How long will it take mankind to learn that while they listen to "the speaking hundreds and units, who make the world ring" with the pretended triumphs they have witnessed, the "dumb millions" of deluded and injured victims are paying the daily forfeit of their misplaced confidence!

Above photo

by Stuck in Customs is used under creative commons license.



Ciarán

Almost 170 years after Oliver Wendell Holmes read these words to the Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge the pseudoscience of homeopathy continues to thrive. An EU commission statement estimates that some 30 million people in the EU use homeopathy, while the WHO estimates that around 500 million in the world use it.Since Wendell Holmes' time a colossal body of evidence has been amounted showing that homeopathy has no medicinal effect beyond the placebo effect. The core concepts of homeopathy fly in the face of science and logic. homeopathy uses highly dilute solutions of a substance to treat disease. Most homeopathic solutions are so dilute that there is almost no chance that they will contain even a single molecule of the original active agent. Counterintuitively, homeopathic practitioners claim that the more dilute the solution, the stronger the homeopathic remedy. This contradicts the well-known phenomenon of dose response, which says that the more of a chemical an organism is exposed to, the greater the effect. Take one sleeping pill and it will help you sleep; take two and the effect is even more powerful; take 100 sleeping pills and you are not likely to wake up … ever! On the other hand, homeopaths would suggest that the more dilute the solution, the more "powerful" the effect. But how could a solution of something that doesn't contain even a single molecule of active ingredient have any effect? Here, things get even more bizarre. They suggest that water has memory. Seemingly, water has the ability to remember contact with certain substances, while at the same time being able to forget all the raw sewage and fecal matter that it has been in contact with. If homeopathy is nothing but water, why do so many people continue to believe it works?Scientists and sceptics who engage with advocates of homeopathy usually end up throwing their hands up in the air in frustration. The reason is that most people who have come to believe in homeopathy do not do so based on scientific data or for particularly rational reasons. As such, it is unlikely that anyone who did not come to a particular position based on logic or reason will be argued out of that position using logic and reason. Indeed, no amount of rational argument will convince proponents of this modality that they are misguided. Holmes was well aware of the ineffectiveness such an exercise, stating that "… it is impossible not to realize the entire futility of attempting to silence this asserted science by the flattest and most peremptory results of experiment."It is tempting to criticise such beliefs on the grounds that the people who hold them are somehow lacking basic cognitive skills. In fact, people who believe in all kinds of strange things are often very rational in other aspects of their life. I would instead argue that the faulty thinking that many engage in is a byproduct of our mind works. The human brain evolved not only to explain the world around us; it evolved to deal with an innumerable amount of tasks. Cultural transmission does not occur by downloading information, as was once believed, but rather is based on an inferential system. We classify things in our environment into ontological categories. Most things we encounter in our environment fall into one of the following groups: person, animal, natural object, tool and plant. Each ontological category has a set of characteristics that define it and set it apart from other categories. We make certain inferences about objects based on which ontological category it belongs to. For instance, we are not surprised when a dog walks down the street but would find it strange if we saw an oak tree doing so. Locomotion is part of our mental template for people and animals but not plants. We find certain counter-intuitive notions more memorable than blander ones, a prerequisite for a successful meme . Superstitious beliefs often combine ontological beliefs with a category violation. For instance, disembodied souls and inanimate statues that can cry, hear or bleed represent category violations for a person and a natural object respectively. However, not all superstitious beliefs are equally believable. While the belief in ghosts is widespread, the belief that ghosts cannot think and have desires is virtually non-existent. Violations must allow for further inferences, otherwise they result in cognitive dead ends. Although few of my readers literally believe in superheroes and zombies, that does not stop us from making inferences about what their needs, wants and limits would be if they did exist.The idea that water has memory is a categorical violation. Memories are characteristic of a person or animal but not a natural object. Crucially, the belief that water has memory does not block further cognitive inferences. Conversely, we would find it much more difficult to believe that water remembers the substances that other water had been in contact with. This type of belief is rare since it prevents us from making further inferences. We have experience with the concept of remembering things that we have been in contact with but don't have experience of what it is like to remember things other people have been in contact with. People I met when I was younger — people who I have not seen for many years – still have an influence on me now. Likewise, it is not such a large cognitive leap to believe that substances that came into contact with water still have an influence over it.Another important component of homeopathy is vitalism. The idea that we are more than just the aggregate of chemical and mechanical processes is an appealing one. Vitalism appeals to our core intuitions. Vitalists believe that the laws of science are inadequate to explain life processes. There must be something more to it – a soul or some elan vital. All of us operationally view ourselves as both body and mind, even those of us who outright reject the idea of a disembodied self or soul. The self is not something that governs the brain, rather the self is the outcomes of brain processes. However, our brain does a wonderful job of convincing us otherwise. The father of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, saw the vital force as a "spirit like" force that maintained life. He believed that the inner vital force maintained the body's internal balance. When the body became ill it would push the illness outwardly, causing the symptoms of the disease or illness to manifest. Many homeopaths believe that all disease come down to one thing — the disturbance of the vital force. They believe that only homeopathic remedies stimulate the vital force into action.Sympathetic or imitative magic is found in cultures the world over. Sympathetic magic is based on two related concepts: the law of similarity and the law of contagion. The former states that like things produce like effects, while the latter is the idea that items that have been in contact continue to affect each other. Perhaps the best known example of sympathetic magic is the use of voodoo dolls to place a curse on a specific person. Cargo cults would also engage in sympathetic magic by building landing strips and radio towers to encourage the airplanes that delivered them precious cargo during World War II to come back again. In the past, whooping cough and a sore throat were often treated by tying knots in a piece of string and hanging it around the ill person's neck. The knots were supposed to symbolise the tightness in the person's throat. Liverworts have been used for hundreds of years as a cure ailments of the liver, probably because of the plant's resemblance to the liver. A cure for pneumonia was to tie the lungs of a sheep to the soles of the feet of a patient. Golden objects and butter were commonly used as cures for jaundice. It was believed that warts could be cured by rubbing them on a frog, most likely because of the frog's warty appearance. The use of oysters, rhinoceros horns and tiger penises as aphrodisiacs are all examples of sympathetic thinking. The list goes on and on.In a similar vein, homeopathy uses the concept of "like cures like." It is based on the idea that substances which produce symptoms similar to those of a particular illness can treat that illness. For instance, homeopaths may treat a person suffering from hay fever with an onion extract, since both produce watery eyes and a runny nose. The idea that water can still remember things it was previously in contact with, is an example of the "law of contagion." In this regard, homeopathy is similar to the concept of holy water that is common to many religions.The brain processes that lead someone to believe in homeopathy exist in all of us. Our mental capacities evolved to aid in our survival, with erroneous beliefs an emergent property of our intuitive psychology. We are all prone to cognitive dissonance aversion, memory illusion, and confirmation bias. Such cognitive traps are probably adaptive and essential to mental well-being. The biologist Lewis Wolpert suggests that scientific thinking is in fact aberrant. Science is a conscious departure from intuition and common sense. Homeopathy is parasitic upon brain processes that originally evolved for other activities. If we want to understand why people believe in homeopathy, we must first understand how such beliefs enlist our evolved mental capacities.Boyer, P (2001): Religion Explained. Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books.Holmes OW (1842). Homœopathy, and its kindred delusions; two lectures delivered before the Boston society for the diffusion of useful knowledge, Boston: William D. Ticknor.Wolpert, L (1993). The unnatural nature of science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.