A little Saturday morning nonsense: iridology and sclerology?

Somehow, I found myself looking at iridology diagrams. Iridologists claim that the surface of the iris is connected to every organ in the body, so the detailed pattern of flecks and lines and spots in the colored portion of your eye is a map to your health, as good as an X-ray or MRI. They actually do get quite specific.

iridology1

From there I stumbled onto sclerology — these sclerologists claim the map is in the whites of your eyes, and that the network of blood vessels, for instance, tells you all you need to know about the state of your body.

sclerology

Why, just this morning, I got up, looked in the mirror at my rheumy bloodshot eyes, and learned instantly that I was a walking tumorous mass that apparently was simultaneously exploded and crushed in a tragic farm machinery accident yesterday. It was terrible.

But this is just patent bullshit, every bit of it.

For one, we’ve taken eyes apart and looked. There is no connection between eyes and every other organ; the iris is innervated via the ciliary ganglion (the parasympathetic pathway) and the superior cervical ganglion (sympathetic). There are patterns to the capillaries of the eye, but they are more for efficient circulation of the blood than reflecting a mystical connection to your pancreas.

These maps owe more than a little to the model of the cerebral homunculus, which shows the targets of innervation by the sensorimotor cortex. That makes sense. There are necessary connections that the brain makes to control or receive input from the periphery. There are no such necessary associations with the eye. Also, those maps were made with thorough experimental and observational analyses of thousands and thousands of people — functional deficits were mapped to stroke lesions, and focal stimulation of brain regions were found to lead to specific sensory and motor responses. We’ve got data to back up the idea of how brains are connected to body parts.

And then there’s the plagiarism: why are the sclera and iris maps so similar, with bowels below and brain above, and heart central lateral and lungs central medial? It looks like someone invented a pattern for one part of the eye, and then a copy cat con artist stole it and redrew it for another part of the eye. And look at the pretense of precision! Do you believe the pituitary is associated with some specific point at about 11:30, while the ego is found at 11:10?

I confess, my ego compelled me to go look in a mirror for my ego. Couldn’t find it. My ego is just shattered now.

It’s still impressive in a pseudoscientific way. None of these maps are constructed by scientific methods — carefully replication of meticulous empiricism — and are totally lacking in any kind of observational foundation. You can just sit down and make stuff up, and if it’s flashy enough and apes the lingo of real scientists, someone will believe it enough that they’ll pay real money to a quack.

The University of Louisiana at Monroe has some interesting priorities

They’re shutting down a museum collection to make room for a larger gym for the track team. Here’s a letter sent out by involved faculty.

Dear Friends,

It is my sad duty to report to you that the ULM administration has decided to divest the research collections in the Museum of Natural History. This includes the 6 million fish specimens in the Neil Douglas fish collection and the nearly 500,000 plant specimens in the R. Dale Thomas plant collection. They find no value in the collections and no value of the collections to the university. The College was given 48 hours to suggest an alternate location for the collections on campus so that Brown Stadium can be renovated for the track team. With only about 20 hours left, we have found no magic solution yet. To add insult to injury on what was a very hard day, we were told that if the collections are not donated to other institutions, the collections will be destroyed at the end of July.

While we weep that our own institution would turn its back on 50+ years of hard work and dedication, we will not abandon the collections to the dumpsters. They did not have the courage to inform us face-to-face, but we have the courage to persevere through these dark times.

Oh, in other sad news, we were informed that there will not be any expansion of the public displays in Hanna Hall.

Do they even realize that a museum collection is an irreplaceable historical resource? Once it’s gone, there’s no way to decide to restore it at a later date, when funds become available. But they have short-sightedly decided that an academic treasure ought to be cavalierly discarded to benefit university sports.

Another problem mentioned at the link is that Louisiana has cut support to the university by 50%. It seems to me, though, that if you’re starving you pare away the non-essentials first, rather than critical resources. I guess ULM thinks their natural history museum is expendable, while their track team is not.

The ongoing commodification of education

oprah

You get a degree, and you get a degree, and you get a degree! Everyone gets a degree! All you have to do is show up and, incidentally, cough up for a continuously increasing tuition.

Nathaniel Bork was recently fired from his philosophy position at Aurora community college. There are two things going on here. One is that he was an adjunct, like the majority of instructors at Aurora, so he had virtually no power or authority, and was easily firable — there are damn few protections for temporary instructors, and that’s exactly the way the administrators like it.

The other problems is that those administrators on high have fewer concerns about the quality of an education, and are more concerned with the number of tuition-paying bodies shuffled through their doors, and also listen too carefully to those tuition-payers who want the guaranteed outcome of a certificate at the end of their “education”. They created some program optimistically called “Gateway to Success”, where “success” was defined as getting a degree rather than learning something.

Just days before Bork was terminated, he says, he drafted an email to the state’s Higher Learning Commission, complaining about Aurora’s new Gateway to Success initiative. The goal of the program was to increase pass rates in these gatekeeper courses but, Bork said, in reality, he’d been asked to cut 20 percent of his introductory philosophy course content; require fewer writing assignments, with a new maximum of eight pages per semester; offer small-group activities every other class session; and make works by women and minority thinkers about 30 percent of the course.

Bork said he was told to keep teaching this way until 80 percent of all student demographic groups were passing the course, which in his view violated the spirit of Colorado law on guaranteed transfer courses to a four-year institution.

I approve of the idea of insisting on more diversity in the course material — a philosophy course would benefit from having more perspectives represented. Small group activities, also fine, since philosophy students should be able to communicate with each other and share ideas. But the rest…that’s simply dumbing down the course. Only 8 written pages total per semester? My impression of philosophers is that they can produce that much text while comatose and drunk after lunch.

I’m at a university with almost no temporary faculty, and talking to them you get a completely different set of concerns. We all want to increase the amount of learning students do — I’m actually talking to my discipline this afternoon about bumping up student math exposure and focusing a little more on quantitative biology, for example. Our goal isn’t to make it easier to graduate, but to make sure our students know the material well enough to succeed in a biology career.

So maybe it’s really one problem, the reliance on faculty the administration considers expendable and a reasonable sacrifice to enrollment goals. Problem solved by giving Nathaniel Bork and his colleagues tenure track positions, instead of firing them.

That might cause some other problems, I admit. Those might be solved by state governments investing in education to a degree they deserve.