This is not going to be an article on Intelligent Design. But Intelligent Design is a member of a class of concepts that appear in scientific dialogue without ever having earned their way in the usual fashion of combining theory with evidence. Now Intelligent Design just happens to be a concept that scientists would like to banish from the discourse. But other concepts that similarly lack the particulars of a scientific theory have overcome the immune reaction and reside happily among us. Examples are the placebo effect, the idea of spontaneous remission, and the Anthropic Principle. These concepts were never intended to become true science. They serve a useful function as placeholders, even as overt “untheories.”
Just as the idea of Intelligent Design makes a place–at least in principle–for a “God of the gaps,” the placebo model and spontaneous remission serve in the role of filling gaps in our scientific models. Matters are least ambiguous with regard to the concept of spontaneous remission. No scientist who is uncomfortable with the idea of Intelligent Design is any more comfortable with the idea of spontaneous remission. The term is not meant literally. One assumes that the spontaneous remission of cancer will ultimately yield to mechanistic understanding. But we have not been prepared to deal with that issue up to now. So everyone understands that spontaneous remission is just a placeholder that allows the conversation to proceed on issues that we can handle. Continue reading “Intelligent Design, Spontaneous Remission and the Placebo”
An article in a recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine finds that anti-depressants don’t contribute significantly to the recovery of bipolar patients. It is estimated that some 70% of bipolars are also being prescribed one or another anti-depressant. Since these are not fast-acting medications, it is often difficult to tell which of the medications being prescribed are actually doing the work.The surprise in the paper, however, was something else. It turns out that the placebo group did better than the medication group! Not only did the addition of anti-depressants fail to improve outcome, but the outcome was actually somewhat worse overall than among those who did not have anti-depressants added to their regimen. The difference was not statistically significant, according to the researchers. Some 23.5% of the treatment arm made “durable recoveries,” whereas some 27.3% of the placebo group did so. 
Jonathan Chait, a senior editor at the New Republic, reports that when the National Journal asked Republican senators and members of the House last year “…whether it’s been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the earth is warming because of man-made problems,” only some 23% said yes. Since that time there has been a further strengthening of the scientific evidence, and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a study signed by 2000 scientists to the effect that the likelihood of man-induced global warming now lay at the 90% level. When a similar question was asked of the Congressmen this year, the percentage assenting had surprisingly dropped to only 13%.