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Commentary: Trust, but verify

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 13, 2011 - Though Ronald Reagan never claimed to be a scientist, he succinctly summarized the foundation of all scientific inquiry when explaining his position on arms negotiations with the Soviet Union: trust but verify.

You don't have to wear a white coat and work in a lab to reason scientifically. All that's needed to benefit from that useful habit of thought is the willingness to subject belief to empirical verification. In the realm of science, data trumps dogma every time.

The statement that God created the universe may be metaphysically true but it's not scientific because it cannot be tested. Daily life abounds with examples of notions that at first seem to make sense, only to later collapse under scrutiny. The sun, for instance, does not revolve around the earth though it looks like it does from down here.

As every sentient being in the metro area is by now doubtlessly aware, the Cards recently defeated the Phillies in the divisional playoffs, 3 games to 2. Because the team that scores the most runs in a given game always wins that particular contest, common sense would seem to indicate that the winning team should normally outscore the losing team for the series as a whole.

But wisdom is seldom common -- the Phillies actually outscored the Cards, 21-19. In fact, in each of this year's four divisional playoffs, the losing team scored more runs than the winner. Of the 170 total runs recorded, 95 (55.9 percent) were scored on behalf of a losing cause.

The lesson I take from this seeming anomaly is that pitching and defense are better predictors of post-season success than is offensive might. For that observation to be accepted as fact, we'd need to expand the data base from a single year to a representative sample of all playoff results. Even if the hypothesis were to survive that analysis, it would still be subject to revision if future developments yielded contradictory results. Science is a process, not a place.

If the need to test belief were limited to oddities in baseball scoring, it would hardly merit serious commentary. Recent findings in the disparate fields of medicine and theoretical physics, however, demonstrate that the exercise can profoundly reshape our understanding of the world.

For the past 20 years, it has been an axiom of American medicine that men over 50 should get an annual prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood test. This procedure was intended provide early detection of prostate cancer. And early detection, the theory goes, would lead to higher rates of cure.

Now come the results of an exhaustive study by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that indicates the test "...does not save lives and leads to unnecessary treatments and serious side effects including impotence and incontinence." The task force concludes that non-symptomatic males should not be tested, regardless of age.

Understandably, this revelation is difficult to accept. The surgeons who performed operations based on the PSA test did so in good faith. They were practicing the best medicine available to them ... which is all you can hope for when you go to the doctor. Suddenly, they're told that they've been harming rather than helping their patients. "We're telling people things that we don't even want to believe," said Dr. Michael LeFevre, a medical professor at the University of Missouri and vice chairman of the task force.

Early treatment has not been proven to be effective against the most aggressive strains of the disease, while more common prostate tumors are "slow-growing and not deadly." Yet despite compelling evidence to the contrary, some doctors still defend the test.

It's difficult in the extreme to admit that everything you believed to be true is wrong. But to continue the present treatment protocol in the face of these findings would inflict untold human suffering with no appreciable benefit to the afflicted. The chief medical officer of the cancer society, Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, laments, "Maybe it's time to listen to evidence instead of hope."

While medical orthodoxy attempts to choke down the heresy of fact, scientists at CERN -- the European high-energy physics research institute that I predict will blow up the Earth in the course of its current investigation into the nature of matter -- have tentatively disproven Einstein's theory of relativity.

They accomplished this annoying feat by discovering a subatomic neutrino that can travel faster than light. According to Einstein, that's impossible because light travels at the unbreakable cosmic speed limit. All modern physics and astronomy are predicated upon that principle.

If the CERN finding is accurate -- and it has so far withstood scrutiny by 160 scientists from 11 countries -- it means that effect can precede cause. Imagine you're standing next to a target on a celestial shooting range. On the distant firing line is a marksman armed with a rifle loaded with faster-than-light neutrinos. From your perspective, his shots would hit the target before the shooter fires.

Such a phenomenon would disprove every fundamental truth we hold dear about the known universe. Contemplating that possibility, columnist Charles Krauthammer remarks, "Aphorisms don't trump reality. ... They are but a frail, poignant protest against a Nature that disdains the most cherished human notions of order and elegance, truth and beauty."

It would appear that our shared beliefs are at best provisionally true and at worse patently false. Under the circumstances, it would seem prudent to heed the Gipper's advice to trust but verify.

M.W. Guzy is a retired St. Louis cop who currently works for the city Sheriff's Department. His column appears weekly in the Beacon.