by Cheryl Rofer
Yesterday, the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, a federal court ruled for science.
The "controversy" over whether childhood vaccines cause autism is settled, now legally as well as scientificallly. And it's one more ending to the Bush years, when science was held to be no more than anyone's opinion.
Evidence does matter. Yes, the media play up the findings that mercury is a toxin, and yes, we seem to be exposed to mercury everywhere. Yes, some children begin to display the symptoms of autism at about the same time they get their immunizations. Yes, some of us need something or someone to blame when something goes wrong in our lives. And yes, mercury has been removed from most vaccines and children are still getting autism. That last is part of the evidence that thimerosol, the mercury-containing preservative, is not the cause of autism.
Science (sorry!) is not a provider of simple answers, and we have to do our part and understand its processes. Most of us understand statistics and the very small numbers that describe the contaminants in our environment very poorly. Neither statistics nor those small numbers comport well with our intuition, so if we are to understand them, we must damp down intuition and use thought. That is what the court did, along with considering the evidence and the predominant conclusions that come from reliable studies.
That does, as the science-deniers point out, involved judgments about reliability and predominance of conclusions. But science provides criteria for those judgments, and intuition and emotion do not.
It's a tragedy to have a severely autistic child. I spent last weekend with a friend whose daughter is severely autistic. Identifying the causes is important, and scientific work continues on many aspects of autism. Identifying the wrong causes will actively damage prospects of alleviating this disorder. The court has helped us all out in correcting these wrong ideas and turned back toward science. Darwin would have appreciated that.