A Plea for Scientific Thought in Breeding

What is scientific thought?

I have a master's degree from the U of Illinois from what was then the Department of Ecology, Ethology, and Evolution.  I went in as a PhD candidate but found I really did not care for the research end of things -- collecting data as a profession can be grindingly tedious.  I don't mind analyzing data, though I'm no stats whiz; there's a hard-to-put-into-words but very real excitement to watching information emerge from a heap of data.  I like reading the results of other peoples' research, depending on exactly what their work involves, despite the desperately boring style in which professional articles are written in academia.  I'm still interested in ecology, animal behavior and evolutionary theory.  I'm also interested in genetics (can you tell?), medicine, psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, politics, and economics.  My brother is a history guru and I think I absorbed some of the social science interests from him.  I teach.  I don't "do" science, not professionally.  Am I a scientist?  Yes, in a sense -- in a broad sense, but I think a true one.

Because of training and inclination, I think in a scientific manner.

What does it mean, for someone to "think in a scientific manner?"

It means, I would say, that you actively seek to discover or develop possible explanations that might underlie observations you make about the world.  More than that, it means that you actively attempt to design rigorous tests so that you can discover which of these possible explanations is the truth, or part of the truth.

Here is a statement that might be made either from a scientific or a non-scientific perspective:  "Watering tomato plants with beer makes them grow better."  I encountered this belief in a botany class I taught -- I had asked my students to design their own botany experiments and one student came up with this practice, followed all his life by her father, as something around which she might design an experiment.

If the beer treatment is routinely applied to every tomato plant in the garden every year because the gardener's father always did it that way, then the practice is not scientific.  It might be an act of faith, or a practice of blind tradition, or a recommendation followed by a novice gardener because she is a novice and is embarrassed not to keep going with what seems to be accepted practice.

If, on the other hand, the gardener is inclined towards a scientific frame of mind, then in the beginning she might simply wonder whether the belief that tomatoes watered with beer do better is true, and, if it is true, why the beer has this effect.  Because the chemicals in the beer act as nutrients for the plant?  Because the alcohol in the beer kills tomato pests?  Because if the gardener waters regularly with beer, she is watering regularly, and regular watering is good for tomatoes?

If the gardener wished to find out whether in general beer is good for tomatoes, she would do a test.  She might do this by growing twenty or so plants of one kind of tomato and watering half of her tomato plants with beer and half with water.  She might grow more plants, divide them up into more groups, and water some regularly and some just when they seem to need it desperately, either with beer or with water.  She might grow her plants in a greenhouse, so she could keep even rainwater away from the plants that are supposed to be watered with beer.  She might routinely water some of the plants by sprinkling the leaves so the beer (or water) will get on any tomato pests -- caterpillars or aphids -- on the leaves.  She might then water others by just watering at soil level so that no liquid gets on the leaves.

She would have to decide at the end of the season if the beer had made a difference.  To do this, she would have to decide what it means to "grow better."  The gardener would probably count the number of tomatoes produced by each plant, and maybe she would weigh them, too.  She might note the date the first tomato ripened for each plant, and the date the last tomato ripened.  Possibly she would measure the height of the plants, or the number of stems they produced, or she might weigh each entire plant.  At the end of the season, she would average each trait for each group to get summaries of the raw data -- the average number of tomatoes produced per plant for each treatment, and so forth.

Even after a very small-scale experiment, and just after one growing season, the gardener would be able to offer a tentative conclusion about whether watering your tomatoes with beer is likely to make a measurable difference in their performance.  The conclusion would be restricted.  She would say something like, "Carmello tomatoes, in the 2004 growing season, in southeastern Missouri, when watered at either regular or irregular intervals with Miller Genuine Draft, did not produce more tomatoes or a greater overall weight of tomatoes than the same kind of plants treated the same way, but with water instead of beer."  This is not the same as saying "Beer does not make tomatoes grow better than water."

    *  The desire to test a belief is part of scientific thinking.

    *  The ability to come up with multiple possible explanations for why something might work is part of         scientific thinking.

    *  The ability to prevent yourself from "falling in love" with a hypothesis and looking only for data which supports it, is part of scientific thinking.

    *  The ability to design an experiment that will allow you to test a belief or a possible explanation is part of scientific thinking -- as is knowing that your experiment should be designed to allow your hypothesis to be disproved.

   *   The understanding that it will take methodical measurement of different characteristics throughout the experiment to reach a conclusion is part of scientific thinking.

    *  The ability to draw a conclusion based on the data and stick with it, even if it doesn't agree with what you expected to begin with, is part of scientific thinking.

   *   The ability to see how your conclusion should be restricted (how generalizable it is, or isn't) is part of scientific thinking.

This tomato test is an example of experimental design in science. 

Often people think of science as "doing experiments."  There is another major category of science, however.  You can also think scientifically just by looking at the world and observing what you see -- but the observations must be rigorous.  Observational studies are important when you cannot do any kind of experiment.  For example, if you want to know what normal dog behavior is like in a feral situation, you simply have to find some feral dog populations and observe the dogs to see how they behave.  There is no way to do an experiment to investigate this question.

The observations have to be rigorous if your study is to be valid (accurately represent reality).  If you are going to note aggressive encounters between male dogs, for example, then you have to define what you mean by "aggressive behavior."  Biting?  Snapping?  Snarling?  Just lifting a lip?  How about when a dog walks towards another dog and the other one moves aside, is the first dog behaving aggressively?  How about when a dog simply looks at another one and that one rolls over on its side submissively -- has the first dog behaved aggressively?  And how are you defining submissive behavior -- rolling over?  Looking away?  Moving away?  Lowering the head and ears?  Lowering by how much?  Tucking the tail?  How "tucked" does the tail need to be to count?

In practice, somebody who studies animal behavior (a behaviorist, or an ethologist, depending) -- might make an ethogram -- a very detailed list of defined behaviors -- after watching the dogs for a while but before beginning serious observations.  Then she will probably observe one animal for an hour at a time or a day at a time -- every interaction it has with other animals, everything it does, including sleep (this is where an observational study would get extremely tedious).  Or she might sit down and record every instance of a particular behavior she sees in the pack for an hour or a day.  She'll record the circumstances under which behaviors take place -- is there a bitch in heat?  A resource, such as a carcass or a trashbin?  Then she'll do more observations the next day, and the next.

After doing an observational study, similarly restricted conclusions can be offered -- "These dogs, in these locations, in packs of these demographic characteristics, when in environments with these characteristics, in this season of the year, behaved in these ways."  Other observational studies done in other locations and times let you eventually find out how generalizable your conclusions are.

One of the very best observational studies I've ever read, by the way, is Jane Goodall's The Chimpanzees of Gombe.  If you want to see how a really thorough observational study can be done on animal behavior, this is a great book to read.  (The book is also informative and entertaining, btw.)

Nearly all studies of natural behavior are observational.

If you change the nutrition regimen for a group of dogs and record their response to the change, that is an experiment.  That is what dog-food companies do.  Or if you want to give folic acid to some bitches and not to others and see how this particular nutrient affects the proportion of puppies born with birth defects, that is an experiment.  Any time you are manipulating part of the environment to see what affect that has on some aspect of dog growth or development, you are doing an experiment -- or you are if you are being methodical, rigorous, and keeping good objective records of what you do and what you find.

If you want to determine the mode of inheritance of a trait, that will be observational.  You may set up the conditions under which the observation will be done -- you choose which bitch to mate to which dog -- but fundamentally you will be counting puppies with trait A versus trait B.  I did an exactly similar observational study out of casual curiosity when I found that petunia seeds I had collected were producing some white seedlings (true whites -- no chlorophyll) -- I simply counted green and white seedlings as I thinned them and compared the ratio I got, from about 150 thinned-out seedlings, to the expected Mendelian ratio for a single-gene autosomal recessive trait.  I drew on background knowledge to make the hypothesis that this was a single-gene autosomal recessive trait.  Most good hypotheses have reasons behind them; they aren't plucked randomly from the aether.  In my case, I happened to know that corn seeds with a similar white mutation are sold by biological supply companies for use in teaching genetics, and in corn the mutation involves a simple autosomal recessive.  (The data fit this hypothesis quite well for my petunias).

Test breedings of all kinds fall into the observational category of study.

When Isabell (Introduction to Genetics for Dog Breeders) noticed that some male puppies showed an early descent of testicles, she did a very nice, if limited, study of the correlation of early testes descent with cryptorchidism -- a fine example of precisely how a single breeder can, and ought to, contribute to the base of knowledge that all breeders can use to improve their breeding programs.  Any single breeder can only do a limited study -- small sample size is the most important constraint on a single breeder.  But even a very small-scale study can yield strong suggestions about how to avoid cryptorchidism, or whatever.  Isn't it nice to know that the daughters of males with early testes descent tended to pass on less cryptorchidism than average to their sons?

That's all very well, but could I, as a small breeder, actually do any kind of useful experiment?

Yes, you could.

If you want to find out whether docking dewclaws inhibits puppy growth or interferes with normal personality development, you could do an experiment -- you could dock the dewclaws of half the puppies in each litter, choosing the puppies at random, and record subsequent growth, vigor, and personality traits.  You'd have to decide how to define "vigor" and how to describe personality traits.  It would take a lot more than one litter to reach conclusions -- tiny sample sizes are one of the most common and most serious sources of error in reaching sound conclusions.  But over time, even with small litters, you could accumulate enough puppies to make your own personal study meaningful.  (Meaningful for your breed.  There is no reason to expect your findings to apply to breeds with substantially different personality type -- Cavaliers are not the same as Basenjis!  It's important to restrict your conclusions.)

You could do something similar if you decided to feed half, but only half (and randomly selected!) of your dogs a bones-and-raw-foods diet.  You'd have to decide what to record and how to record it in each case.  You could decide to socialize every other litter with children at three weeks of age and see how the puppies react to children when they grow up.  How would you define behaviors when watching puppy-child interactions?  You could let half your puppies watch their trained mothers enthusiastically retrieve objects when they are six weeks old and see if this treatment tends to produce puppies that retrieve well when they start their own training at six months of age.

These sorts of experiments are hard to do, not because the question you're trying to answer is particularly intractable, but because the tendency is to make an a priori (before testing) decision that treatment X (BARF diet, say) is probably the best diet.  Well, if it's the best, don't you want all your dogs on that diet?  So rather than try to find out whether the diet actually makes a difference by doing a randomized experiment, you just put all your dogs on the diet and then try to spot improvements that might be attributable to the diet.  This is a very strong impulse, but it leads to very weak conclusions.

Let me illustrate this problem, which is a general one, with a personal example, from gardening.  When trying to start Echinops ritro (globe thistle) from seed once, I judged from the size of the seeds that they should probably be covered by about 1/4 to 1/8 inch with soil.  I got very, very poor germination.  Was this a problem with the seeds or with the technique?  What I should have done the first time, I did for the second go-round:  planted seeds at all different depths (labeled -- you have no idea how easy it is to forget which treatment you applied to which block of seeds if you've never tried to rely on memory for this kind of thing).  I found that Echinops seeds don't want to be covered at all -- they want to lie right at the surface of the soil.  Well, it would have wasted a lot fewer seeds and a lot less time if I'd been in experiment mode the first time.

On the other hand, sometimes data just fall into your hands, if you are paying attention.  You don't necessarily need to deliberately set out to do an experiment as such.  Suppose you simply keep track of puppies you sell and eventually get the impression that puppies sold to older couples with no children living in the house tend to become seriously overweight more often than puppies sold to other types of owners.  This impression is dangerously likely to be dead wrong because it's just part of the human condition that once you get an idea in your head, you always notice data that confirms it more than data that contradicts it (this is called confirmation bias and is a real problem).  Therefore, you carefully make a list of all the puppies you have ever sold and fill in type of owner and subsequent weight.  That way you know whether the trend you thought you were seeing does in fact exist.

Similarly, if you carefully record data on puppy development, you might observe that when you get only one puppy per litter, the puppy tends to grow into a bully who has trouble relating to other dogs.  This might give you ideas about how to socialize singleton puppies to prevent this problem.  And so forth.

In each case, you are not just deciding what to believe on the basis of what you have heard, or conventional wisdom, or untested belief  -- you are testing hypotheses and deciding what to believe on the much sounder basis of actual data.

Even when you don't, or can't, conduct your own tests, you ought to be evaluating the claims that other people make from a scientific perspective, not from a credulous perspective.  Especially sensational claims of the I alone have discovered how to defeat The Establishment and restore our Dogs to the natural health that is their birthright type.  Yes, it's nice to be open-minded -- but not so much that your brains fall out.

You can't know everything about everything -- suppose you encounter a claim that eating dark-green vegetables is good for you because the chlorophyll in the vegetables provides you with oxygen (a claim actually made by a particular "nutritionist" of the current day); I suppose that if you know nothing about botany and less about physiology, you might not instantly realize how utterly nonsensical such a claim actually is.  However, if you come across a claim that on the face of it seems odd and off-the-mainstream, then, especially if it's got that tell-tale Only I have discovered tone, why not read up on the subject a bit so that you can make a reasoned judgment?

What is the alternative to scientific thinking?

There are a lot of fallacies -- dangerous fallacies -- waiting to ambush the breeder who is not in the habit of careful, rigorous thought.  There are, I think, three biggies in particular:

Communal reinforcement is an important phenomenon that serious affects us as breeders (as well as in every other realm of life).  Communal reinforcement is the process by which a strong belief comes to dominate a community (field, school of thought, etc) because repeated assertions that it is true are continually made by members of the community.  Communal reinforcement of an idea does not depend on the idea being sound, or ever having been carefully researched, or being supported by either evidence or common sense.  In "real life," the mass media contribute to this problem by uncritically supporting various claims.  In breeding, one example of communal reinforcement was seen in the historical belief that a bitch, if mated to a random-bred dog, would produce mongrel puppies forever after.  Another was that a mongrel bitch, if mated three times to a pure-bred dog, would produce purebred puppies the third time around.  A third (this one very mainstream) was that the stud contributed all of the genetic influence on the puppies, with the bitch merely providing a womb in which to grow them.

Wrong beliefs like this can get passed down for generations despite being eminently testable.  Communal reinforcement is one of the important reasons why whole societies can believe the most incredible nonsense for hundreds of years, while the whole time every shred of evidence screams that the belief is dead wrong.

A fairly modern example of communal reinforcement is seen in the widespread belief that the "tail male" and "tail female" lines are especially influential to later descendents.  This idea was developed by Bruce Lowe, if you want to go back and look at the history behind the concept.  It is still held by some top-notch breeders, but it seems unlikely on the face of it that this should be true -- since a dog has 78 chromosomes, it seems strange that the sex chromosomes -- the only ones passed solely through the tail lines -- should have a disproportionate influence.  There just aren't that many genes located on the sex chromosomes.  Especially the male Y chromosome.  The tail lines are visible to breeders -- they're on the top and bottom of the pedigree -- but particularly influential?  I doubt it.  So do others who have refuted this belief more decisively than I plan to do here -- particularly Willis in his book Genetics of the Dog.  Willis also just eviscerates Belfield's so-called "study" of sodium ascorbate as a preventative for hip dysplasia -- another example of modern communal reinforcement of a really nonsensical idea.

A possible example of communal reinforcement is the belief, common right now, that XYZ brands or diets of dog food are inferior nutritionally to ABC brands or diets (with infinite permutations on the theme).  A lot -- a LOT -- of completely unsupported claims, some plausible and some completely implausible, are made in the area of canine nutrition right now.  A product must be meat-based to be good.  Beet pulp is bad.  Saponins are bad.  Cooking the food is bad.  Preservatives are bad.  Color dyes are bad.  Let me sum up the whole debate briefly:  hardly anyone involved is interested in information, and communal reinforcement rules.

Correlation vs. causation -- surely most people have heard somebody say Correlation does not equal causation at some time, but generally speaking most people seem either not to understand what this saying means, or else not to believe it's true.  Let me toss a couple of examples of correlations that most emphatically do not imply causation out, just to get the ball rolling.

    1.  Most people who do hard drugs smoked pot when they were younger, so smoking pot predicts / is linked to / causes later use of hard drugs.  Let's demonstrate the problem with this inference:  Most people who do hard drugs drank milk when they were children, so drinking milk . . . This one is a classic demonstration of why correlations cannot be assumed to imply causation.

    2.  Here's one I noticed in a recent introductory psych textbook:  When they start high school, girls overall outperform boys, yet by the time they graduate from high school, girls overall are performing worse academically, so high school must be squishing the ability of girls.  Let me point out the flaw in this reasoning:  When they start high school, girls as a group are taller than boys; yet by the time they graduate, the reverse is true.  Clearly high school must be stunting the growth of girls, right?  (And this was in a psych text!  Isn't psychology supposed to be a science?  Is this an example of scientific thought?)

When two things (events, phenomena, characteristics) occur together, they may be correlated because A causes B, because B causes A, because C causes both A and B, or because of coincidence.  Here's what happens when dog owners and breeders get confused between correlation and causation:

As dogs shifted historically from a diet of table food to a diet of standardized kibble, rates of allergies dramatically increased.  Problem:  a lot of other factors changed over the time span, including -- more dogs kept as indoor pets / close companions vs. as farm dogs, plausibly leading to more allergies being noticed; more dogs kept indoors instead of outdoors, unquestionably leading to a dramatically different exposure to environmental pathogens; a possible shift in diagnostic criteria over the same period; a major shift in breeding practices with the rise of the previously-unknown puppy mill; and a major change in vaccination protocols and other routine care.  I don't claim to have gotten all the plausible suggestions that have been made, either.  The very first correlated factor that occurs to you, or is suggested to you, should not be where you stop thinking about the subject.

I'm sure you have no trouble thinking of other arguments that follow precisely this form:  As combo vaccines were developed, rates of autoimmune disorders increased.  As XYZ changed, rates of genetic disease ABC went through the roof.  When dogs are spayed, they get fat.  When I put my dogs on supplement S, they quit showing condition C.

Sometimes correlations really do indicate an underlying causation.  But a breeder who wants to have a chance to see what's really going on, past the "noise" of chance and the clutter of confounding factors, had better be ready to distinguish between correlations that are real and those that are bogus.  This is where good randomized experiments with rigorous data collection come in.  It also leads to a third major fallacy breeders (and everybody else) are subject to:

The plural of anecdote is 'data.'  Um, no.  This saying is best described as catchy but wrong.

A lot of advertisements today, for ideas as well as products, depend on testimonials.  Breeder A swears that Bach flower remedies did wonders for her dogs -- the remedy manufacturer puts that testimonial on his product.  My dog had cancer, but I changed his diet and the cancer remitted!  I had terrible coat problems with my dogs, but then I switched to XYZ shampoo and now the coats are beautiful and thick.  Just two visits to a pet chiropractor and my dog quit limping . . .

The problem is that anecdotes and testimonials are deeply, deeply flawed as evidence.  The best that can be said of an anecdote is that it is suggestive.  It may support a particular hypothesis or idea or claim.  The problem is . . .

It doesn't matter whether a particular anecdote is true.  It may be perfectly true that a particular dog developed skin allergies, suffered, was put on a new diet, and then showed a resolution of the problem.  The problem is, this anecdote, even if true, carries almost no information.  It is suggestive -- it means that it may be worth investigating the role of diet in allergies more rigorously -- but would be very risky to form a conclusion on the basis of anecdotes alone.

Human perception of events is terribly unreliable.  That is why eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable in court.  Here's what we contend with in this area:  self-deception.  Wishful thinking.  Confirmation bias -- a tendency to see only evidence that confirms what you expect to be true.  Ordinary recovery -- most minor medical conditions resolve by themselves no matter what you do.  Fluctuation in illness -- most medical conditions, even major ones, fluctuate in severity over time.  Normal recovery and temporary resolution of symptoms lead back to self-deception and wishful thinking.

Confounding factors are a huge problem -- if the dog owner tried a veterinary shampoo at the same time as she switched diets, then which made a difference?  If there was a seasonal change at the same time, then did that make a difference?  If she renewed her Frontline application right then, or ran through a quick prednisone treatment, then did those things make a difference?  There is a very strong tendency to try a lot of things simultaneously and then credit any improvement shown to just one treatment.  In particular, if both traditional veterinary treatments and "alternative treatments" are tried simultaneously, most of the time the "alternative treatment" will be credited with any improvement and the traditional treatment dismissed.  Even the inherent honesty of a person does not mean her account is accurate:  if somebody swore up and down that she'd been abducted by aliens or had seen the Loch Ness monster, she might be sincere, but this doesn't mean you can't reasonably doubt her claims.

Particularly when advertisements for some product or diet or procedure rely upon testimonials alone to support the claims made for the product or diet or procedure, you should doubt the claims.  To the basic unreliability of human observers, you get the addition of advertisement.  Surely you don't watch a commercial that shows a pleased woman declaring "tastes just like real bacon!" and assume that the amazing soybean imitation really does taste just like real bacon.  If a used car salesman offered a dozen testimonials from pleased customers, wouldn't you at least wonder if there were twice as many displeased suckers that aren't being drawn to your attention? 

The above problems affect us all -- if we aren't careful.  Even if we try to maintain rigorous habits of thought.  I would tend to sum them up as careless thinking.  But there is another kind of thinking that is even more dangerous, which, for lack of a better term, I'll refer to as magical thinking.

What is magical thinking?

In ancient Babylonia, it was believed that if a physician on the way to see a patient happened to see a black rooster, the patient would die.  It is easy to see how such a belief could get started -- one day a physician on the way to see a patient happened to see a black rooster and . . .

It's also obvious that this belief would never have stood up to any kind of testing whatsoever.

In parts of South America, you may find a fer-de-lance, an extremely venomous snake.  People who live around fer-de-lance snakes may believe that, for example, eating chewing tobacco after being bitten by a fer-de-lance can save you from the poison.  As it happens, about half the time when a fer-de-lance bites, it does not inject venom.  About half the time, therefore, if you eat chewing tobacco after being bitten, you will live.

This kind of belief, created originally by coincidence, is what behaviorists sometimes refer to technically as "superstitious" behavior.  You see precisely the same sort of thing happen when you watch puppies learning to sit.  Perhaps the first time a puppy sat, he also scratched his ear -- and got a tasty reward!  So he tried scratching his ear again, had to sit to do so -- another reward!  Now the puppy thinks he's being rewarded not for sitting, but for scratching his ear.  That's all right, in dog training.  Since the trainer is actually not rewarding ear-scratching, eventually the connection in the puppy's mind will weaken and disappear on its own.

You also see exactly this kind of superstition when a baseball player develops a ritual for tapping his bat before getting ready to swing, or a hunter has a "lucky cap" he always wears while out hunting, or whatever.  This kind of superstitious behavior is harmless.

Superstitious behavior is not so keen when trying to deal with snakebites.  Eating chewing tobacco can kill you.

In the 1800s, it was common to dose people ill with cholera with very large amounts of mercury.  People already very sick usually cannot survive being treated with mercury, which is quite poisonous and has no efficacious effect at all for any kind of sickness.  It was also common to "bleed" sick people, as I think is widely known.  This also had only negative effects on the health of patients.  It's frightening to think how many patients were killed by their doctors -- who, by the way, did not wash their hands as they moved from one patient to another, or sterilize their equipment.  No one at the time knew about microorganisms . . .

Consider the type of question that could be posed at the time about cholera:  "So, doctor, do you believe that it is in fact an imbalance of bodily humors that causes cholera, or instead a miasma of night air?"

It was not possible to pose a correct question until the invention of the microscope and the discovery of microorganisms.  But it would have been possible at any time to disprove the efficacy of the standard "treatments" for cholera.  Anyone who had been in the habit of scientific thought could have randomly assigned patients to different treatments, along with a "control" in which no treatment was given.  Anyone could have rapidly found, by doing this, that the standard treatments for cholera were far worse than doing nothing.

Magical thinking consists, I think, of building a pretty edifice of theory in your head and assuming your theory must then be true because it is elegant, disregarding inconvenient facts that do not fit -- even hugely obvious facts, if necessary.

There is, always, a personal bias in the observer -- any observer.  Everyone always "sees" more clearly evidence that fits in with what she believes, and tends not to "see" evidence that disagrees with her beliefs.  This is called "confirmation bias" -- and it's a very strong tendency that must be specifically resisted, primarily by the rigorous collection of objective data.

Someone who thinks scientifically allows for this unavoidable bias.  The greatest contribution ever made to science, in any field, by anyone, was the randomized, preferably double-blind, test.  A test that is rigorously designed, randomized, and preferably blind or double-blind, can't be used in every situation, but it could be used a lot more often than it is.

Magical thinking remains, even today, exceedingly common.  Let's take a brief look at a system of magic that has a lot of adherents right this minute.

As previously mentioned, it wasn't that long ago that medical treatments were pretty routinely killing patients.  Bleeding patients, forcing them to vomit violently ("purging"), administering salts of mercury, and so forth were horrendously bad treatments and some doctors suspected this.  A few looked around for alternatives.

The Medieval "Doctrine of Signatures" held that one could treat brain disorders by giving the patient walnuts -- because walnuts look sort of like brains.  In the same way, you would treat liver disorders with medicines  made of liverwort plants (the leaves resemble the lobes of a liver, if you look at them right), lung disorders with the leaves of Pulmonaria (lungwort) plants, and so forth.

The Doctrine of Signatures was a strictly magical theory, of course, related to the class of magic called "sympathetic magic", in which you might call forth rain by sprinkling water out of a bowl -- a "like causes like" or "like treats like" type of magic that has roots going back a long way.

So when a German doctor of the era, Samuel Hahnemann, decided quite reasonably to find an alternative to the not only ineffective but also actively harmful treatments of the time, he quite naturally came up with a theory that had a lot in common with sympathetic magic.  What he developed was a theory that one could treat a disease that had, for example, violent vomiting and diarrhea as symptoms, by administering tiny amounts of a substance that would cause similar symptoms in a healthy person (like curing like).  He came up with, in essence, a "library" of substances that should treat various disorders by taking small amounts of this and that and recording any effects he thought he might have experienced -- then using the substances to treat disorders which showed similar but more severe symptoms.

Hahnemann built an elegant and complicated theory around this basic idea.  Part of the theory stated that the smaller the dose of a treatment administered, the better the medical effect.  This led to the creation of "superdiluted" or "hyperdiluted" treatments -- bottles of water in which the substance that was supposed to produce the good effect had been so diluted that not a single molecule of the substance was actually present in the bottle.  The remedy was supposed to work anyway because it was magic -- quite explicitly magic:  it was supposed to cure the patient of a kind of miasma of illness by way of a "spiritual essence" the diluted substance left behind in the bottle.

Does this sound at all familiar?  This is homeopathy, a quite popular type of "alternative medicine" at the moment.  I am not kidding.  This is the theory underlying homeopathy.  In Hahnemann's day, patients had a reason to flock to homeopathy -- it was so much better than so many of the alternatives, since it did no harm and also sometimes benefited from the placebo effect.  Today, the only people who flock to homeopathy are the ill-informed, the magically-thinking, and the desperate.

Advocates of homeopathy will say that there's more to medicine than we understand.  This is true.  It does not excuse using or persuading others to use a magical system that dates back to the Dark Ages to treat real medical conditions today.  It does not excuse advocating a treatment for which there is no shred of supporting evidence from any rigorously-designed study, ever.  And worse, it does not excuse ignoring or persuading others to ignore real medical treatments that work so that later they die.

Don't tell me that the medical establishment won't investigate homeopathy.  It does not take an 'Establishment' and a grant.  It takes rigor in experimental design, and that's all.  Anybody with any kind of decent science education can do rigorous science.

There was more, a lot more, to medicine than Hahnemann understood, too.  It's a shame not to take advantages of the past two hundred years of medical advancement for yourself or your pets.

Every decent pet owner or serious breeder wants the best for her pets.  The question is, do you want to depend on magic, luck, gossip, testimonials, and 'conventional wisdom' for the health and well-being of your dogs, or do you want to think scientifically and take a stab at figuring out what really works to produce healthy, well-adjusted pets and beautiful show dogs?

Just, you know, asking.

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http://www.oracknows.blogspot.com -- My very favorite website related to this topic, maintained by a guy who's a medical doctor (a surgical oncologist) and a research scientist.  If you want to know how a cancer specialist feels when he watches alternative medicine kill people who did not need to die, check out this site.

http://skepdic.com/control.html -- what is a double-blind test and why is blinding important in testing a theory?  Also definitions of ad hoc hypotheses, communal reinforcement, confirmation bias, the experimenter effect, the placebo effect, the post hoc fallacy, selective thinking, self-deception, subjective validation, wishful thinking, the problem with testimonials as evidence, and other ways otherwise intelligent people fool themselves.

http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i21/21b02001.htm -- seven signs of junk science -- Robert L. Park is a professor of physics at the University of Maryland at College Park and the director of public information for the American Physical Society. He is the author of Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud (Oxford University Press, 2002).

http://www.quackwatch.org/index.html -- Stephen Barrett, M.D., a retired psychiatrist who resides in Allentown, Pennsylvania, has achieved national renown as an author, editor, and consumer advocate. In addition to heading Quackwatch, he is vice-president of the National Council Against Health Fraud, a scientific advisor to the American Council on Science and Health, and a Fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP).

 http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/homeo.html -- the best homeopathy page at Quackwatch.

http://www.quackwatch.org/04ConsumerEducation/placebo.html -- spontaneous remission and folk remedies.

http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/altbelief.html -- why bogus therapies may seem to work.

http://www.fmsfonline.org/  -- false memories (False Memory Syndrome Foundation website).

http://www.junkscience.com/ -- Steven J. Milloy is the publisher of JunkScience.com, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a columnist for FoxNews.com. Milloy holds a B.A. in Natural Sciences from the Johns Hopkins University, a Master of Health Sciences in Biostatistics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, a Juris Doctorate from the University of Baltimore, and a Master of Laws from the Georgetown University Law Center.

http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000051.html  -- Bill Whittle's essay on magical thinking.