the science terminology abuse top five
For as long as there was science, there have been people poaching words from technical jargons to generate an initial sense of respectability to whatever they were saying or selling. And unfortunately, for the same length of time, they’ve been disregarding what the terms they borrow actually entail and spun their definition to justify elaborate quackery and crankery. Today, the situation is no different and technobabble flows from the mouths and pages of woo-meisters like an oceanic current. Now, all words are not created equal for pseudoscientific abuse and there are trends in woo-speak. So what are some of today’s hottest out-of-context buzzwords?
#5. Evolution. As far as scientific theories go, evolution is a damn good one so it may seem like an odd place to begin. However, when biologists and non-scientists talk about the concept, they often mean two drastically different things. In biology, evolution is a process of gradual change and selection. In pop culture, evolution is synonymous with advancement which is why many woo peddlers, New Age enthusiasts, and transhumanist pontificators use it in their discussion. According to them, human transcendence or spiritual enlightenment is simply part of an evolutionary process and we’ll somehow overcome our natural limitations as a final stage of our evolution. Seriously? Just try and tell a biologist about a final stage of evolution without being brained and very rightfully so. Evolution is like climate. It’s an ongoing, dynamic process that will be with us as long as life can survive on our planet and its end will only come when the last remaining organisms on Earth a few billion years from now will fade into extinction and our world burns under a blistering, giant, red Sun.
#4. Natural. Invoking the natural, wholesome goodness of things is the latest marketing craze in the generally static food and supplement business. Today, with millions of people highly conscious of their health reading the ingredients on just about every can and box they buy, entrepreneurs figured out that substituting chemical names with herbs and other “natural” products would give their customers a warm and fuzzy feeling of escape from all those scary synthetics. And millions of people fell for it. Here’s the funny thing though. Natural doesn’t mean safe or good for you and many of those scary sounding chemical names on boxes are actually extracts from plants, fruits, vegetables and milk. Nature also has a vast supply of venoms, toxins and radioactive rocks which could kill you just by being in the same room with you. In reality, natural simply means that it’s extant in this universe which is a list that consists of well… everything you can legally buy or illegally obtain.
#3. Energy. Invoked by mystics, homeopaths, psychics and a whole swath of New Age woo-meisters, energy is perhaps one of the most abused terms in physics. To get an idea how badly the term could be abused, just check out the inanities uttered by homeopathic optometrist Charlene Werner. The howling you can hear in the background if you listen hard enough is Einstein’s ghost screaming in his grave as his formula of mass- energy equivalence is violated in ways that would impress even Marquis de Sade. For those of us who live in the real world, energy is the potential of a system to do work via whatever mechanism generates and uses it, not a euphemism for magical powers supposedly laying dormant in our bodies, waiting to be harnessed by a meandering quack who trips over her own tongue trying to explain something a middle school student would be expected to know on a science test.
#2. Toxin. Listen to an alt med practitioner and you’ll soon imagine a miasma of toxins settling over everything you touch. They’re everywhere and their buildup in your body can make you sick which is why all those “natural supplements” they sell should be bought for the purpose of cleaning out your system. While it’s true that toxin buildup can cause you to get sick, diseases are generally caused by germs which is often missed or outright ignored by naturists and alt med quacks. Your body evolved in an environment in which it’s exposed to plenty of toxins on a regular basis and you do have a tolerance for them and their effects on your body. Unless you’re having bizarre symptoms, you’re probably not in danger of being poisoned to death by invisible gunk. And if for some reason you see trees in your neighborhood turn strange colors and producing their own lacquer, you’re probably better off going to a doctor and the EPA than someone who wants to sell you a bottle of whatever he’s calling a natural holistic body cleanser.
#1. Quantum. Ordinarily, quantum mechanics describes the complex behavior of the basic building blocks of matter. The implications of understanding how the most fundamental parts of everything around us work can yield grand insights into the function of the universe itself. But of course, the woo crew had to show up to ruin a good thing and they’ve co-opted some of the most exotic behaviors in particle physics into their technobabble, which seeks to somehow justify their belief that something inherently unscientific and useless actually works. One wonders if any of the cranks who invoke quantum particles have ever even seen the formulas underlying the modern understanding of how particles form, interact, arise and decay. Here’s a small sample…
And that’s just the Higgs Lagrangian which provides an overview of the dynamics of the Higgs boson. Let me give you a moment to pick up your jaw while posing the question of where can we find a paper using what we know to be an accurate mathematical description of how bosons and fermions work, supporting all the ideas behind quantum homeopathy advocated by Deepak Chopra and other oblivious cranks. Even worse, many a theologian eager to play scientist are dropping the word quantum and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in their proofs of a deity’s existence, often demonstrating they have no grasp on the very ideas they invoke. Much like the advocates of woo, they’ve substituted the quantum for their invocation of magic and miracles and then pretend that by merely using a word from scientific jargon somehow makes their explanations empirical when in reality it does no such thing and adds infinitely more harm than good to their arguments.
How about “organic”?
=)
Your entry on ‘evolution’ misses one of the most grating misusages of the word: creationists use the term to damn any branch (or even twig!) of science that threatens or contradicts their position.
Apart from its usual field of biology, this can take in:
- cosmology (“evolution teaches that the universe just exploded into being one day!”)
- geology (“evolution has to use flawed methods which have built-in errors, like radiometric dating”)
- archaeology (“you have to believe in evolution to doubt the historical truth of Scripture!”)
… and I’m sure there are lots more. Masochists are invited to trawl AiG for examples.
(and don’t get me started on the indignities inflicted on the term ‘socialist’ in American political “discourse”)
A good post, for which many thanks.
OH! Another one!
“information”, which to a creationist, means “too complicated for me to be bothered trying to explain it”. In this sense, “information” is measurable enough for creationists to be able to assert with Solomonic wisdom that it can’t be added to or destroyed, but not so measurable that they will actually get around to, ummmm, measuring it.
What Higgs boson? The God particle has already been undiscovered to a couple of sigma, with more on the way,
http://physics.aps.org/files/image_uploads/3171/medium_e2.png
“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”
Great stuff, just love this site, just going outside to search for some “inorganic” vegetables for my dinner, I may be gone for some time.
I had the same thought as Michael Varney: the word organic tops my list of fashionable yet totally misused words. I appreciate that there are those who, with all the best of intentions, use it to distinguish food products according to the farming practices that were used to grow them, but unfortunately it is more of a marketing term that is successfully used to make people pay more for their food. It is debatable whether “organic” foods are any better for our health or for the planet, but it is beyond doubt that this term makes a lot of money for the food industry.
Just the other day, I summarized the Quantum Gambit thusly:
1) My crazy theory doesn’t make any sense.
2) Quantum theory is well supported by science, but even it’s strongest proponents (e.g. Feynman) have been quoted as saying that it doesn’t make any sense.
3) Therefore, my crazy theory is well supported by science.
Yeah, nothing wrong with that logic…
Re: The organic thing, I think people are slowly catching on. There is no doubt that many practices of modern industrial agriculture are environmentally damaging (though I’m skeptical that the products themselves are any worse or better for us), and in the Venn diagram of “organic” and “not nearly as environmentally damaging”, there is definitely some overlap… But it’s not nearly enough overlap, unfortunately. I think people are slowly getting it, though.
I just want to say that this sentence made my day:
The howling you can hear in the background if you listen hard enough is Einstein’s ghost screaming in his grave as his formula of mass- energy equivalence is violated in ways that would impress even Marquis de Sade.
Your blog is fantastic. I could not agree more with your views regarding the misuse of language and specific words. As Humpty Dumpty told Alice, so many vendors today seem to think that they can get away with “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less”.
I have been blessed (cursed?) with an inability to read text without spotting typos and misprints. Unfortunately, there appears to be two in the last paragraph. “Langrangian” should surely be “Lagrangian”, “oblivious” should, almost certainly, be “obvious”.
“I had the same thought as Michael Varney: organic tops my list of fashionable yet totally misused words.”
I would file it under the “natural” heading because the two buzzwords are used the same way and are being intended to mean pretty much the same thing.
“’Langrangian’ should surely be ‘Lagrangian’, ‘oblivious’ should almost certainly be ‘obvious’”.
Oops, thanks for the catch on my Lagrangian typo. It’s been fixed. However, I did mean to say that Chopra and cranks like him were oblivious, as in oblivious to how little sense they make to those of us who have a scientific education.
Sorry I’m late gfish. I’m a land surveyor not a scientist, but I bumped into some science when I was studying engineering. Quantum mechanics sent me scurrying for the exit.
How ’bout the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I never thought I understood it, but I’m just nearly sure it doesn’t support Intelligent Design. While all those freaks use it constantly to prove . . . whatever.
For that matter what about prove, and even worse how ’bout theory.
My biology professor back in 1959 said this: “Evolution is not a theory, it is an observable natural phenomenon, like the sun coming up. The concept by other names was ubiquitous in the scientific community when Charles Darwin was born. Darwin may have coined the term to help elaborate the slow steady movement to speciation implied by his Theory of Natural and Sexual Selection.” Or words to that effect.
But this improvement to perfection thru evolution seems to be such an old, ingrained concept that it’s hard for me to formulate anything much on the subject while avoiding terms like “higher order primates” or some such. But I’m working on it.
Yep, “theory” is horribly misused as well. Creationists like to say Evolution is “just a theory!” They don’t acknowledge that when a scientist uses the word theory, they’re not using it in the way that the average person uses it. What an average person typically means when they say theory is hypothesis.
Nice little blog post you have here. This is the first time I’ve been here, but I’ll be coming back to check it out again in the future.
“They don’t acknowledge that when a scientist uses the word theory, they’re not using it in the way that the average person uses it.”
That’s very true. However, I had an entire post dedicated to that very issue and in this list, I was trying to go after specific words which are common and have a very specific definition in science classes, and yet still get mangled by pseudoscientists.
Pseudoscientists are only part of the mislabeling problem.
Marketers are worse, at least in that they so much more (ahem) energetically promote their abuse of scientific terms and human language in general. You have to exert more effort to get a dose of Deepak than to encounter the word “energy” (attached to everything from multi-vitamins to liquid candy to broadcast amusements). Even in a moderately small town in the southern US, I’ve seen “Evolution” on storefronts, billboards & shelves.
Parasitism, evolution/ecology imply, is inevitable. I suggest this applies no less to semantics, economics, politics, etc, than to biology.
Since I can’t fight it, maybe tactically the next step is to join it: Parasite would be a good name for a band or vidgame. For beers, how about Solvent or Entropy?
The use of the word ‘Organic’ gets me going. I refuse to buy anything with the label organic on it and purchase something next to it that’s organic. If you really want to confuse everyone – technically speaking, since the substance water is inorganic then most if not all organic substances are not totaly organic. They should substitute the term organic with chemical free or non-genetically modified. Food for thought, next time you’re in the supermarket ask the staff why the rest of the vegies are not labeled accordingly as inorganic to take away any confusion. If enough people do this they may get the message how ridiculous the label seems.