"Did we come from gorillas...like at the zoo? Or did we come from Adam and Eve?"

Uh oh. I pretended not to hear and fished for another piece of white meat.

"Ask your Uncle George," his Mom said. "He'll know."

I glared at my sister, thinking, "Are you nuts?" But it was too late. A pair of curious, free-thinking eyes were staring at me and expecting an answer. They had no inkling that this line of thought once sent Western Civilization into convulsions that still haven't died down. Imagine how it could ruin one family's Thanksgiving dinner. Hardly anyone is happy about Darwin's conclusion that we're distant cousins of modern apes and monkeys. You might as well talk about intestinal parasites.

Thinking fast (or trying to), I changed the subject.

"You know, I don't really want to talk about that, but I do want to know if you've written your letter to Santa Cl..."

Oops! Don't go there. With a 6-year-old sitting across the table, these waters could be mined, too.

"Um, I mean, how's your turkey? What's better--white meat or dark?" (Phew!)

Darwin is dangerous. Oddly, I happened to be reading just the book for this occasion--Darwin's Dangerous Idea by the philosopher Daniel Dennett (1995, Simon & Schuster). First the idea, then the danger, and then my theory: audiophiles are Darwinists.

Darwin theorized that species, including our own, come from other species via a process called evolution by natural selection. It has four parts. First, no two members of a species are identical. Variety abounds. Some are bigger, smaller, weaker, stronger, healthier, sicker, and so on. Second, life is difficult. Given the facts of life, populations tend to increase in size geometrically, thus creating a perpetual shortage of resources. Competition is the name of the game. Third, those creatures with small variations that give them an edge over others in life's competitions are likely to live longer and leave more offspring than those without them. Finally, if these tiny variations are passed on from generation to generation, they will become more and more common in the population. (A standard illustration: ancient giraffes that happened to have slightly longer necks than their neighbors had more leaves to eat, had more kids, and had more kids with slightly longer necks.) As thousands of generations go by, these variations can "add up" and lead to entirely new species.

And the danger? Dennett compares Darwinism to "universal acid"--a mythical solvent that eats through everything. It's impossible to contain. If it existed, only gravity could eventually capture it all at the center of the earth. Darwin's theory has nearly the same power. If it's true (as most biologists and scientists believe), it threatens our most cherished beliefs about ourselves and the world.

The well-known religious implications are just hors d'oeuvres. Natural selection, Darwin showed, could do all the species-making work of a supernatural designer (albeit in small, slow steps). And if that's true, Adam and Eve probably existed only in the imagination of the early scribes. And if that's true, then Providence--humanity's divine guarantee of future prosperity--remains only the capitol of Rhode Island. And if that's true.... The acid continues to drip.

Do we have souls? Do we have, that is, immaterial and eternal substances that make each of us unique and endow us with free-will? Darwin's theory plants us firmly within the natural world. So, unless all the birds and worms and giraffes have souls too, Darwin's magic 8-ball says, "outlook not so good."

Drip, drip, drip.

"OK," says the optimist. "So what if I don't have free-will and an eternal, immaterial soul? I don't want eternal life anyway. Look what happened to Ripley in Alien: Resurrection! I'm just fine being me, with all my hopes and fears and plans and goals. I am still me, right?"

According to some evolutionists, you're not the you you thought you were (you got that?). Sure, your personality and hopes and fears are all there. But they count for little in the game of life. You are a transportation vehicle and preservation device for your genes. Your family, your job, your mind and body, are simply support props for evolution's main events: Reproduce! Get those genes out there and into future generations!

Drip, drip, drip.

As I read Dennett's book, I kept wondering if there are any dogmas about music or audio that Darwin's universal acid will dissolve. Of course most audiophiles are well-versed in evolution-speak. We all talk about how components evolve through modifications and updates. But these changes are the result of intelligent, conscious design (of William Johnson, or Dan D'Agostino, for example). They don't illustrate Darwinian natural selection. Nor is competition in the marketplace Darwinian, either. Consumer selection is not natural selection because consumers don't always select the "fittest" of the available alternatives: witness VHS's success over Beta, Windows' rise over Mac (or Unix or OS2), or the fact that 8-track tapes ever sold at all. It's not "survival of the fittest," it's "survival of the best marketed." (Yes, my LPs and turntable asked me to make this point.)

In another way, however, Darwin's ideas do capture the spirit and point of high-end audio. To see this we have to go back to Darwin. Some say his main insight was not the theory of natural selection but rather his new "populational" view of species. Species are simply populations of animals that share an evolutionary history. By contrast, the dominant definition of species in Darwin's day was much more elaborate. A species was not merely a population, but a population whose members each possessed a certain essence that united and defined them. Species, that is, were metaphysically distinct and different from each other. God designed them to be that way. No surprise, then, that many thought Darwin was an idiot. That one species could evolve out of another seemed as unlikely as a triangle becoming a square, or six becoming seven. Essences don't change, so they don't evolve.

But Darwin turned things around. The small, ubiquitous differences among members of a species are not merely noise on a robust, unchanging signal--the essence, or the underlying form of the species. Instead, those differences are the signal. They are the main stuff of life and its history. Nature cares not a whit about essences, only about these variations and deviations. As Darwin metaphorically put it, "Natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life."

Mother Nature sounds like an audiophile, doesn't she? -- "...daily and hourly scrutinizing her audio rig for the slightest variations in performance; rejecting those interconnects and components that are bad, preserving those that work well together..." But it's not this obsession with hardware that makes audiophiles Darwinian. Rather, high-end audio encourages a populational view of music much like Darwin's populational view of species.

Every giraffe is different, if only slightly, and so is every performance of, say, the Brandenburg Concertos. A high-end system lets you hear these differences when low- and mid-fi systems usually won't. In my car, for instance, my neanderthal FM radio gives me just enough information to identify the music that WFMT is playing. But I can never tell (without the announcer's help) who's playing, who's conducting, where the performance took place, how it was recorded, etc. The radio strips away the variations among the many many recordings out there, leaving me with only the musical essence that they all share. In my car, that is, I'm neither an audiophile nor a Darwinist about music.

But in my living room, Richter's Brandenburgs sound very different from Klemperer's, Harnoncourt's or any other conductor's. Through my Krell & Martin-Logan system, distinguishing marks become obvious and--importantly--they're not just incidental. They're not different window dressings on the same, essential pieces of music. Some Brandenburgs are wooden and plodding; others are vivacious and (for me, at least) sometimes dramatic and hair-raising. They're all different.

So which Brandenburgs are the real or essential Brandenburgs? To audiophiles, the question rings hollow. We celebrate these differences among recordings and prize audio systems for their ability to detect them. If you agree that there simply is no real or essential version of the Brandenbergs (or of any other piece of music), then you're Darwinian, too. For there is no real or essential version of a giraffe or anteater, either. What exists are populations of animals and populations of musical performances. [note] Each member of these populations is different in ways that count.

This may be the difference between audiophiles and those hordes of music-lovers who are happy with mid-fi or low-fi systems. They're not very Darwinian. Just as I have to listen through the sound of my car radio (and the rattling of a plastic speaker grill) to the musical information inside it, they must tend to listen through their systems. The trick is to ignore the bad sound, but still hear good music. A professor of mine once lectured me about the singular genius of Beethoven. (I had dared to opine that Bach was more interesting.) Yet he never once mentioned the sound of Beethoven's music, or the experience of hearing any particular symphony. He just listed an impressive array of formal, musicological innovations that Beethoven had pioneered. Coincidence or not, the speaker cartons I spied in his office (where I stood corrected) betrayed his mid-fi leanings. His speakers at home were big old mid-70s Advents--fine for hearing a contrapuntal-hyper-mega-inversion (or whatever--I'm no musicologist), but not so good for telling the CSO from the LSO, a telecaster from a stratocaster, and the other sorts of sonic variations that reveal music's populational character.

Call me sentimental, but I'm sad to see turntables disappear. They were my original calling. Back in 1973 (or so), when a kid from my neighborhood insisted that I see his brother-in-law's "fantastic stereo", I was entranced by a huge Pioneer receiver and walnut AR3a speakers. But most alluring by far was the Marantz turntable. Its brushed stainless steel controls and gleaming, chromed tonearm made it look like some delicate and expensive scientific instrument. Compared to the all-in-one plastic unit I played my Partridge Family records on, the mere sight of it put me on the audiophile path. (And I mean just the sight of it. We weren't allowed to touch). Eventually, his brother-in-law played a record for me, Gordon Lightfoot's "Endless Wire". Since that day, I can chart the passage of my life according to the turntables I've owned (if it's VPI, this must be Chicago).

Now the turntable is going the way of rotary phones and the horse and buggy. At least, that's the conventional wisdom. But it's not really true. Actually, the turntable has undergone a paradigm shift (or something like it). It's still here, but in a different form.

What's a paradigm shift? Good question. For almost forty years, Thomas Kuhn's concepts of paradigms and paradigm shifts (introduced in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) have trickled into the parlance of business coaches and self-help gurus. But Kuhn left some unanswered questions about what, exactly, paradigms are. The best answer I've seen was above a urinal in a college men's room. Someone sketched two busts of an English poet, a lake with two docks, and two coins. Parakeets, paradox, and paradigms.

Kuhn said scientific revolutions occur when scientists abandon one way of understanding, seeing, and talking about nature (that is, one paradigm) and adopt another. Old concepts and procedures disappear as new ones quickly replace them. Instead of portraying the history of science as a gradual accumulation of knowledge (as almost all history books said at the time), Kuhn saw lurching, discontinuous leaps from one paradigm to another. In fact, he claimed, old and new paradigms are often so different that there's no valid yardstick of progress that marks new ones as advances over the old. That is, the reasons scientists cite for preferring one paradigm over another actually belong to the different paradigms in question. If there are no paradigm-independent yardsticks (and Kuhn said there aren't) then science isn't really getting better as time marches on. It's just getting different.

Whether or not Kuhn was right about science, something like this has happened with turntables. The paradigm shift has been happening for years, but I had no clue until I chanced into a DJ expo here in Chicago. DJs don't just play records anymore--they play the turntable as a musical instrument in its own right. "Scratching" first hit the mainstream on Herbie Hancock's song "Rockit" back in the 80s. Since then, scratching and "beat juggling" have grown into an elaborate set of techniques for coaxing all sorts of sounds and beats from turntables. When paradigms shift, so do words--DJs are now called "turntablists" and they're a mainstay of hip-hop culture. (What's that? You're a middle-aged guy who wears Dockers and doesn't know a thing about hip-hop? Try www.hip-hop.com and check out the turntablist/DJ links.)

Turntablists do their stuff in clubs and at competitions (or "battles") like the one I saw. The scene is an odd blend of music-making and sport. As if arriving to play baseball (where the uniforms are baseball caps and baggy jeans), turntablists come well- equipped. They've got LPs, their favorite "slip mat" (that loosely couples the LP to the platter), and a box that holds a small arsenal of headshells and cartridges. Standing behind a row of Technics SL1200s, the table of choice, a pair of turntablists duel back and forth with 60 or 90-second performances. Judges pick the winner who advances to later rounds.

Beat jugglers commandeer a couple of turntables playing recorded beats. The trick is to vary their speeds and mix them into a pulsing symphony of drums and percussion, as if the contestant is conducting an entire rhythm section. Scratchers concentrate more on one turntable at a time. As the record plays, they'll use their hands to stop, start, and rock the platter or LP at various speeds, often with one hand on a volume fader to control the sound's attack and envelope. Though I didn't have the best view, it looked like they tap and drum on the LP with their fingertips, too. The result is a loud, rhythmic collage of sounds (called "forwards," "scribbles", "moving scribbles," and "chirps", for example) that grab your spine and rock it back and forth. It's hard to describe, but there's more than just rhythm in this wall of sound. A good turntablist creates tones, textures, and colors and weaves them into the mix.

Is this a full-fledged paradigm shift? There's no question that turntablists are playing a completely different game than we are. If you haven't seen them in action, the way they manipulate platters and LPs will make you cringe. For us, turntables are delicate devices for extracting precious musical information. Good LPs--well-pressed, well-centered, and not warped--are rare and not to be drummed on. Once everything's set up, a turntable is a strictly hands-off affair. But for turntablists, it's essentially a hands-on affair. When I saw him, Q-bert (one of scene's heavy hitters) hunched intently over an SL-1200. Sometimes he caressed it, sometimes his hands became a frenetic blur. He reminded me of Yo-Yo Ma making love to his cello. The sound was loud and bombastic, but just as riveting.

On the other hand, Kuhn's idea of a paradigm shift doesn't do justice to the logic and rationality behind this revolution in the history of turntables. In a way, scratchers and beat jugglers have solved basic problems in turntable design. From an audiophile perspective, these include pitch-stability, surface noise, acoustic vibration, and noise from motors and bearings--all of which boil down to one circumstance: turntables are mechanical devices. The point at which the music in an LP takes flight into your system and begins its journey to your ears is a mechanical interface between a groove and a vibrating stylus. Designers strive to make this interface stable and as immune as possible from interference. But sources of interference on board: bearings rattle, motors hum and every part of a turntable vibrates, more or less. The ideal turntable is a paradox: a mechanical device that behaves (somehow) as if it were actually non-mechanical.

But if you look at a turntable as a musical instrument, not as a device for reproducing music, this paradox disappears. For turntablists, its parts buzz and vibrate just as they should. The stylus-groove interface shouldn't be purified and isolated--it should be skillfully manipulated and controlled like the interface between fingers and guitar strings or keys and hammers in a piano.

The better metaphor is evolution, not sudden revolution. As turntables thrived in the land of audiophilia, some found their way into a different musical ecosystem, the land of hip-hop, where their musical potential was quickly recognized. The SL-1200 became the turntablist's standard partly because Technics put strobe markings on the perimeter of the platter. Originally designed for monitoring platter speed and keeping it accurate, those raised dimples are a grippy surface for controlling the platter. All DJ turntables have them.

The SL-1200 may be the Adam and Eve of DJ turntables (to momentarily mix metaphors), but their progeny are mutating. Turntablists usually rotate their tables 90 degrees counterclockwise ("battle position"), so that the tonearm is out of the way of their busy hands. Some manufacturers responded by moving controls to the left side where they are more handy. Another issue is skating force--a real problem for scratchers. When they suddenly reverse the normal rotation of an LP, the skating force that was tending to rotate the tonearm inward (toward the spindle) reverses and pushes the tonearm outward. With these forces changing direction so quickly, tonearms can easily jump out of the groove (think breaking a string in the middle of your guitar solo). Ordinary anti-skate mechanisms are no help because they apply a torque only in one direction. So far, the solution is track at very high weights, typically 4-6 grams. Cartridges, styli and LPs aren't too happy about this. They die young.

Hoping that a fitter turntable will survive, Vestax recently tried to circumvent this problem. Since skating forces arise from offset headshell angles, they're making a table with a straight tonearm and headshell--no offset angle. This reduces skating forces and allows tracking weights to be smaller. The price of this, of course, is that the cartridge will be less tangent to the record's grooves--but that's an audiophile thing, not a turntablist thing. Asking a turntablist whether his or her table is a "high fidelity" component is a silly as asking a violinist if she plays an "audiophile" violin. Optimal groove alignment just doesn't much matter.

Still, the evolution metaphor goes only so far. It doesn't show how the cultural and economic roles that turntables play have changed drastically and abruptly. As high-fidelity components, they ushered in the commodification of music and culture. From the 1950s through the early 80s, record companies got large and rich by selling us LPs that brought everyone from Miles Davis to Lenny Bruce to the Boston Symphony into our living rooms. We paid for LPs, turntables and phono cartridges, but we were ultimately buying music, entertainment, and art.

Turntablists buy LPs and turntables, too. But they don't buy music. They make their own. Though I'm an outsider (if not because of my Dockers, because my hands would viscerally refuse to rock a platter back and forth under a delicate cantilever), it's clear that turntablists are proud to have invented a music that is new and all their own. They did it, moreover, using the goods (i.e. turntables and LPs) of an altogether different economic and musical paradigm--one where a performer's image and the marketing muscle behind it have more influence on success than creativity and talent. Even within hip-hop, turntablists struggle against the commercialism of mainstream artists, especially gangsta rap. The creative flame, they say, is turntablism, and they proudly keep it burning. This is not to say that they don't make and sell recordings--they do. The best turntablists are also employed by name artists like Beck and The Beastie Boys. But in it's pure form--public, spontaneous, and competitive--this music can't be bought or sold. You have to be there.

A long, relaxing listening session can be good medicine. But I've never heard a doctor prescribe, "Listen to your favorite recording three times and call me in the morning." At least not yet.

The National Institutes of Health is now funding studies of "alternative" healing techniques at major medical universities. According to the New York Times (Jan. 31, 2000), the story begins with Senator Tom Harkin's amazement over the improved health of his former congressional colleague, Berkeley Bedell. Bedell began alternative therapies after a diagnosis of Lyme Disease and prostate cancer. A few years later, Harkin says, Bedell was "a new man". Harkin started taking bee pollen for his allergies and became a believer. Then he opened up the NIH's governmental purse strings (which he happened to hold).

The result, in 1991, was the establishment of an Office of Alternative Medicine within the NIH--something akin to "setting up an office of deviltry within the Catholic Church" according to one observer. Established to disburse research money, the office was a mired in applications from herbalists, acupuncturists, meditation therapists, massage therapists, and healers of all sorts. Not surprisingly, the scientific credentials of most proposers were low and the office floundered in a sea of applications for new-age research. But things changed in 1994 when legislation passed allowing manufacturers of herbal medications to make claims about the reputed (i.e., not scientifically documented) benefits of their products. The Office found a focus by funding studies of the herbal treatments now flying off the shelves at drug stores across the country. Criticism still abounds within and without the NIH ("quackupuncture") but the enterprise is slowly gaining acceptance. Its annual budget grew (from 2 to 68 million) and so did its title: it's now the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM).

Why the resistance and criticism? One reason is physics-envy. Medicine was long an art more than science. And for centuries its art wasn't very good. Steve Martin's sketch "Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber" from the early days of Saturday Night Live was not far off the mark: "Theodoric," his apprentice says, "your patient is weaker and growing ever more pale. What shall we do?" "That's easy. Bleed her some more!"

Martin was and wasn't joking. Take one of Theodoric's historical counterparts, Johannes Baptiste Van Helmont, the 16th-century physician and alchemist. Were you a soldier stabbed in battle, you might visit Van Helmont for some of his "weapon salve". Follow the instructions carefully: apply the ointment to the knife--yes, the knife--that stabbed you. Van Helmont and others believed that nature was suffused with mystical influences and correspondences (such as one between your wound and the implement that caused it). For a long time, medical treatment was risky business.

By emulating physics and chemistry as much as possible, medicine stays on the sure path of science and keeps its distance from the dark days of Theodoric and Van Helmont. Perhaps that's why some supporters of the NCCAM articulate such high intellectual standards. Dr. David Eisenberg of Boston's Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center says NCCAM's studies must not only demonstrate, if possible, that any given alternative therapy works. They must also determine how they work within the framework of current biochemical and physiological knowledge.

Sound familiar? Substitute "exotic power cables" or "green magic markers" for alternative medicines and these debates look like the ongoing feud between audiophiles and audio engineers. Many of the techniques, tweaks, and beliefs about components in high end audio, the skeptics will say, don't make sense on the basis of modern physics.

But objectivists in audio and medicine alike take a risky position by holding the bar so high. What happens when physics itself doesn't make sense? Ironically, physics tells us that nature sometimes follows the ghostly logic of van Helmont according to which events in one place (applying ointment to a knife) have inexplicable influence on events in another place (your festering wound).

Take the EPR paradox in quantum mechanics. Suppose you and a partner each have a device that simulates flipping a coin when you press a button--something like a Game boy. The coin behaves as a subatomic particle subject to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: just as a particle can have a position and a momentum, the coin has an orientation (heads or tails) and it can also assume two different colors (say, black or white). The uncertainty principle places limits on how much information is available about the coin after it has been flipped. In this case, you can only observe one piece of information. Press one button to observe whether it came up heads or tails or another button to see whether it's black or white. But you can't press both. If your coin comes up tails, it's not that you merely can't see its color. Rather, it doesn't have a determinate color. Such is the logic of quantum mechanics.

You and your partner go into separate rooms and flip 100 coins. Each time, you choose randomly whether to observe the coin's color or orientation after it lands and record your results. You won't see any patterns. Like flipping a real coin, you'll have a 50-50 chance of getting heads or tails (if that's what you observe) or a 50-50 chance of getting black or white (if that's what you observe).

Now, compare your results with your partner's. For those pairs of coins (say, the 2nd, 27th, etc.) for which the two of you observed different pieces of information, your results will still appear random and unconnected. But, for those flips (say, the 3rd, 8th, 44th and so on) for which the two of you observed the same piece of information, your results will show a correlation. If you got heads, for example, your partner got tails (or vice versa). Or if you got white, your partner got black--every time.

The mystery is not these correlations themselves. In real world experiments investigating the EPR paradox, the two coins are pairs of electrons or photons emitted from a common source. If one is observed to be "tails", the other must be "heads" for physical reasons. [note: See www.con.wesleyan.edu/~eric/sparrow/physics/EPR.Paradox.html for a good description of the physics involved. Or search "EPR" or "Bell's theorem" elsewhere on the web.] The puzzle is how these pairs of coins (or photons or electrons) "know" when their physical properties must be correlated.

Look at the situation from the point of view of your virtual coin. It's the tenth flip and, as the coin is flying through the virtual air, you press the heads-tails button. Meanwhile, your partner has pressed the black-white button. As far as your coin is concerned, it's free to land heads or tails. But, just before the coins land, your partner changes his mind and presses the heads-tails button. Suddenly, your coin is no longer free. If the other coin lands tails, it must land heads (or vice versa). Some kind of physical influence, that is, seems to connect the two coins together, regardless of how far apart they may be, and guarantee the observed correlations.

The plot thickens. Experiments have shown that this influence, whatever it is, must travel faster than the speed of light. And that, they'll tell you in the department of relativity theory, is impossible (unless special relativity theory is wrong, which it doesn't seem to be).

I'm not saying van Helmont was on to something. The point is that those with physics envy should be careful what they wish for. If you demand a scientific explanation for how something works--be it a medical therapy or an inexplicably great sounding speaker cable--it's possible that the explanation science offers will make your head spin faster than mumbo jumbo about astral powers or non-physical energies. In the EPR paradox, the equations describe what happens, and experiments prove that it happens. But we don't know how it happens. We may not always get such an answer in audio or medicine, either.

The NCCAM is on track by funding studies to determine whether or not alternative therapies are effective. If an explanation for how they work comes along, that's a bonus. But it's not essential for the business of healing. It's the same in audio. When I get around to buying new interconnects for my slightly sick CD player (it's an older one with a slightly raspy voice), my goal is to make it sing better. I'd like to know how the cure works, if it does, but that's different from knowing that it works. Still, here's no shortage of skeptics in audio and medicine who adhere to Eisenberg's standard: if science can't explain it, it's probably a bunch of hooey.

The growing acceptance of the NCCAM, however, suggests that there's a difference between the skeptics in audio and in medicine. Could hard-nosed skeptics in medicine be just a tad more open-minded than their counterparts in audio? If so, there's a reason. Despite its modern, scientific credentials, medicine's codes and techniques have evolved over centuries and they've always taken account of the fact that different people react differently to diseases and treatments. Case studies teach students to expect common patterns in patients, but also to expect surprises. Some people will beat a disease that others succumb to. Some of us can get a cold just by looking at someone sniffling while others haven't had one for years.

This doesn't mean that supporters of the NCCAM are betting that herbal extracts or ancient massage techniques will soon eradicate cancer or arthritis. They are simply open to the possibility that some patients may draw some benefits from non-standard treatments.

For audio's skeptics, there's less respect for individual differences. The laws of physics are the same in all listening rooms, they'll say, and no one will create an alternate sonic reality by strategically placing bricks or stones or using a different power cord. But this ignores the possibility that individuals may hear differently--in different ways, or with higher acuity--and that some can really detect differences among components or tweaks that others cannot. If medical science accepts that some people have golden immune systems or different physiological sensitivities, why can't there be golden ears among audiophiles? Hearing is as physiological as healing.

Maybe that's so, skeptics will say. But they won't trust subjective reports for proof. If an audiophile reports that changing amplifiers or cables made spectacular differences for their system, they'll chalk it up to wishful thinking or perhaps cognitive dissonance ("If I paid five grand for it, it must sound better"). The only proof they'll accept for the existence of golden ears is in the form of blind listening tests.

When you look at the situation from this medical point of view, however, the blind testing debate seems to go down a blind alley. Suppose 20 percent of subjects subjectively report feeling better from an alternative treatment for depression or chronic pain. Doctors would take that as evidence that the therapy has promise. It may turn out, after all the studies and analyses are in, that it has positive effects for some people.