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A few last words on Coulter’s radiation fetish. Two weeks ago, she claimed ionizing radiation could act as a cancer vaccine, and that nobody died of radiation poisoning at Chernobyl. Then she appeared on the The O’Reilly Factor to defend the column. Last week, she devoted a second column to the promulgation of her pro-ionizing-radiation ideology, entitled “Liberals: They Blinded Us With Science.”
The Juice has covered Coulter’s previous radioactive rants twice already (here and here), so there wouldn’t be any reason to talk about her latest if there wasn’t something accidentally brilliant about it. In a very clear way, it demonstrates exactly where most people of all political persuasions go wrong in thinking about science, and why we lay folk are so often baffled by science writing.
Coulter begins with a discussion of Ed Schultz, Bill O’Reilly’s long-lost liberal twin over at MSNBC:
Ed
Schultz devoted an entire segment to denouncing me … One thing
Schultz did not do, however, was cite a single physicist or scientific
study.I cited three physicists by name and cited four studies supporting hormesis in my column. [NOTE: “Hormesis” is the notion that low levels of ionizing radiation are beneficial to health.] For the benefit of liberals scared of science, I even cited the New York Times.
It
tells you something that the most powerful repudiation of hormesis
Schultz could produce was the fact that a series of government agencies
have concluded — I quote — that “insufficient data on hormesis
exists.”
Think about that one. To Coulter, “insufficient data” is obviously a weakling’s objection — a real man,
she suggests, would rebuke her argument with certainty and immutable
truths. Unfortunately for her, that’s not how science works.
“Insufficient
data” is just right. What Coulter’s been arguing against, without quite
naming it, is the “linear no-threshold model” of radiation toxicity,
which states that lots of ionizing radiation is bad for you, less would be better for you, and none or almost none would
be best of all. The first part of that statement is obvious — because,
no matter what Coulter said two weeks ago, folks at Chernobyl did die from radiation poisoning. (And, to pick the grossest case imaginable, so did our very own Louis Slotin, slowly and agonizingly.) The second part — that moderate doses can be dangerous — is so well-established that only a creationist
could cherry-pick data with sufficient skill to arrive at a different
conclusion. (I’m not just referencing about Coulter here; I’m mostly
thinking about Tom Bethell, from whom Coulter lifts her talking points.) And the third part is very difficult to test. Nobody knows for certain what low doses of ionizing radiation might do to the human body.
Why
don’t we know? Because we’re exposed to low doses all the time. You
can’t blast a fellow with, say, 100 millisieverts of radiation and draw
any conclusion from what happens to him, because he may soon be exposed
to another 100 millisieverts just by going about his business. Or he may
be exposed to almost none. This kind of imprecision makes a scientist’s
job very difficult.
Are there studies showing evidence that low doses of ionizing radiation may be beneficial to health? Yes. Here’s one.
But science is provisional; the conclusions of scientists tentative.
Unlike religion, politics, or law — the areas in which Ann Coulter has
the greatest expertise — good science rewards humility, and good
scientists will not declare a thing unambiguously true until they have
accumulated vast amounts of evidence. One study, or three studies, or
even a hundred studies aren’t sufficient, especially when the evidence
is conflicting. When it comes to hormesis, there is some evidence to
suggest it’s real, but there’s a large amount of evidence suggesting it’s not. What this means, to a person who appreciates science, is that the question is unsettled. There is “insufficient data.”
Two
papers illustrate handily why we ought to be careful about reading too
much into a small number of studies. In 1974, two scientists named Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ published a paper in Nature documenting
what looked, superficially, like excellent evidence for the reality of
telepathy and telekinesis. Fourteen years later, a scientist named Jacques Benveniste
published another paper in that same outlet demonstrating the efficacy
of “homeopathy” — that is, “medicine” in which all active ingredients
have been so diluted in water that not a single molecule of the
original, active substance remains. If, as Coulter seems to believe, the
citation of science-y sounding papers is sufficient to demonstrate the
truth of a claim, then we must concede that we live in a world full of
psychic phenomena and water-with-memory. But we don’t.
As it
turns out, Puthoff and Targ’s star subject cheated, sabotaging the
experiments to maintain the illusion of his paranormal abilities.
Benveniste’s experiments were sabotaged by an overzealous lab assistant.
Their papers were written by imperfect humans, documenting studies
designed by imperfect humans, and they are imperfect — marred by
wish-thinking and faulty experimental design. Subsequent studies
corrected for the errors of Puthoff, Targ, and Benveniste, and now we
know better.
This happens all the time, especially with
difficult-to-observe phenomena like hormesis. Coulter isn’t wrong to
have an opinion on the matter — humans are extremely adept
opinion-making machines, and most of us can’t help ourselves. But
Coulter’s wrong not to be more skeptical of her opinions — to believe
without evidence that the studies supporting her conclusions are
perfect, and that those undermining her conclusions are wrong.
Physicists can’t know that, and neither can she.
But not-knowing
isn’t Coulter’s style, and she dedicates the rest of her column to
proving the left’s scientific shadiness by explaining how we “lied about
AIDS”:
As I described in my book, “Godless,” both
the government and the entire mainstream media lied about AIDS in the
’80s by scaring Americans into believing that heterosexuals were as much
at risk of acquiring AIDS as gays and intravenous drug users. The
science had to be lied about so no ones’ feelings got hurt.
Again, Coulter seems to suggest that we can know a thing before all the evidence is in. Fact is, there were
worrisome numbers of cases of heterosexual HIV transmission in the
1980s, and doctors who only a few years before had witnessed isolated
cases of AIDS in gay men explode into an epidemic were inclined to err
on the side of safety, at least until the numbers were in. Who could
blame them? And how is it their fault that the media sensationalized
their reports? That’s what a certain kind of media figure does, after
all — take tentatively proffered notions from a few doctors or
scientists, iron out the ambiguity, and present unverified ideas as
facts.
That Coulter would call attention to this tendency is
darkly ironic. When the media presented unverified hypotheses about AIDS
as fact, they were “lying about science”; when Coulter, who is very
much a part of “the media,” presented unverified hypotheses about
radiation as fact, she was a bold teller of unpopular truths. But both
are practicing the same kind of deception. Except the journos who fibbed
about AIDS were trying to scare up public attention for a silent
massacre of one of the world’s most reviled populations. Coulter’s just
trying to make nice with the nuclear industry.
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