Sometimes training can become a way of life. When I was a graduate student in Seattle, I once left a nightclub at two in the morning to grab a burger at a nearby fast-food establishment. With hindsight, walking through the Denny Regrade area alone at two in the morning in a very short skirt was a pretty stupid thing to do, but when the man came after me, my body responded before I even had time to think: I blocked his outstretched right arm by swiping it with a left-armed parry and punched him in the gut with my right. Not a wussy girl punch, but a proper one: starting from the resting position with fist facing palm upwards and elbow crooked at my waist, then corkscrewing anti-clockwise so that the punch would concentrate the force precisely on impact. Needless to say it was the last thing he’d expected and when he doubled over in pain, I was able to run away.<\/p>\n
\nThe incredible thing about this incident was that I was only a white belt in karate. I had been training in my local dojo for just six months, but somehow, all of the endless kata<\/em> and sparring exercises had made something foreign become instinctive. When the call came to act, my muscles no longer needed to consult the boss.<\/p>\n \nI feel this way about scientific thinking: it’s instinctive too, and hits me even when encountering scenarios that have nothing to do with the lab. I thought about this yesterday as I stood in a crowded Jubilee Line carriage on my way home from work. In one of the free papers, the headline Ban ‘works’<\/em> caught my eye:<\/p>\n \nThe British Transport Police today revealed how many passengers have been thrown off the Tube for breaking Boris Johnson’s booze ban \u2013 a grand total of zero.<\/span>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \nAfter a brief explanation of the law in question, the rest of the piece set off all of my scientific alarms:<\/p>\n \nBut since the ban’s introduction, not a single drinker has been forced off a train. A spokesman for Transport for London said: \u201cThis shows that the alcohol ban is self-imposing and working.\u201d<\/span>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \nIt does no such thing! The logic here is, of course, fatally flawed. Yes, that is one hypothesis, but there is another one: namely that the law is not being enforced. Indeed, anyone who has been on the London Underground around pub closing time or before and after major football matches will know that many people are still drinking. Either they are hiding the containers from view when they negotiate the barriers, or no TFL staff can be bothered (or dares) to stop them. Once inside the carriages, there are no conductors to tell them to stop, so the merriment continues unabated. Of course, I am open to the possibility that the hypothesis mooted by TFL is the right one, but I’d need to see enough evidence to counter that which I’ve harvested with my own eyes.<\/p>\n \nAs a scientist, I process my entire world through an open mind filtered with a screen of severe skepticism. There are, of course, other professions that teach critical thinking: I reckon lawyers, for example, would have spotted the article’s logical weakness immediately. But what about everyone else? For me, this ability to see<\/em> and analyze is probably the best legacy of a sound scientific education, even if the students go on to do something else. Otherwise we are at the mercy of the media and spokespeople who trust that we will believe everything we read without question.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sometimes training can become a way of life. When I was a graduate student in Seattle, I once left a nightclub at two in the morning to grab a burger at a nearby fast-food establishment. With hindsight, walking through the … Continue reading