Over the past few months I’ve been thinking a lot about the transition between alchemy and formal chemistry, and how the current state of neuroscientific thought is eerily similar to alchemic practice.
While alchemic practice produced the basis for a lot of modern chemistry, the field as a whole was essentially a non-stop fraud vehicle. Because the field revolved around achieving philosophical goals rather than understanding mechanics, the data from alchemical practice was contorted or discarded if it did not support those philosophical goals.
The study of modern nervous system function is largely the same, where we are still defining function in terms of philosophical constructs like “depression” and “addiction”, because “curing” these “diseases” is the philosophical goal, rather than understanding the underlying mechanics of nervous systems.
The most significant issue addressed in the transition between alchemy vs. chemistry was the lack of standardization. Prior to this transition, there was no way to clearly transmit processes or product information. And of course, replication of that information was rare. Often terms and concepts in alchemical practice were intentionally esoteric, to protect against the obvious fraud of the practice.
Most modern nervous system study is less obviously fraudulent, but the philosophy driven expectations lead to the same results. For example, the overwhelmingly common practice of offering results which rely on conditions so specific that it’s impossible to replicate the results is extremely common in most high level journals and “science” reporting.
Further, we generally weight assumptions about random occurrence as imparting greater validity to these results than actual effect sizes. It’s the kind of sloppyness that makes some cases of outright fraud (see amyloid beta 56 or Wakefield colitis/autism) less detectable, but allows us to build a huge body of science based on these fraudulent base concepts.
While we may tar and feather Wakefield publicly today, the ideas in his seminal paper are still being heavily investigated and promoted as possible etiological bases or effects of autism. And despite the amyloid hypothesis being pretty soundly defeated by drugs which reduce plaques but not the “disease”, it’s still the dominant research path regarding dementia in the US.
Modern nervous system study is really only marginally better than alchemy was a few hundred years ago. Neuroscience still has yet to have a Berzelius style revolution, one which standardizes the discrete functions of a nervous system under a common system of mechanics, let alone a more formalized Mendeleevian presentation of function.
(More stuff here later)