They’re Stealing Our Fish!

Seeing shouldn’t always be believing, as a Nelson skeptic discovered thirty years ago.

One night nearly thirty years ago, three men were driving back to Nelson from French Pass after a fishing trip. Road access to the Pass was quite new and there was very little traffic even by day. The road climbs steeply from French Pass, then follows a high ridge with tremendous views of Marlborough sounds on one side and Tasman bay on the other. The headlands and islands showed pitch-black on this moonless night and the sea gleamed in starlight.

As the vehicle reached the ridge, three or four dozen brilliant and mysterious lights could be seen in Tasman bay and further out to sea.

“The Japanese are stealing our fish!”

This was a hot topic in 1965. For years Japanese line fishers had been fishing for high value snapper (quite legally) very close to shore. But a new law excluded foreign vessels from fishing in a region 12 nautical miles (just over 22 km) from the coast.

“That big bright patch must be a mother ship out to sea, these points of lights must be dinghies fishing for snapper, some are right under the cliffs. They are all in the forbidden zone.”

We agreed and each estimated the distance to the nearest light. The maximum guess was three nautical miles.

All of us were experienced at night navigation. One had had a lifetime in small boats, another was a retired senior air-force flying instructor. These two had sufficient confidence in me (very much the junior) to sleep in the cabin while I had brought the boat the full length of D’Urville island (over 30 km) after nightfall.

A brilliant idea was developed, we could measure the distance to the poachers.

We could make out the headlands below us in the starlight and we had a map. With the car we could measure a baseline distance along the road. By sighting the lights over headlands at either end we could determine the angles. A ruler on the map would give the distance and even a calculation would be unnecessary. A crude measure perhaps, but we did not need a high degree of accuracy. All were convinced the boats were fishing well inside the limit.

Thirty minutes later we stared at each other in disbelief. The plan had worked well but it showed the nearest light was at least 15 nautical miles from the coast and the furthest was out more than 40 (28 km and 74 km). How could we be so wrong? Relief mingled with the other emotion, at least we had not driven to the nearest phone (a long distance) and made fools of ourselves. The Navy would not have been pleased to be turned out to apprehend poachers and then find only legal fishermen. These boats were not even in Tasman bay, they were well out to sea.

Only then did we think to use binoculars. Each of the nearer lights was not a point, but a vessel illuminated by many lights. This was our first sight of a squid fishing fleet, then relatively new in New Zealand waters. Each squid-fishing vessel has rows of powerful lights in the rigging. Squid are attracted by these lights and caught by jigging. Thirteen years late a squid fleet off Canterbury was to be one of the UFO sightings in the great Kaikoura UFO mystery. According to Philip J. Klass “the best documented of all UFO cases”.

In our case nobody cried “UFO” (one was a believer but had never seen one). We knew these were lights on boats but otherwise we were horribly wrong. We completely misinterpreted what was visible. We assumed (without considering the possibilities) that the lights were only moderately bright, therefore they had to be close. Because they were close we assumed we were looking down at them (just under the cliffs!). In fact we seemed to be looking down at them — until we knew they were well out to sea. Then we realised we were looking out towards the horizon! They dazzled us, therefore we could not see the horizon (it is usually visible on a clear, starry night).

The big glow well out, originally assumed to be a mother ship, was probably a cluster of lights over the horizon.

It is difficult to get across just how much illumination is used by a squid boat. The night after the Kaikoura UFO sightings, the RNZAF sent a plane out to investigate. It reported the squid fleet was putting out more light than the city of Christchurch!

The incident taught me some skeptical lessons.

Some were negative. Judging the distance of objects is very difficult at night. Judging their position in relation to the horizon is even more difficult. It is all too easy to jump to conclusions. Even when all of a party agree exactly on what they have seen, they can still be completely wrong. Highly experienced people can make quite ridiculous errors. What people report as “sightings” are really conclusions.

Some were positive. It pays to use one’s brains. It is possible to make rough but objective estimates of distance. Binoculars enable details to be resolved even at night.

And when the Kaikoura UFO was in the news I had a really good laugh — until I realised how much money was being made out of the incident. It really pays well to see UFOs instead of squid vessels.

Pseudoscience in the FOREST

Lately — my last few airline flights — I’ve been listening to the in-flight comedy channels. This was how I discovered Bob Newhart and his monologues. These are things where he takes one side of a conversation and leaves you to imagine the rest. There’s one that shows up quite often, where he takes one side of a conversation with Sir Walter Raleigh, who has just discovered tobacco and is sending eight tons of it over to England as an early sample.

Now, as Newhart points out, the uses of tobacco aren’t exactly obvious: you stick it up your nose, or roll it up in paper, stick it in your mouth, set fire to it, and breathe in the smoke. One wonders exactly how these uses were discovered. But these days smokers are a persecuted species, we know that. And I have a suggestion: I think smoking should be reclassified as a religion. In some ways this is already beginning to happen in any case.

Take FOREST, for example. According to FOREST, there is no medically proven link between passive smoking and lung cancer. Twenty years ago, the tobacco industry generally was saying the same thing about smoking itself, even, as the 1970s book Smoke Rings points out, in the face of medical evidence showing the opposite. This article of belief is both pseudoscientific and incomplete: lots of other medical conditions such as heart disease and emphysema are either caused by or worsened by exposure to tobacco smoke, and the children of smokers are well known to have more bronchial and respiratory problems. But point this out, and you run the risk of being labelled a “health fascist”, although this term is mostly reserved for government ministers and doctors who set targets for reducing smoking.

Reclassifying themselves as a religion would solve a number of problems for smokers at a stroke. For a start, there could be no more talk of government proposals setting targets for reducing smoking: we don’t set targets for reducing the numbers of Jews, Christians, Muslims, or even Hare Krishnas, who like smokers practice their religion publicly and sometimes disruptively.

Medical practitioners who refuse to treat smokers for illnesses linked to smoking would be guilty of religious persecution. Better still, smokers could have their own medical practitioners, just like Christian Scientists do, who understand and cater to their religious practices.

Best of all from the smokers’ point of view, they would be able to make a persuasive argument that the government would have to stop taxing cigarettes and tobacco, since that would be equivalent to taxing religious practices. The money thus saved could be collected by the temples smokers would set up for their religious services (which would no doubt replace singing hymns with ritualistic smoking) and used to fund a variety of smoking community needs.

All this would have useful implications for other types of drug use and addictions. Marijuana smokers, for example, could claim status as a heretical sect, as could crack smokers (these might be the dangerous fanatics that all religions have to have). Alcoholics would have to found their own religion, of course.

All this would mandate changes for the self-help movement, too, some of which already has some religious aspects. Members of any 12-step program, for example, call on the help of a Higher Power (defined however each individual member likes, so it doesn’t have to be specifically a god-like figure) to help them stop doing whatever destructive things they’ve been doing — drinking, gambling, overeating, smoking, or inflicting their chaotic emotional states on their loved ones.

Such self-help groups rarely talk about scientific evidence: telling someone smoking or drinking is bad for them generally doesn’t help them stop in any case. They rely instead on shared experiences first of all to show that quitting is possible and second of all to help members with specific problems by giving them a chance to hear how other members have coped with the same problems.

In this sense, reclassifying smoking as a religious practice merely confirms the setup we already have, except that smokers and anti- smokers could battle it out among themselves without reference to anything or anyone else. They don’t need science for this, and don’t use it. The time society at large now spends getting wound up in these battles could be given to finding homes for the conscientiously objecting non-smoking children of smokers, say. Meanwhile, the tobacco industry would be saved a lot of marketing costs, since the temples would obviously want to do their own missionary work to find new members; they could take over the third-world outreach work already set in place by the tobacco companies.

They would do well to take as their role model in all this the Catholic Church, which deems the health risks of pregnancy and overpopulation irrelevant in its campaign against birth control on moral grounds. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether that’s better or worse than their present role model, which seems to be those creationists who insist that “evolution is only a theory” and classify their own theories as scientific.

A Skeptical Miscellany

Picking Winners?

When the short list for the Booker prize was announced there was much chortling about the fact that Jill Paton Walsh had been unable to find a publisher in Britain for Knowledge of Angels. She had to publish it herself.

The Times Literary Supplement (9 Sep, 1994) points out that the English publishing houses could not justify their decision by claiming that they had a surplus of great and worthwhile books. Heinemann has just published what the TLS described as “a work of the purest bilge”. They refer to Nostradamus: his key to the centuries, prophecies of Britain and the world 1995-2010, by V.J. Hewitt.

This adventurous work is not Valerie Hewitt’s first appearance as a seer. In her earlier publication, Nostradamus: The end of the millenium, she predicted that George Bush would be re-elected in 1992, that the Prince of Wales would be crowned King Charles III on May 2 of the same year, and that California would be destroyed by an earthquake on 8 May 1993.

In spite of this unenviable track record, Valerie Hewitt seems to have no difficulty finding gullible publishers. Poetic justice could have won the day. Maybe they asked her, as Nostradamus’ UK agent, to pick the Booker Prize List as well.

An American Dilemma

In the September 16 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, Prof Claude Rawson made a nice point during his review of The Beginning of the Journey — the marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling, by Diana Trilling. I’m sure the TLS won’t mind us quoting at length:

“[Diana] too persevered with analysis despite a series of discouraging experiences, including a date with her first psychiatrist, from which she had to be sent home by taxi in a drunken panic … Three of her analysts died on her, an occupational hazard in transactions not otherwise willingly terminated by either party. One was a drug addict who missed appointments and fell asleep during sessions … She was next treated by by Marianne Fris, wife of Ernst, who told her that Lionel was being mishandled by his analyst … At one point the Trillings shared the same analyst and became “sibling rivals, vying for the attention of the same father figure”

This (Stalinist) doctor turned out to be unqualified and had to be retrained. The next “analyst’s wife, herself a psychiatrist” maintained a courteous professional distance. When her husband fell under a car she demanded payment of bills already paid, maintaining professional behaviour to the end. Diana had seven analysts in all and still feels that she “was never properly analysed”.

You might think she was slow on the uptake, but the persistence with which busy and intelligent persons in the US lavish their time and money on analysis in the teeth of a continuous sense of the inefficacy of the whole thing is a cultural phenomenon that awaits explanation.

If you remain unconvinced, watch the wonderfully scary video called Whispers in the Dark. It’s hard to know who is the most terrifying — the psychiatrists or their patient/victims. (Not for children)

Science and the Citizen

On Tuesday 26 September, National Radio’s Morning Report carried an interview with a scientist discussing his research programme which I hope is better founded than it sounded — seeing that we are all paying for it.

Apparently some Danes have shown that males who eat organic food are more fertile than those who eat regular (inorganic?) food. Our local scientist plans to repeat the programme here because if they confirm the Danish findings, it will prove that — and wait for it — pesticides cause male infertility.

Where does one start being decently Skeptical?

Would it not be simpler and much more direct to dose people with pesticides — without greatly increasing the doses they are presumed to be absorbing from their normal fruit and veges — and then send them out into the world to multiply?

And surely any Skeptic can think of several reasons why organic food-eaters might be more fertile than the average member of the population. Do they wear organic ill-fitting underpants?

But there are even more interesting hypotheses to test. We know that we eat about 10,000 times as many natural pesticides as we do synthetic ones (J.D. Mann, New Zealand Skeptic 32). I buy organically grown potatoes because they taste so much better (even though they cost about twice as much), which suggests that they contain a greater and more concentrated range of compounds than the regular watery variety.

Maybe it’s these “special secret ingredients” in the organic fruit and vegetables which serve to boost fertility among Danish males, rather than any tendency for nasty chemicals to diminish the fertility off their less “green” brethren.

And what might these extra compounds be? I presume that the way to raise vegetables which are resistant to the normal range of pests and diseases is to grow them so robust and healthy that their natural defenses are good enough to provide adequate protection. (Any gardener knows that healthy plants are much less prone to disease than sickly ones.) So maybe the reason these Danish organophiles are more fertile is that they are taking in far more natural pesticides than the rest of their countrymen. (And yes they are men!)

Could be it be that our crafty bodies respond to this toxicologic challenge by producing extra sperm to improve the survival chances of our selfish genes?

Who approves funding this stuff — New Zealand On Earth?

New Zealand Skeptic will watch for the outcome with pitchfork drawn and at the ready.

Numero Uno?

I was driving my car when Kim Hill spent half an hour of public broadcasting time interviewing a woman who claimed to be a Pythagorean Numerologist. The woman claimed that she had not appreciated Pythagoras at school because the teachers focused on arithmetic and all that other dry stuff. But later she learned that Pythagorus was a genuine mystic at heart and was worthy of redemption.

Our numerologist explained to a somewhat sceptical — but not falling-about-the-floor laughing — Kim Hill that Pythagorean Numerology could identify all our personality traits by translating the letters of your born name into numbers and then combining these numbers with the numbers of your birthday.

Evidently we can then all be identified as five/sevens, tens/tens or whatever. As you would expect, a five person could be careful with money, but could be able to overcome this tendency by applying the determination which is also associated with five. These people would make wonderful economists — on the one hand this … but on the other hand that …

Kim Hill did raise the difficulty that Pythagoras used the Greek alphabet, but our numerologist explained that the system had been adjusted to fit the Roman alphabet.

Now if telepathy worked at all, Kim Hill would have heard my 10,000 watt telepathic messages saying “Ask her about the birthdays.” Even Pythagoras could not predict the assumed birthdate of Jesus Christ, so its difficult to imagine him building a numerology system based on his being born on the 30 September 582 BC or whenever. And I cannot conceive of any algorithm which would translate the calenders of Pythagorean times into the Gregorian calendar dates we use now.

Once again telepathy failed me, and we never heard how our numerologist dealt with this problem. However, we learned something about Pythagoras. Evidently he ran a University in which everyone would have been vegetarians, because vegetables, unlike meat, are such spiritual food. I suppose this explains the behaviour of that other famous vegetarian, Adolf Hitler. One of Kim Hill’s questions indicated that our numerologist’s extensive research seemed not to have revealed to her Pythagoras’s famous aversion to beans.

However, my frustration with all this nonsense was eased later on in the morning’s programme when Kim Hill read out a fax from an alert Skeptic who complained bitterly about the use of public radio to disseminate such garbage over the air waves. Well done.

Don’t these programmers realize that this sort of stuff makes it doubly hard to argue in favour of preserving public radio. The more National Radio sounds like No Idea On Air the harder it is for any of us to argue its case for survival.

Psychics Fail Once Again

From a Skeptics’ mailing list comes a record of psychic slip-ups for the previous year.

If you thought 1994 has already featured some amazing events, wait until you see what’s in store for the final days of the year.

Hillary Clinton will plead guilty to shoplifting lipstick, an earthquake will turn Florida into an island, and Madonna will marry Boy George.

In addition, the U.S. Surgeon General will announce that TV watching makes men impotent, and Princess Diana will reveal that an appliance repairman and a postal worker fathered her two sons.

Who says? The world’s top psychics.

Those are just a few of the events that were supposed to come true before the end of 1994, according to the forecasts of the self-appointed psychics, whose predictions are published in supermarket tabloids like the National Enquirer, The Star, The Sun, and the Weekly World News.

Because none of the extraordinary predictions have come true yet, RweUre either going to see a lot of amazing news over the next few days or it will become clear, once again, that the nation’s psychics aren’t as skilled at predicting the future as some people think, according to Gene Emery, a science writer and frequent contributor to the Skeptical Inquirer.

If the forecasts don’t come true, it won’t surprise Emery, who has been collecting predictions in the tabloids since the 1970s.

“When it comes to forecasting unexpected events, psychics historically have had an abysmal track record,” he says.

What They Foresaw

According to these top prognosticators, 1994 was destined to be the year:

  • Cindy Crawford and Richard Gere became “the proud parents of triplets” (as predicted by Judy Hevenly in the National Enquirer).
  • Charles Manson got a sex change operation and was set free from prison (Peter Meers, Weekly World News).
  • Scientists “perfected a small four-cylinder car that can run on tap water” (Leah Lusher, Enquirer).
  • Jay Leno quit ‘The Tonight Show’ (Barbara Donchess, Enquirer).
  • Madonna married a Middle Eastern sheik and became “a totally traditional wife, complete with long robes and veil” (Mystic Meg, Globe).
  • Frank Sinatra was appointed U.S. Ambassador to Italy (Micki Dahne, Enquirer).
  • Whoopi Goldberg gave up acting to join a convent (John Monti, Enquirer).
  • Pope John Paul II decreed that married couples can only have sex on the first Friday of each month (Maria Graciette, Enquirer).
  • Office workers fled from the Sears Tower in Chicago after it began to lean like the Tower of Pisa (Maria Graciette, Enquirer).

“As always,” says Emery, “the tabloid psychics missed all the truly unexpected news of 1994, such as the O.J. Simpson case, the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding affair, the baseball and hockey strikes, and the takeover of Congress by the Republican Party.”

“Instead, we had psychics predicting that the Dow-Jones would rise to 5,000, that a national lottery would cut taxes in half, and that a teenager would build (and accidentally detonate) a nuclear bomb in Pageland, South Carolina.”

For 1995, the psychics have already predicted that

  • O.J. Simpson will be acquitted
  • singer Whitney Houston and boxer Mike Tyson will marry
  • a plant that grows in northern Florida will cure AIDS
  • volcanic eruptions in August will create a new land mass joining Cuba with America.

Will it happen? Emery advises: “Don’t hold your breath.”

Principles of Psychic Predictions

One group of scientists and scholars in Buffalo, New York, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), has been publishing the year-end tally of psychic predictions for the past several years in its quarterly journal (now bimonthly), the Skeptical Inquirer. According to CSICOP, psychics don’t appear to be improving upon their “hit rate” with the passage of time, and currently CSICOP has yet to find any convincing evidence that psychics possess extraordinary talent for seeing the future, finding missing people, or helping solve crimes.

When psychics are tested under conditions that eliminate luck or fraud, their powers evaporate.

Emery says some people argue that the forecasts in the supermarket tabloids are too outrageous to be taken seriously. “But extraordinary things do happen,” he says. “If I predicted a year ago that Michael Jackson would marry Lisa Marie Presley, that would seem pretty outlandish. Yet I would have been right.”

What did the tabloid psychics actually say about Jackson? They predicted that he would marry Oprah Winfrey, become a traveling evangelist, or have a sex-change operation, according to Emery.

The science writer says that scientists who have researched psychics and probed the psychology behind their predictions have discovered that prognosticators use a variety of techniques to make the public think they’re giving accurate forecasts.

Jeane Dixon, for example, likes to be vague. One of her predictions for 1994 was that “Mike Tyson may soon marry behind prison bars and could become the father of a child in the near future” (emphasis added).

“Other times they predict things we’ll probably never hear about,” said Emery. One of Monti’s predictions was that Sally Jessy Raphael and Rush Limbaugh “will become secret sweethearts.”

“If it’s a secret, the prediction becomes impossible to prove wrong,” he says.

In hopes of finding one psychic who can actually predict the future, Emery accepts written forecasts from psychics “as long as they involve unexpected events guaranteed to make headlines. Don’t expect me to be impressed if you tell me there will be a scandal in Washington or an earthquake in California.”

Scary Headlines, Dodgy Science

The New Zealand Herald of 5 September carried the headline “Ozone gap to lift skin cancer 7 per cent”.

Then followed a report from Dr Richard McKenzie of the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research at Lauder. He said that ozone loss in the past 15 years had caused an increase of 8-10% in the amount of harmful ultraviolet rays reaching Otago and Southland, and that UV levels were expected to rise another 2-3%, reaching a peak in about five years.

So far so good. We have no reason to question the quality of the research and his findings that ozone depletion over the southern region has increased UV penetration over the South Island plains. But Dr McKenzie is then reported as saying that:

Cancers caused by past depletion were only now beginning to appear as the disease often developed some years after exposure to the rays.

And that:

Small changes in UV can have large effects on life. There will be extra skin cancers and earlier deaths will result.

Surely Dr McKenzie has moved beyond his field of expertise. The recent increase in skin cancer is almost entirely attributable to the craze for sun-bathing and sun-tans which began in the 1920s and reached a peak during the early ’70s. Any impact of increased ultraviolet penetration is insignificant when compared to this “life-style” choice which encouraged young children to play at the beach all day, fully exposed to the sun, and teenagers to bask in full summer sun for hours on end in their quest for the perfect tan.

Furthermore, changes in the level of ultraviolet light reaching the ground are much more dependent on cloud cover, general atmospheric pollution, and geographic latitude than on any recorded or predicted variations within the ozone layer. A move from the Arctic to the equator increases annual exposure to UV by 4,000%. If Aucklanders are worried about a 10% increase in UV penetration they should move 200 km south to, say, Taupo.

I am prepared to bet $1,000 to $1 that there will be no increase in skin cancers attributable to increased UV over the next few years. The increases which occur will be attributable to the sun-burned baby-boomers growing up and contracting melanoma. This will peak and decline as a new generation of parents encourage their children to wear hats and use sun-blocks.

If Dr McKenzie can set up an experiment using a control population which stays where it is, in an atmosphere which remains as clear as it is today, and in which no-one reduces their exposure to intense sunlight or increases their use of sun protection, then that population might record the increase he forecasts. But such an experiment would be totally unethical, so the predicted outcome cannot happen. Hence my confidence in the bet.

In an interview Dr McKenzie conceded he was no expert in public health. Maybe he should have stuck to his field and let someone else draw the public-health conclusions. People have to deal with daily predictions of doom from all directions. There is no need to add a fear of UV-induced melanoma epidemics to the list. His forecast sounds unavoidable — and it’s not.

Alien Ships in Our Skies

One of the perpetrators told the story behind the Grand Interplanetary Hoax of 1952 to the 1994 Skeptics’ Conference.

Hoaxes have probably been a part of life for thousands of years, ranging in scope, intent and outcome. Some such as the Piltdown saga veer out of control and have unforeseen and potentially serious consequences.

When Denis Dutton first asked me to give a paper on the great UFO hoax of 1952, I was somewhat coy about the matter. Subsequently I was tempted to accept, and here we are.

During the early 1900s, mysterious airships were sighted in various parts of the world, and New Zealand was no exception. While various psychological explanations have been forthcoming for the airship episodes, no evidence has surfaced to my knowledge concerning any structured direction to that piece of mystery history, although I have always believed a hoax might have been the initiating event. H.G. Wells’s haunting and sadly prophetic novel The War of the Worlds was available as a textbook to feed the imagination of the susceptible and the gullible.

We need to remember also that the Christian religion has always emphasised the Second Coming. Such teachings reinforce in successive generations the concept that there will be cataclysmic events and visitations, hopefully in one’s own lifetime. The factors which determine the life-cycle of these events are worthy of study. I have no doubt that many of them are the work of pranksters or elaborate hoaxsters, as is the case in the present episode.

Of more interest to people like me in describing something that happened before many readers were born or living in New Zealand is a retrospective analysis of the various participants, the perpetrators, the reactors and the bystanders. In my acceptance letter for this exposure, I said that I would couch my text, “in terms of what this particular episode teaches about young people’s attitude to pomposity in their elders and towards various aspects of the Establishment (in this instance represented by the Otago Daily Times)”.

A serious skeptic must be a serious historian with healthy respect for the broad picture, the fine detail, and also for what Denis has referred to as the partnership between History herself and Lady Luck.

I do not need to stress to this audience the fact that mythology soon surrounds events such as the “Grand Inter-planetary Hoax”, as the Knox College prank is now known in some circles. That mythology is largely concerned both with how the episode arose and with who was involved. I have chosen to tackle this topic in a chronological sequence, introducing analysis of events as I proceed. Such a plan makes it easier to strip away some of the mythology concerning the events of 42 years ago.

Knox College

During the 1950s, Knox College was a male domain occupied by young men from all over New Zealand, of varying ages, studying for a variety of professions. Within the college community were a number of ex-servicemen, most of them studying for the Presbyterian ministry. Knox had not been shaken at that stage by the liberalism of Lloyd Geering, but there were clearly defined groups within the “Div” students, as they were called, ranging from the more fundamentalist to those with what some perceived to be dangerously liberal theological points of view.

Amongst the medical students there was a similar range of believers, with the more traditional rigid group belonging to the Evangelical Union and the more daring, and I would say open-minded, belonging to the Student Christian Movement of which I happened to be President for part of the period we are discussing. At that time the Student Christian Movement quite openly accepted agnostics and others who were exploring and developing their concepts of themselves and the world in general.

Social life in the College centred on the supper parties which moved from room to room. Students became bored with swotting by about 9:00 or 9:30 and gathered together in various rooms and talked until midnight and beyond. The great strength of Knox College lay in those interchanges. These were much richer social gatherings than the somewhat rushed meals in the dining room. I remain very grateful to this phase of my student life, particularly for what I learned from people studying in the other faculties and from the ex-servicemen amongst us.

It needs to be remembered that the early 1950s saw the beginnings of what ultimately resulted in student unrest in a number of other countries and in the revolt of tertiary students against a number of manifestations of the old order. In my opinion, the stirrings began as students realised that a great new order had failed to emerge from the ashes of the Second World War. Rather, a potentially destructive conflict was emerging between what could crudely be called capitalism and Marxism.

Student Idealism

Throughout history, students have been aware of injustice and abuse of power by successive forms of the Establishment. Students have, to some extent, tended to divide themselves into those who put down their heads and acquire a qualification, looking neither to right nor left, versus those who gain pleasure and seek self-fulfilment in genuine attempts to improve, not only their own life, but that of others. While that may be jingoistic and simplistic it is highly relevant to the context.

During 1951 we had endured privation in the Otago winter during the waterfront and the coal miners’ strike. We had shivered in unheated rooms and endured a pretty awful diet amidst a so-called land of plenty. Regardless of the rights or wrongs of the Holland Government’s struggle with the wharfies and the miners, many of us in Otago became increasingly irritated by the sanctimonious attitude of the Otago Daily Times.

This is not mythology; the pompous simperings of the ODT were tackled regularly during capping week. At times the students set out deliberately to antagonise Mr Moffat and his “smug band of journalists and leader writers”. The Star was a ho-hum paper which did not excite nearly as much reaction on the part of the students. Undoubtedly there was much young arrogance behind our own attitudes, but also youthful energy, mixed with mischief and an altruistic outlook.

The idea of launching a major attack on the ODT surfaced in the winter term of 1952. The pre-occupation of the ODT with flying saucers, and the trivialisation of major events which were happening worldwide, was adding fuel to the antagonism felt among a range of students. What I shall term the “idealistic alliance” between many medical, dental, arts and divinity students provided a fertile area for the gestation of the hoax. From the beginning it was critical that a sufficient group of men with the necessary confidence in one another should come together if the venture was to succeed.

According to my records, the hoax idea was mooted vaguely for the first time in late September. Finally a group of five, at one particular supper party, concocted the crucial elements of the enterprise. One of the group had access to a secretary in the Medical School. She was the one significant person from outside the Knox confederacy who participated and maintained her silence over the years.

Final planning, however, was undertaken by a very small group which was a key to the outstanding success of the episode. For many years I kept a copy of the map I used to draw up the original plan. It was very similar to that shown on the construction produced by Brian MacKrell of Palmerston North in 1978.

One document was central to the planning. The illustration confirms that at least some of the things I have said are not mythological. You will note that the single-page document starts off by defining the objective very clearly.

Designed to cure the ODT of Flying Saucerites and inoculate that worthy journal with a healthy degree of septicism [sic].

Spelling mistakes and the unconscious pun based on a spelling mistake, while not Freudian, are nevertheless interesting. We really only had one possibility of getting the typing done, and there was no proof-reading as far as I can recall. For “saucerites” read “sauceritis”, and for “septicism” read “scepticism”.

However, the point of the sentence is quite clear and an educationalist today would applaud the brevity and the irony inherent in that sentence. As you will note, it is a double irony.

The reasoning behind the genesis of two saucers, with different colour codes for the two extra-terrestrial objects, was itself based upon considerable discussion and simplification. There was much complexity during early stages of the planning with a tendency to various forms of hyperbole. All this was strenuously censored for sound reasons.

The blue saucer was to “disappear over the horizon in ever decreasing circles”. We did drag a few coat-tails!

The final paragraphs in the printed document are again an exemplary piece of the hoaxster’s art. Buried within these instructions are the fruits of our own research analysis of reports plus our own rudimentary understanding of the accoutrements of supersonic flight.

Once the document was available, it was distributed throughout the College, through the supper-party networking system. At this point, differing philosophies and personalities within the College became evident in the decisions taken as to who would and who would not take part. Two divinity students, in particular, protested that this was a dishonest exercise with which they could not associate themselves. They believed that the College would be brought into disrepute. Moreover, they were extremely disapproving of other divinity students who were prepared to indulge in such dishonest joviality. They raised a point which was again evident at the 25 year initial revelation. If we were prepared to dissemble to this extent as students, what were we going to be like in later life; what grip would we have on honesty and integrity? Most of us ignored such qualms, and it was notable that a number of ex-servicemen among the divinity students particularly relished their participation.

This was not the only major attack on the ODT by members of Knox College. A famous Resident Fellow, the late Don Anderson, who at one stage was on the staff at Massey University, found the ODT editorial policies particularly irritating and conducted an entirely fictitious correspondence during which he wrote letters for and against bagpipes over a prolonged period. That particular private pillorying of the august journal has never been revealed in public to my knowledge, but I stand to be corrected on that point. As far as I can recall, Don did not take part in this particular exercise but we would not have expected him to do so because he was grossly handicapped and easily identified. As a victim of cerebral palsy, his speech mannerisms were well known in Otago at that time.

There was one major risk involved in the planning which we had to accept. Everything had to be in place so that, as was the custom of those days, we could complete the bulk of our year’s study in the four to six weeks before the final examinations. This was the reason why the briefings and preparations of the instruction sheet occurred early in the third term. Also, various members of the College left at varying times over a total range of about six weeks. In turn the due date of December 6 was determined by the timing of the departure of the last students at the end of their examinations.

This lengthy delay between concluding the planning and the date of execution led to some awkward gaps in coverage of the country and to forgetfulness which I think was genuine on the part of some who had agreed to participate. Russell Cowie made strenuous and ingenious efforts to provide coverage from places in the South Island by preparing additional letters for the relevant areas. Some of the gaps were covered by correspondents stating that they had been travelling by car. This would account for a letter being posted at a distance from the alleged sighting.

To a perceptive reporter who took the trouble to collate the information, the fact that this was a spoof should have been obvious.

Pure Moonshine

One of my favourite pieces was the reporting of the sighting from Hokonui, the home of the famous southern moonshine whisky. The author of that letter had the sense not to sign himself McRae. I still find it incredible that the ODT did not pick up these trailings of the coat.

If I may be excused a modicum of parochialism I shall describe what happened in Auckland. I chose the Herald and rang from a phone box as I came off overtime, on a clear lovely evening. Fortunately the sky was clear over pretty much the whole of New Zealand on the night; this was the first piece of Lady Luck’s benevolence. Had Aotearoa lived up to its name, the whole scheme would have been strangled at birth.

The Herald reporter who received my telephone call was quite bland about it, asked for a name and address which I gave, having carefully selected a street in which the particular number did not exist (in accordance with the plan). I sent in a letter having said I would do so. Obviously no one ever checked up on that, or if they did they kept the observation to themselves.

A colleague from an adjacent wool-store was assigned the Auckland Star. This was a much tougher proposition. He gave a description which tallied with mine, as he walked home from a different wool-store and used a different telephone box. However, the Star reporter wanted a bit more than a name and address and John realised that this was a hazardous moment. However, he had a brilliant idea of saying, “If my wife knew I was out in this street at this time of night there would be all hell”. “No problem sir,” said the Star reporter and swallowed the whole thing hook, line and sinker. Another student used a similar device. Throughout the country people generally had no problems in having their stories accepted.

The Target Bites

The flood of reports obviously raised excitement. As predicted, the ODT gave quite unreasonable prominence to the reports while missing the whole point and not even correlating the North Island and South Island sightings. In its initial reporting it referred to South Island observations only, even though those in the North had been reported in the Northern press, with suitably modest prominence, and on radio.

At no stage did the biggest circulation newspaper of the country, the New Zealand Herald, or the Auckland Star give the story any undue prominence. The attitude of both the Herald and the Star implied that they thought there might be some trickery afoot. The Auckland Star ran a cartoon and a whimsical leader appeared in the New Zealand Herald. I should comment that the New Zealand Herald has always had a whimsical streak to it.

As many of you may know, there is a tradition on April 1 to publish very soberly written articles which are a send-up of this or that, perhaps the most famous one being of the description of the long-lost tunnel under Auckland Harbour excavated for military purposes in the 19th century. Huge numbers of citizens were taken in by that piece of writing. I am not sure whether Ted Reynolds was on the Herald staff in 1952 but the flying saucer leader incorporated the style of writing for which he was later to become notable, if anonymously.

We did have a problem in Auckland. A Canadian Pacific Airliner came over at the critical time and a group of cargo workers sighted something which was not part of our scheme. This was a further piece of intervention by Lady Luck however, because it tended to confuse things in the northern part of the country and it ultimately was quite useful.

Further south much ingenuity was exercised, including a report from one student and his son, (who certainly did not exist at that stage) reporting that they had seen the two discs together. About three days after the event, some newspapers had correlated all the sightings. The Carter Observatory, which had been contacted by more than one newspaper, had officially stated the reports had contained “quite worthwhile information”. The speed of the two objects had been calculated and tallied with our original computations.

“If only I had seen it” sighed Mr W.D. Anderson, a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society who was consulted by the ODT. “You cannot possibly ignore straightforward, intelligently written reports like these.” He added, “I cannot give explanations off-hand.” Meanwhile, dedicated saucer watchers had concluded that these “fully authenticated reports from New Zealand”, as they were described, indicated that “saucers were flying closer to the Earth’s surface”. This clearly heightened the interest and further raised excitement.

Front Page News

The ODT was in full cry, and 13 days after the event the front or main news page had a double-full-scale column headline entitled “Enigma of the Sky”. It was not the only major reference on the front page during that week. The ODT had commissioned a Mr Anderson and a Mr McGeorge to undertake a survey of the reports. These two worthy gentlemen concluded that:

Assuming that these reports of a swift-moving object in the sky on Saturday night are not the result of collaboration (and they appear to be genuine, independent observations) they constitute a surprising weight of evidence in favour of the proposition that some object of a bluish colour did pass down the South Island.

They went on to calculate size and height of the objects. They ended their report:

We are still looking forward to focusing a telescope on one of these mysterious objects. A telephone call ahead of the object would be helpful, and we suggest that any observer immediately telephone in reports to the nearest office to enable advice to send ahead in time.

A few late reports trickled in and this again was part of the original plan. These were heavily reinforced by Russell Cowie, which ensured that the ODT target was well and truly plastered. He wrote further letters to Southland and Wellington papers to ensure that the coordinated activities of the blue and green discs were recognised.

The excitement eventually died down. The Weekly News of July 12 1953 did feature an article entitled “Mysteries that Fly Past in the Night”, which was based on an interview with Mr H.A. Fulton, president of the Civilian Saucer Interrogation Society of New Zealand (CSINZ). He had been involved early by the ODT and other newspapers at the time of the hoax itself.

The Committee of the CSI had concluded that the most conclusive evidence of the existence of flying saucers was the series of reports received on December 6, 1952. He went on to state that the CSI was satisfied that all the natural and atmospheric explanation by scientists for the appearance of flying saucers did not promise a solution of the riddle.

“Time”, Mr Fulton said, “would tell and the time was not very far away.”

Unexpected Support

Lady Luck favoured us thrice. What we did not know at the time was that we had calculated the speed of our objects such that they would have appeared at the right time over the Gulf of Mexico where a B29 crew saw a small, unidentified flying object. In 1978 the report of that crew still remained on the US Air Force list of unexplained flying objects. The green disc which disappeared off Invercargill could have turned up along a great circle route to the Gulf of Mexico just in time to be observed by the American airmen in their B29. Others have carried out the same correlation which appears in one of the standard books on flying saucers. The New Zealand sighting of 1952 and the B29 report are frequently quoted as being the most convincing evidence to support the reality of UFOs.

In an account prepared in 1984 by Mason Stretch, then Secretary of the Knox College Students’ Club, and presented at an annual meeting of the Knox College Old Boys’ Association, the final two paragraphs ran:

Surely the ODT reporters, the main sub-editors even, must have purred when Mr Thompson of the Carter Observatory said to the ODT, “You have got times and you have got something which might give speeds…that appears to be worthwhile information.”

The ODT had nobly striven to assemble data and report to the public information of world shaking importance — so important indeed that what at other times would be major international news was squeezed out of the headlines by two saucy wee disks [sic] that hissed while hoaxers howled in the background.

I think we were all staggered by the success of the venture and were not quite sure what to do. There was a tacit agreement that nothing should be said. We had achieved our objective, felt satisfied and, quite frankly, the ODT continued on in its ponderous manner. Capping came along next term and, predictably, the memory of the events receded into the background. As I have indicated there were some periodic reports of the 1952 excerpts in the press including the Weekly News article. Some who participated in the hoax did begin to feel a little uneasy that some people 10, 15 and 25 years later were still taking the thing far too seriously, just as the 1909 airship episode with slow moving dirigibles steam-powered from Dargaville to Invercargill towards subsequent sightings in Australia had never been explained. It seemed reasonable to leave things for a while, but not forever.

In the Christchurch Press of 4 March 1978, Brian MacKrell of Palmerston North published an article headlined “The Night of the Hissing Discs”. He had earlier analysed the 1952 newspaper reports and his work produced the map referred to earlier. He said he was not a member of any organisation which believed in UFOs but he had collected newspaper reports of the sightings as a child. He had linked up the B29 bomber report from the Gulf of Mexico. He was aware of the 1909 airship reports.

With what appears to have been unconscious irony, the ODT republished the MacKrell article one week later. There is no indication that the ODT had any inkling of its role as the prime target in 1952.

Some of the group of now moderately old Knox men decided enough was enough, and Ken Nichol of Christchurch Teachers’ College revealed to the Press a general outline of the hoax. As far as I can tell the ODT never published Ken’s article.

As we expected, the reaction to the Ken Nichol revelation was mixed. Some letters refused to accept that the hoax was a hoax.

I believe it is clear from the editorial in the New Zealand Herald and the cartoon in the Auckland Star that the northern papers regarded the whole affair as entertaining and amusing. I suspect in retrospect that they might even have guessed that the ODT was the target. Certainly, when one looks at the New Zealand Herald over the relevant time, international news was not displaced off the front page in the Auckland papers as it was in the Otago Daily Times.

In terms of its basic purpose, the hoax was designed to make the ODT look foolish, mainly in the eyes of those who perpetrated the hoax itself, and hopefully to others. The low standard of professionalism shown by the newspaper reporters and sub-editors in terms of their analysis of Press Association reports, their failure to undertake some simple correlations, and their failure to pick-up the clues deliberately pointing to this being a hoax, almost certainly had no impact within the paper itself and probably not amongst a majority of worthy readers in Otago.

Hoaxers Satisfied

To those of us who took part in the hoax, there was a buzz of excitement and gratification. Our suspicion that the Fourth Estate could be manipulated, even by amateurs, was confirmed as were our thoughts concerning what determined some major aspect of newspaper policy. In a city that had prided itself as the intellectual centre of the country, the toes and part of the fore-foot of the main newspaper were revealed to us as objects of clay.

While we were poking fun at one major pillar of the Otago establishment, we were also indulging in the freedom offered by that academic environment and by New Zealand generally. Like the Oxford students who dug up part of Oxford or Regent Street and got away with it for something like a week, we had risked creating a nuisance of ourselves at the same time as we had challenged pomposity and credulity. We were mounting what we believed to be a humorous but constructive protest against what we correctly perceived to be the destructive nature of modern day superstition and witchcraft, and their handmaidens in some sections of the media.

Ours was a one-off exercise unlike the much more elaborate campaign undertaken in the seventies and eighties by the crop circle hoaxers. Bower and Chorley were in their fifties when they concocted their crop circle hoax as a joke, once again based upon a flying saucer motive. They also were staggered at their success and instead of confessing to newspapers, they made use of the original scheme to spell out the words “we are not alone” in 1986, and “copycats” in 1990. Once again, however, the believers took over and the huge geometrical precision of the July 1990 hoax convinced UFO Research Groups and the United Believers in Intelligence, that intelligence beyond any earthbound being had created the nine circle Worcestershire patterns.

Those particular episodes are much more complex than our own efforts, and just who is hoaxing whom remains unclear. At times it seems clear that the crop circle series may even have been maintained in the interest of some journalists, cynical or otherwise.

History does repeat itself in the arena of hoaxism and Lady Luck rides side-saddle e’en to the noo.

At least some who reacted to Ken Nichol’s preliminary confession believed that the Knox College students had betrayed their academic standards and had displayed a shocking lack of integrity. How could we be trusted on any stage thereafter? The argument that young radicals later became conservatives did not hold much weight with these stern critics. I believe that such guardians of absolute truth failed to perceive that we were acting out of a very healthy intellectual approach to life in general.

Moreover, from what I know of the subsequent lives of a moderately large number of the group concerned, they have maintained a sense of proportion during their careers and they have neither become cynics nor carping critics. Maybe it is their sense of humour combined with their serious intent and a critical capacity to analyse complex issues which has maintained in them this balanced perspective which is a key element in professional success.

I feel there is ironic justice perceptible in the fact that Russell Cowie is an acknowledged expert in the area of the nature and use of historical evidence. I hope that young people continue to behave in the way we did, particularly if they maintain into later adult life a sense of fun, a sense of proportion and an approach to the Establishment which is responsible on the one hand, but skeptical and critical on the other.

And so I conclude and leave you to your own interpretations of one of the cataclysmic events which brought to an end anno domini 1952.

Contradictory Belief Systems

A friend of mine once visited a faith-healer, one of the religious variety from the United States who periodically come to New Zealand to swell their bank balances. She attended the meeting because of a persistent pain in her elbow. Despite my suggestions that it was only tennis elbow, she was worried and thought perhaps the pain was serious. She had an aisle seat near the front and during the proceedings the “healer” approached her and asked about the pain in her arm. Apparently she hadn’t told anyone why she was there. She was impressed.

“How did Pastor S. know that I had a pain in my elbow?” my friend asked. “I hadn’t told him? He knew exactly what was wrong with me. He told me, well, all of us,” she said, “that pain is caused by evil spirits moving around the bloodstream. When they stop, they manifest themselves in the form of pain. Mine had stopped in my arm. He could tell. He had the gift.”

“Oh, come on.” I replied, “You used to teach biology. You know that pain is not caused by evil spirits. What about when you break a bone?”

(I should perhaps explain here that my friend had given up teaching biology because she felt the whole syllabus, including the classification of plants and animals, was based on evolutionary principles, and this contradicted her strong belief in creationism.)

“If you didn’t have evil spirits inside you when you broke a bone,” she responded curtly, “you would not feel the pain.”

She was deaf to my suggestions that perhaps the spirits were not all bad, since without pain indicating that something was wrong we might not attend to our hurts.

“All pain is bad.” she insisted.

“What else happened at the meeting?” I asked.

“I had to go and stand at the front, with other people who had pain or sickness. Pastor S. laid his hands on my arm and demanded, in the name of God, that the evil spirits leave my body. He drove them out.” Her eyes shone as she brought back the memories.

“How does the arm feel now?” I asked.

“Oh, much better, thanks,” she smiled, “Pastor S. said the pain would go quickly now, but I could help by resting it.”

Of course the pain did lessen. Tennis elbow is susceptible to rest. Despite my protestations, my friend insisted it was due to Pastor S., driving out evil spirits. The devastating part of the whole story for me is that though she has been scientifically trained, has a university degree in fact, she is content to go through life holding two mutually exclusive beliefs — one based on common sense and rational thought, where it applies to everyday events and can’t possibly undermine long-held views, and another resting on superstition and religious arguments for its authority. All credit to her, though, that she finds it possible to remain friends with a “sinner” such as myself.

Science Teachers

Having taught for many years, in four schools and one university, I have met quite a number of science teachers. Being insatiably curious (many would say intrusive) I take every appropriate opportunity to talk to them about their beliefs. Despite their education, the holding of two mutually exclusive belief systems by science teachers is common.

In an informal survey I considered some of the science teachers I have known well enough to discuss matters of belief over the last few years. There have been 21, whom I categorise as follows;

  • 7 “Standard” Christians, who attend a mainstream church on a regular basis at least a few times a year. One in fact is an ordained Anglican minister
  • 4 “Fundamentalist” Christians, who meet in religious gatherings at least once a week
  • 5 Theists, who hang on to belief in a god but do not attend any religious meetings
  • 1 New Ager, who, surprisingly, believes in such things as aromatherapy, homeopathy, and the like
  • 1 into Transcendental Meditation
  • 1 Anthroposophist
  • 1 Theosophist
  • 1 Atheist, with strongly-held views

At least 14 of these, I suggest, hold mutually exclusive belief systems. For example, the majority of them believe that miracles have occurred at some time or other, despite this contradicting scientific laws they promulgate every day in the classroom.

Most avoid providing explanations for miracles, but some believe that God has the ability to suspend scientific laws to accommodate them. More logically perhaps, some suggest that scientific knowledge at present is not profound enough to provide adequate explanations for miracles. I have included under the heading of miracles, virgin birth and resurrection.

So, where does that leave us? All of us, I think, expect the natural laws of science and logic to apply to everyday events, but many of us subscribe to an additional belief system that transcends common sense. This second system allows the unthinkable to happen. It can be important to us, especially when we are apprehensive about the future. In such cases we can “cross our fingers and hope for the best”, even for a miracle to occur.

Christchurch Pesticide Scare

The media were quick to cry “Wolf” when concerns were raised about the fungicide Benlate.

On 9 December, 1993, the people of Canterbury read an alarming headline in the Christchurch Press: “Herbicide scare after babies born with defects”. Three City Council staff “who worked with herbicides gave birth to babies with defects”. In this first report neither the nature of the defects nor a specific herbicide were mentioned.

Several comments by Council officials and others, intended to soothe public fears, were quoted in the report — “coincidence”, “a link between the defects and herbicides was unlikely”, “the substances … did not absorb well through the skin”. An occupational health expert had been asked to investigate and report urgently; a fourth parks employee of the Council, who had worked in the same area as the other mothers, had given birth to a healthy baby.

During 1993 the office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Helen Hughes, had been investigating the use and disposal of dangerous chemicals in New Zealand, and the report arising from these enquiries was published only a few days after the story in the Press. The Commissioner was quoted as saying that the controls recommended by her office would have been even stronger had she known of the Christchurch birth defects.

Despite the encouraging noises emerging from the Civic Offices and other official buildings, public anxiety increased almost to the level of hysteria.

Within a week the substance under suspicion had been identified as benomyl (a fungicide, not a herbicide), made by Du Pont and sold under the name “Benlate”. Sales plummeted, TV cameras were taken to garden centres to picture staff sweeping the stuff from the shelves, and only eight days after the first report, Du Pont’s New Zealand Manager was buying whole pages of advertising space in the newspapers to rebut the accusations made against his company’s product.

During the week journalists interviewed some of the people involved, and a few personal and medical details emerged. Two of the three babies were blind; the mother of one, born in 1990, was “in anguish” after slowly rebuilding her life; the parents of the other were in a more belligerent mood, threatening legal action against Du Pont. The Wellington bureaucracy was also quick to act; the Ministry for the Environment’s representative on the Pesticides Board announced she would press the Board to de-register benomyl, and recommend the Department of Health should ban its use.

Further comments intended to lessen public anxiety came from the City Council, including the announcement that Benlate was being withdrawn from use in the Parks Department. Then, less than ten days after the first report, the matter sank from public view while New Zealanders attended to the serious business of the Christmas-New Year summer holiday period. Behind the scenes, however, Dr John Alchin, Occupational Physician, was very busy. Before the issue became public, the City Council had asked him to investigate the birth defects. His report, 74 pages long, was submitted on 15 April, 1994, and reported in the Press the following day. The sub-editor’s summary of Alchin’s summary read, “Report on birth defects finds no pesticide link.”

Alchin’s investigation had been very thorough. He had examined the hospital obstetric and paediatric records, the medical and ante-natal records of the family doctors, and the notes of the obstetricians and paediatricians concerned. He had interviewed the parents at length and scrutinised City Council procedures. He instituted wide searches of two computerised medical databases, and talked to several New Zealand experts in epidemiology, environmental health, medical genetics and toxicology.

Concerning the two babies who were born blind, he noted: (1) one was born in 1990, the other in 1993; (2) their blindness resulted from two quite distinct congenital defects; (3) birth defects are not uncommon, there is roughly a 1 in 1000 chance of any two babies being born with major anomalies; (4) the two mothers had had minimal exposure to pesticides during pregnancy; and (5) other studies show no linkage of human birth defects to pesticide exposure. In view of the emphasis given to Benlate in the media reports, it is odd to note that Alchin could not confirm that either mother had been exposed to this material during pregnancy.

The third baby in the study was said in early reports to have “severe epilepsy”. Dr Alchin found he began having seizures at three or four days old, but from three months at least until nine months, had had none. His mother’s exposure, if any, had been to Roundup (glyphosate), not to Benlate. Alchin considers neonatal seizures to be common, and no evidence links their occurrence to pesticide exposure.

It seems that we have here another case of “chemophobia”, an irrational fear of exposure to chemicals, particularly synthetic, biologically active substances. What was presented initially as almost an epidemic of birth defects associated with horticultural sprays is seen on careful examination to be nothing of the kind.

Those of us who were born more or less whole, and have borne/sired healthy children, can hardly imagine the depth of pain suffered by the parents of these two blind babies, nor appreciate the handicap with which the infants start out in life. To seek some cause for such an affliction, any cause rather than no cause at all (chance), is perhaps natural. Nonetheless, to pin blame on something baselessly can in the long run only be harmful and an impediment to understanding.

Despite the thorough investigation, and Alchin’s exoneration of the pesticides, not everyone was convinced. A spokesman for the Toxins Action Group was quick (too quick even to have read the document) to label it a “whitewash”, and, at last report, the parents of one of the blind babies were continuing their legal action. Before the findings were announced, the Soil & Health Association had decided the eye defects were caused by Benlate, and was demanding its withdrawal.

The City Council emerges creditably from this affair. Its arrangements for proper handling of the wide range of horticultural materials used in our parks and gardens seem to be carefully designed with safety in mind, a thorough investigation was promptly set up as soon as an apparent problem appeared, and Council officials tried, though with little success, to counter the inappropriate public response.

As a Christchurch ratepayer, I feel my contribution to the costs of the enquiry was well worthwhile. It is good to know that this scare was unfounded; one can hope, but not with much optimism, that such scares may not occur again with so little cause.

Maori Science

Can traditional Maori knowledge be considered scientific?

The idea of a separate indigenous science, practised by Maori before European settlement and passed on to their descendants, is an appealing one. The phrase “Maori science” has cropped up in school curriculum reform and in Museum of New Zealand planning documents. Courses on it have been taught at university level. The Department of Conservation has decided it is “highly relevant to future policies for science and research”. But does “Maori science” even exist?

At first, this seems a silly question. After all, we know that Maori possessed a huge body of knowledge about their environment, passed on orally for generations, even if today much of it has been lost. The knowledge of how to make bird snares, process karaka berries to destroy their toxins, and differentiate dozens of different varieties of harakeke surely qualify as science.

But science is more than a body of in-depth knowledge about the world. Other bodies of knowledge include history, literary theory, gardening, auto mechanics and rugby. If knowing a lot about flax is enough to make you a scientist, then so is knowing a lot about rugby. Although scientists tend to know a lot about their area of study, as astronomer Carl Sagan has said, “science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge”.

Defining Science

The aim of science is to understand how the world really works. Not just collecting facts about the world, but questioning the mechanisms behind those facts. Knowing how to prepare karaka berries is knowledge; trying to find out why and how they are poisonous, and how your preparation is removing the poison, is science. A perfect scientist (most are mere human beings) is continually questioning, never accepting hearsay or declaring an area closed to inquiry. This aim of science, and all the methods that flow from it, is responsible for the extraordinary understanding of the natural world we have today.

Dr Ian Hawthorn of Waikato University defines science as “objective rational co-operative knowledge acquisition”. That is, it deals with the real or empirical world as opposed with subjective opinion or personal belief. It believes that the world can be understood rationally, without recourse to the supernatural, and it operates through the sharing of knowledge by scientists.

Under this definition of science, how does Maori knowledge measure up? The answer, it seems, is not very well.

Kaumatua Morris Grey has pointed out that there was no demarcation between religion and knowledge in Maori culture. Religion’s goal is not to understand the natural world, but to help people to live in it. It operates on faith and authority. However good the knowledge database possessed by Maori, questioning (“Why don’t kakapo fly? Why is the sky blue? What is a rainbow?”) would quickly bring you up against religious and supernatural explanations, which by their nature are not open to questioning.

Maori culture was not alone in this, of course. On the contrary, every society in the world until very recently operated much the same way. Society then was what we today would call authoritarian, where the authority of your elders and gods was not up for challenge. In Maori society, knowledge was not freely available, but imparted to those who were deemed worthy in a controlled environment. Knowledge was power, and had to be restricted. It was legitimised by the authority of your teacher.

A society in which science can develop needs to have people with sufficient technology and leisure time to do research. It also has to have a good communications network, and ways of reliably storing, disseminating and duplicating information. This state was nearly reached in several ancient societies, but the right conditions were only achieved a few hundred years ago in Europe, and it is only an accident of history that science began there and not in China or South America. Maori society had neither the communications network nor the social structure for collaborative research to go on between different iwi.

So Maori knowledge acquisition was neither objective (relying as it did on religious faith), rational (it mixed supernatural with mundane explanations), nor co-operative (it relied on authority rather than challenge and consensus).

Matauranga

It seems then that “Maori science” doesn’t qualify as science. What should it be called then? Botanist Murray Parson has suggested the useful word matauranga, one Maori term for knowledge, and one which makes no assumptions about how scientific that knowledge is.

The phrase “Maori science” is problematic in a second sense. Most scientists would agree that the universality of science is one of its strongest features. Science is only accidentally European and, more importantly, can be practised by any culture. So the terms “Pakeha science” or “Western science” do not make sense — either a practice is science or it is not, regardless of the practitioner’s culture.

Maori knowledge or matauranga seems to have concentrated more on getting along in the world than understanding what makes it tick; it has more to do with technology than science. The words science and technology are often used together or interchangeably, but biologist Lewis Wolpert has argued that until quite recently the two areas had very little to do with each other — the technology our ancestors used for hunting, farming and building houses was uninformed by science until the 19th century. So matauranga may not be science, but that is only one of the problems that would assail anyone that tried to defend it as a research method or a curriculum subject.

Demeaning Traditional Knowledge

Calling matauranga a science demeans it. Maori knowledge — a mixture of religion, mythology and observed facts — is sometimes inconsistent and often resorts to an appeal to authority to justify a statement. It has different aims and standards to science. Moreover, to contrast it with “Pakeha” science, which is wider in scope and both more detailed and more accurate in almost every case, will teach Maori children that they are heir to a “science” that is less comprehensive and often simply wrong. Scientific standards are the wrong ones to use when examining matauranga.

Consider the story quoted by early anthropologist Elsdon Best about the pukeko arriving in New Zealand on the Aotea or Horouta canoes. This is a good example of the sort of knowledge claim that might be put forward in a Maori science class. It is also empirically testable. Ornithologists will point out that although pukeko are indeed found though most of the Pacific, New Zealand pukeko belong to the Australian subspecies, not the Pacific. This is consistent with other facts, such as the ancestors of takahe being pukeko which settled here long before humans, and the number of other bird species that have arrived here from across the Tasman. It is not, however, consistent with matauranga.

Such contradictions and anomalies are not rare. If matauranga were to qualify as science, it would have to play by the rules of the game and discard its mythological and religious elements. To many, and I am sure to most Maori, this seems a ludicrous solution, one which would rob matauranga of its coherency and richness.

There is another problem with the concept of Maori science. Although some of its promoters have the laudable aim of making science more accessible to Maori children, setting up an opposition between Maori and Pakeha science will have a different effect. The message conveyed will be that “real” science, with its wide-ranging and powerful explanations, is owned by Pakeha, and that Maori own only a lesser version.

As artist Cliff Whiting has pointed out, this ignores the fact that any race and culture can practice science. Members of historically excluded groups, such as Maori and women, should be encouraged to participate in science, not taught that it is the tool of the dominant culture and that to study it is to sell out.

Why Indigenous Science?

Given that there are so many problems with the notion of indigenous science, why is it being promoted at all?

The seminal publication in this area is a paper by Liz McKinley, Pauline Waiti and Beverley Bell, published in 1992 in the International Journal of Science Education. It advocates studying the culture of Maori students to encourage their achievement in science. The proponents are not cynical and malicious, as the creationist movement in the US has been in its struggle to introduce religion into science classes. They genuinely believe that Maori knowledge is science and should be taught. The problem here is that criticising their solution could be misinterpreted as criticising the very real problem of poor Maori participation in science.

About half the paper offers constructive suggestions for making science relevant to Maori. Again and again, however, the authors slide from this point to actively defending a separate indigenous science. Their use of the term “Maori science” seems to be an attempt to legitimise matauranga in Pakeha eyes, by borrowing the cloak of science to confer some mana. As Mere Roberts, a zoologist studying kiore, has pointed out, this is a little like the situation of some decades ago, where some Maori discarded their language and culture by “trying to be Pakeha”. Why should Maori have to “legitimise” their matauranga by trying to turn it into science?

Maori science is not being talked about only in academic journals. In 1992, the Department of Conservation, in response to the debate generated over the poisoning of kiore, the Polynesian rat, gave a bicultural presentation. Roberts talked about kiore from a scientific point of view, Bradford Haami from that of matauranga (which DoC called tikanga Maori, or Maori custom/protocol). The message was that each of these “techniques” of data-gathering are of equal value when doing research, and that this approach was highly relevant to future policies for science and research.

In 1993, McKinley and Waiti are on contract to the Ministry of Education to translate the NZ Curriculum Science Statement into Maori. An interesting point made in their paper is that some scientific concepts will not be crossing the language barrier; the concepts taught in Maori may not be the same as those taught in English. Their example is that in Maori “wind” would be termed “Tawhirimatea” for the name of the Maori god of wind. They defend the inclusion of religion in a science course by pointing out that concepts of energy taught by a physics and a chemistry teacher also differ, which hardly seems a reasonable analogy even if it is true.

The idea of Maori science seems to make sense at first hearing, partly because of a vernacular but inaccurate definition of science as “a body of knowledge”, and partly because it appeals to the fairness of teachers, who genuinely want different perspectives and to tell both sides of the story. The latter appeal is misleading, and echoes creationist requests for equal time for their story. Presenting two alternative viewpoints is only appropriate if the viewpoints are genuine alternatives; that is, if they are seeking to do the same thing in different ways. Science and matauranga do not seek to do the same thing.

The transitions going on in New Zealand society at the moment mean that discussions of cultural beliefs can become emotionally polarised, with misquotation and misunderstanding running riot. Posturing, name-calling or Maori/Pakeha-“bashing” will not help answer these issues. It is vital that critical and constructive argument can occur instead.

Bruce Ames: Environmental Prophet or Apostate?

What is the link between chemicals and cancer?

Forty years ago, Bruce Ames was a young microbiologist working at NIH in the day and enjoying Scottish country dancing in the evening, when he had an inspiration: to use the rapid growth of bacteria as a method for determining whether a particular chemical was able to cause mutations. If the chemical was positive — i.e., was mutagenic — it might be considered as a possible cause of cancer. This method, soon called “the Ames test”, became widely used. It was cheap, fast, and sensitive. One of the first discoveries was that a dye commonly used in children’s pyjamas had mutagenic properties. Bruce Ames became a hero to the environmental movement when he led a successful campaign to ban such dyes.

Ames was more interested in reducing the death toll from cancer than he was in attacking new chemical technology. As more results from the Ames test accumulated, he realised that many naturally occurring chemicals were also giving positive results. Even more disturbing, the number of chemicals that seemed to be positive in high-dose tests on mice and rats was, he felt, excessive. In an extensive series of important reviews, published in prestigious journals such as Science and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he has attempted a quantitative estimate of the difference in human cancer. Because his figures show manmade chemicals in food and the environment to be quite insignificant compared to natural or self-inflicted factors, the name of Bruce Ames is now anathema to the same environmental movement that once applauded him. Nevertheless many professional scientists believe that Ames’ position is basically correct. If the inventor of the Ames test now says that most methods for detecting carcinogenicity are invalid, it is certainly not a case of sour grapes. This article is an attempt to summarise his beliefs. Those who are sufficiently interested should read some of the papers listed in the bibliography.

(1) What do we know about the incidence of cancer?

First, cancer risk increases according to the 5th power of age. That is, a 40-year-old is 100,000 times more likely to be cancerous than a 20-year-old. There are more cancer cases per 100,000 population simply because we are living longer and no longer dying of infectious diseases.

Second, the age-corrected mortality (death rate) from cancer has been declining since 1950 except in those over 84. Overall decline has been 13%. Naturally much of this decline is caused by improved detection and treatment. The only exceptions are lung and skin cancer, clearly caused by tobacco smoking and by increased exposure to sunlight. There are occasional claims that certain types of cancer are increasing slightly, but improved methods for detection are probably responsible.

Thirdly, some mostly unknown environmental factors have a major influence on the types of cancers that are likely. Japanese, for instance, have a high incidence of stomach cancer, yet Americans and Japanese-Americans have a low incidence. On the other hand, American men have much more likelihood of prostate cancer than do Japanese.

(2) What are the major known causal factors in cancer?

The single most important factor is smoking. This accounts for one-third of all US cancer deaths, not to mention one-fourth of heart disease. Each year, smoking causes 400,000 premature deaths in the US and 3 million deaths around the world.

Chronic infections contribute to about one-third of cancer on a world- wide basis. As mentioned below, any factor that causes body cells to divide increases the likelihood of cancer. Hepatitis B and C infect 500 million people, mainly in Asia and Africa. This liver infection is a major cause of “hepatocellular carcinoma”. Two different Schistosomiasis worms infect Chinese colons and Egyptian bladders, being associated with increased cancer risk in those two organs. Liver flukes cause chronic inflammation of the biliary tract, hence risk of cholangiocarcinoma. A bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, is adapted to living in the human stomach and is now believed to be a major cause of stomach cancer, ulcers and gastritis. (So much for the classical psychogenic explanation for ulcers!)

Overall about 70% of cancers might be caused by environmental factors, but pinpointing the exact causes is very difficult. There remains some 30% that cannot be ascribed to any factor other than age and bad luck.

(3) How does cancer develop?

The first requirement is that a dividing cell suffer some sort of damage to its DNA. (DNA is the basic material of our genes.) DNA damage occurs all the time, but our bodies have excellent repair mechanisms to detect and destroy damaged DNA. Based on the amount of DNA breakdown products in the urine, Ames and co-workers estimate about 10,000 “hits” on DNA every single day in an adult. These repair mechanisms are not 100% perfect, and some damaged DNA does escape.

DNA damage is mostly caused by oxidants. The oxidants in turn arise from both internal and external sources. Internal oxidants come from mitochondria, peroxisomes, cytochrome P450 enzymes, and phagocytic destruction of infected cells. The production of oxidants when infected cells are destroyed may be a factor in the connection between chronic infection and cancer. External sources of oxidants include the nitrogen oxides of tobacco smoke, iron and copper salts, and natural plant phenolics like chlorogenic and caffeic acid.

If oxidants are bad, then antioxidants should be good. They are: antioxidants protect against disease. Natural antioxidants include ascorbic acid (vitamin C) and tocopherol (vitamin E). Synthetic antioxidants are also good. One worker estimated about 5% reduction in cancer because of approved antioxidants added to our food.

The health benefits of antioxidants, provided mostly by fruits and vegetables, are statistically highly significant. The quarter of the US population with the lowest intake of fruits and vegetables has double the cancer rate of the quarter with the highest intake. This applied to “epithelial” cancers (lung, mouth, larynx, oesophagus, stomach, pancreas, cervix, bladder, and colorectal) plus ovarian cancer. Breast and prostate cancer, on the other hand, is less affected by fruit and vegetable diets. (Although there is at least a statistical link between fat/calorie intake and breast cancer.)

Persons taking daily tocopherol or ascorbate had one-third the risk of developing cataracts. In contrast, smoking and radiation (both well known oxidative stresses) are strong risk factors for cataracts. Smoking seems to destroy ascorbate: smokers need to take double or triple amounts of ascorbic acid to achieve the same blood levels as non-smokers. Incidentally, smoking by the father seems to affect sperm production and health; smoking fathers increase the risk of birth defects and childhood cancer in their offspring.

Excess food, at least in rats, is “the most striking rodent carcinogen ever discovered”. Even a 20% increase in calories over the optimal results in shorter life, with more endocrine and mammary tumours.

Excessive cell proliferation (cell division) is a very important factor in cancer production. This has been mentioned above in relation to chronic infection. Major dietary factors, such as salty pickles in the Japanese diet, have been hypothesised to be involved in the high rates of stomach cancer in this population. Even table salt, at high enough concentrations, can cause stomach cancer.

That cell proliferation predisposes to cancer is a major source of false positives in chemical screening as normally carried out. Test chemicals are repeatedly applied to animals at the “MTD” (maximum tolerated dosage). This is like chronic wounding, “which is known to be both a promoter of carcinogenesis in animals and a risk factor for cancer in humans”. Many chemicals that purportedly have caused cancer at high dose (MTD) levels, may therefore not be true carcinogens. The infamous saccharine tests are a case in point: only female mice dosed with nearly toxic levels of saccharine showed an increase in bladder tumours.

For these chemicals that “cause cancer” at high doses only by tissue irritation, a tenfold reduction of dose in a rat or mouse experiment would show much more than a tenfold reduction in risk. This seems to have been confirmed. One analysis of 52 tests showed that two-thirds of the purportedly positive results for carcinogenicity would not have been found if the dosage had been cut even by one-half! (I suspect that commercial cancer-screening laboratories get new contracts in direct relationship to how many “successes” they have had previously.)

(4) How do synthetic and natural chemicals line up as causes of cancer?

The conventional cancer-screening techniques are, as stated above, too sensitive. There are not merely a few chemicals that show up as carcinogenic. Instead, nearly one-half of all chemicals tested seem to be positive in these tests. The ratio is the same for both natural and manmade chemicals, even though very few natural chemicals have been tested. Thus we cannot generalise that natural chemicals are inherently safer or riskier than synthetic chemicals. We must look instead at the quantities of chemicals ingested.

Plants contain surprisingly large quantities of natural pesticides. One of Ames’ greatest achievements, in my opinion, has been to compile convincing evidence about how many natural chemicals have pesticidal functions. (In my youth, the question of the function of different “secondary” plant products was much debated. Some thought that products like alkaloids and lectins were mere accidents of metabolism, a plant process gone wild. I personally thought that the main role of these chemicals was to provide research material for young biochemists.) Ames pointed out that up to 5% of the fresh weight of vegetables can be natural pesticides.

The list is very long, and a sample limited just to non-toxic plants would include: the sharp flavours of mustard and other cabbage-family crops; piperine (10% of weight of black pepper); light-sensitising psoralens in parsnip and celery; chlorogenic and caffeic acid in coffee beans; nerve-poisoning alkaloids in potatoes, tomatoes and eggplants. The cat-attracting chemicals in catnip are actually very good insect repellents. The vast majority of plants are inedible by us. Even so we are at risk of poisoning if cattle or sheep graze on them. Abraham Lincoln’s mother died when she drank milk of cows that had grazed on snakeroot. A California infant was born deformed when fed milk from a goat that had been eating lupin. The concept that “natural is harmless” is simply false.

Ames has published numerous estimates of the amounts of natural pesticides that we eat every day. He calculates that we eat about 10,000 times more natural pesticides than synthetic pesticides. More usefully, he and his coworkers have attempted to estimate the relationship between the amounts of different chemicals we are exposed to, and their potency as carcinogens. After all, it is the dosage that makes the poison, to coin a phrase. Some of his calculations are shown in Table 1, rewritten from Ames et al., 1987. The last column (HERP%) is a relative risk. A 5% HERP doesn’t mean a 5% risk of cancer!

Material Carcinogen, dose to 70kg person Rodent Potency Risk (HERP%)
Tap Water Chloroform, 85 ug 90 0.001*
Contaminated Well water Trichloroethylene, 2800 ug 940 0.004
Home air Formaldehyde, 598 ug 1.5-44 0.6
PCB’s, daily PCB’s 0.2 ug (US average) 1.7-9.6 0.0002*
DDT/DDE, daily DDE, 2.2 ug (US average) 13 0.0003*
Bacon, cooked Nitrosamines, 0.4 ug 0.2 0.003-.006
Peanut butter Aflatoxin, 64 ng/sandwich 0.003 0.03
Brown mustard Allyl isothiocyanate, 5 mg 96 0.07
Mushroom, 1 raw Hydrazines 20-300 0.1
Beer, 350 ml Ethyl alcohol, 18 ml 9110 2.8*
Wine, 250 ml Ethyl alcohol, 30 ml 9110 4.7*
Comfrey-pepsin tablets, 9/day Comfrey root 626 6.2
Diet Cola, 350 ml Saccharin, 95 mg 2143 0.06*
Phenacetin pill Phenacetin, 300 mg 1246-2137 0.3**
Phenobarbital, 1 sleeping pill Phenobaribital, 60 mg 5.5 16***
Formaldehyde, industrial Formaldehyde, 6.1 mg 1.5-44 5.8
EDB, industrial exposure Ethylene dibromide, 150 mg 1.5-5.1 140

Table 1: Calculated risk factors for common chemicals.
* Material not believed to be gene-damaging; that is, acting as a carcinogen only by irritation or damage at high concentrations.
** Some evidence for increased kidney (renal) cancer after long-term use.
*** Apparently no cancer risk to people taking it for decades.

How then do these theoretical risks relate to the “real world”? A few links can be found. There have been perhaps dozens of cases of liver damage from comfrey-pepsin tablets, although this has been as “hepato-occlusive disease” rather than cancer. These comfrey-pepsin tablets have a risk factor (HERP%) of about six.

Although alcohol is a low-potency carcinogen, large quantities are consumed by some people. Alcoholics have significantly increased risk of cancer in the mouth and throat. Thus HERP’s around five seem to be genuine risks. On the other hand, the HERP value of 16 for one phenobarbital sleeping pill is apparently not connected with any risk of cancer. (Note that phenobarbital is one of the numerous so-called carcinogens that shows up as positive only at tissue-irritating concentrations.)

One interesting point is that TCDD (the dreaded “dioxin” of milk cartons and teabags) is known to cause most of its effects by reacting with an animal component called “Ah receptor”. There are chemicals in broccoli, mainly indole-carbinol, that also react with the Ah receptor. Both chemicals can protect against cancer if administered before challenge with a carcinogen. Both chemicals can promote cancer if administered after the carcinogen has already acted.

Taking potency into account, a 100 g portion of broccoli has 20,000 times more effect on the Ah receptor than a legally allowable TCDD intake of six femtograms/kg/day. (Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that experiments in which rats given a carcinogen were protected by including broccoli or cabbage in their diet. There is evidence that humans too are protected by these vegetables: People who are high-crucifer eaters are significantly less likely to wind up in cancer wards.)

(5) How pesticide regulations and chemical scares diminish public health.

Diet is one of the key routes to better health. Only 9% of the US population eats sufficient fruit and vegetables, higher consumption of these would decrease cancer as well as other diseases. There is plenty of margin to increase fruit and vegetable eating.

To discourage consumption of vegetables and fruits is to diminish public health. Excessively strict limits on harmless levels of synthetic pesticides act to increase vegetable and fruit prices, by reducing production and by increasing cost of production. Thus these regulatory restrictions may well be harming health rather than helping it.

Similar comments could be made about the attacks on Alar a few years ago, when apples disappeared from the lunchboxes of many children.

This then is one reason why Bruce Ames is hated by many “environmentalist” groups. He has shown that they are, in all likelihood, damaging public health under the guise of protecting it against non-existent or unimportant risks.

Acknowledgement:

This review was inspired by an article by Dr Arthur B Robinson in Access to Energy, April 1994.

References

B.N. Ames. 1983. Dietary carcinogens and anticarcinogens. Science 221: 1256-1262.

B.N. Ames, R. Magaw, and L.S. Gold. 1987. Ranking possible carcinogenic hazards. Science 236: 271-280.

B.N. Ames and L.S. Gold. 1990. Environmental pollution and cancer: some misconceptions. In: Science and the Law (Ed. Peter Huber).

B.N. Ames and L.S. Gold. 1990. Too many rodent carcinogens: mitogenesis increases mutagenesis. PNAS 87: 7772-7776.

B.N. Ames, M. Profet and L.S. Gold. 1990. Dietary pesticides (99.99% all natural), mitogenesis, mutagenesis, and carcinogenesis. PNAS 87: 7777-7781.

B.N. Ames, M. Profet and L.S. Gold. 1990. Nature’s chemicals and synthetic chemicals: comparative toxicology. PNAS 87: 7782-7786.

B.N. Ames, M.K. Shigenaga and T.M. Hagen. 1993. Oxidants, antioxidants, and the degenerative diseases of aging. PNAS 90: 7915-7922.

B.N. Ames. n.d. Does current cancer risk assessment harm health? Published by The George C Marshall Institute, 1730 M Street, N. W., Suite 502, Washington, D. C. 20036-4505. ($US 5.00) [Not seen by me yet — JDM]

Multiple Personality Disorder

What can events 100 years ago tell us about a modern disorder?

Students often ask me whether multiple personality disorder (MPD) really exists. I usually reply that the symptoms attributed to it are as genuine as hysterical paralysis and seizures, and teach us lessons already learned by psychiatrists more than a hundred years ago.

Consider the dramatic events that occurred at the Salpêtriére Hospital in Paris in the 1880s. For a time, the chief physician, Jean-Martin Charcot, thought he had discovered a new disease he called “hystero-epilepsy”, a disorder of mind and brain combining features of hysteria and epilepsy. The patients displayed a variety of symptoms, including convulsions, contortions, fainting and transient impairment of consciousness.

A skeptical student, Joseph Babinski, decided that Charcot had invented rather than discovered hystero-epilepsy. The patients had come to the hospital with vague complaints of distress and demoralisation. Charcot had persuaded them that they were victims of hystero-epilepsy and should join the others under his care. Charcot’s interest in their problems, the encouragement of attendants, and the example of others on the same ward prompted patients to accept Charcot’s view of them and eventually to display the expected symptoms. These symptoms resembled epilepsy, Babinski believed, because of a municipal decision to house epileptic and hysterical patients together (both having “episodic” conditions). The hysterical patients, already vulnerable to suggestion and persuasion, were continually subjected to life in the ward and to Charcot’s neuropsychiatric examinations. They began to imitate the epileptic attacks they repeatedly witnessed.

Babinski Vindicated

Babinski eventually won the argument. In fact, he persuaded Charcot that doctors can induce a variety of physical and mental disorders, especially in young, inexperienced, emotionally troubled women. There was no “hystero-epilepsy”. These patients were afflicted not by a disease but by an idea. With this understanding, Charcot and Babinski devised a two-stage treatment consisting of isolation and counter-suggestion.

First, “hystero-epileptic” patients were transferred to the general wards of the hospital and kept apart from one another. Thus they were separated from everyone else who was behaving in the same way and also from staff members who had been induced by sympathy or investigatory zeal to show great interest in the symptoms. The success of this first step was remarkable. Babinski and Charcot were reminded of the rare but impressive epidemic of fainting, convulsions, and wild screaming in convents and boarding schools that ended when the group of afflicted persons was broken up and scattered.

The second step, counter-suggestion, was designed to give the patients a view of themselves that would persuade them to abandon their symptoms. Dramatic counter-suggestions, such as electrical stimulation of “paralyzed” muscles, proved to be unreliable. The most effective technique was simply ignoring the hysterical behaviour and concentrating on the present circumstances of these patients.

They were suffering from many forms of stress, including sexual feelings and traumas, economic fears, religious conflicts, and a conviction (perhaps correct) that they were being exploited or neglected by their families. In some cases their distress had been provoked by a mental or physical illness. The hysterical symptoms obscured the underlying emotional conflicts and traumas. How trivial a sexual fear seemed to a patient in whom convulsive attacks produced paralysis and temporary blindness every day!

Staff members expressed their withdrawal of interest in hysterical behaviour subtly, in such words as, “You’re in recovery now and we will give you some physiotherapy, but let us concentrate on the home situation that may have brought this on”.

These face-saving counter-suggestions reduced a patient’s need to go on producing hystero-epileptic symptoms in order to certify that her problems were real. The symptoms then gradually withered from lack of nourishing attention. Patients began to take a more coherent and disciplined approach to their problems and found a resolution more appropriate than hysterical displays.

The rules discovered by Babinski and Charcot, now embedded in psychiatric textbooks and confirmed by decades of research in social psychology, are being overlooked in the midst of a nationwide epidemic of alleged MPD that is wreaking havoc on both patients and therapists. MPD is an iatrogenic behavioural syndrome, promoted by suggestion, social consequences, and group loyalties. It rests on ideas about the self that obscure reality, and it responds to standard treatments.

To begin with the first point, MPD, like hystero-epilepsy, is created by therapists. This formerly rare and disputed diagnosis became popular after the appearance of several best-selling books and movies. It is often based on the crudest form of suggestion. Here, for example, is some advice on how to elicit alternative personalities (alters, as they have come to be called), from an introduction to MPD by Stephen E. Buie, MD, who is director of the Dissociative Disorders Treatment Program at a North Carolina hospital:

It may happen that an alter personality will reveal itself to you during this [assessment] process, but more likely it will not. So you may have to elicit an alter… You can begin by indirect [sic] questioning such as, “Have you ever felt like another part of you does things that you can’t control?” If she gives positive or ambiguous responses, ask for specific examples. You are trying to develop a picture of what the alter personality is like… At this point you may ask the host personality, `”Does this set of feelings have a name?”… Often the host personality will not know. You can then focus upon a particular event or set of behaviours. “Can I talk to the part of you that is taking those long drives in the country?”

Once patients have permitted a psychiatrist to “talk to the part…that is taking these long drives”, they are committed to the idea that they have MPD and must act in ways consistent with this self-image. The patient may be placed on a hospital service (often called the dissociative service) with others who have given the same compliant responses. The emergence of the first alter breaches the barrier of reality, and fantasy is allowed free rein. The patient and staff now begin a search for further alters surrounding the so-called host personality. The original two or three personalities proliferate into 90 or 100. A lore evolves. At least one alter must be of the opposite sex (Patricia may have Penny but also must have Patrick). Sometimes it is even suggested that one alter is an animal. A dog, cat, or cow must be found and made to speak! Individual alters are followed in special notes for the hospital record. Every time an alter emerges, the hospital staff shows great interest.

The search for fresh symptoms sustains the original commitment while cultivating and embellishing the suggestion. It becomes harder and harder for a patient to say to the psychiatrist or to anyone else, “Oh, let’s stop this. It’s just me taking those long drives in the country.”

The cause of MPD is supposed to be childhood sexual trauma so horrible that it has to be split off (dissociated) from the host consciousness and lodged in the alters. Patient and therapist begin a search for alters who remember the trauma and can identify the abusers. Thus commitment to the diagnosis of MPD is enhanced by the sense that a crime is being exposed and justice is being done. The patient now has such a powerful vested interest in sustaining the MPD enterprise that it almost becomes an end in itself.

Certainly these patients, like Charcot’s, have many emotional conflicts and have often suffered traumatic experiences. But everyone is distracted from the patient’s main problems by a preoccupation with dramatic symptoms, and perhaps by a commitment to a single kind of psychological trauma. Furthermore, given that treatment may become interminable when therapists concentrate on fascinating symptoms, it is no wonder that MPD is regarded as a chronic disorder that often requires long stretches of time on dissociative units.

Charcot removed his patients from the special wards when he realised what he had been inventing. We can do the same. Close the dissociation services and disperse the patients to general psychiatric units. Ignore the alters. Stop talking to them, taking notes on them, and discussing them in staff conferences. Pay attention to real present problems and conflicts rather than fantasy. If these simple, familiar rules are followed, multiple personalities will soon wither away and psychotherapy can begin.

What Does Quantum Mechanics Show Us?

Attempts to interpret the results of quantum mechanics in ways people can understand can themselves lead to confusion.

Some physicists and philosophers conspire to waste intellectual resources on pseudoproblems with no empirical consequence — notoriously, quantum interpretations. In the process, it is perhaps not surprising that some more ancient conceptual cul-de-sacs put in an appearance.

Some of the words that get thrown around often are “determinism”, “causality”, “reality” and so forth. Some pictures, like Bohmian hidden variable interpretations, are best seen as attempts to preserve the viability of certain labels, though empirically the whole enterprise remains vacuous. However, since interpretations are useful only as conceptual tools if at all, certain conceptual perversities introduced can be grounds for criticism of an interpretation beyond its inconsequentiality.

Bohmian pictures typically preserve a classical-like sense of reality, universality of causation (there are no fundamentally uncaused events), and, provided standard quantum mechanics is retained, determinism. Note, however, that these terms refer to nothing of any possible empirical consequence, and are but descriptive of a particular language used to describe the physical content. The conceptual perversity enters in confusing idiosyncratic features of descriptive language with information content.

To illustrate, let us go back to some venerable theology (actually quite an apt comparison for some pathologies of theoretical physics). One of the classical “proofs” of God invokes the notion that everything must have a cause. This would appear to be a perfectly good generalization from our experience, and we would of course like to extend this to a universal statement instead of having unseemly exceptions to the picture. Even if all in the universe is in a causal chain, it as a whole cannot be explained by causes internal to it.

So, instead of leaving the totality of everything uncaused, we declare it to have an external cause, and equate this to God. To terminate the potentially infinite causal series there, we call on the total self-sufficiency or self-causedness of God. This is basically the classical cosmological argument. There are many reasons for its failure, one being that no coherent self-sufficient God-concept can be found.

Is “God” Useful?

But let us ignore such problems for a second, and ask if any information is being conveyed by the God explanation for “it all”. The answer is none: the whole argument is driven by the principle that everything must have a cause, and “God” merely serves as an empty label to provide us with a cause, within this argument. Instead of inventing spurious entities to save principles, it is better to acknowledge the notion of uncausedness. It is intimately related to patternlessness, i.e., randomness, and it is inescapable. The cosmological argument merely points to a deficiency in our conceptual equipment.

It is not only theology that ties itself into knots over causes, but philosophy as well. Interpretations of quantum mechanics that have no empirical consequence whatsoever, but restore the notion of full causality by invoking permanently hidden variables and non-communicative superluminality, similarly convey no information while preserving the universality of causation.

The necessity of causation is a conceptual deficit that has been embodied in theology, which has regularly offered pseudo-explanations for cases where no pattern existed. Randomness is one of our psychological blind spots, in areas having little to do with religion as well; even a so-called “hard” science has its troubles with it (not only in QM, but in statistical mechanics also).

It is in this sense that interpretations can be pernicious, beyond being a waste of time. Taking them seriously as anything but inessential conceptual tools dictated by convenience leads to the pretense that predictions of consequence can be obtained from them.

Consciousness or holistic connectivity can be invoked in consequence-free ways, but it is regularly stretched to the point where one can pretend that empirically relevant forms of these words naturally have a place in the physics. They do not, unless some very important modifications are made in quantum mechanics. It will not do to propose revolutionary ideas merely by resorting to information-free, obfuscatory philosophizing.

In his Minority Report (1956), H.L. Mencken summed it up well:

“Astronomers and physicists, dealing habitually with objects and quantities far beyond the reach of the senses, even with the aid of the most powerful aids that ingenuity has been able to devise, tend almost inevitably to fall into the ways of thinking of men dealing with objects and quantities that do not exist at all, e.g., theologians and metaphysicians … of all men of science, they are the most given to flirting with theology.”