Ever watch reality TV and think to yourself, “Ugh, ridiculous. Absurd. Absolute lunacy. Next episode.” But where else can you get your fix of the far-fetched? Where else is there an archive of logicless trainwrecks and brain bloopers to hold you over until the next episode of Love Island? The answer may surprise you: Science..
Don’t get me wrong, I love science. Studying science didn’t get me bombarded with party invitations in college, but science has other merits. You know, life-saving antibiotics. Electricity. Other, slightly-cooler-than-keggers stuff. These scientific victories are sufficiently satisfying, and the music is generally a more reasonable volume, but, though it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of science, we must beware of bad science.
Now, what do I mean by bad science? I’m not talking about science wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses while riding off on a Harley (without a helmet). Bad science can be misinformation, mistranslation, omission, wastefulness or inconsistencies in the study. It’s the kind of science that we pride ourselves on sniffing out and squashing, so that we can focus on spreading the good science, even if it might take a little more work to communicate.
Bad science runs rampant on social media these days, but even before TikTok advertised the benefits of broiling your butthole, there were some prominent, widely-accepted examples of said bad science -can I get a “flat earth”? Unfortunately, bad science seems timeless, so from doom-crusted tortilla chips to frost-forward Nazis, here are five examples of bad science throughout history that would give the ridiculousness of Jersey Shore a run for its money.
Aristotle’s theory of the spontaneous generation of life is fairly straightforward — it is not a reference to the kids these days being a particularly spontaneous, wild generation. Odd as it sounds, Aristotle did not, in fact, theorize that.
His theory was the idea that life could (and did form) spontaneously from non-living matter. Which sounds...weird? The concept of a phoenix rising from the ashes is all well and good in terms of theatrics, but science? That’s bad science. Aristotle’s idea included claims like scallops being generated from sand and maggots from dead flesh. I guess because that’s where people saw them emerge without ever seeing them being created.Following that logic, am I then generated from Trader Joe’s at the height of pumpkin spice season?
Given that the theory was originally developed by Aristotle, it serves as proof that even the greatest minds have brain farts. Pobody’s nerfect.
But, it also illustrates the dangerous longevity of incorrect information, because it wasn’t until the mid-19th century, when Louis Pasteur disproved it, that the theory stopped being accepted. Now, Luis can hang his hat on being one of the few people that can justifiably tell Aristotle to suck it. That’s impressive, sure, but to me he’ll always live on as the reason we can have milk and cookies without acute danger. Well, danger to us, at least. The cookies have the world to fear. That being said, it means the theory persisted for over 2,000 years! That’s almost as long it takes to do one 45 second plank!
In a nutshell, a lobotomy is a brain surgery that involves inserting a small surgical rod with a retractable wire loop into the brain. That rod is then used to form cavities in areas of white matter. These operations could fundamentally alter somebody’s personality which was actually the reason for quite a few of them throughout history 一 they were supposedly a “cure” for things like homosexuality and women having any sexual thoughts whatsoever 一 I know, how despicable! Fun fact, the graham cracker was also made to help people cut down on sexual urges. Two very different, equally unfounded approaches.
But, this is about bad science, and boy, was there bad science here. The goals of this procedure were morally dicey at best , and the surgeries were too often unsuccessful, resulting in death or vegetative states. You know, little risks you take when you shove a rod into your skull. And, in case you thought it couldn’t get any worse, a staggering number of lobotomies were performed on people that might not have wanted them, or even had the ability to make the decision at all. Plus, the elderly, female, queer, and Black communities were disproportionately targeted and a needlessly high number of patients were subjected to this increasingly barbaric practice.
What?! Increasingly barbaric?! Surely, brain surgery must be done in highly regulated, sterilized environments! Not so, my sweet, naïve kittens. Take Walter Freeman, who personally performed a whopping 3,500 lobotomies. I’d love to say that these numbers were possible because he was an efficient, talented surgeon but in reality, none of that was true.
He took a practice that was already dangerous at best and did away with the unnecessary parts like sanitation, record-keeping, anesthetics, or, that pesky “consent.”. He moved to performing the procedure in an office setting, anesthetizing patients with a portable electroshock machine, and ignoring small speedbumps like the hospital reprimanding him for “not being a surgeon,” and “having to apply for a surgical license.” He was all about cranking out those lobotomies, making it the Fast and Furious franchise of the neurosurgery world. I’m actually reluctant to call this “bad science,” because that would give it the satisfaction of anyone deeming it actual science.
On the (very serious and very sadly still misunderstood) topic of mental illness, Dr. Henry Cotton had his own ideas. As a medical director during the early 1900s, Cotton developed a theory that mental illness was due to physical infections, specifically in patients’ teeth. As such, his approach was the same as mine, when I find a spot of mold on my block of cheese -remove the affected area. Just, pull the teeth out. With Cotton in charge, 11,000 teeth were extracted from mentally ill patients. I realize that therapy can be like pulling teeth, but I doubt this was what people bargained for.
Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t much improvement in patients after Cotton’s treatment. Instead of rethinking his theory from the problematic basis, Cotton shifted to believing that the infection was simply not contained, and that it has spread to other organs! Of course, the solution was then to just remove these. Gall bladders, stomachs, uteruses, ovaries, testicles, colons - get ‘em all out of here. Cotton claimed a success rate of a whopping 80% for treating mental illness. But anyone can claim anything. His mortality rate was actually astronomical. Bad science! Bad, bad, bad science! Go to your corner!
At least he believed in himself, having pulled several of his own teeth as well as those of his wife and children. At least they would have matched for the family Christmas card? While four out of five dentists agree that Dr. Cotton was a stain upon the good name of medicine, one out of one Dr. Cottons found dentists to be peculiar, probably because they were doing ridiculous things like fixing teeth rather than pulling them out. At least he wasn’t a cardiologist. I have to assume that this whole scheme runs much deeper than we all see 一 probably some elaborate partnership and money-laundering scheme with Tooth Fairy. It would be great TV, but it’s bad science.
Before you get too excited, I’m not hinting at a Frozen 4, but rather expertly and seamlessly segueing into Austrian engineer Hans Horbiger’s theory from 1894, wherein he supposed ice to be the basic substance of all cosmic processes, including the moon, the Milky Way, and the ether. He observed that the moon was shiny and rough, like ice. Not a whole lot to go off of, considering that category also houses crinkled tin foil or my personality.
But since Horbiger did not have either aluminum foil nor the pleasure of my company, it’s conceivable to give him the benefit of the doubt. Until, that is, he justified the development of this theory with a vision 一 yes, a vision 一 wherein he was floating in space, observing a pendulum swinging until the tether broke.
The next logical step was to theorize that ice is the fundamental building block of the universe, complete with an icy ether and celestial bodies. Apparently. For a little bit, rationality held off the popularization of the theory, and it didn’t really gain much traction (but ice rarely does) until Horbiger upped his networking game a little bit.
After being dismissed by the scientific community, he focused on marketing directly to the people, a tactic that contributed to the longevity of many pseudoscientific theories. There was also the event of the Nazis coming to power.This led to the expulsion of many scientists from Germany, among whom was Einstein and his Nazi-rejected theory of relativity, but it helped the World Ice Doctrine along as an alternative cosmological model in the eyes of the Third Riech. Both Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, one of the more occult-leaning Nazis, were notable proponents. Dream visions and Adolf Hitler sound like the plot of a movie that absolutely no one should see.
This one is a little scary because it was pretty widely believed 一 before the discovery of blood types in 1901, many physicians decided against the risky process of transfusing human blood to patients and instead tried to find a substitute for blood. You’ve heard “better safe than sorry,”, but there were some rebellious doctors out there that opted to turn the saying on its head for a “better sorry than safe,” approach. This brings us to 1854, when Toronto’s Dr. James Bovell and Dr. Edwin Hodder injected a patient with cow’s milk. The original “Got Milk?” spokespeople, Bovell and Edwin acted with the justification behind the substitution being that the fatty particles in milk would become what we now refer to as white blood cells. Does it sound crazy to us now? I sure hope so. However, milk transfusions were an active, relatively popular research topic for about 30 years, until saline infusions came to the rescue in the 1880s. Kind of makes me shudder 一 emphasis on the “udder”.
The next logical question, of course, is what if we try with oat milk? It might not work but, damn, will it be trendy. Think of the influencers who will rue the day they wrote their bios to say “oat milk runs through my veins”. It’s okay. Those guys love irony.
As I’ve hopefully illustrated, good science isn’t necessitated by the suffix “Dr.” or the presence of a study. It’s tricky business, this science stuff, but in conclusion:
That last one wasn’t in the blog, it’s just the quintessential reminder of good science.
It may be that you clicked this link because you knew ridiculous science would be good for a laugh, but what if we told you that good science could be funny, too? You can have content that’s well-researched, while still being entertaining and accessible - heck, you just read some. Look at Ologies with Alie Ward. Look at Bill Nye the Science Guy. We implore you to look at us, and deem us worthy of being in that category. If you think that your presentation on Cytological Demonstration of the Clonal Nature of Spleen Colonies Derived from Transplanted Mouse Marrow Cells can’t be a knee-slapper, let us prove you wrong. If you think you’ll never understand how on earth AI works, let us break it down for you.
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