Each of us is Two People: Insights from Earl Nightingale

When I was in high school, I made it a point to never miss the five-minute radio program in which the deep-voiced Earl Nightingale explained surprising and uplifting things about the world. I had to miss a few, but only a few, from 1972 to 1975. Radio stations (worldwide) that carried his program offered to send free copies of his scripts in a self-addressed stamped envelope. Of course, today, the programs would all have been on a website, which Nightingale, who died in 1989, did not live to see. I sent for all of his scripts. The secretary at the radio station wrote to me, wanting to know more about this unusual, perhaps unique, little boy who listened to every show.

Nightingale talked about anything he wanted to. A common structure of his programs was, I’ve been reading a book by x entitled y. I think you would enjoy hearing about it. And he was usually right. He seemed to like Eric Hoffer and Abraham Maslow a lot. He usually talked about successful business and personal life, and how to have a healthy mind—for example, how to not be a mumpsimus. But he sometimes threw in things that were a bit puzzling, such as how there might be UFOs, about the Bermuda Triangle, or about an article called “Secret Thoughts of a Happy Husband.” Not sure where that came from. But we all listened to whatever he said, and most of the time were enriched by it. One of his broadcasts was about the dangers of smoking. In the photo above, notice the absence of an ashtray—a noticeable absence in the mid-twentieth century.

Nightingale knew by experience what he was talking about. When he was twelve, in the middle of the Depression, his father abandoned the family, and he lived in a tent city with his mother outside of Los Angeles. But it was not long before he worked his way into successful military and business careers.

Nightingale’s messages were simple, often obvious—at least, obvious after someone says it. They were based upon the secrets of his vast success in business. He would give examples of how you have to treat your customers with respect, give them what they want, convince them that you care about them, and then really do it. As he was the first to admit, his ideas were not new; they sound strangely like the Golden Rule. But at the time, like today, many people in business thought that the path to success was to beat down your competitors and to get every nickel out of your customers that you can. Nightingale explained that this was a sure path to failure.

As it turns out, in the decades after Nightingale’s death, exactly the kind of oppressive corporate atmosphere that Nightingale hated, one that leaves us customers feeling like the scum of the earth, has become the dominant experience in the marketplace. He would not have liked to see what has happened to our economy in the twenty-first century. When Nightingale was recording his programs, he said that executives really deserved getting paid more than the average worker. But at the time, executives got paid only ten times more; today, it is more like two hundred times. I doubt that executives are twenty times as valuable to their companies today as they were in the 1970s. The modern American economy, dominated by TBTF corporations, would have outraged him.

Nightingale was definitely a conservative, as the concept was understood at the time. He was always defending free enterprise, and was puzzled at the counter-culture people who thought that working for monetary reward was bad. He even said that socialist countries like Sweden were an economic disaster and suffered massive crime waves. Maybe they did at the time, but socialist democracies have since that time flourished. He had the typical mid-century male view of women, they should be secretaries etc., but he was also open to them progressing to an equal status with men, someday. He championed female college education. But he never mixed religion with his conservatism, and he never said one word about the Vietnam War or Richard Nixon, as I recall. He was the kind of conservative we wish we still had.

This is one of several websites with Nightingale quotes.

One of his images that stuck with me is that each of us is two people. One is the person that everyone sees, which I might call the biological person. This is the person who goes to work and fills his or her role in society. The second person is like a ghost hovering over and around the first, invisible but real. This is the potential person, what he or she could be by using all the creativity and zeal that he or she has, looking for and capitalizing upon opportunities. When I look out over a classroom of students, I sometimes I imagine seeing this second person. In many cases, the first person joyfully fills the space created by the second, but in many other cases I see students wanting to get their education over with so that they can walk unprepared into the world where they will have actual responsibilities and not be ready for them.

In some ways, Earl Nightingale was the world’s first blogger. He posted short essays on whatever topic he wanted. Anybody can do a blog now, for free, but back then, Nightingale had to convince sponsors to pay for his show. Maybe my blog posts are my way of doing what the great Earl Nightingale did.

Scientific Pseudo-Understanding

As I explained at great (and, I think, interesting) length in my new book Scientifically Thinking, the scientific way of thinking reveals the deep significance and structure of the world around us.

But sometimes us scientists are guilty of pseudo-understanding. I am about to encounter one example in a couple of hours. I am giving the final exam (which includes a lab practical) for my Systematic Botany course. I expect students to know about 150 different kinds of plants, though in reality I emphasize just the most common ones (still about 70). (If you don’t like plant biodiversity, don’t move to Oklahoma. We have more plant species per square kilometer than any other state.) They can pass the exam with a C if they only know the common names, but to get an A they have to know many Latin names as well.

For me, and I bet for many students, if we can say, “that plant is a mustang grape,” we feel as if we know everything there is to know about it. If we can say, “that plant is a Vitis mustangensis,” we really understand everything about it. But of course just giving something a name does not mean we know very much about it. The Latin nomenclature allows us to recognize the relatives and the evolutionary ancestry of the plant, but that is about all there is to it.

The people who really understand each of the plants are those who can recognize it in the wild (hence the lab practical), and who know how it grows and its place in the community of species. The mustang grape, like other grapes, is a vine that takes advantage of the strong stems of bushes and trees in order to get its leaves up in the sun without having to make its own strong stems. Unlike the other common grape species in Oklahoma, the muscadine grape (Vitis rotundifolia), the mustang grape has thick woolly hairs on the underside of the leaf, which might mean that it grows in sunny locations, being able to reflect some of the light and therefore the heat. The two grape species probably bloom at different times, thus preventing cross-breeding that would be beneficial to neither species. Now that’s understanding. Just reciting the name is not.

Sometimes I catch myself reciting the name and then not looking further at the plant. This usually happens when I am on a walk with my wife. She cannot always remember what the plants are, but she probably looks at them more than I do.

Well, time to go give my final practical. I have to be ready for either indoors or outdoors during Oklahoma’s spring-long potential stormy weather. One of the species is poison ivy, and of course I will not tell them which one it is.

How Biology Is, Or Is Not, Different: Thoughts from Ernst Mayr

Ernst Mayr was one of the leading figures in modern biology. He was the last surviving architect of The New Synthesis of evolution. And he kept writing books until he died at age 100 in 2005. Because of his age, his writing is fairly clear: he knew he did not have time to go off onto tangents. He had to get to the point, since he knew any sentence might be his last.

One of his main points (expressed in two books, This is Biology and What Makes Biology Unique?, which are very similar but not quite the same) is that biology cannot be judged by the same standards of scientific rigor as the physical sciences. Yes, we all know that biological systems (such as organisms) follow natural laws. But each biological phenomenon is the result of such a prodigious number of interacting natural laws that you can never exactly predict what is going to happen. The best example is evolution. Immanuel Kant said that there would never be a Newton for a blade of grass. Several writers have noted that Darwin became that very person.

But Darwin was a “Newton for a blade of grass” because he changed our view of biology the way Newton changed the view of physics. What Darwin did not do was to establish a system by which the exact course of evolution could be predicted. One reason for this is that each organism is unique, while each electron is the same as every other electron. It is true that the molecules in a glass of water are different from one another; each has its own kinetic energy, and some of them have hydrogen and/or oxygen atoms with extra neutrons. Although one could say that a glass of water has a “population” of molecules, they do not differ from one another in the extreme way that organisms in a population do.

I will let you read Mayr’s books, if you wish. But I want to remind all of us that there are some laws of nature that biological systems always follow. They include:

• The rate of diffusion (of molecules, heat, electrons, etc.) is proportional to the concentration or energy status divided by the resistance. One of the components of resistance is distance; it takes a molecule four times as long to diffuse twice as far. This is why diffusion is rapid over short distances, such as a synapse, and slow over long distances, such as a room. This is true everywhere in biology. This is why leaves and animal tissues both have numerous, tiny vessels. I am aware of no exceptions.
• A related concept is that an increased surface-to-volume ratio increases chemical activity. This is why kindling burns faster than a log, and why bacteria can metabolize so quickly. Any exceptions?
• A third example is from fluid dynamics. The rate of fluid flow is proportional to the fourth power of the diameter of the vessel. This law is always true for laminar flow, such as in blood vessels and xylem. Any exceptions? For larger things, such as water pipes, gas pipes, and rivers, it is almost true, but turbulent flow (when the fluid starts roiling around) slows the fluid down.

Most scientists agree with Mayr. This is the main reason that I am seldom interested in mathematical models of biological phenomena. A few decades ago, various botanists figured out equations for how much transpiration was needed to cool a leaf off, and how big or small a leaf should be to keep from overheating, and other such things. The equations gave a verisimilitude of precision. Actual leaves may or may not follow these equations precisely. They are good generalizations, but no more than that.

I recommend the writings of Ernst Mayr, even if you are not a professional scientist. Even at age 100 he had an all-encompassing mind.

Thinking Back on René Dubos: Ecological and Evolutionary Medicine

For many years, I have been teaching a subject in general biology classes that I call the Ecology and Evolution of Disease. It includes the subject that is now called Evolutionary Medicine (it now even has its own journal). I continue to be amazed that no general biology textbooks seem to mention it.

I grew up thinking what most people still think about health and contagious disease. As Ogden Nash wrote, “A mighty creature is the germ, though smaller than the pachyderm...” It was all very simple. Germs caused contagious diseases. The solution was to kill the germs. Problem solved.

But it is not so simple, and the book that opened my eyes to the real complexity of health and disease was Man Adapting, a 1965 book by René Dubos. It was an old book when I first read it in the late 1980s. It was ahead of its time, and maybe still is.

Dubos’s main point was that health is a creative response. It is delimited by biology and evolution but it is highly personal. That is, a disease can take a different course in different individuals. Dubos said that, when we ask what man is, we should not be satisfied with the answer that he was an ape. Instead, we should think of ourselves as ecosystems in which health is the result of the proper balance of all of our physiological processes, as well as all the microbial species that call our bodies home.

Dubos wrote about how the human body is an integrated whole, and conditions of the body can alter the course of disease. For example, stress can affect the immune system, with the result that bacteria that are already present but unnoticed can flare up into disease. This is now well known. The stress of viral disease can make a person susceptible to bacterial infections such as sinusitis and pneumonia, caused by “germs” that were already present. The stress of allergies caused me recently to have severe sinusitis. We have all seen examples of people who, from stress and its related habits such as smoking, seem to always be sick. Also, Dubos may have been one of the first scientists to write extensively about how an upset to biological rhythms can result in disease, including infections.

And the effects of stress can pass on from one generation to another. A mother animal who experiences stress can have behaviorally abnormal offspring, and it might result in part from the effects of stress on the prenatal environment of the fetus.

Dubos also included a lot of information about how Old World diseases killed up to 90 percent of many Native American and Polynesian populations, because they had never evolved resistance to these germs. Why didn’t the Europeans die of New World diseases? Because there weren’t very many. America was populated by immigrants from Siberia, and Polynesia by people sailing long distances in boats. Only healthy people could have made those journeys. This opened my eyes to a whole new understanding of some parts of human history. After Dubos, many historians have written about this.

An important, and still often ignored, aspect of our body ecosystem is its microbial inhabitants. Gnotobiotic animals (born, raised, and maintained in totally sterile conditions) are abnormal. Their organs develop abnormally, and so do their immune systems. They heal more slowly from injuries.

Many parts of our bodies, especially the skin and digestive tract, harbor trillions of bacteria, most of which are harmless, and some of which are beneficial. Some of the beneficial ones produce molecules which, to them, are wastes, but to us are vitamins, especially B vitamins. In our intestines, the lactobacilli and bacteroides are beneficial, while bacteria such as the famous E. coli are usually harmless. E. coli just seem to be along for the ride. In rodent colonies with normal intestinal bacteria, kept in total isolation from the outside environment and other rodents, the E. coli gradually disappear, leaving the lactobacilli and bacteroides to dominate. But even the merely non-harmful bacteria can do us some favors by crowding out the pathogenic bacteria.

This is the ecology of disease within a human body. (There is also the ecology whereby bacteria spread from one host to another.) But evolution also plays a role. This was the book where I first read about how many disease organisms have evolved to become less virulent. For example, many diseases, such as smallpox, leprosy, and (a disease Dubos and his wife studied) tuberculosis became less and less deadly over the course of many decades even before the introduction of antibiotics and antiviral therapy. Some infectious diseases have pretty much evolved themselves out of existence. One example is the English sweating sickness, which was a severe plague from 1485 to 1551. Its main symptom was profuse sweating. Then it vanished. Perhaps, Dubos speculated, it evolved into such a mild form that nobody noticed it after 1551.

I knew he was right as soon as I read his book, because I could think of my own stories. I had read many gruesome stories about smallpox. But my own grandmother had smallpox. For her, it was a severe but not deadly disease, and did not leave pock marks when she recovered. She had become infected with a relatively mild strain of smallpox. Before the WHO began its campaign of worldwide vaccination to eradicate it, smallpox was already on its way out. I also knew this from direct experience. I grew up in Tulare County, California, after which the disease tularemia is named. It is endemic to the area, and probably everyone who lived there had gotten it. Only, for us in the twentieth century, it was a mild disease that we mistook for the flu. I did not know I had had it until I tested positive for tularemia antibodies when I was a teenager.

How can a disease evolve to become milder? The simplest explanation is that a horrible germ that quickly kills its host cannot easily spread to a new host after it kills the first host. The first host is too sick to get up and spread germs around, and everybody stays away from him if he tries. Also, some people are naturally immune to the disease, and they are the ones who survive the most often. But the main reason is that the mild germs are the ones that are successful at spreading to new hosts.

This is the evolutionary process of balanced pathogenicity. It was scientifically demonstrated by a study on a rabbit virus, myxomatosis, in Australia in the 1960s. The rabbit populations evolved resistance to the virus, and the virus populations evolved into a milder form.

I got the impression from reading Man Adapting that balanced pathogenicity was true of all infectious diseases. Of course, it is not. Cholera has not evolved into milder form, because you get it from drinking contaminated water—water that has been contaminated by very sick, or by mildly sick, people. You cannot avoid the bad germs of the very sick people, mixed in as they are with the mild germs of the mildly sick people. Also, malaria may evolve to become worse, because mosquitoes like to bite sick people who cannot shoo them away, rather than alert people who are busy. (However, Dubos pointed out, a person who is very sick from malaria will die sooner, such that the mosquitoes might bite the mildly sick people more often simply because there are more of them.)

It was this book, Man Adapting, that changed many of my views of science, making them less linear and more holistic.

The Book of Knowledge

In its twenty volumes, an immense amount of information is crammed. It was intended for children 6 to 16, but I doubt that even 16-year-olds could handle it back in 1951, certainly not now. It was the strangest mixture: Mary Had a Little Lamb would be right next to a long article about English portrait painting during the Restoration, and pages of unclear black and white photos of cathedrals. This set of books struck me, a writer, as a really bad idea from the start, but somehow The Book of Knowledge persisted for at least 40 years. There were pages and pages of “birthday congratulations” for the encyclopedia on its fortieth printing, even one from Bing Crosby, who carefully avoided saying whether he had ever actually read anything from earlier editions of the book when he was a kid.

But I actually enjoyed looking through The Book of Knowledge recently. I do not have television or internet in my second house, where I was confined to recover from the antibiotic-resistant infection of which I wrote earlier. To me, looking through these books was a fascinating glimpse into the past: How to send a telegram, how telephones (the old black bakelite ones) worked, how card catalogs worked in libraries, how sorting machines were used on census cards, how motor cars are made. “Could we ever travel to the moon?” Fun with your typewriter! (You can make faces on typing paper with it.) Wax cylinders for temporary recordings from which secretaries could transcribe letters!

The Book of Knowledge was extremely American-oriented. Under “The Distribution of Wealth,” the entire discussion was about capitalism, which also dominated “How Wealth is Created.” At the same time, one passage said that the assumption upon which taxation is built is equality of sacrifice of both rich and poor. God, where did that idea disappear to? We need it back.

Despite the American bias, The Book of Knowledge presented all the parts of the world equally and, by mid-century standards, without judgment. All religions were treated equally. Women of every race were beautiful, men handsome, and every culture had its own brilliant literature and music. The encyclopedia did not talk about the early civil rights struggles; instead, it included a big section about outstanding American “Negroes,” which was the honorable term at the time, leaving the reader to conclude that black people deserved far better than what they were getting.

And the books told kids how to do some things that were, at least at the time, important, such as how to do first aid, how to knit, how to make a whistle, how to make a violin from a cigar box, how to make a princess petticoat for your doll, how to cook.

There were classic stories, everything from Guy de Maupassant’s The Diamond Necklace to Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. They were always nourishing and uplifting even if, like Maupassant’s story, the ending was a little tragic.

But there was something in this set of books that is often missing in modern education: a sense of wonder. Over thousands of pages, the book asked questions about things that kids had seen many times but never thought about. The wonder of a piece of silk! Does a plant go to sleep? Why is it good to boil potatoes in their jackets? How do chemical bonds form? (Smiling atoms looked at each other and said, “Got any room for a lonely electron?”) How do plants move and feel? And the life of a tree: “How thrilling would be the story of trees if only they could speak!” This sense of wonder was the best thing about this set of books.

The strangest part was how the books were organized. They weren’t. One topic was smooshed against another at random. As a result, each volume had to have an outline at the beginning to classify the topics and tell which page they were on, and Volume 20 was an index. Very confusing. No wonder that the New Book of Knowledge, which replaced this old one, is alphabetical like every other encyclopedia.

On the other hand, all of knowledge is interconnected. That is the way the world is: each bit of knowledge is mixed in with other bits. The kids were expected to just read through the Book of Knowledge and have their knowledge enhanced in every way at the same time, a carnival of sensations. I wonder if it might not be time to go back to this sort of non-arrangement. If such a set of books was online, then you could search for any topic you might want by pressing Control F. I hesitate to admit that this old Book of Knowledge was organized somewhat the way my brain works! As a matter of fact, when I was a kid, I used to imagine that I would lead a big research institute in which all knowledge would be encapsulated. I started a list of topics, in which birds had equal standing with bubbles. I imagined that I would complete the work and die happy at age 103. I soon recognized that it was impossible to gather all knowledge into one place.

But I will never lose my passion for the interconnectedness of all knowledge.

What Does a Scientist Do When He or She Gets Sick?

I mean, besides griping and whining like everyone else. And feeling embarrassed for sneezing in front of a class. And I don’t mean an ordinary sneeze. I mean a convulsive one that makes me bend over double, one that is uncontrollable, and which makes me invent new consonants. Red Skelton did a comedy routine about this once.

What do we scientists do when we get sick? We test a series of hypotheses, that’s what. It keeps our minds occupied even though we may never find out which hypothesis, if any, might be true.

When I became sick over a month ago, I tried to figure out what it was. I first assumed it was allergies. Allergies are famous in Oklahoma. I got a severe sore throat one night, assumed it was a cold, Hypothesis 1, but it was gone the next day, to be replaced by all the usual symptoms of either an allergy or a cold. Lots of other people had the same experience on the same day, which just happened to be the day the rain stopped and a strong wind came from the south during cedar pollen season (Juniperus ashei, abundant in Texas). How likely was it that I had an infection when everybody else had allergies? The rain came back and our windshields ran yellow with cedar and elm pollen. That was hypothesis 2: allergic reaction.

But it didn’t go away. I assumed that Hypothesis 1 had been correct. But nine days later, I still had this cold. Maybe, I thought, it was a bacterial infection, Hypothesis 3. Maybe the allergic reaction weakened my immune system, making me vulnerable to bacteria that I already harbored and which had been waiting their chance to invade me. Evidence: yellow snot. Not just from breathing pollen, but even when the pollen had been rinsed away by more rain.

Ten days of amoxicillin seemed to help. At least my sense of taste returned. But my cough and congestion continued. I went to the clinic again. My snot was now clear, so the conclusion was that Hypothesis 2 had been correct, and I got an allergy shot.

By the beginning of the fourth week of whatever-the-hell, I was beginning to think of bacteria again, because the allergy shot brought no relief. I thought it was working, but this was bias on the part of my brain. My snot was yellow again, and there were the convulsive coughs, along with abdominal muscle pains just from the coughing. I have already used more tissues than I typically do in two or three years. But this is Hypothesis 4: amoxicillin-resistant bacteria.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria kill thousands of people. They are the premier example of the statement I used in my encyclopedia: What you don’t know about evolution can kill you. If I had not studied evolutionary medicine, I might never have thought of Hypothesis 4. Most infections, even bacterial ones, are self-limiting, which means you eventually get over them in a few months or decades. But I have too much life that I want to finish before I die, so I hope it doesn’t take this long. And recovery is not guaranteed. Weep not for me, gentle friends, but for the books I will not have a chance to publish unless I recover.

As of this posting, the second-line antibiotic seems to be working. If it does not, I hereby authorize my heirs to post a notice on this blog.

I was in the mood for hypothesis testing because I was reading This Is Biology: The Science of the Living World, by the late great Ernst Mayr. He wrote the book when he was 92 years old; he died at age 100 in 2004. It is thick with information, but pleasantly written (even with a joke or two), and I could relax in the assurance that he had figured out the philosophy of science so that I did not have to. He was not a great fan of philosophers; during the height of Karl Popper’s popularity, he said that every scientist he knew claimed he or she was a Popperian and then went ahead and did whatever he or she was going to do anyway. If I did not have to sit at home, I might never have looked at this book.

Hypothesis testing helps us understand reality, but it also helps take our minds away from the reality that would depress us.

May the Spirit of Science Be With You!

If you can, find some time to sit back with a copy of my latest book Scientifically Thinking and read it while sipping your favorite drink. Preferably a book you have bought rather than borrowed from the library, though enough libraries have purchased it that you can probably look at it first before buying it.

I have received several emails from people who have thoroughly enjoyed this book, which presents science as a thoroughly human activity but one that is constrained by logic that does not come easily to the human mind. One of them interviewed me on his radio show even though he had only read the introduction. (He asked me to tell him more about the Acknowledgements page.)

The most interesting response I have so far received was an email from Gary Spedding, a distillation quality consultant, a member of judging panels for distillation quality, and a contributor to the magazine Artisinal Spirit. (I like to think the title refers both to alcoholic and to creative spirit.) Trained in biochemistry, Gary runs the BDAS (Brewing and Distilling Analysis Services) website. Although British, this Gary is not the same Gary Spedding as the notorious British (brutish?) Holocaust denier by the same name. Gary shared with me an article that is to be published in an upcoming issue of Artisinal Spirit. It is safe to say that I have little experience with this field of study. And I think that Gary probably already knew most of the things that he wrote about my book in his article before reading my book, but my book gave him a framework to organize his thoughts and to show that his work is not entirely different from the work of those of us who call ourselves professional scientists.

Below I will mention some of the topics in Gary’s article, to show you some of the scientific considerations involved in the practice of good beverage distillation. Distillers already know these things, as evidenced by Gary’s articles and references therein, but many need some clarification.

The concept of terroir. I did not know that distillers worked with this concept, though the French wine industry is largely based upon it. Terroir comes from the word for earth, and it means that wine made from grapes raised in one location, say Bordeaux, is very different from an otherwise identically-produced wine made from grapes grown in Alsace. Theoretically, this could apply to almost any agricultural product—I suppose sauerkraut (choucroute) raised in Alsace would taste different from choucroute raised in Bordeaux, that is, if they raise any in Bordeaux. Since it is hotter and drier in Bordeaux, I’ll bet the Bordeaux choucroute would be more bitter. But I had supposed that any terroir-associated differences in the grains used to make whisky or gin would have been lost during distillation. Perhaps I was wrong about this. Gary pointed out how easy it is for an individual, or even a tasting panel, to be biased in its detection of terroir quality (please, Word software, quit changing this to terror).

Tasting panel bias. Humans are all biased, and a panel of expert tasters is no exception. Individual tasters can be influenced by other factors such as color. As Gary pointed out, tasters might think that a darker whiskey tastes better. Also, the taster should do his or her test at a time of day and under circumstances in which bias would be minimized, for example, at least an hour after using toothpaste, but during a time of peak sensitivity, e.g., mid-day. Also, in a panel of judges, some individuals can influence others. If one of them says “Ah!” this must surely influence the others. Are all the tasters blindfolded in individual cubicles? And just how objective are the panelists? Do they enjoy tasting the samples so much that they become the equivalent of the field zoologist’s “trap-happy animals”? (See page 143 of my book.) I wrote that all humans are biased, even scientists, but scientists try to compensate for it. Gary improved on what I said by entitling one of his sections “If you’re biased and you know it clap your hands...” Maybe what you want in a tasting panel is not uniformity of expertise but diversity of tastes, in which case—you might not want to go there—pulling volunteers off the street might be more reliable than what the experts say.

Sample size. A distiller cannot draw a conclusion from one vat, even if s/he has a control vat (whatever that might be) to which to compare it. How many vats? As many as possible? It really depends on your market. If you think “scientifically tested with thousands of independent samples” will sell more product, then do it, if it doesn’t cost more than your likely profits. A scientific rule-of-thumb for statistical significance is to use 30 specimens in each treatment. Is it worth it? Even the statistical tests must be done by expensive computer programs. Don’t use the same vat over and over; that’s pseudo-replication.

Humans as measuring devices. Human senses are not reliable measuring devices. As Gary points out, the sense of smell (which responds to thousands of scents, unlike taste, which responds to only six) varies greatly from one individual to another. One individual might be unable to taste, say, ethyl acetate, while another finds it pleasant, and another dislikes it. Human senses are also influenced by the sequence effect: tasters will pay closer attention to the first sample than to the twelfth, especially if they swallow. (I don’t know whether they do. I have heard that there is such a thing as a spit bucket, so I suppose they don’t.) Even something like how long a bottle has been opened (since opening a bottle introduces oxygen and thus oxidation) can influence taste. Drinks consist of thousands of chemicals, as will anything of biological origin, and a taster cannot pay attention to all of them. But is this really an important consideration? It is, after all, humans who will be drinking it. A subjective (scientifically unreliable) opinion might be exactly what you want from the panel of tasters.

You can use the scientific method just about anywhere. Or, you might intelligently decide to not use it. You just should not overlook it. I will end this entry where Gary ended his article, “May the spirit of science be with you!”