2010Michael Specter‘s Denialism promises much via subtitle (How irrational thinking hinders scientific progress, harms the planet and threatens our lives), cover blurb and hype. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of ‘how’ in the book and certainly no ‘why’.
Specter uses six examples where public debate around science and scientific evidence has become polarised and irrational with (he says) negative consequences.
Vioxx was an anti-inflammatory drug that was withdrawn from the market following concerns about side effected. Specter uses this example to show how poorly the general public understand risk, and how our evaluation of statistical risk often doesn’t include the risk of not doing something.
Specter then goes through the MMR vaccine case and the anti-vaccination movement that grew out of it. He is especially critical of celebrity campaigners such as Jenny McCarthy and those who give them platforms (like Oprah Winfrey), who appear to make no attempt to understand the body of scientific research around vaccines but instead rely on personal experiences and anecdotes. He notes how quickly this kind of campaigning can lead to populist politicisation and polarisation of the debate, to the detriment of understanding and trust in evidence.
His third example is GM and organic food. I found this chapter poorly argued. Specter undermines his case for rational and informed debate by being completely uncritical of the GM food industries’ arguments in favour of their products. He quotes the Golden Rice example as one of the benefits of GM food, however as Raj Patel points out in Stuffed or Starved, people in south east asia are not deficient in Vitamin A because there is something wrong with rice. They are deficient in vitamin A because they can’t afford to eat anything but rice.
Specter also ignores any engagement with the ethical arguments around organic food and GM food, in favour of treating the debate as one of mere nutritionism. Given his emphasis on the importance of understanding risk in the Vioxx example and his pleas for rational decision making, it was really disappointing that he incorrectly defined the precautionary principle as ‘hold[ing] that any risk, no matter how remote, must be given more weight than any possible benefit, no matter how great’ (here is the actual definition) and used this spurious definition to support his argument.
Next comes complementary medicine. Specter focusses more on the activities of someone called Andrew Weil, who has a big internet-based business in selling dietary supplements and complementary medicines. He makes some good points about poor regulation by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and draws attention to the competing aims of the FDA and the $100 million a year National Centre for Complementary and Alternative Medicines, established on the lobbying of a US Senator who believes that bee therapy cured his allergies. Specter uses quotes from this Senator to illustrate a neat point: ‘confusing popularity with authority is one of the hallmarks of denialism‘.
Specter moves on to consider some of the controversies that have arisen from DNA technology and racial differences. Differences in how people from different ethnic background metabolise drugs, for example, or the persistence of certain diseases in some groups and not others. Race is probably a hotter issue in the US than in some other countries, but it would have been interesting to have seen more engagement in this chapter with economic and social issues that also persist around race, and how these play into the debate about medicine and disease.
The final example he uses is synthetic biology, but this was not well explained (nor did he have many examples of denialism to make his case). It seems more of a repository of a few interesting things he’d come across in the course of research that he couldn’t bear to leave out.
The underlying theme of this book, which is largely hidden beneath layers of ranting and first person examples, is not really the glib ‘denialism’, but more that the public no longer trust governments, regulatory structures, institutions and science largely because of poor communication by those groups (and some bad behaviour). This has allowed people who are better communicators (like Oprah Winfrey) to take over as trusted conduits of information, never mind that the information they are putting out there is wrong.
It’s also short on solutions. In the final two paragraphs Specter make a peculiar attempt to provide an argument for re-engaging public interest (though not trust) in and understanding of science, by invoking peak oil and climate change as motivating factors. Leaving aside that these areas are as affected by mistrust and misinformation as any other, I find it hard to believe that these issues will fix the problem.
