All aboard the science roller coaster!

Henry thought he'd try the religious haunted house ride next.

Welcome to the science roller coaster. More loops and inversions than any other philosophical theme-park attraction and guaranteed to make you dizzy.

I won’t review the hype. If you’ve been living on Earth for the past week, you’ll already know how the world’s date with NASA started in a low-cut dress and mini skirt, but ended with a stoic hand shake and a pained smile. Speculation of life on Titan shifted to misrepresentations of evidence supporting a shadow biosphere on Earth, to be quickly replaced by a challenge to the defining elements of biochemistry, only to end with a shrug as the previously exciting results sustain cracks under closer scrutiny.

There’s no shortage of discussion on the topic on various science blogs, bulletin boards and the Twitter stream, with emotions running wild as lovers of science are left with the academic equivalent of blue balls.

What happened? Nothing, really. Or a lot. Depending on your angle.

On one front, it is science as usual. NASA funded the study of a species of an extremophile bacteria which might reveal something about how life can be sustained in environment we would normally consider hostile, thereby possibly broadening the range of extraterrestrial habitats worth investigating. The research came back promising, although the method was found to be too messy for such a revolutionary conclusion to be taken for granted. In time somebody will try again, modifying the method to close the gaps, and either give the thumbs up or will admit they failed to replicate the previous results.

This sort of thing happens every single day in science. It just doesn’t make ripples outside of select tribes of researchers.

NASA’s media division would have to have been pretty daft to have not predicted the impact an embargoed whisper featuring astrobiology would have had on the the public. Of course, this is how people imagine science works – a punctuated equilibrium of discovery, where an odd electromagnetic signal or a peculiar chemical reaction constitutes a revolutionary ‘Eureka!’ moment. On the back of this fantastic view of science, all it takes is a subtle suggestion for the excitement to spread.

Will the community have learned a valuable lesson here on how science really works? I doubt it. Rather, I foresee cynicism and decreased confidence in scientists. It’s hard enough explaining to people that science is a plodding process where ‘wow!’ moments are best appreciated with years of hindsight, and not in the first five minutes of a curious anomaly.

People like the thrill of scientific discovery and innovation. They have done ever since the industrial revolution gave them cheaper socks and fatter pigs. And in a competition for attention, there’s no use in sitting back and asking for the patience it deserves.

Science cat-fights: The media’s intelligent design of belief

The scientists were calmly discussing string theory when the journalist bellowed 'cat fight!'.

If it’s attention you’re after, you can’t go past a good fight. Controversy and antagonism seem to trigger a level of engagement within the community that well tempered reasoning cannot ever hope to compete against and succeed.

The more polarised the issue, the more important it seems. Better still, as the level of certainty increases amongst those involved and their investment in being right increases, the more significant the issue appears to those on the sidelines. We need look no further than the strange behaviour surrounding the education of biological evolution to see this in action – few debates have ever made it to such dizzying heights of public interest.

Without a scrap of evidence to support my opinion, the sociologist in me is convinced that it is our desire to join the ranks of those who most closely share our values and beliefs in their fight that draws us in. Like a pack of poodles being forced by their lupine wiring to chase cars, humans take cues from those who represent their tribe and take sides in a fight, regardless of whether they’d ever given the argument a moment’s thought before.

Science relies on fights. Hence it’s common for the media to tap into this natural reservoir of conflict and present it to the public as some sort of egg-head gladiatorial. A battle of the boffins, if you will. Yet while it goes against our primal habit of group polarisation, the values of the scientific methodology favour calm mediation as opposed to emotional hair pulling and screaming matches. Where arguments are par for the course in science, journalists act like the drunken tosser who always yells ‘cat fight’ whenever two or more women do so much as roll their eyes at one another.

CNN journalist Christopher Reddy discusses this phenomenon in his must-read article, ‘How reporters mangle science on Gulf oil’.

“I must have spoken with at least 25 journalists last week, and despite my every effort to explain our findings, the media were more interested in using the new information to portray a duel between competing scientists. The story turned into an us-versus-them scenario in which some scientists are right and others are wrong. Seeking to elucidate, I felt caught in a crossfire.”

In dealing with the media, science communicators risk having measured opinions made into certainties in the name of a good fight. Subsequently, when new evidence comes to light, as is happening almost weekly in the Gulf oil disaster, scientists are left with egg on their face, or in the very least seem arrogant in their presumptions.

Conversely, consensus can be turned into opinion in order to create conflict under the guise of ‘fair reporting’. When the swirling light of the Falcon 9 rocket booster was spotted over Eastern Australia in June 2010, the ABC felt the need to include the easily-refutable views of a ‘UFO’ expert. Given it took very little research to show how flimsy this individual’s criticisms were, it can’t be for want of balanced reporting that the journalist chose to forgo the science for the appearance of a discussion.

I’ve had it put to me that it’s the love of mystery that pulls in the readers. I disagree. I don’t think people like mysteries. In fact, our brains hate them. Mysteries require us to say ‘I don’t know’. Our neurology isn’t comfortable with this information vacuum so rushes in to embrace answers regardless of their prematurity.

Rather than the lure of the unknown, it’s the dichotomy of right and wrong which motivates us to engage with the media. Journalists know this and understand the goldfield that science presents for conflict. Far from being presented as a gradual process of natural selection of ideas where theories slowly strengthen with time, science comes across as a punctuated equilibrium of discovery, if not a spontaneous intelligent design of beliefs.

Which came first: good science or bad headline?

Chicken Caesar: not of egg was born.

If you’d been in one of my senior biology classes, chances were you would have had the question ‘Which came first; the chicken or the egg?’ as a complex reasoning question on one of your mid-semester exams. I found it to be a great way of assessing the student’s understanding of principles of evolution.

To get full marks, the student had to comprehend that somewhere during the ancestry of the species we call ‘chickens’ today, there came sufficient evolutionary change to warrant a new species. In other words, while this precise point might be debatable as far as what defines a species, a bird-thing that couldn’t be called a chicken produced an egg, from which hatched something with the characteristics of the modern chook. Even if the students didn’t get that far, they’d get a mark or two for realising that the egg defines a characteristic of the embryonic bird.

Now, as a science writer, I completely sympathise with a journalist’s desire to use a lede or a heading that draws the  attention of an audience that is too often intimidated by anything that sounds overly ‘sciency’. The age-old pseudophilosophical ‘which came first’ conundrum is a light-hearted riddle that most of us find to be familiar. If only it made sense in this particular case, with such head-scratching headers as They’ve cracked it at last! The chicken DID come before the egg and Scientists think chicken came first, I might have merely ignored it as another cheesy attempt at making science look appealing.

The science behind the story is actually quite interesting; British chemists at the University of Sheffield and the University of Warwick developed a computer model  showing that egg shell production is reliant on a protein called ovocleidin-17 which serves as a catalyst, creating a nucleus for calcium carbonate particles to crystalise and form the egg’s hard shell. Not exactly the cure to cancer or alien contact, but not the most boring discovery to have ever been uncovered in a laboratory.

But what does this have to do with the chicken coming first? Is it presuming the early embryo is an eggless chicken, and it’s only with the latter formation of a hard shell that we can say the egg then develops? Perhaps…but for a gimmick headline, it is an unnecessary addition that risks confusion for the sake of an ice breaker. Worse still, in situations such as these, the line between a glib, light-hearted angle and a serious scientific question can be blurred. While I’m no longer teaching, I can almost imagine a student earnestly presenting such a headline as serious evidence for ‘chickens coming first’, not understanding that the research and the riddle are as related as a knock-knock joke and the science of acoustics.

Nobody says science always has to be serious. Humour can be extremely effective at grabbing attentions. From the popularity of the angle’s use throughout the media, it’s easy to presume it was lifted straight from the press release, and few journalists (in their rush for a deadline) would be tempted to spend precious moments considering an alternative. But the cost is misrepresentation of otherwise good science and public confusion over the real issues that scientists deal with.

Paul – a champion for mathematics

With all due respect to the Spanish football team, the real winner of the 2010 World Cup is a certain German cephalopod who goes by the name of Paul. If you’ve not heard of him, you must have been lurking under the very rock he crawled out from beneath. What began as a cute parlour trick by a humble Octopus vulgaris at the Sea Life Centre in Oberhausenhas become a global sensation as Paul’s groping tentacles predicted the winner in each of the eight instances its clairvoyance was sought.

Paul knows he'll be added to a salad if he gets this one wrong

2010 was a particularly good year for Paul’s future-vision, it seems. His previous act in 2008 gave a success rate of a paltry 66 percent, correctly guessing only four of the six games. Still, an overall success rate of 86 per cent is nothing to sneeze at. Random coin flipping would mirror Paul’s most recent feat only once in every 2⁸ (or 256) trials.

Hence it’s almost forgivable that Paul might be considered to have the gift of second sight. Almost, but not quite. For this small Chthulu-wannabe to have a brain capable of reacting to visions from the future it would require a lot of what we know about biology, physics and chemistry to be overturned. Put simply, short of using numerous variables in conjunction with a generous application of logical deduction, we have no reason to think a nervous system is capable of detecting stimuli that will occur in the future.

The fundamental philosophy of science is forbidden from stating categorically that this is impossible, of course. Yet science isn’t about possibilities. It is a probability engine, and the chance that we’ve gotten so much wrong over the past few centuries – enough for Paul to be considered an eight-limbed Nostradamus – is low enough to ignore for want of better evidence.

Surely a 1 in 256 result is convincing of something spooky, though, right? Given that we don’t have good figures on how often animals are used to make future predictions, it’s hard to say. If there have been 256 attempts at some sort of zoological precognition in recorded memory, there’s a good chance that at least one of those animals will boast Paul’s 2010 success rate at picking a winner. Most won’t come close, of course, but they’d probably be Sunday roast after their second fumbled call. So Paul’s appearance on the front page of the local tabloid makes him seem rather unique.

Still, 256 feels like a big number. Is it really conceivable that it was just pure luck?

Again, we don’t know. The system employed by the aquatic park staff was far from well controlled; given it was a bit of a lark, nobody can blame the employees at SeaLife for not drawing up a double blinded, randomised trial. However, the method of using food rewards hidden in Perspex boxes decorated with the competing countries’ flags leaves plenty of room for a non-paranormal explanation.

A quick look at five of the eight winning flags suggests Paul might a fetish for yellow. Sadly, as the zoologist JB Messenger discovered in 1977 our brainy, stomach-footed friends-of-the-sea lack colour vision. Yet there are other variations between the flags that could tantalise Paul’s aesthetic tastes, as far as stripes and shades go. Any visual preference there could nudge results one way or another.

Ever the patriot, he held a particular regard for Germany’s flag. Could he have been tempted or unintentionally guided to pick his home country?

Lastly, six of his choices were the right-hand box. One choice was from the left and the first (Australia Vs. Germany) was too early in Paul’s 2010 season to be recorded. Is it possible that position alone might have accounted as a gentle persuasion?

These questions are the reason why science uses things like controls and repeated trials. The methodology says we have to admit so long as there is room for doubt, the observation shouldn’t put our confidence in any particular conclusion. Paul was undoubtedly lucky in his pickings. Any football-mad punter would agree. But given a choice between a hypothesis that contravenes the laws of physics and one that relies on an octopus biased towards picking a strong home team several times (and a healthy dollop of coincidence), the safe bet is on the latter.

The bottom line is that that we know a lot about octopuses and a lot about our human ability to invent complex and contradictory explanations when a shrug of the shoulders is far more honest. We have no good reason to suspect that Paul’s success is due to psychic powers. From other observations, we have plenty of good reasons to know we often misunderstand probability. And for most people, that’s ok. It’s a great yarn. Fortunately it also presents us with a great opportunity to discuss some of the more fascinating aspects of probability, statistics, psychology or biology.

Sadly, this opportunity isn’t taken up by many. The author of this ABC news story titled ‘Expert won’t rule out Octopus Paul’s psychic ability’ chose to confuse ‘pragmatic doubt’ (the natural scepticism that exists in science which says all conclusions must leave room for the possibility of evidence) with ‘practical doubt’ (actively viewing alternative possibilities as being potentially useful). It’s true that the octopus expert wouldn’t rule out ‘psychic powers’. I’d go one step further – he can’t rule it out, especially if he was a scientist worth his salt. Given he’s a scientist, he’d refrain from ruling anything out; not out of an unwillingness to commit to an idea but because that’s fundamentally how science works.

The expert in the story goes on to confess to being sceptical about Paul’s psychic prowess, disinclined to present himself as being controversial. Fair enough, I guess. Considering the relatively tiny percentage of readers who’d feel embarrassed on behalf of the author for their lack of science literacy, it’s also easy to sympathise with why the author chose a sensationalised headline over accurate reporting.

Paul has now retired, so it’s unlikely he’ll be challenging his own record for the next World Cup. But given our propensity to indulge in stories of magic and make believe over the non-committal philosophy of science, I can guarantee Paul won’t be the last ‘psychic’ animal to grace the headlines.

More information

• Pauline – Paul’s less talented Dutch equivalent
• BBC: What are the chances Paul is right?