I don’t think that giving a description of ‘what skepticism is’ is going to help illuminate someone who is coming to this cold, if only because I don’t think people come to skepticism cold. They come to it gradually, absorbing it piece by piece through a kind of osmosis. Then one day they realise that their vaguely connected interests and questions have led them into a particular area of thought and activism called skepticism, like walking down a cul-de-sac to find a party at the bottom. Then they find they have to put up with people asking them ‘what skepticism is’ and are reduced to writing amateurish blogposts like this one in order to avoid giving an answer…

What I thought I would do instead is go through a selection of some of the books/podcasts/programs that formed my skeptical education – for want of a better term. All of these things opened up my mind in some way, either teaching me something I didn’t know, portraying the things I already knew in a fresh light, or both. They cleared away some of the mental fog that surrounded me, and simultaneously made me realise how much I didn’t know and how much there was to learn. In short, they woke me up a little. I list them here as suggestions for those new to skepticism, in the hope that the effect they had on me may be replicated for them. Even if only one person is inspired, that is still worth the attempt. I’m probably not suggesting anything here most skeptics haven’t already heard of, as I won’t be going far from the beaten track so to speak, but you may get something from my tuppence-worth of thoughts on them regardless. It’s not an exhaustive list, just a list of books I’ve read essentially, and of other things aside from books, too. This is basically my attempt to justify all those hours of my life spent absorbing knowledge that has basically sat in my head all this time with nowhere to go. Validate me, oh wonderful blogosphere!

Books:

The Bible – my first exercise in skepticism, when I wasn’t even aware what it was. You often hear from theists turned atheists that reading the bible from beginning to end with an open and critical mind was the turning point in their journey away from belief. I can completely understand why. Although I have always been atheist, I have also always had an interest in religions themselves, and a few years ago while on hard times and unemployed with lots of spare time I decided to read the Bible right through, in as objective a way as possible. What you get, divorced from the highly selective quotes priests throw out of pulpits like m & ms designed to lead you, ET-like, up the garden path of belief, is a fascinating collection of historical texts from many different periods of time, that give a huge insight into what people have believed in over the years, their intentions and their dreams, their preferred reading materials, their rituals, way of life: everything. It is a great historical compendium. It is also an extremely unpleasant book, filled with the worst kinds of disgusting violence, racial hatred and misogyny, just to list a few of its repellent peccadilloes. However, what you receive overall is a sense of how building a narrow religious worldview around a book such as this is in reality a rather daft and thankless task. You wonder why they bother; but then, maybe the main lesson to be learnt here is that most Christians don’t read the whole Bible. They should, because by doing so, you realise that believing in God isn’t quite the sane idea it may have once seemed. If you read the Bible objectively, it becomes much more difficult to argue the case for God without running into all kinds of complications, some linguistic (we’re talking translations of translations of translations here: of texts written by people who often disagreed with each other in the first place), some historical (it could after all, just be made up: the archaeological evidence is sketchy at best for most biblical events), some rational (donkeys and snakes don’t speak; the Noah’s ark story stretches science into the realm of fantasy), and some philosophical (is God love, or is he an utter bastard?). At the end of the matter, it just boils down to applying your own judgement. You should never beleive in God because of someone else’s interpretation of a book you’ve not fully read or understood. You have to do that yourself. That is Skepticism.

For the record, I skimmed a lot of the prophets, and the psalms. This was for my own sanity. My favourite book of the Bible was Ecclesiastes. You don’t need to know this, but now you do.

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. This book is famous more for the responses to it than for anything actually in the book itself. It annoyed a lot of Christians. It probably also annoyed a lot of those ghostwriters for shit celebrity ‘auto’biographies who were kept off the number one spot in the bestseller lists. It could also be argued that it didn’t do any favours for the perception of atheists in the media either, and this could be down to what a lot of people saw as Dawkins’ holier-than-thou tone in the book, sometimes adopted by slavish fans of the book who just want to get one up on the creationists. Dawkins maintains his writing is simply passionate, and that the accusations say more about religion’s easily bruised sense of blasphemy. Anyway, all this would be to miss the point. I read the book to see what all the fuss was about, and it was quite easy to see why it has become such a touchstone book for many atheists. It really is one of the best argued cases against the idea of a God: well constructed, and extremely well-informed and presented. Dawkins knows his stuff, and knows how to write. The tone can occasionally grate, but it’s worth it. Read the Bible and then this and you’ll feel like a professor.

On a side note, I can sometimes get frustrated by what comes across like a skeptical obsession with evolution. It used to seem strange to me that nearly all the science focus in skepticism was around evolution. It’s extremely important, yes, but science is a huge and fascinating arena full of many other ideas we can focus on. The problem is that skepticism hasn’t really had any choice, given the rise of creationism over the last few decades (particularly in America, but also to a lesser extent in Britain). I am frustrated by the impression sometimes given that we are some kind of Darwin cult, but if science education is constantly getting attacked by fundamentalists who object to the theory of evolution because it disagrees with their favourite book, then I’m not sure that skeptics have had much choice other than to go on and on about evolution. We go on about it because there is a genuine attempt to confuse people about what it is, and to damage the education of children. There is a genuine fear that if we don’t do our best to convey why evolution is true then science education will just slide backwards until we’re really in trouble. I wish we could shut up about Darwin for a while, but we can’t.

Anyway, it’s a good book. Unlike ‘The’ Good Book.

Bad Science: this book is simply a great reference tool (aswell as funny). It highlights another area where woolly thinking and credulity can be dangerous, that of public health. The world of medicine is constantly undermined by the halfbaked claims and sometimes outright fraud of people who claim to be offering viable ‘alternatives’. Names such as Patrick Holford, Gillian McKeith and Matthias Rath will no longer sound innocuous after reading this book. This doesn’t mean the book is character assassination. It is never anything but fair and accurate. The book is ruthlessly researched and reasoned, and is simply one of the best books on the subject, if not the best. If you have any doubts about the latest alternative medicine fad, Goldacre is the man to read.

I would add that while in America religious fundamentalism seems to be the bigger threat in society, here in Britain alternative medicine is the more accepted form of muddy thinking and falsehood. This is why the book is important. Both are dangerous in different but no less important ways. This book helps to show how skepticism can be part of a truly righteous fight in the real world, not just a personal exercise in self growth.

Programs/Podcasts:

TED talks. These lectures from the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design conference woke up my science brain. This was before I got into skepticism, but was a major step on my way to that destination. The actual conference itself is something of an elitist and expensive backpatting session for smart people, but the lectures are published online for free, and they are great (but short) lectures by leading figures in many areas of research. For me, they reinvigorated the sheer joy of ideas, and experimentation, and finding out about the world. Sometimes, there just doesn’t seem to be enough of that in our everyday lives: the joy of simply knowing stuff.

There’s not just TED: there are science lectures and programs all over the net. They’re even on tv. Carl Sagan’s lectures are highly regarded, though I have yet to see them myself. These days, most science lectures or programs seem to presented by Brian Cox. He doesn’t sleep, I think.

Skeptoid: the first podcast I ever listened to, and the first self-described skeptical product I ever exposed myself to. Each week, Brian Dunning takes a well researched skeptical look at some aspect of pop phenomena. It could be anything from the city of Atlantis to UFOs. I don’t always agree with his conclusions, but that’s fine, because that’s part of skepticism. The research is always thoroughly done, and the show always interesting. The first episode to really impress me was the one which completely debunked the conspiracy theories surrounding Roswell in New Mexico. There is research in that episode which I have never seen or heard on any other show purporting to get to the facts regarding the Roswell ‘incident’. That fact alone has caused me to never take any statements regarding unusual theories at face value. I will find as much research as possible via my own initiative, striving for objectivity, and keep a closer eye on those who I know are doing the same. The world of UFO research all too often resembles an echoing chamber, in which only a couple of choice selections of data can be heard, rebounding constantly from researcher to researcher… If you’re interested in getting as close as you can to the truth regarding strange claims, then Skeptoid is a great place to start. Websites by lone bigfoot hunters and UFO enthusiasts who only reference those who only reference them, are not… Skeptoid was good for my skeptical side in that I stopped reading a lot of bullshit which was simply wasting my time.

Podcasts are a huge part of organised skepticism. Essentially web-based radio shows, they can be a great disseminator of skeptical material, and can be instrumental in bringing people together. Indeed, a mutual liking for Skeptoid was one of the catalysts which led to the first stirrings of what became the MSS. Two years later and the MSS now has a well established Skeptics in The Pub night every month, two podcasts and an international conference under its belt. The conference was organised in conjunction with the Greater Manchester Skeptics, who formed themselves after seeing what was going on just down the motorway in Liverpool, and who also now have a very well established Skeptics in The Pub night and a podcast. And all in the space of a couple of years. Check out the list on the right hand side of this webpage for a good introductory starting point in skeptical podcasting.

Skeptics in The Pub:

Skeptics in the pub! That great informer, entertainer, friendship creator, skeptical haven and supplier of food and drink. Skeptics in The Pub is one of the great inventions in skepticism. All the other stuff is made up of things you can do on your own, but if you want to meet other self-described skeptics and/or curious people like yourself, SitP nights are the place to go, and they’re all over the place! Go to one near you. You won’t regret it.

This list attempts to cover all the SitP groups of the British Isles. It probably doesn’t, so if anyone knows of any that I’ve missed, please let me know and I’ll include them in the list below. For now, however, this is more than a good start. Most of these groups either have their own website (a quick google should find it), twitter feed or facebook page:

Aberdeen, Aberystwyth, Bath, Belfast, Birmingham, Brighton, Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Cork, Cheltenham, Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Guildford, Hampshire, Kent, Lancaster, Leeds, Leicester, Lewes, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Milton Keynes, Newcastle, Norwich, Nottingham, Oxford, The Peak District, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Reading, St Andrews, Sheffield, Swansea, Westminster and Winchester.

Aswell as SitP, there are also various other skeptical organisations, such as Grassroots Skeptics and Ladies Who Do Skepticism, plus other similar groups outside the skeptical umbrella that do the same kind of thing, such as Cafe Scientifique and SciBar. Whatever it is you want in a skeptical community, it is out there waiting for you.

So, what are you waiting for?

The English libel law is particularly dangerous for bloggers, who are generally not backed by publishers, and who can end up being sued in London regardless of where the blog was posted. The internet allows bloggers to reach a global audience, but it also allows the High Court in London to have a global reach.

You can read more about the peculiar and grossly unfair nature of English libel law at the website of the Libel Reform Campaign. You will see that the campaign is not calling for the removal of libel law, but for a libel law that is fair and which would allow writers a reasonable opportunity to express their opinion and then defend it.

The good news is that the British Government has made a commitment to draft a bill that will reform libel, but it is essential that bloggers and their readers send a strong signal to politicians so that they follow through on this promise. You can do this by joining me and over 50,000 others who have signed the libel reform petition at
http://www.libelreform.org/sign

Remember, you can sign the petition whatever your nationality and wherever you live. Indeed, signatories from overseas remind British politicians that the English libel law is out of step with the rest of the free world.

If you have already signed the petition, then please encourage friends, family and colleagues to sign up. Moreover, if you have your own blog, you can join hundreds of other bloggers by posting this blog on your own site. There is a real chance that bloggers could help change the most censorious libel law in the democratic world.

We must speak out to defend free speech. Please sign the petition for libel reform at
http://www.libelreform.org/sign

Well, he’s done it again.The warning signs are there: the labelling of a multitude of scientific professions and people as a sinister, elitist cabal working behind the scenes like lab-based illuminati; the relentless and paranoid derision of anything remotely science-based; the palpable fear that ‘scientists’ have evil designs against the human race… It’s pure Jenkins by numbers. He even managed to get his own twitter trend this time around. Last Monday was “Spoof Jenks Monday“, when people used the hashtag #spoofjenks to post exaggeratedly anti-science comments, such as “Computers would work just as well powered by Ballet as Electricity”. The idea started with Jennifer Rohn at her blog and snowballed from there, as these twitter-things tend to do. You can read all the #spoofjenks comments at said blog.

So what’s got Jenkins’ luddite goat this time? The title of his latest rant is:

“Martin Rees makes a religion out of science so his bishops can gather their tithe.”

Hurrah! Already we have the accusation that science is just another religion and that scientists are its blinkered bishops forcing their worldview on the plebs! This idea that science is just another worldview (despite not even being a worldview – it’s a method) is a familiar form of dopey thinking usually espoused by religious apologists, and creationists especially. Make everything seem relative and it renders your position unassailable, no matter how asinine. Not that I think Jenkins is approaching this in a pro-religion way. I don’t think he’s doing that at all. He just doesn’t like scientists. I suspect he had a bad experience watching Frankenstein as a child. Either that or his opinion pieces have just been one long joke for the purposes of skeptical research. I live in hope…

Next, we have this sub-heading:

“The BBC’s reverence for genes, space and bugs gives its Reith lecturer a claim to public money based on faith, not reason.”

The religious accusations just keep flying. No ‘reason’ here, claims Jenkins, just ‘reverence’ and ‘faith’. He seems to think that if he throws enough of these words around then maybe reality will rearrange itself in response to suit him. Well, it worked for Neo, I suppose… The article proper begins by mentioning a bio-medical centre due to be built in London, which will cost £600m and house about 1,250 “cutting-edge” scientists. The inverted commas are Jenkins’ own. Not sure why he’s put them in there; maybe he thinks there’s no such thing as a “cutting-edge” scientist, or that these particular scientists are only “flat-middle”. All that’s clear is that Jenkins thinks you can’t trust those damn scientists. Also, if we were to question the value of this building, science would apparently ‘jeer at the idea’, because, of course, biomedicine has no concern with value, nor provides any benefit for the human race. Jenkins then claims that this building has been dubbed:

“… a cathedral of science, justified by faith, not reason.”

I think he’s quoting himself here. There’s no way to tell. I am lost in an emotive soup.

I don’t know how employing 1,250 people and providing important advances in biomedicine lacks reason, but then I’m just a deluded lamb due to be sacrificed on the altar of science. However, none of this matters because Jenkins then forgets about this building. Having informed us that science is a religion and got us suitably frothing at the mouth about an apparent expensive waste of taxpayers’ money, Jenkins then pulls a bait-and-switch and moves on to his real concern (did I mention that Jenkins has a knighthood for services to journalism?).

Jenkins’ beef is with the Reith lectures, particularly this year’s involving Martin Rees, astronomer and president of the Royal Society. The lectures are a yearly event, broadcast on the BBC, where known faces in the world of science give public lectures. This is Jenkins’ description of the lectures:

“Each year the BBC gestures towards high seriousness by getting a celebrity intellectual to muse in public for four hours. Ennui is relieved with a chatty preamble from Sue Lawley, followed by safe, hand-picked questions and no nasty supplementaries. The whole thing has the air of a Soviet academy.”

So the Russians are the bad guys again? It must be ‘old Bond movie week’. I love the way that the BBC showing a science program can only be ‘gesturing’ towards seriousness. I wonder at what point the BBC is actually allowed to be genuinely serious. Is there a numerical rule at play? One science programme a month: not serious enough. Two science programmesa month: serious. Three to a hundred science programmes a month: gesture towards high seriousness.

I love Jenkins’ seeming objection to the idea of people ‘musing’ in public. Maybe he’s worried that some of those dangerous thoughts might leave the stage and take root in the minds of the science-worshipping acolytes in the audience. He also objects to the ‘safe, hand-picked questions’. Maybe every audience member should get the opportunity to ask a question then, Simon? Unfortunately, that would make the programme last about a week, and Jenkins already doesn’t like it at four hours. I suspect Jenkins is just upset because he’s not hearing the questions that he would like to hear asked (probably due to the fact that poorly-informed anti-science questions don’t make it through screening). The next paragraph would seem to suggest that this is indeed Jenkins’ stance:

“He [Martin Rees] spoke of the BBC’s current craze – anything to do with science. The airwaves are crammed with science quizzes, science chatshows, science magazines and science feedback. News must have science stories, the Today programme science items, all reverential. No scepticism is admitted to this new orthodoxy.”

Well, here’s some skepticism, Simon (albeit with our usual ‘k’), and it’s the proper stuff: not your denialist, contrarian excuse for it. Skepticism isn’t about deliberately disagreeing with whatever the scientific consensus is on an issue. It’s about objectivity, or getting as close to it as you can get. Saying that climate change, BSE and swine flu aren’t that big a deal, as you have done in the past, simply because that’s the opposite of what your boogeymen, the ‘scientists’, are saying, is not skepticism. Skepticism is about dealing with facts, and there’s nothing to suggest this ‘religion of science’ that your are so worried about. The only faith on show here seems to be your own in the duplicity of science.

He continues:

“Rees is shameless. After a brisk, familiar canter through the wonder of science – internet, genomes, bugs, space travel – his last lecture brought him to the matter in hand. Science, he said, should “engage more broadly with society and public affairs”. In other words, it should get more money. There is nowhere better to plead for this than on the BBC.”

The only direct quote he gives from Rees here, is that science should “engage more broadly with society and public affairs”. The stuff about Rees trying to grab money for science is purely Jenkins’ speculation. So it’s a bit sad to find that the rest of the piece is about this supposed religious crusade of the ‘scientists’ to get money and waste it. Then he has the gall to blame it on Rees right in the piece’s title, despite the poor bloke simply having had the bad luck to be name-dropped by a man with a chip on his shoulder about men and women who wear lab coats.

The rest of the piece has such Jenkins gems as:

“Science gives us an exaggerated fear of risk.”

“Scientists do not do priorities, they just want money.”

“The £7bn spent on the LHC would have been better spent on energy research.”

“The science lobby is a religion, and Rees is one of its archbishops.”

“The BBC lavishes it [science] with favours against less-fashionable claimants.”

Ok, so maybe science is enjoying a bit of a renaissance in the public eye at the moment. Good. It is not a faceless religious cult intent on stealing public money and throwing it away on frivolities. It encompasses a multitude of disciplines, knowledge areas, and has many different uses. Above all, it is already intertwined with society and public affairs. It is important. Planes, television, medicine, space travel, it is all science. It moves us on as a species, it helps us live longer. It is not a waste of money. The money spent on science does not spiral down a black hole: it employs thousands of people in labs and in the field, it employs thousands more to build those labs and the technology that goes in them. The discoveries that come out of said labs lead to new uses and technologies. So the LHC is a waste of money? I read Jenkins’ piece on the internet. The internet started out as a databank for CERN.

Science is an essential part of the world. It needs money, just like anything else, and asking for money does not make it religious. Once again, Jenkins has simply let his dislike for scientists skew his interpretation of the facts. He has repeatedly done this. I think this is a bad thing for science journalism, which is already suffering neglect in the mainstream press. So often are scientists portrayed as distant boffins fiddling about in labs with no concern for the human race, making mistakes and making it up. The reality is that scientists are part of the human race not seperate from it, and until certain strains of journalism grow up a little and treat science subjects more rationally, then the public at large is going to keep getting fed this blinkered and false view of the reality of science.

It is not good enough.

Liverpool and the Large Hadron Collider

by Phil Allport
When: Thu, Jun 17, 2010 8.00 – 11.00 PM
Where: The Vines (aka the Big House), 81 Lime Street, Liverpool

Summary

The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) with the intention of testing various predictions of high-energy physics, including the existence of the hypothesized Higgs boson.

Dr Phil Allport will be talking to the MSS about the involvement of Liverpool and other UK universities in the design and construction of the LHC experiments, as well as the schedule for the accelerator’s projected 20 years of operation.

Biography

Dr Phil Allport leads the Liverpool Particle Physics Group (one the three largest in the UK) and is Director of the Liverpool Semiconductor Detector System. He also chairs the UK Institute of Physics High Energy Particle Physics Group. Internationally, he jointly leads the ATLAS Experiment Tracker Upgrade Project at the LHC and is a member of the ATLAS Experiment Upgrade Steering Group and Project Office.

• RSVP on Facebook »
• RSVP via Email »

Another possible attempt at topicality was the date – April 1st being April Fool’s Day of course. Instantly, my brain was on skeptic-alert. Am I about to be had? Will I fall uncritically for a story with as much basis in reality as the spaghetti harvest? I can be on occasion quite gullible, despite being a skeptic. I suppose my involvement with skepticism is probably due in some degree to a form of damage limitation. Like putting my seatbelt on. But I digress.

The article itself was about synaesthesia, specifically a form in which the synaesthete can perceive the ‘geography of time’, as the article puts it. Synaesthesia is a condition in which the senses are mixed, so that a sound or a number may be perceived alongside a colour, or certain emotions may be linked with a smell or a taste, and other variations of mixed senses.  Readers may have heard of a man called James Wannerton, who’s name often pops up in synaesthesia research. He is a synaesthete who experiences different smells and tastes for the people he knows. One person always provokes the taste of earwax, while another smells of wet nappies. Daniel Tammet, an autistic savant as well as a synaesthete, experiences specific emotions and colours for different numbers. (Incidentally, I recommend his book Born On a Blue Day, which is an interesting insight into the unique properties provided by his dual conditions.) Famous synaesthetes include Richard Feynman and David Hockney.

What makes this article potentially dubious is its focus on so-called time-space synaesthesia, which is not exactly a commonly recognised form. The article concerned a study of 183 students conducted by David Brang of the psychology department at the University of California. Brang describes the condition of space-time synaesthesia thus:

“In general, these individuals perceive months of the year in circular shapes, usually just as an image inside their mind’s eye … These calendars occur in almost any possible shape, and many of the synaesthetes actually experience the calendar projected out into the real world.”

One of the subjects in the study apparently saw the year as a circular ring surrounding her body. The ‘ring’ rotated clockwise throughout the year so that the current month was always inside her chest, with the previous month right in front of her chest.

In the study itself, each of the 183 students were asked to visualise the months of the year and construct this representation on a computer screen. Four months later they were shown a blank screen and asked to select a position for each of the months. They were prompted with a cue month – a randomly selected month placed as a dot in the location where the student had originally placed it. Four of the 183 students placed their months in a distinct spatial array – such as a circle – that was consistent over the trials. To Brang, this suggested they were time-space synaesthetes.

A second test compared the synaesthetes against non-synaesthetes in memorising an unfamiliar spatial calendar and reproducing it. The time-space synaesthetes had much better much recall than the time-blind majority.

I don’t pretend to be particularly knowledgeable on the best way to conduct a study. I actually have difficulty seeing how this study leads to the conclusions drawn, as it just seems to be testing the students’ powers of recall more than anything else. However, I don’t feel like I know enough about the area to make a judgement so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on that one and accept it.

What I’m not sure about is whether I can accept the validity of the article itself. I can’t shake off the possibility that it might be a well-crafted April Fool’s Day hoax. I initially accepted it quite uncritically, and considered using it for the latest Skeptics With a K, but on bringing the article up with my fellow hosts eyebrows were raised. Am I being gullible? The possibility of this form of synaesthesia existing seems quite feasible to me, but then I seem to be in a minority on this one.

The article links to the journal of Consciousness and Cognition,  a real journal which unfortunately demands money before you can read the study itself. Even more unfortunately, I like my money to stay in my bank account.

So, I ask you readers out there if any of you know anything about this subject and can enlighten me on whether this is a real condition. Is it all a hoax, or just real stuff dressed up in glitzy glad rags like a lot of New Scientist articles?

Is there such a thing as time-space synaesthesia?

If there is, it would be interesting to know whether something like this comes in useful in daily life. Even more interesting would be to know what kind of jobs these people have, and whether they utilise their unique perspective on the world. Maybe it’s something you could even semi-train non-synaesthetes to do, rather than simply being an exclusive skill. Who knows. Not me. I’m the thick one asking you all for help!

A week later, the article began to surface from the sea of my subconscious and I grew increasingly irked. I gradually came to realise that it was a much more frustrating article than I had initially given it credit for. The article basically accuses scientists and the government of effectively making up the scale of the swine flu threat in order to scare and distract the public, for reasons seemingly pulled from Jenkins’ nether-regions. At first, I thought: ‘So what? It’s just his opinion’. The whole point of an opinion piece is that it is an opinion, and if people disagree they can leave a comment. But I couldn’t shake it off. What good is an opinion if it’s not informed? Surely if a newspaper is going to print an opinion, it should be more than a knee-jerk reaction? Jenkins was basically using facts to support an already formed opinion. For me, journalism should be a bit more thoughtful than that. Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore and felt that I had to respond in some way. I’m not the only one. Tom Sheldon responded with his own piece, “Swine Flu Wasn’t Overhyped – Research Meant We Had to Play It Safe”, in the same section of The Guardian a week later. But here’s my belated tuppence-worth anyhow.

Let’s go through it piece by piece (don’t worry, I’ll leave out the boring bits so you won’t abandon me). The secondary headline reads:

“Remember the warnings of 65,000 dead? Health chiefs should admit they were wrong – yet again – about a global pandemic”

Then, in the first paragraph, we get:

“Six months ago… Swine flu was allegedly ravaging the nation. The BBC was intoning nightly statistics on what “could” happen as “the deadly virus” took hold. The chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, bandied about any figure that came into his head, settling on “65,000 could die”, peaking at 350 corpses a day.”

The inverted commas are Jenkins’ own.

Ok, first things first: health chiefs should admit they were wrong about a global pandemic. Already, Jenkins is misrepresenting the issue as well as just being plain wrong. Swine flu ‘is’ a pandemic. It ‘is’ global. What exactly is he wanting the apology for? That not enough people died? He then goes on to complain about the BBC and the chief medical officer telling us what could happen due to the Swine flu outbreak, as if informing the public of possibilities is somehow dishonest. I for one want to know how serious Swine flu could be. If it turned out to be extremely deadly, like some flu epidemics throughout history have been (to a terrifying degree), I would be very angry and upset if the government had not informed me of this very real possibility. Knowing the potential threat means we can prepare for that eventuality. If it doesn’t happen, that’s a cause for rejoicing, not attacking government language. Plus, Jenkins seems to forget the grilling the government took when they didn’t respond thoroughly and quickly enough for a BSE outbreak several years ago. A few years later, there was another outbreak of BSE and this time the government responded immediately and comprehensively, with plans already in place. Maybe the outbreak wouldn’t have spread far this time, but they couldn’t take the risk again. Governments prefer to have as easy a ride as possible at the hands of the voters. Of course, they were lambasted for a supposedly disproportionate response, but for them it was a case of choosing the lesser of two evils. One can’t help but think Jenkins would have slammed them either way.

Misusing language seems to be Jenkins’ secret weapon in this article too.  Aswell as the constant inverted commas implying dishonesty without any qualification, we have phrases such as allegedly ravaging, which instantly implies deceit; we have the BBC intoning nightly statistics, which gives them an aura of some kind of street preacher preaching the end of the world, or of the Grim Reaper himself pointing his finger at us through the TV screen and saying “Come with me…”. Sir Liam Donaldson apparently bandied about any figure that came into his head, although how Jenkins managed to get access to the inside of Donaldson’s head, I don’t know. Maybe he has a journalist’s pass? It’s enough to make a Daily Mail columnist blush, let alone a Guardian one. Take away all of Jenkins’ assumptions and emotive language and we’re left with no trace of an argument: it exists only in what Jenkins himself suggests, not in the reality he claims to convey.

The whole article is written in the same way. Paragraph two:

“Donaldson knew exactly what would happen. The media went beserk. The World Health Organisation declared a “six-level alert” so as to “prepare the world for an imminent attack”. The happy-go-lucky virologist, John Oxford, said half the population could be infected, and that his lowest estimate was 6,000 dead.”

Donaldson knew exactly what would happen. Implying what? That Donaldson was lying? That the government deliberately created the scare? Grand claims, especially as Jenkins never once provides any evidence to support them throughout the entire article. His description of John Oxford as happy-go-lucky is simply an attempt to malign him in the minds of the readers. Warning of the potential risk is hardly happy-go-lucky, but courtesy of Simon Jenkins we now imagine John Oxford as this glib monster, casually terrifying the public with offhand comments without caring of the consequences. Cheers, Simon. Nice to know you’re treating us like adults.

What is starting to come through quite clearly by this point is the conspiracy theory mentality behind Jenkins’ thinking. He has quite obviously already decided that the BBC and the government have worked together to create the Swine flu ‘scare’, and doesn’t seem remotely interested in providing any proof. He even complains that:

“If anyone dared question this drivel, they were dismissed by Donaldson as extremists.”

So: what the government is saying is drivel, and the good, concerned public are being misleadingly labelled as extremists. No argument or proof here, just assertions; Jenkins is unconcerned with persuasion, preferring instead to hoodwink us with rhetoric. How closely the government and the BBC are supposed to be working together is left a bit vague, as Jenkins often seems to confuse the two as one organisation. They have become the faceless ‘them’ pulling the strings from behind the scenes to scare the public. Maybe it’s just anyone who wears a suit and appears on television that fits the bill for Jenkins. Look out, it’s an authority figure! Beware! Scientists, on the other hand, seem to confuse Jenkins; it is never quite clear whether he blames them as well, or sees them as duped by the same rhetoric. Certainly Jenkins is not a fan of scientists, as he spends most of his articles in the Guardian slagging them off; but he seems to be leaning more toward a buffoonish caricature of them in this one. At one point, he says:

“The “Andromeda Strain” was stalking the Earth, and its first victims were clearly scientists.”

For an article about the government trying to scare people with language, Jenkins certainly loves trying to do it himself. He’s the one referencing science fiction novels about killer viruses, not the Chief Medical Officer. Only a few paragraphs in and we’re already in a state of fear that the government, the BBC and maybe scientists are all out to terrify us to death. Who else can we throw into the mix?

“The government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies sails gaily on, still graced by the presence of Sir Roy Anderson, who happens also to draw a six-figure salary as a non-executive director of GlaxoSmithKline, which made hundreds of millions from the government’s panic.”

Heeeeeeeere’s Big Pharma!

So why all this paranoia and accusations? Does Jenkins just hate everyone? Of course not…

“I accept that anyone can make a mistake, and authority has some duty to err on the side of caution. As Alastair Campbell implied on Tuesday, Iraq might have had weapons of mass destruction, so Blair was right to go to war just in case. But it is reasonable to ask, as the Chilcot inquiry is doing, why precaution on such a colossal and potentially destructive scale was justified when those who questioned the need for it have since been proved right. Is anyone asking about flu?”

I had to grit my teeth to write that. It is probably the most idiotic part of the entire article. So it’s okay to overreact when bombing unseen foreigners, but scaring the public by giving them information on the ‘potential risk’ of Swine flu is somehow out of order? Jenkins’ linking of the two is inane and offensive. Thousands of innocent civilians died because of the Iraq war. No-one died because they got a little frightened about a potential pandemic. Reality seems to have seeped out of the article at this point, and I’ve said all I have to say on this particular piece of stupidity.

After all this scaremongering – on Jenkins’ part, not anyone else’s – we are left to wonder: why? Why would it benefit the government/BBC/big pharma/the lizard people to scare the public? Jenkins references the BSE and SARS outbreaks and implies that the government likes to regularly scare its people in order to distract from other issues:

“The Blair government, and now Brown’s, have proved adept at using scare politics to divert attention from other troubles.”

Okay, cool, Jenkins has stopped preaching and is now putting forward a hypothesis. Great, now we can get to the meat. I wonder what troubles he means, and what his evidence is? Let’s find out…

Ah. It’s just that one sentence. That’s it. That’s the whole argument there. Sorry, I got excited for a moment.

It’s a baseless claim. It’s also worth pointing out that these ‘scares’ Jenkins refers to happened at the time of actual infectious outbreaks. There’s nothing suspicious about them on their own. You have an outbreak, you have a response. The absence of responses would have been much more of a concern. I also can’t imagine what things Jenkins thinks the government was distracting from – and judging by his omission of them in the article I doubt he does either. Governments are always mired in controversy, and there was nothing specific to the times of these outbreaks that needed to be distracted from then than at any other time. Maybe he’s suggesting that the government just responds to whatever’s there at any one time in order to just distract from government in general? If he is suggesting that, maybe he should have let the readers know. What I think he actually is suggesting, however, is that these scares are completely engineered. He constantly quotes statistics throughout the article in an attempt to downplay the severity of the various infectious outbreaks we’ve had over the years, comparing them to government statistics regarding how severe they ‘may’ have been, and pointing out how less severe the reality was. Every time, he seems to forget that the government figures represent the ‘potential’ possibility. The point isn’t that the figures in reality should end up being the same as the prediction. The point is that the prediction COULD have come true, and we need to know these things.

I mentioned earlier about how the government was criticised for not reacting swiftly to the first BSE outbreak. I don’t blame the government for acting differently from then on. It is better that we are scared and live, than the government reacts poorly and people die, leaving a government mired in shame. Lives are at stake. The government cannot afford to understate risk to the public. These are decisions that have to be made regarding risks. They are not nice decisions, but we have a government precisely so that those kinds of decisions CAN be made.

The consequences of understatement can be disastrous. We know what epidemics and pandemics can do from history. Jenkins is simply making stuff up that isn’t there in order to attack the government, the BBC and whoever else grabbed his goat that week. It is pure conspiracy theory mentality. In reality, this isn’t about Blair or Brown, or the BBC: this is about practical decision making. He’s criticising the government for doing their job.

The article ends with:

“This is why people are ever more sceptical of scientists. Why should they believe what “experts” say when they can be so wrong and with such impunity? Weapons of mass destruction, lethal viruses, nuclear radiation, global warming … why should we believe a word of it? And it is a short step from don’t believe to don’t care.”

The problem, Simon, is that the “experts” weren’t wrong with such impunity. They weren’t even wrong. This is all in your head. You don’t seem to understand the nature of risk, and of caution based upon that risk. Just because things did not turn out to be as bad as they could have been, does not mean that the wrong decision was made. That is the basic error at the heart of your article.

I can only hope that most of Jenkins’ readers are more discerning than he is.

When: Thu, Feb 18, 2010 8.00 – 11.00 PM
Where: The Vines (aka the Big House), 81 Lime Street, Liverpool

Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances our booked guest speaker Andy Lewis is unable to make this event. However, all is not lost – in honour of the first anniversary of the Merseyside Skeptics Society we’ve decided to replace Andy’s talk with a number of short talks on a variety of topics:

• Emotional Freedom Technique, by Allan Callister – a look at the latest craze for face-tapping therapy
• Bad Logic, Mike Hall – examining logical failures, with examples from the world of religion
• PR and the Media, Michael Marshall – how PR gained control of journalism, and where we go from here
• How Science Works, Tom Williamson – what is science, how do we do it and how do we know it works?

Plus, a live recording of the Skeptics with a K show.

Andy Lewis developed the web site quackometer.net that explores the pseudo-medical claims of alternative medicine web sites and their impact on society. Despite his detractors claims, he does not own a yacht in the South of France paid for by Big Pharma. He has yet to secure a single penny from such sources for his work.

• RSVP on Facebook »
• RSVP via Email »

So there I was, roaming ‘teh interwebs’ one last time before entering an extended Christmas weekend and going off radar, when I came across a link tweeted by a fellow Skeptic. It referred to something called ‘Project Pterosaur’. Interesting, I thought. I wonder what that’s about? So in the interest of simple human curiosity I clicked on the link.

Oh, and what glories did I behold! This site is the most fantastically bonkers and bewildering woo-stew I have ever seen. I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, vacate the Earth or simply join in the fun these people seem to be having.

The main site is something called objectiveministries.org, and it is an ‘educational resource’ for Creation Science. These kinds of sites are everywhere, the most well-known being answersingenesis.org. They’re all attempts to push very skewed versions of reality onto the public under the pretense that science is some kind of ungodly blight that hides the ‘truth’. This site is no exception. The link above takes you to a particular article on the site, detailing the aforementioned Project Pterosaur.

So, what is this project? I’ll let Dr Richard Paley, the leader of the project explain it in his own words:

“The goal of Project Pterosaur is to mount an expedition to locate and bring back to the United States living specimens of pterosaurs or their fertile eggs, which will be displayed in a Pterosaur Rookery that will be the center piece of the planned Fellowship Creation Science Museum and Research Institute (FCSMRI). Furthermore, the rookery facility will establish a breeding colony of pterosaurs in order to produce specimens that could then be put on display by other regional institutions or church groups.”

Yes, you read that right. Project Pterosaur is an expedition to kidnap living pterosaurs – a clade of creatures the fossil record implies hasn’t existed since the cretaceous period - and put them in a special zoo. Presumably with a big sign saying: “Nur nur! Silly Evolutionists!”

Once the sensation of being in the wrong universe wore off, I was obviously filled with questions. The main one was ‘why do they think pterosaurs even exist in the first place’, quickly followed by ‘what are they hoping to achieve by doing this, anyway’. I’ll come back to the first question - clearly the most important one! – in a moment. The second question is soon answered on the website. The three main goals of Project Pterosaur are:

1. Support Creation Theory by showing the incorrectness of the philosophy of Evolutionism.
2. Educate the population about Creation Science.
3. Create excitement about Creation and the Bible in the public.

As fantastic as a living pterosaur specimen would undoubtably be, it wouldn’t remotely do what Objective Ministries are claiming it would. It would not promote Creation Theory and it would not disprove evolution. Creationists tend to believe that dinosaurs (I know that pterosaurs are technically not dinosaurs, but I’m simplifying for brevity) lived in harmony alongside humans until ‘The Fall’, when they were promptly drowned in the flood due to a typical Yahweh hissy fit. This, they say, explains the fossil record. It doesn’t explain why there are no dinosaurs roaming around now, however. Wouldn’t they have been on the Ark? What about all the flying ones? And this, presumably, is why finding a living pterosaur is so important to them. They think it will make their ‘theory’ look more credible.

Except it wouldn’t. Let’s imagine for a moment that they’re right, and pterosaurs do exist. In terms of ‘proving’ biblical stories it is irrelevant. It just means that pterosaurs still exist. It says nothing about whether its ancestors lived on a boat, just that a particular clade of animals have survived longer than previously thought. The entire span of current scientific knowledge already disproves Creationism. Finding an animal that is unusual doesn’t change that. The existence of the Coelacanth hasn’t put biologists out of work, it just made their work more interesting.

That is also the reason it wouldn’t disprove evolution either. The principles of evolution are sound and proven. The discovery of pterosaurs wouldn’t damage it, it would just make biology more exciting. Objective Ministries seem to think that the theory of evolution would wither and die in the spiny face of the pterosaur, when in fact it would be rejuvenated. Scientists would love this kind of opportunity.

So, back to the first question. Why do they think pterosaurs still exist? It seems to be a mixture of wishful thinking, the twisting of myths and some blatant weird assertions. An example of the latter would be statements like this one:

“[Pterosaurs] were a constant presence in the skies over Eden, where they peacefully ate fruit and plants. After the Fall, many of their descendants degenerated to a carnivorous diet and became feared by man. … Various Pterosaur kinds were common throughout Eurasia and Northern Africa up until the early Middle Ages and interacted extensively with Man. Today, although Evolutionists falsely insist that they are extinct, pterosaurs can still be found, hidden away in the unexplored wilds of our world.”

So now we know. They’re so confident! Personally, I’d love to know the biblical verse that states:

“And Eve was again left hungry when the twelve foot pterosaur stole her apple.”

All I see in Genesis is Adam and Eve and some trees. No massive flying reptiles like in this picture:

Notice the conveniently placed wing and beak

I also don’t seem to remember pterosaurs cropping up in history lessons on the middle ages either. Maybe I was ill that week.

Other sources of ‘proof’ include Hebrew/Egyptian myths of a creature called the Saraph, the works of Cicero and Aristotle (!), the Native American Thunderbird myth, Mayan myth (Quetzelcoatl) and of course, the Bible. They even claim that mummified pterosaurs were found in Tutankhamen’s tomb only to be promptly and conveniently stolen, possibly as part of an Evolutionist conspiracy!

Their use of the Bible is hilarious. It’s not worth me paraphrasing, as this is pure gold on its own:

“The danger of these creatures is evident when Moses — later leading his people out of Egypt — was unable to use the protection of ibises, resulting in the Jews being tormented by pterosaur attacks throughout the 40 year Exodus. The attacks were brought under control only after the Lord instructed Moses to create a pterosaur effigy on a pole to scare them off (Numbers 21:6-9, Deuteronomy 8:15).”

I’m pretty sure that never happened in the Bible. I’ve read it. I’d remember Moses scaring off pterosaurs with a special shining staff! It really is unbelievable. I recommend after reading this blog you go away and look at the whole site for yourself. Believe me, I am only giving you a taster of the sheer wealth of nonsensical wonders that site contains.

Charlton Heston didn't do this!

One thing which caught my imagination on this site was their  belief that the Native American myth of the Thunderbird was based on sightings of pterosaurs. Now, I’m going to be slightly less dismissive for a moment and go out on a limb. It is not impossible that in extremely remote environments creatures may exist which are very similar to their distant ancestors. They would most certainly have to exist in a remote environment if they are as large as these creatures are supposed to be, otherwise we would know about them (new species are discovered all the time, but tend not to be large animals, most of them have been already discovered). In addition, it’s not impossible that local myths may reflect sightings of these creatures. I can completely understand people becoming fascinated with these myths and can even appreciate people believing it. That doesn’t make it likely to be true, however. What I found really interesting with regard to the site’s tying together of the pterosaur with the Thunderbird myth, was this picture of a photograph, supposedly from about 1860:

After cartoons of Moses and Adam and Eve, this one did startle me a bit. I had not seen this photograph before. I am not an expert in photography and am completely unable to offer any suggestions regarding how it was created. It purports to show American Civil War servicemen standing proudly around the corpse of a ‘thunderbird’ that they have shot down. I was really intrigued by the photograph so attempted to do some research (yes, this means surfing the net. Buggered if I’m going across the water to the Liverpool library in this weather!). It turns out that there is a couple of these photographs knocking about. At least one is known to be fake, and one is talked about but doesn’t seem to actually exist in reality. This photograph in particular doesn’t seem to be traceable, and as such I could find no information on whether it has been debunked or analysed in any way, although it is not given much shrift by skeptics. It is also apparently similar to a fake photograph created for the series FreakyLinks, by the makers of The Blair Witch Project, which certainly doesn’t bode well for it being a genuine photograph. So, as interesting as the photograph is (even if it’s fake, it’s a great photograph), given the lack of any other evidence whatsoever, I’m going to have to wield Ockham’s Razor like some maniacal ‘thirties gangster and move on.

It doesn’t stop with pterosaurs though…

Dr Paley and his fellow Creationists also believe that apatosaurs are living in the jungles of the Congo, claiming they would attempt to bring back a specimen, except that they are too large for the proposed enclosure. Aswell as apatosaurs, they also believe plesiosaurs exist (they’re probably thinking of Nessie), trilobytes and velociraptors. They claim that velociraptors are actually the fabled chupacabra and that – I’m serious here – they guard the remains of Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat.

At this point, I’m thinking the website must be a hoax. So I researched that, too (yes, the internet again – leave me alone, I’m sensitive), and it seems that no-one else is quite sure if this is a piss-take or not either! If it is a hoax, it is the most detailed and thorough hoax I have seen, and a lot of time and effort has gone into making it look real. Yes, it is ridiculous, but only slightly more ridiculous than genuine Creationists I’ve met!

That said, there  is that other part of the site about putting a giant cross on the moon… and the man who fights Satanists along with his cat, Milton…  oh, and the Youth Rock Ministry containing songs such as “Who Let The Praise Out!”… the bit about catching the pterosaurs by disorienting them with a frankincense smoker was a bit weird, too…

Can it be real? I’m not sure I recognise this universe anymore! Help! I recommend you all go and visit the site right now to see for yourselves the genius of Objective Ministries’ Project Pterosaur!

Right now, here at the Merseyside Skeptics Society, we’re well underway with our plans for the 10:23 campaign – a campaign which will become more vocal in the early parts of this year, and one which has had a somewhat mixed response in some circles. The reason for much of the criticism (excepting that of the predictably irate and irrational homeopathic community), arises where perhaps the intention behind the campaign is misunderstood. Because we’re looking to ‘take on’ homeopathy and the claims made by homeopaths, this is seen by some as an act of aggression and negativity. Plaintiff calls of ‘Leave them alone, everyone has a right to believe what they want!’ and ‘People should be free to choose what they like’ ring out in our general direction. But I think these complaints perhaps miss the point being made – it’s not a case of attacking pseudomedicine, it’s a case of defending conventional medicine from the attacks of those of the alternative industries. While doctors and surgeons and nurses save lives, homeopaths and chiropractors and acupuncturists lambast what they see as the failures of medicine, to the detriment of the reputation of real healthcare.

In the recent evidence check on homeopathy, Peter Fisher admitted no homeopathic remedy has ever been withdrawn due to adverse effects and it’s inherent harm – only a malaria prevention remedy removed because it was proven not to work. In the meantime, in real medicine, numerous drugs and medical techniques have been withdrawn – where side effects outweigh benefit, where new techniques become available, where old techniques are proven to be more harm than good. Does conventional medicine ever fall? Definitely. But only real medicine picks itself up and learns from the stumble – using the knowledge to refine or redefine it’s approach, so there’s no repetition of the same mistakes. Pseudomedical practices like homeopathy prefer to deny all flaws, rather than seeking to eradicate those flaws methodically. What’s more, where conventional medicine is concerned, built into the system is a method of progression, advancement, development – while alternative medicines will cite their hundreds or thousands of years of unchanged practice compared to the ever-changing world of conventional healthcare, they fail to see that continual change is a strength, not a weakness.

Pseudomedicine thrives on anecdotal data, while scientific practice of conventional medicine shuns this unreliable form of results for more impartial, measurable information. Well, sod it – this is my blog, and I’ll be unscientific if I like. And I have anecdotes too…

• My sister was born with cerebral palsy. Not so severe, mercifully, that she’s unable to talk, walk or function without a degree of independence; but no small thing either, leaving three of her limbs significantly-impeded if not partially-paralysed. The operations and physiotherapy she received at a young age kept her out of a permanent wheelchair for 27 years and counting; while her arthritis and muscle spasms leave her prone to collapse at unpredictable times, it’s real drugs and healthcare management that are keeping her on her feet; where she has fallen, and where the arthritis leaves her in near-constant pain, it’s painkillers that are fighting to hold back the agony for her.
• When I was 6 or 7, my grandma was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma – almost 20 years later, she has real medical care to thank for each day she’s here to tell the tale. What’s more, in that time conventional medicine has enhanced and increased her life in innumerable ways – whether it be the spectacles she wears, the hearing aid she uses, the operations that removed her cataracts, the antibiotics which helped her fight pneumonia, or the myriad of other interventions that have allowed her see in another New Year.
• At the age of 18 my girlfriend discovered she had dysplasia in her right hip, where the socket of the joint was too shallow for the top of her thigh bone, causing her thigh to protrude out of her hip and leaving her in excruciating pain – at the age of 25 she had an operation to break her pelvis in 3 places and reset it to alleviate the condition, allowing her to walk without discomfort and continue her life free from pain. The operation was severe, but thanks to skilled surgeons, physiotherapists, nurses and anaesthetists, as well as took-for-granted techniques like blood transfusions and orthopedic screws, she’s now perfectly healthy. What’s more, due to the latest surgical practices, the whole invasive operation was carried out through relatively minor incisions, leaving her with the very minimal of scarring.
• Personally, I wore spectacles from the age of 10, and they were a big part of who I was. At the age of 25, a skilled expert was able to use a high-powered laser to cut the front of my eyes open, and burn the corneas into more efficient shapes with extreme precision, leaving me with perfect 20-20 vision. The operation took 20 minutes, to put an end to 15 years of wearing glasses.

Real medicine is amazing – stop and think of what can be done these days and it really does blow your mind.

I have any regrets about my sister’s healthcare, it’s not that she didn’t try having her back cracked or her spine needled or the lumps on her head read – it’s that she wasn’t born in 20 years time, when our medical techniques will have improved even further, when her suffering would be even further lessened. But even those regrets are tempered by the knowledge that in the future, other people who are born with the same condition will have more options, greater care, and less suffering. Science progresses, develops, improves. And I for one find that worthy of genuine wonder.

The oral hearings take the form of witnesses with relevant backgrounds being quizzed by committee members.  Witnesses for the first of these sessions included the legendary Ben Goldacre, Edzard Ernst from the University of Exeter, and Tracey Brown from the charity Sense About Science.  Speakers in favour of homeopathy included Paul Bennett from Boots, Peter Fisher from the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, and Robert Wilson from the British Association of Homeopathic Manufacturers.

The big thing that came out of this hearing, from a rhetorical point of view, was the admission by Paul Bennett that Boots did not believe homeopathy to be effective – but they sell it anyway because of consumer demand.  This lead to us here at Merseyside Skeptics drafting An Open Letter to Alliance Boots, calling upon them to withdraw the product.  If you haven’t done so already, or even if you have, please check out the letter.  Digg it, tweet it, repost it, write about it.  Help up make some noise!

Ahem.

The pro-homeopathy witnesses, when challenged, mentioned a number of studies which they claimed supported the idea that homeopathy has strong effects beyond placebo.  So I thought I’d look up a few of the studies mentioned and see what those studies actually say.

The first study mentioned in the oral evidence was what Robert Wilson referred to as the “Witt Trial”.  When challenged to give a single homeopathic product for which there is good evidence to support efficacy, Wilson said:

Arnica, which is for bruising, and is extremely useful in post-operative care. There was a major trial done on arnica and, indeed, there is one that has just been published, the Witt Trial, which was done by the Charity Hospital in Berlin. It was a large trial - 3,700 patients involved - and that has shown clearly that there is a strong benefit in homeopathic use to these patients with long-term chronic conditions. One of the subjects of that trial was arnica.

For a kick off, the so-called Witt Trial is not a clinical trial.  It was a cohort study, published in December 2008, in the journal BMC Public Health.  3709 consecutive patients who were referred to a predefined selection of homeopaths for a consultation were recorded. Eight years later, they went back to the same 3709 and people. And guess what had happened?

Some of them had got better. Therefore, homeopathy works.  Makes sense to me!

On top of that, their criteria for “better” was based upon asking the patient “do you feel better?”, rather than any objective measure.  It was actually more standardised than that (please rate your condition today on a scale of 0 to 10 where 0 means you are 100% better, etc) but ultimately that’s what it came down to.

There was no control over what else the patients did in that time.  Many of them could have, and likely did, take other medicinal products during that time, be they complementary or evidence-based.  This lead to the study’s authors commenting:

As patients were allowed to use conventional therapies and other complementary therapies during the study period, the observed improvements cannot be attributed to homeopathic treatment alone.

There is no mention in the study, that I could see, of arnica, which is what Wilson claimed that the study showed effectiveness for.  There is no mention of any specific treatments actually, so although Arnica may well have been studied, I have no idea what for.

At the end of the eight year study, only 33% of the patients were still taking homeopathy.  29% had stopped taking homeopathy because they had recovered and 26% stopped taking homeopathy because they thought it wasn’t working.  Interestingly, twice as many children than adults had stopped treatment because they thought their condition had improved.  Adults were more likely to have stopped because they thought the treatment was ineffective.

The same patients were also quizzed two years after their visit to the homeopath.  The study says that there was practically no difference between the figures after two years and after eight years; and that in children, no relevant difference was found between those who stopped homeopathy and those who continued.

the differences in the outcome between those patients who stopped treatment and those who still continued were small

This seems to have been taken as a sign that the effects of homeopathy are long-lasting, rather than the arguably more sensible view that they’re non-existant.

I don’t claim to have any special expertise in reading clinical trials.  At best, I have a layman’s understanding.  Perhaps the data presented here is actually very interesting and relevant for a hundred different reasons.  But what this study certainly doesn’t do is provide strong support for the efficacy of homeopathic arnica, which is how Robert Wilson presented it in his evidence.  On the contrary, the study actually says:

The aim of this study […] was not to test the effectiveness of homeopathic drug treatment

The next study Wilson mentions was referred to as the Möllinger Trial.  This was published in the German journal “Research in Complementary Medicine”, edited by the psychologist Harald Walach.  This is some cause for concern, as Walach is also listed as co-author of the study.  That’s doesn’t have to be a reason to suspect foul play, but it is a red flag.

I couldn’t find the full text of this trial freely available online so there is a limit to what I can talk about, but I was fortunate enough to find some skeptical commentary from people who have read the full study; and of course we have the abstract.

This was described as a double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trial.  Which is a good start.  The participants – all healthy individuals – were divided into three treatment groups and studied over four days.

The first group was given 30C Arsenicum Album (which is the fancy-shmancy homeopathy way of saying Arsenic); the second group was given 30C Natrum muriaticum (a fancier-shmancier way to say table salt).  A third group was given placebo.

The idea is that, if homeopathy is true, because the patients are all healthy, then those in the Arsenic group should develop the same symptoms that homeopathic arsenic is used to treat.  Similarly, the patients in the salt group should develop the symptoms that homeopathic salt is used to treat.  And the people in the placebo group wouldn’t develop anything at all, or at least what they do develop would be unrelated.

There is another name for this type of study: a homeopathic proving.  Back to Robert Wilson for a moment:

a homeopathic proving is a technical term for when homeopathic medicines are assessed. It is not a way of doing a trial.

Sorry – why are you citing this paper then?  Arguably, citing provings only makes sense if the mechanism of action for homeopathy was plausible. Which is it not.  Leaving that aside for a moment, let’s look at the data.

The data seems very clear cut… perhaps too clear cut.  What about the trial’s methodology?  The number of participants is very important because, as Robert Wilson said in his evidence:

Any sample of fewer than 500 is not going to be statistically relevant.

If Wilson believes this, when why is he citing the Möllinger trial?  This trial included – wait for it – no fewer than twenty-five patients.  I’ll give that to you again – twenty five patients only.  By Wilson’s own flawed view of statistics, this trial is not statistically relevant.  I say flawed view because, as Evan Harris MP pointed out Wilson during the hearing:

whether the sample size is statistically significant depends on the frequency of the outcome you are measuring

And after the hearing, Ben Goldacre made a similar comment on his blog:

if you have a pill that cures everyone from an incurable condition then 40 people is fine, hell, a dozen would do

Another red flag is that all twenty-five subjects were actually trainee homeopaths, not that that has to make a difference.  As I say, just another red flag.  Though there does seem to be an increasing number of them!

Looking at the data itself – no non-specific symptoms in the two homeopathy groups, but eleven in placebo?  Surely you would expect to get similar numbers of non-specific symptoms across all groups?  This being the very point of the control group.  Absolutely no non-specific symptoms in the homeopathy groups? That is very suspicious.

Worse than that, they don’t just say an average of zero symptoms.  They say 0±2.  How can you get a deviation of ±2 without at least one patient having a negative symptom?  I don’t understand.  Genuinely!  Have I missed some subtle feature of statistics?  Answers on a postcard, please.

Next up is the randomisation code for this study.  This is the secret code used to blind the patients and clinicians from knowing which group is which.  The code for this trial was created by Rainer Schneider, though worryingly Scheider is also the person who did the analysis of the data, even though he knows (because he wrote the code) what the codes refer to.  This represents a flaw in the blinding.  I’m not accusing Schneider of deliberately introducing bias, but it’s another red flag to add to the list.

The results of this study do seem to be too good to be true.  One co-author is the editor of the journal which published the study, another co-author generated the blinding codes then performed supposedly-blind analysis of the data.  The result set itself doesn’t make any sense, with its ±2 symptoms and zero non-specific symptoms on the homeopathic groups.  It all seems very fishy.

Even if it were all above board, the study would still need to be repeated, with tighter protocols and more participants before it can overturn the mountain of evidence which suggests homeopathy doesn’t work.  Moreover, as mentioned earlier, this was never a test of efficacy, but a homeopathic proving!

The last paper I’m going to look at was referred to by Peter Fisher, who talked about an Italian trial done comparing homeopathy for the prevention of flu against placebo for the prevention of flu. He says:

quite a lot of people who actually got the homeopathic medicine got flu-like symptoms but did not actually get flu.

This was cited as a situation where homeopathy was known to have side effects.  If homeopathy was merely a placebo, then you wouldn’t expect to find side effects, says Fisher.

Except that’s bullshit.

I wasn’t able to locate this paper.  I did find a paper called “A randomized trial in the prevention of influenza-like syndromes by homeopathic management“, which was published in France, but the lead author was Italian.  This may or may not have been the paper to which Fisher was referring, but as I can’t find even an abstract for this paper online, there really isn’t much I can say about it.

What I can do, however, is query Fisher’s assertion that placebos do not have side effects.  Placebos can have side effects as much as they can have effects – it’s all down to the patients expectations.  If they expect a tablet to make them nauseous, then there is a good chance they will feel nauseous!

After the hearing, Ben Goldacre posted a note up on his website, which I think very accurately summarises the hearing.  Over to you, Ben:

One thing that will never get old for the homeopaths, it seems, is the old practise of pulling out a single trial and saying “ah, but look, pish to your meta-analyses, here is a trial where homeopathy works”. No matter how many times you point out why this is foolish and wrong, they will always think you’re just being picky, and that is why they will always give us joy.