When did we fall away from being a nation that taught science? The application of the scientific method? How to gather and examine evidence? The value of facts? Too many people today, it seems, are willing to believe all manner of snake oil, nitwittery, drivel, goo, and woo, and it seems certain that our education system is at least partly in fault, because honestly, we're not doing a very good job of teaching science, mathematics, and other basic, fact-based subjects.
Come to think of it, our education system, for the most part, isn't doing a very good job at all.
The supposedly science-based media isn't helping, either. Which brings me to a publication that, years ago, I enjoyed: Scientific American. Back in the day, this magazine brought us some interesting news: Discoveries, the latest research projects, some piece of pure theorizing, and so on. It wasn't a scientific journal with peer-reviewed papers; it was intended for the general public, including people who may not have been educated in a scientific discipline. Nevertheless, it generally presented fact-based information.
Somewhere in the late 1980s and early 1990s, that started to change. More and more pseudoscientific nitwittery started showing up, from UFO speculation to climate panic-mongering. I stopped reading Scientific American about then.
Now that seems to have hit Peak Stupid, as James Smoliga, a professor & researcher at Tufts University School of Medicine, has brought to our attention a real head-scratcher: An article on diagnosing diseases by examining tongue color.
I stumbled upon a hard copy of the October 2025 issue in a waiting room and began reading. Inside it, I found a piece that highlighted a study claiming that tongue photographs, analyzed by machine learning, could diagnose diseases.
My immediate reaction was: This can’t be serious. See below:
Here's the chart depicted, and it's a howler:
Utter drivel and goo. pic.twitter.com/FdTac7cdON
— Ward Clark (@TheGreatLander) June 12, 2026
Dr. Smoliga continues:
Tongue-reading has a long history in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), and while it can be culturally meaningful, its scientific basis has never passed basic clinical scrutiny. So I clicked through to the original research article.
Within seconds, three red flags were waving so loudly they practically slapped me in the face.
The paper, and news stories surrounding it, claimed that simple tongue photos could diagnose:
- Diabetes
- Mycotic infections
- Asthma
- Anemia
- COVID-19
- Even “resistant pylori infection” and “circulatory problems”
All based on tongue color categories like yellow, white, green, blue, and red.
As soon as I saw this, I knew the underlying methodology had to be flimsy. And unfortunately, it was worse than flimsy — it was almost comically so.
"Flimsy" doesn't begin to cover it.
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The descent into nitwittery continued:
When I opened the methods section, it became clear the model wasn’t diagnosing diseases.
Instead, the model was classifying colors.
Literally just colors. That’s right, AI was examining an image (not necessarily of a tongue) and saying “red” or “blue” or “yellow.” In other words, a skill that a 3-year old can reliably perform.
After that, it took images of 60 tongues and determined their color. I emphasize, that’s all it did, classify their tongue as one of seven colors.
Then, and this is the crucial part, the authors manually created a lookup table based on TCM that said things like:
- Yellow tongue → diabetes
- Green tongue → fungal infection
- Blue tongue → asthma
- Red tongue → COVID-19 or appendicitis or stroke (take your pick!)
I'll leave the balance of Dr. Smoliga's takedown of this blatant hooraw to him in the article linked above, and it's worth the read, because this is an actual scientist working on taking down a "study" that is utter garbage. But what makes this kind of thing possible? What drove Scientific American, once a reputable publication, to this juncture, where they post drek like this?
Again, I think it's our failure to teach science, to teach how to apply the scientific method.
Here's the thing: Science isn't a philosophy. It isn't an ideology. There is no dogma. Science, in the form of the scientific method, is a tool, for gathering and examining data - evidence - drawing conclusions from that evidence, developing theories with predictive capability, and testing those theories through experimentation. As with any tool, the scientific method can be used properly or improperly. But the science community is supposed to be self-checking. How? Because reputable people working in any area where the scientific method applies, when they document their results, are supposed to release not only their conclusions but also their methods and their raw data, so others can check and attempt to reproduce their work.
That's how science is supposed to work. And, in many disciplines, like my own - biology - for the most part, it still does. But there are areas, like climate change, where the reputable have been overshadowed by those with an agenda, the ones working backwards from a conclusion.
In the case of Scientific American, the trend seems to have gone towards favoring sensationalism over science, nitwittery over facts. That's too bad. This is a once-reputable journal that now, without some kind of major editorial course change, is headed to join the ranks of supermarket check-out lane tabloids.
