I saw two mentions of Cargo Cult science on Saturday. I’d never heard of it before, so I went to look it up. Its relevance to animal research and antivivisection? Well, read on and judge for yourself.
Cargo Cult science was a term coined by the late great physicist Richard Feynman. He outlines the story in the book Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman:
‘In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.’
The first mention I saw of Cargo Cult science was in Saturday’s Bad Science column in The Guardian by Ben Goldacre, in which he has another pop at ‘nutritionist’ ‘Dr’ Gillain McKeith
‘Maybe this pamphlet is just a shortened and simplified version of [Gillian McKeith’s] PhD text, but if it is at all based on her thesis it is not a good advert for that as a scholarly work. Inside is what I could only describe as Cargo Cult science: she’s going through the motions, but the content, only closer inspection, is like an eerie parody of an academic text.’
Bad Science, Ben Goldacre, The Guardian 3 February 2007
Then Channel 4 aired the theories of the extraordinary Dr Aubrey De Grey on Saturday evening in Do You Want to Live Forever? (If you follow this link, you don’t get any information about the programme, unfortunately). He calls his theories – which do not seem to have been tested by any real experimental science – SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence). Anyway, half watching this programme, which made a reasonable stab at debunking De Grey’s ‘science’ there was a sequence showing the South Seas cargo cult – probably a re-creation.
De Grey’s theories do have some relevance to animal research, in that they don’t yet involve any. Calling De Grey a ‘well-informed flake’, Thomas Sutcliffe in today’s Independent TV review (unfortunately I couldn’t find it online) says:
‘It doesn’t help Dr De Grey’s standing with the bench scientists (the people who do the hard grind with fruit flies and rhesus monkeys) that his disciples range from the wilder frontiers of scientific prognostication.’
Thomas Sutcliffe’s TV review, The Independent, 5 Februay 2007
But wait a minute ... De Grey co-founded the Methuselah Foundation and the Methuselah Mouse Prize: ‘the premiere effort of the Methuselah Foundation and is being offered to the scientific research team who develops the longest living Mus musculus, the breed of mouse most commonly used in scientific research.’
How to define the longest living and thus trigger the award? Unfortunately I couldn’t work it out from a quick read of the website – life’s too short to get stuck into in all this Cargo Cult nonsense, I thought. I’ll just stick to debunking the antivivisection Cargo Cult.
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