Science—you’re doing it wrong

Sen. Tom Harkin, the proud father of the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine, told a Senate hearing on Thursday that NCCAM had disappointed him by disproving too many alternative therapies.

"One of the purposes of this center was to investigate and validate alternative approaches. Quite frankly, I must say publicly that it has fallen short," Harkin said.

The senator went on to lament that, since its inception in 1998, the focus of NCCAM has been "disproving things rather than seeking out and approving things."

Skeptics have complained all along that Harkin and his allies founded this office to promote alternative therapies at public expense, not to test them scientifically. Harkin's statement at the hearing explicitly confirms that hypothesis.

Majikthise, via Pharyngula

In other words, the point of this institution was not to figure out if alternative therapies work and promote the ones that do, but rather to promote them whether they can be shown to work or not. There are already groups that do this: They’re called advertisers (and alternative medicine is a multi-billion dollar industry). No one’s tax money should fund it.

Near-Death Experiences

I don't get the popularity of the NDE "evidence". I had a friend once who told me that he had the most awesome experience on 'shrooms — he'd melted into a purple puddle that soaked into the earth, and he had spiritual sex with tree roots. I'm pretty sure that didn't actually happen, and I wouldn't use it to argue that human beings were capable of phase changes into a fluid state or that intimate congress with plants was fun and rewarding, but people use the same logic all the time in arguing that while they were in a brain-damaged state, befuddled by anoxia, their perception of the hallucinatory state afterwards is evidence that there is a heaven.

P.Z. Myers, Pharyngula

My own objection is, perhaps, a little more subtle. Some people claim that their experiences cannot have been natural because they were clinically dead while they had the experiences. Of course, if you were temporarily brain dead, any experience you had at the time cannot have been due to brain activity…but this is a non sequitur, because the experience such a person relates is not the experience he had while clinically dead, but rather the experience he recalls as having happened while he was clinically dead.

What we must determine is, therefore, whether this experience did in fact transpire during the blank period, or whether the recollection may be flawed.

Memory is notoriously fallible (c.f. confabulation and false memory syndrome); my claim is not that the NDE is naturally explicable in terms of what happened while the person was dead, but rather in terms of what the brain does to sort out the experience of dying, —, reviving and fill in the gap.

Applying Occam’s razor (we know that false memories do occur disturbingly often; we know that the brain doesn’t fare so well under anoxic conditions; we don’t have any evidence of the purported reality experienced in NDEs), the obvious conclusion is that NDEs are most likely phenomena of living brains at times surrounding the traumatic events causing temporary brain death.

P.Z.’s version is much more pithy than mine, though.