Science Can't Catch A Break

One of the points I make about negative social mood as it relates to socionomic theory, is that negative mood can be positive if it is put to productive use. Just as the recession cleans out the malinvestment, negative mood can be a time to reverse bad policies or implement long needed reforms.

One of the things that happens during periods of declining social mood is people turn against technology and science. Sometimes this is accompanied by a rise in magical thinking, but it can just as easily manifest itself as a movement mainly against science—and that isn't necessarily a bad thing as I pointed out in Scientists Turn Authoritarian and Retreat From Science:

If you told me 10 or 20 years ago that science would be a casualty of negative social mood, I would think science would suffer. Today, it is clear that science has become political itself, corrupted by government and corporate funding, and turning out junk science at a rate of about 80% in cancer research, as one example. (see: Scientists' Elusive Goal: Reproducing Study Results)

Negative social mood will be positive for science itself, but it will be very negative for those who have corrupted science and turned it into a political tool.

Much of what passes for science is "political science." Group consensus on various issues, not an investigation of nature and pursuit of truth. Where money is involved, results often meet the desires of the person or organization writing the check. A general decline in moral standards also leads to scientists either rejecting scientific papers from journals because they threaten the orthodoxy, or at the other end, nobody reads the papers and many journals publish gibberish papers or studies with unreproducable results.

Thus far, negative social mood remains very positive for science as the bad parts of science are attacked. It is the scientists who are bearing the brunt of public anger, not science itself, and the latest subject is diet.

The Questionable Link Between Saturated Fat and Heart Disease

Our distrust of saturated fat can be traced back to the 1950s, to a man named Ancel Benjamin Keys, a scientist at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Keys was formidably persuasive and, through sheer force of will, rose to the top of the nutrition world—even gracing the cover of Time magazine—for relentlessly championing the idea that saturated fats raise cholesterol and, as a result, cause heart attacks.

This idea fell on receptive ears because, at the time, Americans faced a fast-growing epidemic. Heart disease, a rarity only three decades earlier, had quickly become the nation's No. 1 killer. Even President Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in 1955. Researchers were desperate for answers.

......Critics have pointed out that Dr. Keys violated several basic scientific norms in his study. For one, he didn't choose countries randomly but instead selected only those likely to prove his beliefs, including Yugoslavia, Finland and Italy. Excluded were France, land of the famously healthy omelet eater, as well as other countries where people consumed a lot of fat yet didn't suffer from high rates of heart disease, such as Switzerland, Sweden and West Germany. The study's star subjects—upon whom much of our current understanding of the Mediterranean diet is based—were peasants from Crete, islanders who tilled their fields well into old age and who appeared to eat very little meat or cheese.

As it turns out, Dr. Keys visited Crete during an unrepresentative period of extreme hardship after World War II. Furthermore, he made the mistake of measuring the islanders' diet partly during Lent, when they were forgoing meat and cheese.

......Indeed, up until 1999, the AHA was still advising Americans to reach for "soft drinks," and in 2001, the group was still recommending snacks of "gum-drops" and "hard candies made primarily with sugar" to avoid fatty foods.

This attack on junk nutrition science is dovetailing with wider use of genetics. And Yet Another Tale of Two Maps

Humans vary in nearly all traits, whether height, skin color, or our guts. Back when it was the craze to measure such variety European scientists discovered that Russian intestines are about five feet longer than those of, say, Italians. This means that those Russians eating the same amount of food as the Italians likely get more out of it. Just why the Russians had (or have) longer intestines is an open question. Surely other peoples differ in their intestines too; intestines need more study, though I am not going to volunteer to do the dirty work. We also vary in terms of how much of particular enzymes we produce; the descendents of peoples who consumed lots of starchy food tend to produce more amylase, the enzyme that breaks down starch. Then there is the enzyme our bodies use to digest the lactose in milk, lactase. Many (some say most) adults are lactose deficient; they do not produce lactase and so do not break down the lactose in milk. As a result, even if they drink milk they receive far fewer calories from doing so than do individuals who produce lactase. Each of us gets a different number of calories out of identical foods because of who we are and who our ancestors were.

A sea change in thinking is underway and negative social mood will accelerate the transition.