Religion and science

We as scientists often like to believe that we are truly neutral in evaluating experimental data and theories. Reams of legitimate literature exists that remains relatively neutral in results discussion, always giving several explanations to experimental outcomes. Unfortunately, literature appears that is driven by philosophical or religious (the two concepts are the same) motivations and are not true scientific inquiry. This kind of literature embarrasses the entire scientific community, invalidates the studies within this biased literature and creates mass public confusion.

This post is about one poorly written book from the vegan philosophy camp, The China Study, by T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M Campbell II. I started reading the book and made it through the 4th chapter before giving up. Obviously biased information within the first 81 pages is enough to repudiate anything else within the book.

First, the book is written by a father/son team. This immediately casts a shadow on the results. Why do you need your son to coauthor a book? I will tell you why. No other respectable scientist who needs a careers would put his/her name on such a piece of work.

Second, and more importantly, is science depends upon addressing other findings from within the scientific community and giving appropriate responses to their theories. The author talks about other scientists not giving "open-minded" intercourse to his ideas. This "open-minded" discussion runs two ways and there lies the problem. Everyone is supposed to just accept his simplified animal based protein is the cause of Western disease theory as a fact. Other scientific views backed by years of research are not relevant. Campbell even arrogantly makes the comment in Chapter 1,

....we scientists focus on details while ignoring the larger context. For example we pin our efforts on and our hopes on one isolated nutrient at a time, whether it is vitamin A to prevent cancer or vitamin E to prevent heart attacks. We oversimplify and disregard the infinite complexity of nature.

This entire book is a simplification of three studies stating that animal based protein is the cause of all degenerative diseases like heart disease and cancer (referred to as Western disease). What makes your simplistic idea any better than other scientist's? Did God have a direct communication with you? This is double-speak my friends and shows tremendous bias towards a philosophical idea.

Third, the book's premise are based upon experiments that lack any serious analysis. I could personally rip each of the poorly executed experiments to shreds, but for brevity sake they all have one conclusion without any thorough discussion. Thousands of factors could lead to the found results like nutrition, genetics and other biological mechanisms instead of one simple answer, his anti-meat explanation. This saddens me the most, because anything useful to be gained from the various studies was wasted among the dishonest conclusions. Other deep flaws litter the experiprocedures. It raises a further question, are the results repeatable?

Finally, the author contradicts himself in Chapter 4. The basic premise I outlined in an early blog posting, Supplementing what?, is long term veganism is not found in any large human populations worldwide. It results in malnourishment from lack of certain vitamins and minerals. Poor health is the result. Of course he could not find one of these vegans for his study (they would not live long enough), but he goes on to attack the closest thing. He describes one of his studies' subjects in China as consuming about 1/10 the amount of animal protein than in American diets and his results were on page 80,

We expected that when animal protein consumption an d blood cholesterol were as low as they are in rural China, there would be no further association with Western diseases. But we were wrong.

Maybe the exclusive cause of "Western disease" is not animal protein consumption?

I will stop here because I could fill several posts on this horrendous book. What I am pointing out is sometimes science is distorted with the purpose to sway a select audience. Often, it is for religious or philosophical reasons. In worst case scenarios, it is for outright fraud. In both cases, it is unethical.