Science Overturns Itself

Examples of debunked scientific beliefs
should give pause about what scientists know

 

 

For your Friday the 13th amusement, here are some examples of things that were commonly accepted as true that are no longer believed by scientists.

Are fish oil supplements as healthy as we think? And is eating fish better?  (The Conversation, 24 Sept 2023). Evangeline Mantzioris, a food scientist at the University of South Australia, says the science is fishy. Fish oil supplements make little difference in protecting against heart disease. There might be some benefit in alleviating the severity of rheumatoid arthritis, and there are some indications that eating fish might forestall Alzheimer’s Disease. But any such benefits are slim; a pill is not going to save you. Until the next revision, here’s her advice:

At the moment, the evidence suggests fish oil is beneficial for rheumatoid arthritis, particularly if people find it difficult to eat large amounts of fish.

For dementia and heart disease, it’s best to try to eat your omega-3 fats from your diet. While plant foods contain ALA, this will not be as efficient as increasing EPA and DHA levels in your body by eating seafood.

Do blue-light glasses really work? Can they reduce eye strain or help me sleep? (The Conversation, 24 Sept 2023). This belief has been strong enough to make Google Android offer night-reading modes on smartphones to reduce blue light on their screens in the evenings. Laurie Downie from the University of Melbourne, Australia has some corrective lenses for believers of this mythoid. Her team, along with two other UK universities, ran experiments to see if there is any basis to blocking blue light from human vision. They could find no evidence it reduced eye strain, improved sleep, improved eye health or gave any other benefits. “Blue light is all around us,” the article points out.

Overall, based on relatively limited published clinical data, our review does not support using blue-light filtering lenses to reduce eye strain with digital device use. It is unclear whether these lenses affect vision quality or sleep, and no conclusions can be drawn about any potential effects on the health of the retina.

She recognizes that more long-term studies would be needed to confirm any benefits or harms from lenses and devices that reduce blue light.

A Gutsy Move – New Study Challenges Conventional Wisdom About Nerve Cell Origins of ‘The Second Brain’ (Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, 9 Aug 2023). Scientists have debunked a notion that during development a “second brain” emerges from the neural crest that runs the gut. The gut is lined with neurons called the “enteric nervous system” (ENS) that tells the brain when we are hungry, full, or have indigestion. But does it come from the neural crest in the embryo? Prepare for decades of dogma to be thrown out the window.

Since the mid-20th century, scientists have believed that the ENS is derived from the neural crest before birth and remains unchanged after. Now, in a paper published in the journal eLife, researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) present a completely new paradigm describing a developmental pathway by which ENS development continues after birth in mice and human tissue samples. This discovery overturns decades of scientific dogma on the fundamental biology of neuroscience and of ENS, by showing evidence for the first time of a non-ectodermal and a mesodermal origin for large numbers of enteric neurons born after birth. The findings show the relevance of these neurons to the maturation and aging of the ENS in health and disease.

Why BMI is flawed — and how to redefine obesity (Nature, 11 Oct 2023). The body mass index is familiar to everyone trying to improve their physical fitness. It has been used around the world as a measure of health. Now, Nature says it is a flawed measure, because it “accounts for only height and weight, leaving out a slew of factors that influence body fat and health.”

BMI, which is calculated by dividing weight by height squared, has been used for several decades as an international standard to determine healthy weights. It serves as a proxy for body fat, and higher numbers can indicate increased risk for metabolic disease and death.

But BMI does not measure body fat, and it also ignores factors that affect how healthy someone is at a given weight, including age, sex and race. Not everyone with a high BMI has poor health or a raised risk of death.

Should we really aspire to eat like cavemen? (University of New South Wales, 19 Sept 2023). The paleo diet or “ancestral diet” is hugely popular among men, taught that we evolved as hunters in caves and should emulate what our genes serviced among our forebears.

Some scientists say we are living out this experiment across modern society. We evolved to eat a hunter-gatherer diet during the Palaeolithic era, a period from about 2.6 million years ago to approximately 10,000 BC. Our bodies are not yet accustomed to farmed and highly processed foods, with serious health consequences like high blood pressure, clogged arteries and type 2 diabetes.

Now, scientists have questions about this diet craze. If our ancestors were healthy, it wasn’t only because of what they ate. “They didn’t sit around all day. And that’s an incredibly important part of the story that gets overlooked all the time.”

Ultra-processed food isn’t always unhealthy, say UK food officials (New Scientist, 27 Sept 2023). Bad, bad, bad, we’ve been told about “processed” food. Lumping all packaged delicious items is poor science, though: it commits an unwarranted generalization. What is meant by ultra-processed food? It’s not the processing; it’s the dietary content that matters. Some UK scientists are getting off the bandwagon.

They also warned that people who cut out all ultra-processed foods could make their diets more unhealthy, for instance if they avoid foods such as low-sugar drinks and yogurts, low-fat spreads and wholemeal breads and cereals. “We need to be driven by the science and not have this knee-jerk reaction that treats [all UPF] the same when we clearly know that everything is not the same,” said Robin May, chief scientific adviser at the UK’s Food Standards Agency.

For some rebuttal, see this article about the risks of ultra-processed foods (Medical Xpress, 26 Oct 2023).

Philosopher argues that mindfulness rests on dubious philosophical foundations (University of Copenhagen, 17 Aug 2023). “Mindfulness therapy” has been a darling concept among psychologists and psychotherapists seeking a non-religious approach to the treatment of anxiety and depression. Articles about mindfulness have not been uncommon, like this one last July that claimed it can reduce anxiety about visiting the dentist. Similar to Buddhist meditation, mindfulness therapy has found its way into smartphone apps that millions around the world download for mental health. This philosopher says it’s bunk.

Mindfulness is one of the most widespread forms of therapy for people suffering from stress, and many report that they benefit greatly from it. However, the philosophical assumptions on which mindfulness is based are dubious and should not be accepted as a matter of course, says philosopher from the University of Copenhagen.

Why does Dr Odysseus Stone say such things? He allows that it might makes sense sometimes to “acknowledge our thoughts and emotions and notice them as events in the mind, but not invest them with importance or spend too much time worrying about them.” But mindfulness as a therapy goes far beyond this. In the article, he points out several assumptions made by mindfulness therapy that are not only wrong, but could be harmful.

Mindfulness in schools doesn’t improve mental health. Here’s why that’s a positive (Medical Xpress, 7 Aug 2023). A huge 8-year project “rigorous in scope and scale” involving 28,000 students, 650 teachers, 100 schools and 20 million data points found that a mindfulness training project for schools was ineffective. The results were a “wake-up call” to those thinking mindfulness is beneficial. So how can the headline say “that’s a positive” result? The answer: “Finding what doesn’t work moves mental health science forward.”

It could be argued that in science, null results are necessary to report as well as positive results. In fact, not reporting failures can mislead researchers. But the process of elimination with therapies involving complex human minds is a hopeless approach. By the time millions of potential therapies are shown to fail, someone might invent mindfulness by another name and repeat the cycle.

Speaking of anxiety, how can you treat what you don’t understand? A Harvard psychologist announced on October 6, “We need to rethink anxiety.” If you treat something you can’t even define, you might make it worse. At least that’s the opinion of David H. Rosmarin in his latest book, until it gets debunked by the next psychologist in a long train of debunkings of psychological theories.

Debunkings of long-held beliefs is fairly common in the articles we survey for CEH. Many times, it is scientists debunking other scientists. That is good, because nobody should believe things that aren’t so. Human beings are fallible. We all know the tendency to accept things we hear without checking the empirical basis for them.

If scientists can be so wrong about observational things like mind therapy, fish oil and blue-blocking sunglasses, how can they be trusted with historical claims that supposedly took place over millions of unobserved years? Oh, but evolution is a fact!

Evolutionists, we keep showing, are the ones most in need of debunking. We saw cosmic evolutionists astonished at early mature galaxies. We saw evolutionary anthropologists astonished at woodwork supposedly dating back half a million Darwin Years by “primitive” human ancestors. See an Oxford scientist admit, “Discovery of half-a-million-year-old wooden structure shows we’re wrong to underestimate our ancient relatives” (The Conversation, 6 October 2023). Darwinism itself is often just plain silly. It dumbs down science.

What society needs is not more scientific activity. It needs more logic. Science is supposed to systematize observation and logical thinking. As C.S. Lewis said, “The physical sciences, then, depend on the validity of logic just as much as metaphysics or mathematics. If popular thought feels ‘science’ to be different from all other kinds of knowledge because science is experimentally verifiable, popular thought is mistaken. Experimental verification is not a new kind of assurance coming in to supply the deficiencies of mere logic. We should therefore abandon the distinction between scientific and non-scientific thought. The proper distinction is between logical and non-logical thought.”