You Will Shoot Your Eye Out

Not meaning to seem like some unwashed lunatic, but science is sometimes a bit overrated. “Follow the science” became the rallying cry throughout the darkest days of COVID. However, it turned out to be just a form of virtue signaling — a means to point out how much more culturally responsible some people felt they were compared to others.

Reality is that nobody knew what the best solution was to the thorny problem of a novel global pandemic. We still don’t. We were all just doing the best we could.

Some of that stuff was pretty darn crazy. There was ample unfettered lunacy on both sides. It was kind of nuts to push the entire species to take a vaccine that could not have been adequately tested due to immutable time constraints.

It was also a bit unhinged to overdose on equine worm medicine that you scored at the local Tractor Supply because some dude with an internet connection said it was a good idea. Nobody was thinking straight.

Anyway, I digress. I do that a lot, as you have no doubt noticed. I’m sure my long-suffering wife covets your prayers. The point is that we should take “science” with a grain of salt. Failure to do so can lead to sketchy vaccines and horse medicine overdoses.

Past Performance, Future Results

Science is fluid. It evolves in response to new discoveries. The competent scientist should be open-minded and willing to relinquish dogmatically held concepts if newer, more insightful ideas arrive to take their place. Some of that looks a bit daft with the crystalline clarity of hindsight.

It wasn’t so long ago that we were treating medical maladies with leeches and tobacco smoke enemas. In the 19th century, tobacco smoke enemas were used to manage everything from bowel obstructions to constipation, head colds, hernias, respiratory failure, and belly cramps.

Practitioners of the day even used this curious therapy to try to resuscitate drowning victims. That all seems pretty stupid in retrospect.

Everybody in the world seems to be on blood pressure medication these days. It was only within my lifetime that we figured out that the kidneys control blood pressure and that elevated blood pressure was such a compelling risk for heart disease and stroke. And then there was the coelacanth.

The coelacanth was the archetypal transitional form in the fossil record. This big, bug-ugly fish really looked the part. He had short, muscular fins that looked a bit leg-ish, like he could scurry up on shore, gulp a little air, and then slide back into the water, thereby setting the evolutionary stage for fish to become amphibians.

Coelacanth fossils even fell into the right slot in the fossil record — they purportedly died out in the late Cretaceous Period, some 66 million years ago. All that worked great right up until 1938, when one of these ghastly monsters showed up smelly and gross in a fish market in South Africa.

The Coelacanth is what scientists call a Lazarus Taxon, a creature that seems to have petered out zillions of years ago, only to show up again unexpectedly in the present for no good reason. It is also a really deep-water fish. If you bring it close to the surface or near the shore, it just dies. It never actually aspired to become an amphibian after all.

The point simply being, question everything. Science is dynamic — it’s always a work in progress. Cling to its tenets, but do not do so intransigently. Nobody wants to be that guy who thinks tobacco smoke enemas are established science, only to find out later they were actually ridiculous.

Survivorship Bias

During World War II, the Allies were faced with appalling, unsurvivable losses among the bomber forces launched against the Germans in Europe. The Statistical Research Group at Columbia University was tasked with assessing the empirical data and making suggestions to airplane designers concerning where our warplanes should be improved.

These scientists evaluated crippled aircraft returning from combat missions and found the damage to be clustered around the wingtips and tail assemblies.

Some among them, therefore, posited that these were the places on the aircraft that should be more heavily armored. A Columbia statistician named Abraham Wald, however, disagreed.

Wald observed that they only had access to the planes that survived. The aircraft that were lost were the ones that were NOT hit in the wingtips and tail. If anything was to be armored further, it needed to be the engine nacelles and fuselage, the very spots that were not damaged in the surviving planes.

This statistical concept is called survivorship bias. Really smart people looked at the same data set and drew entirely different conclusions.

Ruminations

So, be sensible in the way you look at life, but try not to cling unduly to the things of science. Draw enlightened conclusions based upon the best data but then don’t get your feelings hurt if new information proves you wrong. That’s the only reliable way to avoid a tobacco smoke enema.