If there was an award for the single greatest hub of pseudoscience on the internet, the website Natural News would well and truly take the crown tin foil hat. Expect to find anti-vaccine paranoia which extends not only to your garden variety antivaxxer favorites such as the debunked link to autism but to crackpot claims that vaccines caused the "cancer epidemic" and were even responsible for the "origin" of AIDS. According to Natural News, Microsoft is developing "eugenics vaccines that target specific races and nationalities with infertility-inducing pharmaceuticals". Alongside this you'll also find full blown AIDS denialism:
According to Natural News, "HIV does NOT cause AIDS. HIV does not cause anything. A staggering statement given the hype and acceptance by the scientific establishment and, through them, the public that the HIV virus is the only cause of AIDS. HIV is a weak virus and does not dismantle the immune system. Nor is AIDS passed on sexually."
It is worth noting that the above blog post is authored by David Icke, the man who believes that the world is controlled by a race of reptiles from outer space who reside in underground tunnels. If you thought things couldn't get much darker than AIDS denialism, you'd be wrong. Natural News reached dangerous new levels of hysteria when it published a post indirectly calling for the deaths of journalists, publishers and scientists who have worked on the topic of genetically modified organisms. In this latest post Mike Adams, the creator of Natural News, calls for the creation of a list of pro-GMO "publishers, journalists and scientists":
"Just as history needed to record the names and deeds of Nazi war criminals, so too must all those collaborators who are promoting the death and destruction caused by GMOs be named for the historical record. The true extent of their collaboration with an anti-human regime will all become readily apparent once the GMO delusion collapses and mass global starvation becomes an inescapable reality."
In the same blog post, Adams states (apparently with no relevance to his statements describing scientists, journalists and publishers as guilty of "genocide") the following "fundamental philosophical truth": "It is the moral right -- and even the obligation -- of human beings everywhere to actively plan and carry out the killing of those engaged in heinous crimes against humanity."
Shortly after publishing this, Adams updated his post, linking to a website which he writes was "inspired by a suggestion from this story" which lists the names of journalists (whose names I won't repeat here) and publishers including Discover Magazine, Alternet, National Geographic and Forbes. The list of scientists is ominously labelled "under construction".
Adams appears careful to distance himself from his justification of the murder of journalists, publishers and scientists, following his case with the disclaimer:"Do not misinterpret this article as any sort of call for violence, as I wholly disavow any such actions. I am a person who demands due process under the law for all those accused of crimes"
In a classic "I'm not racist but..." style remark, Adams immediately follows his disclaimer against violence with a line that seems designed to encourage the reader to conclude for themselves that violence against journalists, publishers and scientists is the only way to save the world from the "evil" scientists: "But what is the appropriate punishment for the criminal act of unleashing genetic pollution across our planet, contributing to mass crop failures, collapsing indigenous seed diversity, instigating widespread human starvation, suppressing scientific knowledge and dousing the world's farmlands with the toxic chemical glyphosate? How do you even decide on a punishment that can fit the scale and magnitude of such a collection of crimes?"
In what appears to be an attempt to backtrack, perhaps due to the realisation of the severity of what he has written, Adams has now updated his story yet again, claiming the list, which he suggested be created: "...is a bait-and-switch trap engineered by the biotech industry in an effort to lure in support from GMO skeptics and then discredit them with some sort of insane "call to action" of some kind".
In a few short days we've witnessed the creation of yet another brand new conspiracy theory from start to finish. To further complicate matters, the hit list that Adams claims he has nothing to do with, was created hours before Adams' blog post calling for its creation and evidence has now emerged that the website was created by the same person that created Natural News.
Back to the less extremist but no less deluded beliefs that have been put forward on the website; Natural News once claimed that a paper in Nature Neuroscience provided evidence for astrology (yes the belief that the position of planets at the time you were born affects your personality), spoiler: it didn't and for that matter it had nothing whatsoever to do with planets, let alone astrology. Other obviously made up stories include that “People Who Grow Their Own Food (are) Labeled 'Extremist' by Dept. of Defense” as one Natural News headline put it. Five months after Slate's request for evidence for this claim Natural News remains silent. Mike Adams' views on Skeptiks are so absurd, fanatical and plainly made up, that it's almost impossible to believe that you're not reading The Onion.
Coincidentally, alongside the conspiracy theories on Natural News, you will find an assortment of miracle cures (which conveniently happen to be sold on the site). Earlier this year Natural News set up a "laboratory" that so far seemingly consists of nothing whatsoever except a lone mass spectrometer and a white lab coat:
Since then, Natural News have pumped out "findings" of heavy metals in various health foods. They've also claimed to have discovered heavy metals in flu vaccines - which they would have discovered far more easily if they'd.. erm.. simply read the label of the vaccine. The relevance of this information is parodied in an amusing blog post by skeptical blogger Paul Gallagher.
This month things have taken another twist, Natural News have now launched a product called Heavy Metals Defence which they claim: "captures lead, cadmium, arsenic, mercury, aluminum, uranium and even copper"
Predictably, the evidence to back up this claim is nonexistent. Adams' response to skeptics is even more staggering: "The only people who argue with this are those who are already mercury poisoned and thus incapable of rational thought. Mercury damages brain function, you see, which is exactly what causes some people to be tricked into thinking vaccines are safe and effective"
So if you're not on board Natural News' express train to cloud cuckoo land, you are obviously already brain damaged by mercury, well now it all makes perfect sense. If the implications of Adams' website weren't so serious, the whole affair would be comical; however, the reach of Natural News is really quite staggering. Adams claims 7 million unique readers per month, to put that figure in context, even conservative estimates by a third party ratings service, of 1.7 million visitors per month puts Natural News into the same range of influence as the Mayo Clinic, with double the monthly readership of the US government's official website about cancer - Cancer.gov and twenty times the readership of the US government website about alternative medicines. With over a million Facebook likes it is more than likely that you know at least one person who inadvertently liked their page, perhaps after reading one of Natural News' more innocuous articles. Thanks to Facebook's new graph search you can click here to see which of your Facebook friends like their page. You might like to take this opportunity to send them this blog post to let them know exactly what it is they have subscribed to.
Postscript: If you ever feel the need to link for whatever reason to Natural News' content please link via a service such as Do Not Link (or use a Nofollow tag), one reason Natural News can claim millions of visitors per month is the number of websites that debunk their content but inadvertently increase their Google Ranking by providing links in. Using the Nofollow HTML attribute allows you to debunk the content of sites like Natural News without helping them in the process.
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Does science tell the truth? The answer to this question is not as simple as it seems, and my 13.8 colleague Adam Frank took a look at it in his article about the complementarity of knowledge. There are many levels of complexity to what truth is or means to a person or a community. Why?
It's complicated
First, "truth" itself is hard to define or even to identify. How do you know for sure that someone is telling you the truth? Do you always tell the truth? In groups, what may be considered true to a culture with a given set of moral values may not be true in another. Examples are easy to come by: the death penalty, abortion rights, animal rights, environmentalism, the ethics of owning weapons, etc.
At the level of human relations, truth is very convoluted. Living in an age where fake news has taken center stage only corroborates this obvious fact. However, not knowing how to differentiate between what is true and what is not leads to fear, insecurity, and ultimately, to what could be called worldview servitude — the subservient adherence to a worldview proposed by someone in power. The results, as the history of the 20th century has shown extensively, can be catastrophic.
Proclamations of final or absolute truths, even in science, shouldn't be trusted.
The goal of science, at least on paper, is to arrive at the truth without recourse to any belief or moral system. Science aims to go beyond the human mess so as to be value-free. The premise here is that Nature doesn't have a moral dimension, and that the goal of science is to describe Nature the best possible way, to arrive at something we could call the "absolute truth." The approach is a typical heir to the Enlightenment notion that it is possible to take human complications out of the equation and have an absolute objective view of the world. However, this is a tall order.
It is tempting to believe that science is the best pathway to truth because, to a spectacular extent, science does triumph at many levels. You trust driving your car because the laws of mechanics and thermodynamics work. NASA scientists and engineers just managed to have the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter — the first man-made device to fly over another planet — hover above the Martian surface all by itself.
We can use the laws of physics to describe the results of countless experiments to amazing levels of accuracy, from the magnetic properties of materials to the position of your car in traffic using GPS locators. In this restricted sense, science does tell the truth. It may not be the absolute truth about Nature, but it's certainly a kind of pragmatic, functional truth at which the scientific community arrives by consensus based on the shared testing of hypotheses and results.
What is truth?
But at a deeper level of scrutiny, the meaning of truth becomes intangible, and we must agree with the pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus who declared, around 400 years BCE, that "truth is in the depths." (Incidentally, Democritus predicted the existence of the atom, something that certainly exists in the depths.)
A look at a dictionary reinforces this view. "Truth: the quality of being true." Now, that's a very circular definition. How do we know what is true? A second definition: "Truth: a fact or belief that is accepted as true." Acceptance is key here. A belief may be accepted to be true, as is the case with religious faith. There is no need for evidence to justify a belief. But note that a fact as well can be accepted as true, even if belief and facts are very different things. This illustrates how the scientific community arrives at a consensus of what is true by acceptance. Sufficient factual evidence supports that a statement is true. (Note that what defines sufficient factual evidence is also accepted by consensus.) At least until we learn more.
Take the example of gravity. We know that an object in free fall will hit the ground, and we can calculate when it does using Galileo's law of free fall (in the absence of friction). This is an example of "functional truth." If you drop one million rocks from the same height, the same law will apply every time, corroborating the factual acceptance of a functional truth, that all objects fall to the ground at the same rate irrespective of their mass (in the absence of friction).
But what if we ask, "What is gravity?" That's an ontological question about what gravity is and not what it does. And here things get trickier. To Galileo, it was an acceleration downward; to Newton a force between two or more massive bodies inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them; to Einstein the curvature of spacetime due to the presence of mass and/or energy. Does Einstein have the final word? Probably not.
Is there an ultimate scientific truth?
Final or absolute scientific truths assume that what we know of Nature can be final, that human knowledge can make absolute proclamations. But we know that this can't really work, for the very nature of scientific knowledge is that it is incomplete and contingent on the accuracy and depth with which we measure Nature with our instruments. The more accuracy and depth our measurements gain, the more they are able to expose the cracks in our current theories, as I illustrated last week with the muon magnetic moment experiments.
So, we must agree with Democritus, that truth is indeed in the depths and that proclamations of final or absolute truths, even in science, shouldn't be trusted. Fortunately, for all practical purposes — flying airplanes or spaceships, measuring the properties of a particle, the rates of chemical reactions, the efficacy of vaccines, or the blood flow in your brain — functional truths do well enough.
A Dadaist artist is painted with the ashes of burned banknotes during the financial crisis.
In a world gone mad, what can the few sane people left do? What can someone say when there are no words that seem up to the job? How can anyone hope to express ideas so terrible when doing so will only reduce those ideas?
These are some of the things that inspired the Dada movement, and in its absurd, surreal, and chaotic nonsense, we find the voice of the voiceless.
The origin of Dadaism
Dada was a response to the madness of World War I. Reasonable, intelligent, and sensitive people looked at the blood and mud graveyards of the trenches and wondered how any meaning or goodness could ever be found again. How can someone make sense of a world where millions of young, happy, hopeful men were scythed down in a spray of bullets? How could life go back to normal when returning soldiers, blinded and disfigured from gas, lay homeless in the streets? Out of this awful revulsion, there came one bitter voice, and it said: "Everything is nonsense."
Dada is the art of the nihilist. It smashes accepted wisdom, challenges norms and values, and offends, upsets, and provokes us to re-examine everything.
And so, the Dada movement expressed itself in absurdity. Tzara, the closest you get to a Dadaist philosopher, put it like this: "Like everything in life, Dada is useless. Dada is without pretension, as life should be." Dada rejects all systems, all philosophy, all definite answers, and all truth. It is the living embrace of contradictions and nonsense. It seeks "to confuse and upset people, to shake and jolt". It aims to shout down the "shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners," when actually "everything happens in a completely idiotic way."
In short, Dada is a response to the world when all the usual methods have broken down. It's the recognition that dinner party conversations, Hollywood blockbusters, and Silicon Valley are not how life actually is. This is a false reality and order, like some kind of veneer.
The Dada response to life is to embrace the personal and passionate madness of it all, where "the intensity of a personality is transposed directly, clearly into the work." It's to recognize the unique position of an artist, who can convey ideas and feelings in a way that goes beyond normal understanding. Art goes straight to the soul, but the intensity of it all can be hard to "enjoy" in the strictest sense.
Where is this Dada?
For instance, Dada is seen in the poems of Hugo Ball who wrote in meaningless foreign-sounding words. It's in Hausmann, who wrote works in disconnected phonemes. It's found in Duchamp's iconoclastic "Fountain" that sought to question what art or an artist really meant. It's in Hans Richter's short film "Ghost before Breakfast," which has an incoherent montage of images, loosely connected by the theme of inanimate objects in revolt. And, it's in Kurt Schwitters' "psychological collages" which present fragments of objects, juxtaposed together.
Dada is intended to shock. It's an artistic jolt asking, or demanding, that the viewers reorient themselves in some way. It is designed to make us feel uncomfortable and does not make for easy appreciation. It's only when we're thrown so drastically outside of our comfort zone in this way that Dada asks us to question how things are. It shakes us out of a conformist stupor to look afresh at things.
The paradox of Dadaism
Of course, like all avant-garde art, Dada needs to address one major problem: how do you stay so provocative, so radical, and so anti-establishment when you also seek success? How can maverick rebels stay so as they get a mortgage and want a good school for their kids? The problem is that young, inventive, and idealistic artists are inevitably sucked into the world of profit and commodity.
As Grayson Perry, a British modern artist, wrote: "What starts as a creative revolt soon becomes co-opted as the latest way to make money," and what was once fresh and challenging "falls away to reveal a predatory capitalist robot." With Dada, how long can someone actually live in a world of nonsense and nihilistic absurdity?
But there will always be new blood to keep movements like Dada going. As the revolutionaries of yesterday become the rich mansion-owners of today, there will be hot, young things to come and take up the mantle. There will always be something to challenge and questions to be asked. So, art movements like Dada will always be in the vanguard.
Dada is the art of the nihilist. It smashes accepted wisdom, challenges norms and values, and offends, upsets, and provokes us to re-examine everything. It's an absurd art form that reflects the reality it perceives — that life is nothing more than a dissonant patchwork of egos floating in an abyss of nothing.
Jonny Thomson teaches philosophy in Oxford. He runs a popular Instagram account called Mini Philosophy (@philosophyminis). His first book is Mini Philosophy: A Small Book of Big Ideas.
