John Ellingsworth wrote:
Speaking of the health benefits of smoking, this from yesterday's DP was pretty funny:
<snip>
Yet, to panelist Michael McFadden, author of Dissecting Antismokers' Brains, all this evidence is questionable. McFadden said the studies conducted on second-hand smoke had been twisted and that no action should be taken to dissuade people from smoking in public spaces.
"It could be that smoking even prevents you from getting cancer. Who knows?" the West Philadelphia resident said.
</snip> (Obviosly, the author doesn't know.)
Someone ought to let this guy McFadden know that there's this thing called "science." It's this really neat system, where evidence is gathered, theories are proposed to explain or codify causalities, and through this method we can "know" about such things. It's led to a tremendous amount of insight into "knowing" things-- for example, thanks to science, we now know that life developed through a long process of evolution over millions of years. And he may be surprised to know that there is a lot of this 'science" done on the role of tobacco in the etiology of various forms of cancer. By and large, it suggests very strongly that smoking increases one's risk of developing cancer to a very high degree.
Readers interested in this 'science" thing may try browsing to http://www.pubmed.com, and plugging in such terms as "tobacco," "cancer," and maybe "review articles." This will bring up the abstracts of studies about the health effects of smoking. Those of us who work at Penn have access to the full-text of many of these articles.
The neatest thing about "science" is that it filters out blue-sky speculations such as McFadden's. In fact, the very argument McFadden tosses out was proposed, seriously, back in the 1950s and 1960s by one Ronald Aylmer Fisher, who was a pioneer in genetics research. Fisher suggested that perhaps smokers developed cancer because they had pre-cancerous polyps in their lungs, and smoking was the way they alleviated the irritation of the polyps. But, thanks to this "science" thing, Fisher's arguments were disproven by the sheer weight of the evidence gathered through epidemiological studies, autopsies, animal experimentation, and many other methods known collectively as "scientific research." (History hasn't been kind to Fisher's related notions of genetics and human society, i.e., eugenics.)
All of this illustrates that, if we are to develop some kind of social policy about smoking, it ought to at least _consult_ with scientific evidence. We really should avoid this wifty, quasi-New-Agey avoidance of empiricism that McFadden indulges in-- the same sort of "well, we don't _really_ know," plaintiveness one hears from UFO enthusiasts and "it's only a _theory_" sophistries one usually hears from believers in trance-channellers and Creationists.
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