A new golden age?

His name is Gold, he describes himself as a post- goth Discordian web developer, and one day soon he hopes to be homeless. He’ s also the new chair entity of NZ Skeptics. Annette Taylor finds out more.

The phone is not the instrument of choice for Gold. The 39-year-old suggests Skype, although his webcam is not working; it’s been a hectic few days in Christchurch, in the aftermath of the earthquake.

Flatting – temporarily- in Richmond, 2km north-east of the city, a chimney collapsed and things were “up and down and all over the place. We spent a day or so picking stuff up; otherwise it wasn’ t too bad.”

While we’re talking he pauses and waits for an aftershock to pass. Eris, the Greek Goddess of chaos, is having a grand old time.

“When anything goes wrong, when things don’t got to plan, that’s Eris,” Gold says.

He discovered Discordianism while at Canterbury University and says it’ s all about chaos and destruction and a sense of humour.

“We worship Eris and have a Bible equivalent and tenets we follow, such as that one must eat a hot dog on a Friday, which insults almost every religion you can think of, including our own. It’s a joke religion, which is one of the things that completely sold me on it. It’ s a fun thing, and nice to have someone to blame when things go wrong.”

And “post-goth”?

“I used to be a goth. You know – black clothing, the make-up, piercings, tattoos, the great music. It was a phase, so now I refer to myself as post-goth. I’ ve kept the dress sense; the piercings are not quite as obvious anymore. The tats are a little harder to get rid of. I still have the attitude, which is what it was all about, really. And the music is still great.”

Apart from five years in Australia, Gold has lived in New Zealand all his life, much of it in Canterbury. And for most of that time, he has been a sceptic.

Currently an atheist, he didn’ t have a religious background of any sort. “And it wasn’t until early 2000 that I sort of came across skepticism as a movement, or way of thinking. Up until then I was one of those people who didn’t really know there was a label for it.”

He was living in Sydney at the time, and a close friend was a full-on, practising witch.

“While it was kind of cool, I thought that yeah, no, this may be interesting, but it’s not real. It just didn’t gel.”

What galvanised his thinking more were skeptical podcasts and blogs, which he started to “passively consume” while overseas.

He returned to New Zealand in 2005, and headed straight back to Christchurch where he now works developing websites. And, last year, started the first Skeptics in the Pub meetings. “I came across this while in Sydney. It an idea that started in the UK, about 11 years ago, as a lecture series. Afterwards, people wanted more of them, so they continued. It became a very social thing and started to spread across the UK, into the US and Australia.”

But not in New Zealand. “I was working in the central city, away from my previous social group, and thought bugger it, I’d give it a go. I paid some money and set up the first meeting, at the Twisted Hop. We got about 35 people along and it’ s kept going since then. It’s a nice way to get together with like-minded people and have a drink.”

Now there are meetings in Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin as well, but he would like to see more.

Which is a good reason to be intentionally without a home.

“One of the things about the job I’m doing is that all I need is a laptop and net access. I can work anywhere. I can travel around, and pop up somewhere. My plan is to stay in backpackers, and maybe build them a website instead of paying for a room. So, I can be a roving catalyst for getting Skeptics in the Pub meetings set up all over the country.”

He was aware of the NZ Skeptics when he arrived back in New Zealand. “Yes, I’d come across the website, and I knew Vicki. I joined, but it didn’t seem terribly active in a social sense.”

Skeptics in the Pub and the NZ Skeptics will continue to remain separate from each other. “Obviously they have similar agendas, but they serve different purposes. In the pub you have a place where you can say whatever you want, about anything and not worry about libel. The society has assets that can be taken off it, so has to be more cautious.”

As chair-entity, there are a few areas he wants to focus on, and one revolves around, little surprise, computers.

He’d like to work on the members area of the current website, so details can be added.

“Take the case of homeopathy, one of my pet peeves. Someone might find a paper touting the latest proof for it. We can put a link to that paper up, but at the same time we can add other sites that might have done research debunking it. And members can list if they have any special interests or skills on a subject, so they may be a medical doctor, or a lawyer, and have something to add. They can also flag if they are active or passive skeptics, whether they want to be involved in particular issues.”

One issue he would like the society to focus on this year is ACC’s priorities. “As everyone knows, they’re looking at making various cutbacks but on, I think, the wrong things. They still subsidise acupuncture, but are cutting back on hearing aids for elderly people. It’s something the society could have rather a large impact on, if we can get it done right.”

He’d also like to see more use made of social microblogging tools like Twitter.

“Recently I was involved with the Australian Skeptics’ campaign with the Australian Vaccination Network, who should really be called the anti-vaccination network. They’re getting a real hammering over there. By using Twitter, a whole bunch of us were able to join in, in real time, and make a difference. It’s powerful crowd-sourcing stuff.”

Similarly, the homeopathic overdose utilised the net to good advantage. “This was started by the Merseyside Skeptics, in the UK, and it pretty much went around the world. We got to kick it off, in Christchurch, because of the time zones. And that led to the NZ Council of Homeopaths admitting on national TV that there is no active ingredient in their so-called medicines. But that campaign was run online as well.”

He acknowledges Vicki’s rat-like cunning. “She’s a clever one, no doubt. I found out recently she spent some time grooming me for this role.”

There is another connection between the two. Vicki started KAOS, Killing As an Organised Sport (in which participants are given contracts to assassinate one another with toy guns), while at university in the 1980s. “Then she picked up the chair role. I was Dictator of Kaos at Canterbury University in 1996. Now I’ve picked up the chair.”

Coincidence? He thinks so. “But it’s very cool. And maybe it means I have the right qualifications for the job.”

As to the name Gold, there’s a story there which he’s happy to talk about, but he tends to save it for face-to-face.

So, if he pops up at a pub in your town go and have a yarn with the new incarnation of the Skeptics’ chair-entity. It’s bound to be illuminating.

Forum

Global Warming — Where Should Skeptics Stand?

Although I have been receiving free email alerts for a long time, I am a (very) new member. Among the goodies which I received a couple of days ago was the Spring, 2003 newsletter, number 69. Obviously, free speech is the first requisite of such an organ, but I was rather taken aback by contribution in Forum from Lance Kennedy of Tantec, an organisation in the biocide industry, on the subject of global warming. Its content is highly selective, and it contravenes all the principles outlined in the Skeptics Guide to Critical Thinking. He writes of a “sound and healthy reluctance to subscribe to anthropogenic greenhouse… warming”. He says that the Scientific American is committed to “greenie (a pejorative term which has no place in a serious discussion) nonsense”.

He believes that criticism of Bjorn Lomborg, author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” comes into this category. Perhaps it is time to look more carefully at Lomborg. Until recently, this very personable young man held a rather lowly position on the staff of the political “science” department at Aarhus University, Denmark, and since his book was published, he has become the archpriest of the multi-billion dollar greenwashing industry. Although the greenwashers’ hype portrays him as a “brilliant statistician”, the Statistics Department of his own university has publicly disowned (on the university website) his methods as flawed and unacceptable. He writes of many disciplines, but he has never published a peer-reviewed paper in any of them. In every discipline, his methods, data, and conclusions have been roundly repudiated by a large majority of the scientific establishment of that discipline. Who then is right? — a lonely Don Quixote, tilting at imaginary windmills, or the scientific establishment?

Kennedy deals with three issues; these are:

  1. “Glacial extensions of the polar icecap on Mars are now in retreat. Peninsulas and islands of ice disappearing”. This he naively takes as evidence that solar output must be increasing. However, this is in fact evidence of precisely the opposite! Atmospheric cooling on Mars locks water vapour up as ice in the icecaps, and causes the lower latitude extensions to disappear rapidly. Own goal!
  2. “Meteorologists are adopting a new stance… many want to move away from ‘anthropogenicity’ and accept that warming happens.” This rather vague statement falls into the category of a paper tiger or, as the “Skeptics Guide to Creation “Science” puts it, a straw man. I am not aware that meteorologists “want” to believe in anthropogenic warming. It is put forward as the most probable explanation of the observed facts. Indeed, most would be delighted to be proved wrong. This is where real science differs from junk science. Greenwashers “know” they are right; scientists try to preserve open minds. Another example of naivety is to suggest that meteorologists have a vested interest in “preserving the myth”, for fear of losing their research grants. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are a thousand reasons for wishing to learn more about our climate and global warming research is a by-product rather than the primary object. If all such research were to cease immediately, it would make little or no difference to climate research as a whole. What meteorologists and others recommend is the exercise of prudence in the light of current theory. This is opposed both by greenwashers and by many in the pseudoscience of economics as advocated by those of the Friedman school, in whose eyes “sustainable development” is never an oxymoron.
  3. He refers to a paper on the influence of cosmic rays on the atmosphere, though not to the original paper by Fangqun Yu of the State University of New York. It was put forward as a mere hypothesis at this stage, and if subsequent work provides confirmation it will be a useful explanation for the anomalous discrepancy between surface temperatures and those in the atmosphere just above, which will be welcomed by all meteorologists. Kennedy doesn’t mention that Yu also suggests that interaction between greenhouse gases and the ionisation caused by cosmic rays may also be a contributing factor to greenhouse warming. Yu also points out that his hypothesis does not in any way rule out anthropogenic contributions to gobal warming.

Alan P Ryan, Retired meteorologist

Global Warming

In contrast to Lance Kennedy (Forum 69), I regret the failure of The Skeptics to recognise the reality of anthropogenic climate change.

The basics are undeniable:

  • Atmospheric carbon dioxide warms the atmosphere by blocking outgoing radiation.
  • Anthropogenic emissions of CO2 have been growing for two centuries, and especially in the last half century. Atmospheric CO2 is now a third higher than pre-industrial levels.
  • Radiation from the earth into space has been measured directly. A comparison of data for 1990 and 1997 showed the expected fall, with the largest reductions at the predicted wavelengths.

Beyond the basics, climate change is hellishly complex and far from fully understood, but enough is known to show a clear anthropogenic effect. The UN’s IPCC have taken a consensus overview of the work being done in a very wide range of fields. Their third assessment report, issued just three years ago, estimated that average temperatures would rise another 1.4-5.8°C between 1990 and 2100. That range looks very uncertain, but about half the uncertainty is in the human response: we can still limit the maximum rise to around 2.5°C if we get our act together. However, global warming will continue for centuries, no matter how quickly we reduce emissions.

Problems with CO2 and temperature are be expected, and the details will be debated and cross-checked for many years to come. However, the data is already good enough to identify minor effects. One such effect was a mysterious warming and cooling over a 1000 year cycle, traceable over 10,000 years. It turned out to be the moon, changing its orbit and hence the strength of the tides and the extent of vertical mixing of the ocean. Higher tides create more mixing, bring up more cold water and cool the atmosphere.

Of course, it is possible that new evidence will show that global warming will soon go away — good science has to be falsifiable. But the evidence produced by Kennedy is not it, and the precautionary principle tells us not to put our shirts on him. There is now enough evidence to allow a great deal of cross-checking: the Greenland ice cores tell the same story as the Atlantic silt cores; the effects of varying solar radiation and changes in the earth’s and moon’s orbits have been factored in; the cooling caused by the Mt Pinatubo eruption improved understanding of some minor effects; and so on. And on.

With so much evidence already gathered, it is not enough for the global warming contrarians to point to isolated studies; that is like pointing to a back eddy as evidence that the stream is flowing uphill. If there is a serious case against global warming let us hear it — but it will need to be good.

Kerry Wood, Wanganui

Science and Morality

Bruce Taylor is a high priest of the anti-human, anti-science, anti-Darwinist religion of Environmentalism. He has no use for science unless it can be used to support his dogmatic opinions and the “policies” based on them.

On the other hand he is much more tolerant of religion, myth, prejudice, suspicion, custom, fantasy, and old wives’ tales.

Alan Hart is quite wrong to claim that “science doesn’t necessarily say anything about moral values”. Moral values, which may be defined as the rules which govern societies, are essential for evolutionary survival and progress of every society.

Most societies possess rigidly tyrannical “moral values” .We are, each of us, a society composed of genetically and chemically controlled specialised cells, each derived from a single embryo, only one kind of which participates in reproduction. Any dissident cell becomes a cancer and causes death of the whole organism.

Ants, bees, and termites, are also genetically and chemically controlled fascist dictatorships, and their evolutionary success depends on it. Most animal societies such as monkeys and seals have equally ruthless “moral values”.

Early human societies had similar “moral values” to monkeys, and some, such as approval of murder, rape and slavery, survive today in primitive tribes. “Moral values” of human societies have included wholesale genocide, the burning of heretics and witches, slavery and cannibalism. Torture and slavery are common today, and even genocide is a “moral value” recently practised in several societies.

Progress of human society depends on an improved emphasis on human moral values and a priority for human rights, a reduction of war, violence, hunger, disease, prejudice, suspicion and irrationalism, and a continued advance of science and technology.

Environmentalism is opposed to human “moral values” because it

  • Regards animals and other organisms as more important than humans.
  • Considers evolution to be always harmful, exclusively caused by humans, and capable of being prevented.
  • Fundamentally opposes modern technology, such as genetic engineering and nuclear energy.
  • Regards science only as a support mechanism for these views.

Our society cannot progress unless we can restore genuine human moral values.

Vincent Gray, Wellington

Socialism and Starvation

So, I again find myself in an argument with Jim Ring. I think I preferred it when we were all united against the purveyors of quack medicines and fundamentalist religions.

Jim Ring rightly claims that few people have read the literature on famine. I’m not surprised, it is vast. But I can quote 33 peer reviewed works on the subject, ranging from some by a Nobel laureate economist, to Cambridge historians. When I did a quick Google on those sources that Ring provided for his evidence I found for one no match, and for the other an ideologically driven American so-called think tank. I must admit that I have read nothing of this type of literature, but then neither do I read the stuff by UFO “researchers”.

Ring is right about one thing, his original letter confused me. If the Oxus Research foundation, whoever they are, suggest you can use the words socialism and starvation without further clarification, they are wrong. It is necessary to know what is meant by socialism because definitions depend more on one’s own position on the political spectrum than any objective criteria. I also think it’s necessary to know what Ring meant by people starved under socialism, because by itself it’s a meaningless statement which requires the qualification that people have also starved under capitalism, feudalism and any other -ism you care to name. Although to be honest I could probably make out quite a good case for no famines in Germany under Nazism — does this make them good?

Famine, or starvation if Ring insists on the word, occurs for any number of reasons rather than simple socialism — or capitalism for that matter. Again Ring has jumped into an area where he is out of his depth, to make a political point. For every famine he can quote me under a Socialist government I can quote him at least one under a capitalist regime. The Indian state with the highest literacy rate and life expectancy has been run by socialists in various coalitions for years. Ring is oversimplifying to make a political point.

Ring also makes generalisations about the anti-globalisation movement. As far as I can see they are not some sort of monolithic anti-capitalist group but consist of a number of quite disparate groupings including trade unions in developed countries who resent exporting jobs, and farmers’ groups in underdeveloped countries who quite like globalisation but resent the fact that the developed countries such as the United States and the European Union don’t apply it to themselves.

I also think that Ring has misunderstood the term green revolution. Perhaps he is confusing it with more recent genetic modification of crops. I can’t see why the green revolution, which largely consisted of improvements in irrigation, fertilization and the development of new strains of rice, should be against socialist principles. For one thing some of the new strains of rice were developed in government laboratories in India under so-called socialist governments. And if the idea was against socialist principles why did Stalin spend so long trying to create a green revolution of his own? In fact many of the new strains of rice were rejected by the very people they were meant to benefit, because they require large amounts of fertiliser and extra water which they could not afford. The earlier strains also tasted bad and were therefore rejected by the market.

I stand by my statement that Ring provides little other than glib generalisations and inaccurate case studies. One thing I have found by reading articles from the new right is that they tend to leave out economic case studies that don’t fit the ideological bent. I think Ring does the same. However I will make this offer — I don’t think that the pages of the New Zealand Skeptic the correct forum for publishing political tracts, so if he gives up writing them I’ll give up criticising them.

Bob Metcalfe

Yes, enough politics already! This correspondence is now closed -ed.

Kinesiology

Dr. Welch’s Hokum Locum column in NZ Skeptic 69 contains the words “pseudoscience known as kinesiology”. This is incorrect. Kinesiology is a respected, science-based, study of human movement dynamics. Several universities offer degrees in this field — eg University of Waterloo, in Canada. See http://www.ahs.uwaterloo.ca/admissions/whykin.html. Perhaps Dr. Welch is thinking of “Applied Kinesiology” which is indeed crackpot stuff.

Vaso Bovan, P.E., Canada

A Close-Run Thing

The Eugenics movement in New Zealand had legislative successes greater than anywhere in the world outside the USA and Nazi Germany

Eugenics was a phenomenon that lasted for less than a hundred years, although for some it still exists as a rational stand to take on the population problem, if not as a scientific theory. Of course advances in genetics have reintroduced the idea that we can by our own scientific efforts improve the human race. It was a theory that engaged not only some of the finest scientific, but also the finest philosophical and ethical minds of the day. It was a scientific theory that was brought to a halt less by scientific inquiry than by the moral revulsion produced by the excesses of Nazi Germany. Eugenics is interesting partly at least because New Zealand went further than anywhere else except for Germany and the US in the application of practical Eugenics in certain areas of legislation.

Francis Galton (1822-1911) began an investigation in the 1860s into the inheritance of genius, which was to have profound effects on the way people viewed the poor and the handicapped for almost 100 years. His ideas incorporated those of his cousin Charles Darwin and others who were worried that evolution might be reversed, and the human race become “degenerate” if those regarded as of little worth were allowed to breed unchecked, and the middle classes restricted the size of their families. Galton had some funny ideas about what might be inherited genetically from one’s forebears. Love of the sea for instance, as he noticed that the sons of ships’ captains often followed their fathers to sea. Galton was joined in his research and beliefs by several famous researchers including Karl Pearson, regarded by some as the founder of modern statistics.

Eugenics remained a concern mainly of a few biologists and statisticians until the first decade of the 20th century when it became very popular with certain sections of the public in particularly Europe and the US, although it did spread almost throughout the world. In Britain the popular movement was begun by Sybil Gotto, a recent widow. Many wellknown people either joined or supported the society. Cyril Burt, Havelock Ellis, Julian Huxley, John Maynard Keynes, George Bernard Shaw, all supported eugenics. Winston Churchill represented Britain at the second international congress in 1912. His views on the subject were considered so embarrassing to the government that they were suppressed until 1991. The reasons for the popularity of eugenics are complex but can probably be ascribed to perceived social problems affecting the latter half of the 19th century and the relatively new belief in science as the answer to the world’s problems. Both the popular and scientific beliefs in eugenics were remarkably resistant to the discovery of evidence refuting them.

Two family case studies came to encapsulate popular eugenics ideas about the results of degeneration. Both of these came from the US. The Jukes were a related group of misfits and criminals traceable to a single couple in New York State. The Kallikaks were a pseudonymous feeble-minded family discovered by H. H. Goddard, a prominent American eugenist who published his research about the heritability of feeble-mindedness in 1912. Eugenists continued to use these case studies as evidence of the truth of their beliefs long after they had been discredited.

Eugenists were often associated with social darwinists, who saw the solution to the problem of racial degeneration in allowing a high death rate among the lower classes to keep their numbers down. However Eugenists were interested in using social instead of natural selection to increase the proportion of the best “stock” in the racial group. The definition of good and bad stock was entirely predictable. Eugenic worth was seen as incarnate in oneself and one’s associates, and there was general agreement that many of the traits of the lower classes, such as poverty, disease, mental defect, and unemployment were not only unwanted but inherited. Eugenists generally divided people into three broad groups: “desirables”, “passables”, and “undesirables”. The desirables were almost invariably members of the Eugenists own social grouping, that is members of the academic and professional classes. The passables did change slightly over time but tended to be seen as the upper end of the working class. The undesirables could be people with mental or physical disabilities, the poor, or members of a race lower on the Victorian hierarchy of ethnic groups, the highest of which of course was Anglo-Saxon.

Popular Movement

Eugenics then, became a small popular movement among sections of the middle class responding to what they saw as the major population problems of the 20th century, sparked off by specific events, such as the poor state of health of many of the population shown by medical examinations of troops in the Boer War, and the IQ tests given to American soldiers in World War I.1 The idea was to promote eugenics as a solution to these problems by either encouraging the worthy to breed (positive eugenics) or somehow discouraging or preventing those of lesser worth from having children (negative eugenics).

The German Society for Race Hygiene was established in 1905, the English Eugenics Education Society in 1907, the American Eugenics Record Office in 1910, and the French Eugenics Society in 1912. Eugenics societies were also established in Latin America. The New Zealand society was established in 1910. In Britain and the US laboratories were funded to undertake eugenic research. Karl Pearson became the first director of the Galton laboratory for National Eugenics at University College in London, and Charles Davenport founded the Eugenic Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor in the US, which due to its generous funding could employ hundreds of researchers, most of whom were women.2

Legislation

Eugenists agitated for legislation which reflected their beliefs. This could be relatively benign. In France for instance, because Eugenists there remained Lamarckian in their outlook, they agitated for better working and living conditions for the lower classes in the belief that these conditions would produce healthier people who would pass on their good health to their descendants. In Germany however, because of their obsession with so-called racial hygiene, these beliefs eventually led to the Nazi programme of racial extermination.

Eugenic beliefs changed over time, tending to become more benign. Gradually, very gradually, scientists began to realise that eugenic beliefs simply didn’t stack up. However what was more influential was the association with the excesses of the Nazi regime, particularly in the US. Basically eugenics fizzled out from the 1930s onwards, and was regarded with loathing from 1945. Many Eugenists moved into the area of genetic counselling, advising rather than compelling the changes they wished to see. However as late as the 1950s at least one ex-eugenic researcher was employed by the tobacco industry to produce “research” showing that genetic predisposition, rather than smoking, was responsible for lung cancer.

The New Zealand Experience

Interestingly I could find no evidence of eugenic ideas in any of the New Zealand scientific journals in the 19th century. Eugenics in New Zealand was more a popular phenomenon that a scientific one. Those scientists that were interested in eugenics tended to be working in the public service rather than engaging in research.

New Zealanders did embrace eugenics enthusiastically however, when the first society was formed in Dunedin in 1910. As with the overseas experience members of these societies tended to be middle-class people, often medical or academic. Many politicians also accepted eugenics if they did not join the societies. One of the major eugenic publications, The Fertility of the Unfit was published by W B Chapple (later a Liberal MP in Britain) while he was resident in New Zealand.

The New Zealand societies agitated for eugenics to be applied to legislation in this country and began an education programme for schools and other interested bodies. As far as I could see eugenics was not as such taught in high schools or universities in this country, but some was certainly taught in training colleges, interestingly enough. (It was taught extensively in US high schools and colleges.)

Eugenists allegedly influenced the passing of the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act Amendment Bill of 1907, which granted divorces to those married to the insane, insanity being fairly broadly defined by Eugenists and regarded as something that could be bred out of the race.

In spite of the fact that the New Zealand eugenics societies lapsed at the beginning of World War I the fertility of the unfit remained a common cause of many influential New Zealanders. This culminated in the introduction of two bills which were to some extent designed to curb it. Part of the reason for doing this of course was economic, as the unfit were considered to be a huge drain on the finances of the state. Eugenics may have given these bills a certain scientific legitimacy which they may not otherwise have had.

The first of these was the Mental Defectives Bill of 1911. This was a large bill which set out to reorganise care of the “feeble-minded”. Much of it was concerned with classification, and treatment, and much of it was uncontroversial and of benefit to people in institutions. However a substantial proportion of the bill was concerned with the segregation of the allegedly feeble-minded from people of the opposite sex and protecting them from their own “uninhibited and promiscuous sexual nature”. People of unsound mind, and I might add that epileptics were considered to be in this category, were thought to breed like rabbits. Therefore carnal knowledge of mentally defective females became an offence, with consent of the female not considered to be a valid defence, although ignorance of her mental defect was. This bill passed with very little opposition, although MPs generally eschewed any drastic solutions to the problem such as sterilisation or contraception. Sterilisation was regarded at this time as both politically dangerous and a problem for doctors who may have been sued.

The next bill, the Mental Defectives Amendment Bill of 1928, was much more problematic, as it did include provisions for sterilisation of the unfit. Indeed a government committee of inquiry, which was set up to investigate the whole question of mental defect and sexual offending, discussed the lethal chamber with some enthusiasm. On the other hand, there was an organised and stout resistance to the bill from various politicians and members of the academic community.

Nationwide Questionnaire

The commission was a particularly thorough and large-scale exercise. A questionnaire was sent to every GP in the country, asking about numbers of mental defectives and suggestions for treatment. There was some discussion of eugenics in general in the New Zealand Medical Journal, but little about the actual bill. Very few GPs replied, and those that did tended to be scathing.

Almost everyone with any bureaucratic authority seems to have been solicited for an opinion, including the Government balneologist.3 The commission’s report was sought by a great number of organisations, from women’s groups and the major churches to the Theosophical Society. The list of organisations to which the report was sent runs to five pages and the print run for the report was very large. Overseas governments and organisations as far apart as Australia, the US and Germany also showed interest in the report.4 There seems to have been a general enthusiasm for sterilisation in the US, Germany and Scandinavia at this time. The first eugenic sterilisation laws in Europe were introduced in 1928 by the Swiss and in 1929 by the Government of Denmark. The Americans were also sterilising quite large numbers of people they judged to be mentally unfit, and had been, both informally and formally, for some years. All of this would have been apparent to the Inspector General of Mental Hospitals, when he was sent overseas to gather information for the bill.

Controversy

The bill itself had a number of uncontroversial clauses relating to the classification and treatment of so-called mental defectives. Like the preceding act of 1911 much of the bill was procedural. However certain clauses relating to sterilisation of mental defectives, the prohibition of their marriage, the new classification of “social defectives”, and the classification of children who were two years behind in their school work as mentally defective, caused much controversy. The clause relating to the sterilisation of mental defectives attracted more opposition than anything else in the bill. (Although the trade unions were naturally opposed to the social defective classification, which they thought might be used against them.)

All this resulted in a remarkably lively debate in Parliament. Although the eugenic societies had been defunct for about 10 years it is obvious that eugenics ideas were very much alive. The opposition debate in particular was both vigorous and informed. Peter Fraser, who was the best informed of the (Labour) opposition members, had obviously done some research into genetics as he quoted some of the best geneticists of the day in support of his argument for dropping the controversial clauses. He also sensibly quoted a number of examples of famous fathers who had had less than perfect sons while refuting the inevitable references to the Jukes and Kallikaks.5 On the government side the arguments tended to be less scientific, although the Minister of Health claimed to have “…searched the world’s best literature on the subject…”. On the whole though, the government arguments tended to be fairly agricultural. The member for Riccarton, for instance, likened human beings to Clydesdales.

The best debate however took place in the daily newspapers. This paralleled the various debates on this topic overseas, with those people involved with the care and control of mental defectives generally being for sterilisation, and academic psychologists being against. This debate mostly took place in the Auckland papers but did spill over into others. It seems to have been between R A Fitt, professor of Education at Auckland University College, with W Anderson, Professor of Philosophy at the same institution on the one hand, and W H Triggs, chairman of the Committee of Inquiry into Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders on the other. The general public did not on the whole take part in this debate.

Trenchant Criticisms

Professor Fitt offered some trenchant criticisms of the science that the bill was based on. His main objection was that there was not as yet enough scientific knowledge about the measurement of mental defect, or enough work on interpreting its causes. He also believed that the psychiatrists who were to be put in charge of the classification of mental defectives were not properly competent to do so. He quite rightly stated that scientific testing should be used instead of the intuition of the psychiatrists in charge of the classification board. Triggs’ defence of the government’s position on the bill was eugenic in nature, stressing typical ideas about the unrestricted multiplication of the unfit and its cost to the taxpayer. This debate went on for some time, in the form of letters and articles from the main protagonists and others, including the Controller of Prisons, B L Dallard, on the government side, and a group of Auckland academics and educationalists including the headmaster of Kings College.6 Others who supported Fitt and Anderson were Professor J S Tennant, Professor of Education at Victoria University College, and Professor James Shelly, Professor of Education at Canterbury University College.

Other groups who might have been expected to oppose this of course were the Catholic Church and the unions. Both of these groups, like Fitt and Anderson, were quite prepared to accept quite a bit of eugenic theory at least as regards to the inheritance of mental defect, but the Church opposed sterilisation for various ethical reasons, including the idea that it was punishing the morally innocent. Neither of these groups put up a particularly vigorous fight, at least in public. Particularly the Church which, if one looks at the amount of space dedicated to these topics in the Tablet, seemed much more concerned with the threat of prohibition.

It is fairly clear why the clauses concerning sterilisation were dropped. Public reaction as such was minimal, but the vigorous attack put up by politicians and academics probably had its effect. However, if the clauses had been implemented New Zealand would have been the first country to implement legislation of this type (excluding American states) and this would have been the most extreme eugenic legislation short of Nazi Germany.

There is very little information about eugenics in New Zealand but these two books are both good general reading. Kevles, D J, 1985: In the Name of Eugenics; Knopf, New York. Paul, D B, 1995: Controlling Human Heredity, 1865 to the Present; Humanities Press, New Jersey.

Footnotes

1 These tests purported to show that recruits who were of Southern and Eastern European stock, and non-Europeans had lower IQs than Anglo-Saxons. They were later shown to be deeply flawed.
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2 Eugenists attitudes towards women were contradictory, in that as “race mothers” womens’ major role of course was in breeding. Many women however were involved in eugenics research, possibly because they were cheaper, but some took doctorates which was apparently uncommon at the time.
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3 The person in charge of public baths.
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4 It is interesting to note that the German government introduced in 1932 legislation for voluntary sterilisation of various groups. Possibly the reaction in New Zealand to compulsory sterilisation influenced this legislation.
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5 We find for instance, that Luther’s son was insubordinate and violent; William Penn’s son was a debauched scoundrel; … the son of Cicero was a drunkard….
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6 These divisions reflect some of the debate that took place before the commission, except that two academic biologists who were consulted were both supporters of sterilisation or segregation. Others who gave evidence, including teachers, headmasters, probation officers, doctors, nurses, religious leaders and others were overwhelmingly of the opinion that mental deficiency is hereditary, that it can be easily identified, and that people with this problem should be segregated and/or sterilised if not desexed.
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Warwick Don replies

I deny any fudging on the use of the word “creationist”. I make a clear distinction between young-earth creationism and intelligent design (ID) creationism, at the same time indicating a link between the two. In my article in Investigate magazine (November 2002), I write: “there are several types of anti-evolutionary creationists”, implying that there are also pro-evolutionary creationists. So I object to being accused of bandying the term (creationist) around.

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That Eureka Moment: How Science Works

This article is drawn from interviews with Allan Coukell on the NZ National Radio science programme “Eureka!” in 2001.

We live in an era where science is universally needed but rarely appreciated, little understood and much misunderstood. This is not just a problem of the wider non-scientific community; science is increasingly specialised and even prestigious scientists may have little awareness of areas of science outside their specialised research niche. Science is typically learned by studying and working in a particular discipline, but often such narrow perspectives don’t allow us to reflect on wider issues about science and appreciate its strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, the specialized, abstract, nature of much science education all too often alienates many of its victims, while leaving the survivors blind to the limits and problems of their craft. There is irony in the way that science, the ultimate questioning activity, frequently fosters such unquestioning supporters and critics.

What is science?

Obviously science comes in many shapes and sizes and any attempt to provide a “one size fits all” description is bound to fail. Some scientists are engaged in an open-ended exploration of natural phenomena; some spend their lives developing and testing theories or models. Yet more scientists try to find out whether some theoretical entities like quarks are “real”, whilst others are trying to measure properties of the world with greater and greater precision. What, if any, are the unifying features of such a diverse discipline?

Given that science is such a multifarious thing, is it even sensible to ask a question such as “what is science?” Richard Feynman was a brilliant scientist who thought it was. Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965, was not only one of the most brilliant scientists and science teachers of the 20th Century, he also reflected on the nature of science and communicated his perspectives vividly to a wide audience. Here’s how he addresses the question “What is science?”1:

The word is usually used to mean one of three things, or a mixture of them. … Science means, sometimes, a special method of finding things out. Sometimes it means the body of knowledge arising from the things found out. It may also mean the new things you can do when you have found something out, or the actual doing of new things … so the popular definition of science is partly technology too.”

Science and technology are inextricably linked in the public’s eye; it is technology that provides the gadgets to which society becomes addicted. The reliable and informative nature of scientific knowledge underpins modern technology, but science is not simply a means to technology. As Feynman points out, it is crucial to realise that science is an intellectual adventure, a cultural activity that should be undertaken for its own sake:

“The things that have been found out [are] the gold. This is the … pay you get for all the disciplined thinking and the hard work. The work is not done for the sake of an application. It is done for the excitement of what is found out. You cannot understand science and its relation to anything else unless you understand and appreciate the great adventure of our time.”

Science is an adventure. It involves asking questions about the universe, coming up with theories about the way nature works, and testing those theories to see how valid they are. As any scientist knows, it is a challenging activity:

“Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen.”

Given the complexities of undertaking a scientific investigation, what is it about science that makes it such a powerful way of finding things out about the world? This is Feynman’s view:

“[S]cience as a method of finding out … is based on the principle that observation is the judge of whether something is so or not. All other aspects and char-acteristics of science can be understood directly when we understand that observation is the ultimate and final judge of an idea. But ‘prove’ used in this way really means ‘test’ … the idea should really be translated as ‘The exception tests the rule.’ Or, put another way, ‘The exception proves that the rule is wrong.’ That is the principle of science. If there is an exception to any rule, and if it can be proved by observation, that rule is wrong.”

Fireworks at NASA

Given the variety and complexity of science, scrutinising illustrative episodes of science in action is a good way to understand more about science. Again Feynman provides a lead: he not only discussed science, he exemplified the whole philosophy of questioning the world and testing scientific ideas. Early in 1986, when he was fighting terminal cancer, Feynman was once again thrust into the public eye when he performed one of the most public demonstrations of science during the inquiry into the tragic accident of the space shuttle “Challenger”. Feynman’s role in this investigation provides an illuminating vignette into science.

On January 28th 1986 the space shuttle Challenger was launched, and almost immediately exploded in a horrific fireball. It is salutary to sometimes reflect on the fallibility of science and the icons of technological sophistication. Yet science rose, phoenix-like, from the ashes, due almost exclusively to Feynman’s scientific acumen.2 Within a week of the accident, on February 4th, Feynman was appointed to a committee of inquiry. He immediately began quizzing the engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where much of the space shuttle technology was developed. On the first day he learned of well-known problems with the shuttle, including cracks in the turbine blades. Feynman also learned of problems with the O-rings – glorified rubber bands thinner than a pencil and more than 10 m long – that sealed the joins between sections of the solid-fuel rockets. A pair of O-rings had to expand to prevent the leak of hot gases during the burning of the solid fuel rockets. However, on some launches one of the O-rings was being scorched. Feynman jotted down some notes: “Once a small hole burn thru generates a large hole very fast! Few seconds catastrophic failure.”

Feynman flew to Washington and quizzed NASA officials, especially about the effects of the unusually cold weather at the launch of the Challenger shuttle. Because the elasticity of the O-rings would decrease at low temperatures, the problems with the O-rings would be exacerbated. Over the weekend Feynman was hot on the O-ring trail and, when the committee reconvened on Monday 12th February, he was frustrated by the inconclusive and evasive testimony of Lawrence Mulloy, the project manager for the solid fuel rockets. That night at dinner, his eyes fell on a glass of iced water and he saw a way to test whether 0oC (the temperature of the Challenger launch) would affect the resilience of the O-rings.

The next day he bought a small C-clamp and pliers. At the hearing Feynman asked for iced water and then broke off a bit of O-ring material as a sample was passed round. He clamped the O-ring material in the C-clamp, then after a short break in the proceedings, Feynman asked to speak to Mulloy. The rest has become a historic exchange captured by the TV cameras:

“I took this stuff that I got out of your seal and I put it in ice-water, and I discovered that when you put some pressure on it for a while and then undo it, it doesn’t stretch back … In other words, for a few seconds at least … there is no resilience in this particular material when it is at a temperature of 32 degrees [Fahrenheit]. I believe that has some significance for our problem.”

Here, in a nutshell, was the heart of the scientific problem. As another great theoretical physicist, Freeman Dyson, commented:

“The public saw with their own eyes how science is done, how a great scientist thinks with his hands, how nature gives a clear answer when a scientist asks her a clear question.”

Stages of the scientific process illuminated by Feynman’s experiment:

  1. Science starts with a problem: in this case the question of what caused the Challenger to explode.
  2. There is background detective work: finding out what is already known (in most scientific investigations this involves extensive literature work; here it involved garnering various streams of evidence such as the previous O-ring problems, the observed puff of smoke from the solid booster after 0.5s of flight, the lower resilience of rubbers at lower temperatures etc).
  3. Hypothesis formulation: that a momentary loss of resilience of the O-ring allowed hot gases to burn through the seal and caused the rocket to leak.
  4. Hypothesis testing via experiment, or observation: testing that the elasticity of the O-ring material was indeed compromised under the conditions of the launch.
  5. Bringing the results into the public arena for critical scrutiny: committee hearings are an unusual forum for discussion; for most research investigations the academic literature is where scientific claims are subject to critical scrutiny.

What does the Challenger inquiry tell us about science?

Without Feynman’s input, the committee of inquiry was likely to have been a whitewash. Most of the establishment would have liked to rubber stamp the worthiness of the shuttle programme. Scientists have to be careful about not falling into the trap of defending the work of a programme they believe in, rather than subjecting it to full critical scrutiny. Feynman, as the consummate scientist, shows that science is not about confirming your prejudices or defending your patch, it is about uncovering truths about the world.

Feynman’s beautiful experiment did not absolutely prove that problems with the O-rings caused the Challenger disaster. However, together with the history of problems with the shuttle and the particular climatic conditions for the launch, the case was proved “beyond reasonable doubt.” Scientific knowledge bears more than a passing resemblance to court proceedings: the more direct the experimental evidence, and the greater the accumulated weight of diverse lines of evidence, the more clear-cut scientific knowledge becomes.

Science is not a method of generating infallible truths about the world; only tyrants claim to do that. Neither is it simply a way of producing just another opinion about the world – no better or worse than any other (as many postmodern social scientists would have us believe). While science does not dispense absolute truths, it does produce the best knowledge we have in areas where we can subject our theories to rigorous tests. Although the theories that survive such tests can never be proved to be true, they are likely to be close to the truth if they survive detailed scientific scrutiny without being proved wrong.

Furthermore, in areas where theories have been well tested and flaws of the theory are exposed, it is often the case that the theory is not thrown out wholesale – instead the previous theory is often found to be a limiting situation for the theory that succeeds it. We are more confident in the predictions of Newtonian mechanics in the wake of Einsteinian mechanics than we were before, since we now clearly understand where it does and does not apply. Similarly we have not dispensed with atomic theory now we know that atoms are comprised of smaller entities.

So the heart of science is criticism, the use of observations and experiments to test our theories and always being able to accept that we might be wrong. The ability to modify our views, in the face of evidence, is a keystone of science.

Perhaps the last word should go to Feynman3:

Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud and from show.”

References

1 The quotations in this section are from Chapter 1 of The Meaning of it All, R. P. Feynman which is drawn from a public lecture that Feynman gave in April 1963.
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2 For a slightly more detailed chronology of Feynman’s participation in the Challenger investigation see Genius, by J. Gleick, pp414-428.
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3 Quoted in Genius, by J. Gleick, p285.
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This article originally appeared in Chem NZ No. 86.

How Thinking Goes Wrong

This article originally appeared in the excellent US magazine Skeptic, edited by Shermer, (Vol 2 No 3) and also forms Chapter 4 of Shermer’s book Hope Springs Eternal: How Pseudoscience Works and Why People Believe in It. It’s a thought-provoking piece which should be handy reference for any skeptic’s library. This is part one of three.

In one of the most important books ever written on the philosophy of science, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington made this observation in The Philosophy of Physical Science (1958, p.9): “For the truth of the conclusions of physical science, observation is the supreme Court of Appeal.”

It is that simple. Whenever there is a dispute we have merely to look and submit our conclusions to the Court. The decision will be obvious and indisputable. Of course, if it were really that easy Eddington would not have had to write an entire book about it, covering all the problems scientists confront in the physical sciences, a relatively “pure” enterprise compared to the biological and social sciences.

The problem is that the Court is staffed by illogical, emotional, ego driven, culturally biased, and socially embedded observers. They are filtered through these fallible brains, and in the process thinking can and often does go wrong. And not just for those pseudoscientists, paranormalists, and fringe-belief inhabitants whose claims skeptics often take such delight in skewering. The multi-faceted fallacies of thinking, unfortunately, apply to everyone, even the most rigorous and careful of scientists and skeptics. Even skepticism, taken to an extreme, can be an inhibitor to creative and critical thinking.

Thus, it is a useful exercise for us to reexamine these various ways that our thinking can go wrong. I have subdivided them into different categories, with lists of specific fallacies and problems in each. As a positive assertion on how thinking can go right, I begin with what I call Hume’s Maxim and close with what I call Spinoza’s Dictum.

Hume’s Maxim

The importance of skeptical publications in this late 20th century resurgence of interest in miracles and various claims of the paranormal cannot be overstated. yet it is equally important to remember our historical antecedents and how they analysed and critiqued such claims in their own time.

One of the greatest skeptics of the Modern Age is the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), whose work, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, is a classic in skeptical analysis. The book was originally published anonymously in London in 1739, as A Treatise of Human Nature, but, in Hume’s words, “fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.” (An author’s biggest fear is not being panned; it is being ignored.)

Hume blamed his own writing style and reworked the manuscript into An Abstract of a Treatise of Human Nature in 1740, and again in 1748, as Philosophical Essays Concerning the Human Understanding. The work still gained Hume no recognition, so in 1758 he brought it out in a final version as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, which comes down to us today as his greatest philosophical work.

Ironically, when Hume finally did achieve fame and position, his critics often attacked his earlier works, a practice Hume found “very contrary to all rules of candour and fair-dealing, and a strong instance of those polemical artifices, which a bigoted zeal thinks itself authorised to employ,” as he wrote in an “Advertisement” to the final publication!

In Section XII, “Of the Academical or Sceptical Philosophy”, Hume distinguished between “antecedent skepticism”, such as Descartes’s method of doubting everything, that has no “antecedent” infallible criterion for belief; and “consequent skepticism”, the method Hume employed that recognises the “consequences” of our fallible senses, but corrects them through reason: “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.” Wiser words could not be chosen for a skeptical motto.

For the modern skeptic, Hume’s Section X, “Of Miracles”, provides a foolproof, when-all-else-fails analysis of miraculous claims.

That is, when one is confronted by a true believer whose apparently supernatural or paranormal claim has no immediately apparent natural explanation, Hume gives us an argument that even he thought was so important (and Hume was not a modest man) that he placed his own words in quotes and called it a maxim.

I think it is so useful an argument that it bears repetition, as Hume’s Maxim: The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention), “That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.”

When anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.

Scientific Problems in Thinking

Theory Influences Observations

In his quest to understand the physical world, Werner Heisenberg concluded: “What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” This is especially true in quantum mechanics, where the “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum action states that “a probability function does not prescribe a certain event but describes a continuum of possible events until a measurement interferes with the isolation of the system and a single event is actualised (1987, p.412)

The Copenhagen interpretation eliminates the one-to-one correlation between theory and reality. The theory, in part, constructs the reality. Reality exists independent of the observer, of course, but our perceptions of it are highly influenced by the theories through which we examine it. Philosophers thus say that science is “theory laden”. Eddington put it this way (p.110):

Suppose an artist puts forward the fantastic theory that the form of a human head exists in a rough-shaped block of marble. All our rational instinct is roused against such an anthropomorphic speculation. It is inconceivable that Nature should have placed such a form inside the block. But the artist proceeds to verify his theory experimentally — with quite rudimentary apparatus too. Merely using a chisel to seperate the form for our inspection, he triumphantly proves his theory.

This is true not only in the physical sciences, but in all observations made of the world.

When Columbus arrived in the New World he had a mental model that he was in Asia, and proceeded to perceive it as such. Cinnamon was a valuable Asian spice and the first New World shrub that smelled like it was declared to be it. When he encountered the aromatic gumbo-limbo of the West Indies, Columbus concluded it was an Asiatic species similar to the mastic tree of the Mediterranean. A New World nut was mistaken for Marco Polo’s description of a coconut. Even Columbus’ surgeon declared, based on some Caribbean roots his men had uncovered, that he had found Chinese rhubarb.

A theory of Asia produced observations of Asia, even though Columbus was half a world away. Such is the power of a wrong theory to deceive our senses and our mind.

Observations Change the Observed

Physicist John Archibald Wheeler once noted the change in thinking that quantum mechanics had wrought in our understanding of nature (1987, p.427):

Even to observe so minuscule an object as an electron, he must shatter the glass. He must reach in. He must install his chosen measuring equipment. It is up to him to decide whether he shall measure position or momentum. To install the equipment to measure the one prevents and excludes his installing the equipment to measure the other. Moreover, the measurement changes the state of the electron. The universe will never afterward be the same.

The problem is especially true in the human and social realm as the act of studying a problem can change it. Anthropologists know that when they study a tribe the behaviour of the members may be altered by the fact they are being observed by an outsider.

Margaret Mead was apparently duped by her female subjects in Samoa, who acted the way she expected them to with regards to their teenage sexuality. This is why psychologists use blind and double-blind controls. If subjects know what experimental conditions they are being subjected to, they may alter their behaviours. Or, if the psychologist knows which group they are in, he or she may perceive the behaviour to be appropriate for that condition.

Lack of such controls is often found in tests of paranormal powers and is one of the classic ways that thinking goes wrong in the pseudosciences.

Experiments Construct Results

The type of equipment used and the manner in which the experiment is conducted, very much determines the results. The size of telescopes throughout history, for example, have shaped our theory of the size of the universe. Hubble’s 60-inch and 100-inch telescopes on Mt Wilson in Southern California, for example, provided the seeing power for Hubble to determine individual stars in other galaxies, thus proving that those fuzzy objects called nebulae that were thought to be in our own galaxy, were actually seperate galaxies. In the 19th century, craniometry defined intelligence as brain size, and measured it as such; today intelligence is defined by the IQ test.

To illustrate the problem Eddington presented this clever analogy (p16):

Let us suppose that an ichthyologist is exploring the life of the ocean. He casts a net into the water and brings up a fishy assortment. Surveying his catch, he proceeds in the usual manner of a scientist to systematise what it reveals. He arrives at two generalisations:

(1) No sea-creature is less than two inches long.

(2) All sea-creatures have gills.

In applying this analogy, the catch stands for the body of knowledge which constitutes physical science, and the net for the sensory and intellectual equipment which we use in obtaining it. The casting of the net corresponds to observations.

An onlooker may object that the first generalisation is wrong. “There are plenty of sea-creatures under two inches long, only your net is not adapted to catch them.” The ichthyologist dismisses this objection contemptuously. “Anything uncatchable by my net is ipso facto outside the scope of ichthyological knowledge, and is not part of the kingdom of fishes which has been defined as the theme of ichthyological knowledge. In short, what my net can’t catch isn’t fish.”

Likewise, what my telescope can’t see isn’t there, and what my test can’t measure isn’t intelligence.

Anecdotes Do Not Make a Science

Anecdotes — stories recounted in support of a claim — do not make a science. Without corroborative evidence from other sources, or physical proof of some sort, 10 anecdotes are no better than one, and 100 anecdotes are no better than 10.

Anecdotes are stories told by biased and selective human story tellers. Farmer Bob in Puckerbrush, Kansas may be an honest, church-going, family man, but we need concrete physical evidence of an alien spacecraft or alien bodies, not a story about landings and abductions at 3:00 a.m. on a deserted farm road.

Likewise with many medical claims; I do not care if your Aunt Mary’s cancer was cured by watching Marx Brothers movies, or taking liver extract from castrated chickens. It might have gone into remission on its own, which some cancers do; or it might have been misdiagnosed; or, or, or…

What we need are controlled experiments, not anecdotes. We need 100 subjects with cancer, all properly diagnosed, 25 of whom watch Marx Brothers movies, 25 of whom watch Alfred Hitchcock movies, 25 of whom watch the news, and 25 of whom watch nothing. Then we need to deduct the average rate of remission for this type of cancer, and then do a data analysis to determine if there is a statistically significant difference between any of the groups. If there is, which would be extraordinary, we better get confirmation from other scientists who conduct their own experiments separate from ours, before we hold a press conference to announce the cure for cancer.

Pseudoscientific Problems in Thinking

Scientific Language Does Not Make a Science

Packaging a belief system in the facade of science using the language and jargon, as in “creation-science”, means nothing without evidence, experiment, and corroboration. Because science is such a powerful system in our society, those who wish to gain respectability but do not have evidence, do an end-run around this problem by trying to look and sound the part. Here is a classic example from a New Age column in the Santa Monica News:

This planet has been slumbering for aeons and with the inception of higher energy frequencies is about to awaken in terms of consciousness and spirituality. Masters of limitation and masters of divination use the same creative force to manifest their realities, however, one moves in a downward spiral and the latter moves in an upward spiral, each increasing the resonant vibration inherent in them.

How’s that again? I have no idea what this means, but it has the language components of a physics experiment: “higher energy frequencies”, “downward and upward spirals”, and “resonant vibration”. These things mean nothing without precise and operational definitions. How do you measure the planet’s higher energy frequencies, or the resonant vibration of these masters of divination? For that matter, what is a master of divination?

Bold Statements Do Not Make True Claims

A red flag that something is pseudoscientific is when outrageous claims are made for its power and veracity, especially when supportive evidence is lacking.

L. Ron Hubbard, for example, opens his book, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, with this statement: “The creation of Dianetics is a milestone for man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to hsi invention of the wheel and arch.” Wilhelm Reich called his theory of Orgonomy “a revolution in biology and psychology comparable to the Copernican Revolution.” I have a file filled with papers and letters from obscure authors filled with such outlandish claims (I call it the “Theories of Everything” file).

Scientists sometimes make this mistake, and when they are wrong they pay a high price, as we saw at 1:00p.m., March 23, 1989, when Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann announced to the world through a pres conference that they had discovered cold nuclear fusion.

The proper procedure in science is to hold the press conference after the claim has been tested and corroborated by other scientists in other labs, and after it appears in a peer-reviewed publication. The more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary the evidence must be before making such pronouncements. Gary Taubes’ excellent narrative of the cold fusion debacle, appropriately named Bad Science (1993), well demonstrates the implications of this problem.

Martyrdom Does Not Equal Correctness

They laughed at Copernicus. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. Yes, well, they laughed at the Marx Brothers. So what? Becoming a martyr does not mean you are right.

Wilhelm Reich compared himself to Peer Gynt, the unconventional genius out of step with society, and misunderstood and ridiculed until proven right:

“Whatever you have done to me or will do to me in the future, whether you glorify me as a genius or put me in a mental institution, whether you adore me as your saviour or hang me as a spy, sooner or later necessity will force you to comprehend that I have discovered the laws of the living.”

History is replete with chronicles and tales of the lone and martyred scientist working against his peers, and in the face of opposition from the known doctrine of his own field of study. Most of them turned out to be wrong and we do not remember their names. For every Galileo shown the instruments of torture for exclaiming the truth, there are a thousand (or ten thousand) Walter Wanabees whose “truths” never cut muster with the powers that be.

Can Walter really expect scientists to take the necessary time to test every fantastic claim that comes down the pike? No. If you want to do science you have to learn to play the game of science. This involves getting to know the scientists in your field, exchanging letters, calls, faxes, and (now) email with your colleagues, presenting papers at conferences, publishing in peer-reviewed journals, and the like. Galileo paid his dues and learned to play the game. Walter Wanabee must do the same.

Rumours Do Not Equal Reality

A classic fallacy of thinking is “I read somewhere that…” or “I heard from someone that…”. Before long the rumour becomes reality as it is passed from person to person, usually by work of mouth, without the necessity of supportive evidence. Rumours, like “urban legends”, may be right, of course, but they usually are not, even if they do make for great tales.

What teenage boy did not tell his date on Lover’s Lane the “true” story of the escaped maniac with a prosthetic hook who haunted that very parking spot, with the addendum that one couple, when they returned home, found a hook dangling from the passenger door handle? Or the “Vanishing Hitchhiker” story where a hitchhiking woman vanishes from the car in which she was picked up, whereupon the driver, who had lent her his jacket, discovers that she had died that same day the year before; he then discovers his jacket on her grave. (There are many modified versions of these stories, but the core remains the same.)

At a dinner I once hosted for Stephen Jay Gould, the Caltech historial of science, Dan Kevles related a story he suspected was apocryphal about two students who took a ski trip before their final exam but did not get back in time because the evening activities extended well into the night. They told their professor that they got a flat tire so he gave them the final the next day. Placing the two students in separate rooms he asked them just two questions: (1) “For 5 points, what is the chemical formula for water?” (2) “For 95 points, which tire?”

Both Gould and Carol Tavris, also at the dinner, suspected it was an urban legend because they had heard a vaguely similar story. The next day I repeated the story to my students, three of whom simultaneously blurted out “which tire?” before I could give the punch line. They had heard the story in high school. Urban legends spread far, wide and fast.

The following are examples of rumours that, in fact, have no basis in truth:

  • The secret ingredient in Dr Pepper is prune juice.
  • A woman accidentally killed her poodle by drying it in a microwave oven.
  • Paul McCartney died and was replaced by a lookalike.
  • Giant alligators live in the sewers of New York City.
  • The moon landing was faked and filmed in a Hollywood studio.
  • George Washington had wooden teeth (false teeth were made of ivory or walrus tusk).
  • The number of stars inside the “P” on Playboy magazine’s cover indicates how many times publisher Hugh Hefner had sex with the centrefold (it was actually just a distribution code).
  • A flying saucer crashed in New Mexico and the bodies of the E.T.s are being kept by the Air Force in a secret warehouse.

There are a thousand more like these that are titillating to consider but should not be taken seriously without confirming evidence.

Unexplained Is Not Inexplicable

Most people are overconfident enough to think that if they cannot explain something, it must be inexplicable and therefore a true mystery of the paranormal. There is nothing more amusing than an amateur archaeologist declaring that because he cannot figure out how the pyramids were built, that they must have been constructed by space aliens.

Even those who are more reasonable at least think that if the experts cannot explain something it must be inexplicable. This is often seen in the performance of seemingly impossible feats, such as the bending of spoons, firewalking, or mental telepathy, which are thought to be of a paranormal or mystical nature because most people cannot explain them. And when they are explained most people respond with a “yes, of course”, or “that’s obvious once you see it”.

Firewalking is a case in point: people speculate about supernatural powers over pain and heat, or mysterious brain chemicals secreted to block the pain and prevent burning. The simple explanation is that the capacity of light and fluffy coals to contain heat is very low, and the conductivity of the heat from the light and fluffy coals to your feet is very poor. As long as you don’t stand around on the coals you will not get burned. (Think of a cake in a 450-degree heated oven. The air, cake and pan are all 450 degrees. Only the metal will burn your hand, because air and cake are light and fluffy and have a low heat capacity and conductivity.)

This is why magicians do not tell their secrets. Most of their tricks are extremely simple and knowing them takes the magic out of the trick.

There are many genuine unsolved mysteries in the universe and it is okay to say “We do not yet know but someday perhaps we will”.

Coincidences Are Not Causation

Coincidences are a type of contingency — a conjecture of two or more events without apparent design. When the connection is made in a manner that seems impossible by our intuition of the laws of probability, there is a tendency to think something mysterious or paranormal is at work.

You go to the phone to call your friend Bob. The phone rings and it is Bob. You think, “Wow, what are the chances? This could not have been a mere coincidence. Maybe Bob and I are communicating telepathically.”

Most people have a very poor understanding of the laws of probability. Gamblers will win six in a row and think they are on a “hot streak”. Or they will think they are “due to lose”. They have just predicted both possible outcomes, a fairly safe bet! The probability of two people having the same birth date in a room of 30 people is 71%, yet most would be shocked to find such a “coincidence” and think something mysterious was at work.

As B.F. Skinner proved in the laboratory, the human mind seeks relationships between events and often finds them even when they are not present. Slot-machines are based on Skinnerian principles of intermittent reinforcement. The dumb human, like the dumb rat, only needs an occasional reinforcement to keep pulling the handle. The mind will do the rest.

I believe that one of the reasons paranormal beliefs and pseudoscientific claims flourish in market economies is because of the uncertainty of the marketplace. According to James Randi once communism collapsed in Russia there was a significant increase in such beliefs.

Not only are the people freer to try and swindle each other with scams and rackets, many truly believe they have discovered something significant about the nature of the world. Capitalism is a lot less stable a social structure. These uncertainties lead the mind to look for explanations for the vagaries and contingencies of the market (and life in general), and these often take a turn toward the supernatural and paranormal.

Continued next issue.

Hokum Locum

Sickness and Psychogenic Illness

The Canterbury ME (chronic fatigue syndrome, or CFS) are up in arms over proposed tighter controls on patients receiving both invalid and sickness benefits. CFS patients want funding for “residential detoxification services and “subsidies on natural remedies”. CFS is a classical psychogenic illness and as such it is quite improper for any affected patient to be on any long-term benefit on their own terms. Because of self-denial these patients resist any sensible suggestions on treatment and end up chronically unwell in a fulfilment of Abraham Lincoln’s statement that “most folks are as happy as they make up their mind to be.”

I managed to persuade such a patient to take anti-depressants and the improvement in well-being was amazing. This same person had paid to have all amalgam dental fillings removed and replaced with a predictable lack of improvement. A characteristic of CFS is the almost fanatical belief of the patients that their “illness” has a physical cause. Here is a report from a clinical psychologist about such a patient: “He scored nought on the depression inventory and three on the anxiety inventory. This is a person who does not wish to reveal anything about himself. During the interview he made it clear that he sees his problem in terms of recovery from a physical illness with no concomitant psychological manifestation.”

This fanatical belief in a physical cause of ME is also shared by many doctors whose therapeutic contact with their patients becomes a classic folie a deux.

Cultural variations were found in a WHO study which looked at depression worldwide. Only 5% of patients who were depressed said that they had psychological problems. Such a level of denial is compounded by the useless treatments offered by doctors. For example, antidepressants were prescribed for anxiety as often as for depression. Japan had a low incidence of depression due to the Japanese concept of jibyo signifying a mild chronic illness which a person carries through life and is not considered serious.

It should be mandatory for all patients with a diagnosis of CFS to undergo assessment by a Mental Health team. No person with CFS should be entitled to any long-term benefit unless they have had at least a six month trial of anti-depressant therapy. (Christchurch Press 18/7/95 New Scientist 25/3/95 p10)

Multiple Personality Disorder

This is a typically loony belief of New Age psychiatrists and it has received widespread acceptance in the US. This is hardly surprising in a culture where thousands of people believe that they have been abducted by aliens. Even such an august institution as Harvard Medical School has a psychiatrist who believes that extraterrestrial beings have visited this planet and abducted Earthlings! Striking a blow for academic freedom, the Dean of the Medical School “reaffirmed Dr Mack’s freedom to study what he wishes and to state his opinions without impediment.” In contrast, the British specialists have condemned the idea in scathing terms. Imagine the convenience of being able to blame an alternative personality for some misfortune such as a criminal offence. This absurd concept of MPD fits in to the prevailing “victim” philosophy of life whose adherents view themselves as being subject to forces beyond their control. (New Scientist 17 June 95, GP Weekly 23/8/95)

Continuing OOS Delusions

The occupational health professionals continue to indulge themselves over OOS. ACC is reported as being concerned about the vague nature of OOS and the fact that claims cannot be satisfactorily proved or disproved. Claims against ACC reached $4 million in the year ended 30 June 1994 and are increasing. The huge army of consultants advising on posture are doing just that — posturing.

At least I managed to get my contrary view published in Safeguard. Bernard Howard also sent me a newspaper cutting of a story concerning a musician allegedly suffering from OOS. I will quote his remarks which need no further comment: “After centuries of playing their instruments for hours per day, every day, musicians are only now developing OOS. Come back Paganini…all’s forgiven!” (Safeguard Update Nos 26, 27 1995.)

Medicine Chinoise

15,000 French doctors practise acupuncture and many also use “high-dilution” homeopathic medicines. It is not surprising then that a hospital dedicated to traditional Chinese medicine will open in Paris next year under the joint sponsorship of the Chinese and French Ministries of health. It is promoted as a measure to control spiralling health costs.

This trendy quackery will help the “worried well” but will do nothing to control spiralling health costs which are a feature of unreasonable patient expectation and over-application of medical technology. (British Medical Journal Vol 310 p1285)

Uncontrolled Medical Appetites

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a radiological technique which is valuable for examining internal organs. In NZ Doctor, an American doctor outlines what he calls MRI madness. Americans are so obsessed with MRI technology that there are 25 times as many machines in California as in Canada, which has about the same population. Patients demand MRI scans for virtually any medical condition and as a third party (ie. insurance company) is paying, they get what they want.

Just about everyone with low back pain gets an MRI scan. However, a new study found that two out of three people without back pain have evidence of a disc protrusion. The authors concluded that anatomical abnormalities are common in normal people.

A skeptical US doctor described the obsession with MRI as “MRI tiger balm”. (GP Weekly 27/7/94, NZ Doctor 23/6/95)

A Reader Writes

In Skeptic 36 I asked how long before magic mushrooms (Kombucha) arrived in New Zealand. John Turner has written from Motueka to tell me that they are here! [See also Forum] I hope I am not compromising his continued existence in Golden Bay by passing on his description of the area as being a “bloated gelatinous pancake of new Ageism.” As John describes it: “the ‘mushroom’ has a baby which is then passed on to someone else.”

One convert claimed he was cured of “toxins” which coloured his urine brown as they left his body. John quite reasonably enquired as to what colour the mushroom brew was. It was brown! Those readers contemplating a visit to Golden Bay will be pleased to know that every quack treatment is available from holistic pulsing to sound healing with “yidaki” or as it is more commonly known, didgeridoo therapy. This may all sound like a lot of didgeridoodoo but in the US a woman died and another was hospitalised due to severe acidosis after drinking Kombucha tea. (John Turner (personal communication), Nelson Evening Mail 8/7/95, NCAHF Vol 18 No.3)

Anti-Immunisation Quacks

I recently complained to the Medical Practioners Disciplinary Committee (MPDC) about a doctor who made a series of ignorant and unproven claims in respect of immunisation. The MPDC is fairly toothless when it comes to dealing with scientific incompetence in medical practitioners and the unrepentant doctor even wrote me a letter declaring he was proud to be a member of the American Quack Association (Quack = Quality, Care and Kindness). I will quote a short passage to show how impossible it is to argue with such people.

I challenged his claim that Vitamin C is an effective treatment for viral diseases (7 placebo controlled trials showed lack of effect for Vit C in the treatment of cold virus infections). Here is his reply: “There is extensive peer-reviewed literature bearing witness to the clinical effectiveness of ascorbic acid in viral diseases. You will not find reference to this in Medline or Index Medicus journals that represent only about 10% of the world’s scientific journals and are controlled by the international pharmaceutical industry.”

This one paragraph contains two of the main quack elements. Firstly the suggestion that some alternative inferior data base is an acceptable alternative to controlled trials, and secondly the familiar old conspiracy bogey that scientific journals are controlled by vested interests.

The President of the Australian Medical Association has come out a lot more strongly than the NZ MPDC, by recommending that doctors who use their scientific standing in the community to support the anti-immunisation movement should be charged with medical negligence. At the time he made this remark Australia came near the bottom of a list of industrialised nations when rates of childhood immunisations were compared.

It is sad that at time of writing Russia is in the grip of an epidemic of diptheria which has killed more than 2000 people. This was a direct result of allowing immunisation levels to drop below the 95% required to prevent epidemics. (Dr Quack (personal communication), British Medical Journal Vol 310, p760. Lancet Vol 345 p715)

Evidence Based Medicine

Although my main interest is alternative medical quackery there are many traditionally accepted medical practices which have never been critically evaluated. I mentioned counselling in Skeptic 36 and this was enlarged on by Jim Ring in the last issue.

In Britain, the BMJ is sponsoring a Journal of Evidence-Based Medicine which is aimed at critically evaluating both new and old treatments. The key element is randomised controlled trials (RCT’s) in which patients must be randomly allocated to either a new treatment group or a control group (may be the existing treatment or no treatment). A survey of RCT’s in pregnancy and childbirth found that out of 100 procedures commonly carried out by obstetricians and midwives, about 20 are actually harmful.

If you go to your doctor complaining of a cough, the chances are that you will come away with a prescription for an antibiotic. This is despite the fact that seven RCT’s have shown no benefit for such treatment. It was also difficult to carry out the trials because in one survey 60% of eligible patients refused to enter a trial because they felt that antibiotics were absolutely necessary to cure their condition. Perhaps this is a good argument for using harmless placebos in such cases? I should mention a note of caution against blindly imposing the results of RCT’s on patients and this point was well expounded by Sir John Scott at our last conference. What will it take to stop physicians from prescribing antibiotics in acute bronchitis? (Lancet Vol 345 p665)

Fat Fraud

Aminophylline-containing cream is a popular quack remedy for reducing the size of large thighs. In a test, researchers studied women who were asked to massage either the cream or a placebo into one thigh and one side of the stomach. 11 out of the 17 women completed the study and, as anyone could have predicted, there was no fat-reducing effect. Despite measurements to the contrary, one woman was convinced that the cream worked. If it is important for people to believe in something, no amount of evidence to the contrary will convince them. (National Council Against Health Fraud (NCAHF) Vol 18 N0.3)

Civic Creche Case

Professor Michael Hill examined some of the issues behind the civic creche case in an article in the Christchurch Press 31/3/95 which I have forwarded to our editor. Hill coins the phrase “culture of complaint” in which disaffected people take little responsibility for their own lives and look instead for someone to blame. The existence of compensation through litigation completes this ‘Americanisation’ of our culture. It is incredible how quickly the false ideas behind ritual sexual abuse spread and were recreated throughout NZ.

I was disgusted with the judiciary over the civic creche case although the whole process was hijacked by the usual cohort of poorly trained quack therapists. The prosecution was able to get away with not presenting evidential material so ridiculous that it would have weakened their case. In a trial of any kind all the evidence should be available to both sides. My heart goes out to the falsely accused women whose lives have been ruined by this evil nonsense. I seriously question whether there was any chance at all of Peter Ellis getting a fair trial in an atmosphere of hysteria reminiscent of the Salem witch hunts.

Homeopathologies

A group of scientists have petitioned the FDA to place tighter restrictions on homeopathic remedies by making them reach the same standards of safety and effectiveness as other OTC drugs. There should not be any problem over safety since such remedies are the pharmacological version of the emperor’s new clothes. The drug exists in the imagination only.

Predictably there has been opposition from the National Centre for Homeopathy because “homeopathy doesn’t treat diseases but treats people who are ill.” The NCH wants a different type of evaluation. This is rather like admitting that homeopathy is scientifically inexplicable so a new science must be created to explain it.

Forum

PC for Me, See?

“US Universities, cringing under a wave of Political Correctness and an extreme form of “multi-culturalism” are abandoning programmes which present the history of Western Civilisation as anything other than the history of the rape and plunder of minorities and other victims by a conspiracy of middle-class white males.” (“The Challenge to Reason”, Skeptic 34.)

Well I’m a skeptic. What is the evidence for that claim? And how does “multi-culturalism” differ from multi-culturalism? Bear in mind that for a very long time, the history of Western Civilisation (or Western “civilisation”) was presented as the activities of few but middle-class white males. The relatively sudden inclusion of non-whites and and non-males, and of the rape and plunder of minorities and other victims by middle-class white males (after such a long and significant silence on the subject) might make it look like that — especially to other middle-class white males.

I don’t see a wave of Political Correctness. I see only a war against something described as PC by its enemies, but which looks to me suspiciously like social justice and cultural sensitivity.

Here in Wellington, we see article after article, syndicated world-wide, all saying in effect, “Help! I’m being silenced! I can’t say that horis/niggers are lazy (and stupid — as in The Bell Curve), homos are unnatural, Jews are avaricious, women are bitches any more. Waaaaaah!” And in saying so, they contradict themselves. And just try to get a rebuttal published. So who is being silenced?

It’s not that something called Political Correctness has arrived for the first time, it’s that the struggle between two paradigms is hotting up. When the prevailing PC was white, male, heterosexual, etc. it wasn’t called that. Hell, it’s only 1993 when the Gisborne Herald refused to publish an advertisement containing the word “lesbian”.

If, as they say, PC is taking over the world, where do I join?

Hugh Young, Pukerua Bay

The Editor Replies

Hugh Young is obviously an excellent Skeptic; he quite properly asks for evidence for my claims regarding Political Correctness in America and for a definition of “multi-culturalism”. Until a few months ago when I was forced to familiarise myself with what is actually happening in US universities I would probably have asked the same questions.

The evidence for the PC Cringe and the new version of “multiculturalism” can be found in a number of publications including P.J. O’Rourke’s All the trouble in the World, Robert Hughes The Culture of Complaint, “End Game” by Pete Hamill in the November ’94 issue of Esquire magazine, “What to do About Education, 1: The Universities” by Gertrude Himmelfarb in the October issue of Commentary, and many issues of the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.

The most appropriate piece of evidence on the PC cringe, given Mr Young’s particular interest in the issue, is from the case of Doe vs University of Michigan. In the Doe case a student had been subjected to a formal hearing under the university’s “Speech Code” (Yes, they actually have them) because he had expressed the belief, during a class on social work, that homosexuality was a disease susceptible to psychological treatment.

It should come as no surprise that an American student held this belief; until a few years ago it was the official position of most of the medical professional bodies in that country. Many fundamentalist groups refuse to consider any alternative. I am sure that had Mr Young been in the class he would have willingly mounted a well reasoned and well researched rebuttal of the claim. But if a University’s Speech Code prohibits a student from even expressing such a belief in class how will Mr Young or anyone else know that these beliefs continue to be held — and when will they be granted the opportunity to challenge them?

Fortunately the Court held “What the University could not do …was to establish an anti-discrimination policy which had the effect of prohibiting certain speech because it disagreed with the ideas or messages sought to be conveyed.”

Surely the terrifying aspect of the case is that a District Court Judge (of evidently limited literacy) has to point out this obvious truth to such a highly regarded academic institution as the once great University of Michigan. Does Mr Young look forward to such PC Speech Codes being introduced into New Zealand? Is this the PC rule he really wants to join?

As for “multi-culturalism” I experienced the difference between what we mean by the word and what the word means in the US in the course of preparing a paper for presentation to a group of American business executives in Florida later this year.

Here in New Zealand I am happy to call myself a multi-culturalist because it means no more than that one is tolerant of other cultures and is prepared to assess those cultures and their belief systems on their merits. But in the US, a declared “multi-culturist” holds that one can only respect other cultures if one is prepared to despise everything associated with Western culture or civilisation. My essay objected to those who present the history of Western civilisation as anything other than the history of the rape and plunder etc — a point which Mr Young appears to have overlooked.

Of course the history of Western civilisation has its share of horror stories including the Inquisition, slavery, the Salem witch hunts, Nazi Germany, Marxist Leninism and many cases where it never realised its own ideals. But name the culture that doesn’t. At least the Enlightenment led to constitutions which promoted ideals of liberty, equality, freedom of speech and belief and the other ideals which underpin any form of democracy and freedom.

Mr Young claims that there has been “a long and significant silence on the subject of plunder etc”. Well, the following white males have thundered against tyranny, slavery and despotism in all its forms: Aristotle, Epictetus, Aquinas, Plutarch, Calvin, Shakespeare, Milton, Hobbes, Locke, Swift, Voltaire, Mostesquieu, Rousseau, Smith, Kant, the Authors of the Federalist Papers, Mill, Boswell, Hegel, Tocqueville, Dickens, Doestoevsky, Twain, Darwin, and even Marx. So where is this long silence?

Multi-culturalism in the US means that universities now accept, and even encourage, so-called scholarship which seeks to re-write history so as to deny that there are any good tales to be told. Because Jews have played such a prominent role in the development of Western thought this new “multi-culturalism” has given new legitimacy to a remarkable rise in anti-Semitic “scholarship” such as texts widely circulated within black communities which claim that Jewry was responsible for the slave trade and that the slave trade was a uniquely western crime. (See for example The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews, Volume One, The Nation of Islam, 1991)

In fact France was the first nation in history to make slavery illegal. Long after England, and then the US, abandoned the practice, the African slave trade continued to be run by joint ventures between African and Arabic states, as it had been for thousands of years. I have now learned that to write this last paragraph within many once-great US universities would probably cost me my job.

I can understand that given New Zealand’s limited and restrained practise of PC and multiculturalism Mr Young has found the concepts to be positive and encouraging for himself and his friends and colleagues battling against decades of homophobia. But these ideas, which have been taken to extremes in the US, have no place here. We know that child abuse exists; we also know that the US was first to turn this real problem into a victim-based industry which threw many hundreds of innocent people in jail and has damaged the lives of scores of thousands of others.

I don’t need ideologically driven speech-codes to tell me not to refer to kikes, niggers, and bitches in my classes, in my writings or in my private life. Tolerance, good manners and the normal standards of civilised behaviour are quite sufficient.

Owen McShane, Editor, author of “The Challenge to Reason”

Speaker’s Other Interests

Skeptics who attended the conference in Palmerston North will doubtless recall with amusement a talk on magnetic resonance devices given by Bruce Rapley, BSc, Dip. Psych., of Massey University. Mr Rapley, whose calling card describes him as “Bio-Electro-Magnetic Consultant (E.L.F.)”, is an energetic and entertaining speaker who cast a skeptical eye on Australian firms that are marketing magnetic paraphenalia that appear to me to be quack medical devices.

I was therefore surprised to be made aware of some of Mr Rapley’s other interests as described in literature that has come into my hands. Mr Rapley is a leader of something called Resonance Research, a non-profit organisation involved in “furthering the understanding of phenomena occurring at the margins of traditional knowledge”. RR offers “a variety of inspirational seminars and workshops”, and networks in the areas of Bio-Energy, Counselling, Geopathic Stress, Homeopathy, Radionics/Radiesthesia, and Vibrational Memory.

In particular, Mr Rapley has recently been energetically arranging a visit to New Zealand by Viera Scheibner, PhD, who warns against vaccinations. In particular Dr. Scheibner finds “obvious” the connection between “vaccine injections and cot death”.

Denis Dutton, University of Canterbury

Forum

Reasoning About Reason

Congratulations on featuring the superb contribution from Peter Münz in Skeptic 31. It seems to concur with a passage from Antony Flew I have just been reading. He says that to know something is “to believe what is in fact true, and to be rationally justified in that belief”. Like most people shivering in the postmodernist shadow, my first reaction was to draw back, thinking that all seemed a bit too definite. Surely it’s not still allowed to be definite about something?

To question the veracity of crystals, palm-reading, apocalyptic prophecy and all the rest of it has been to incur the disapproving epithet “dogmatic”, or even “fundamentalist”. Now that’s really scraping the barrel of abuse.

The warning about the morass of justifications and provisos that await the advocate of “reason” is also timely. Is it not too harsh, however, to write the process of reason off as “woolly”, given the thoughts of Karl Popper, who Münz very rightly quotes approvingly elsewhere? Does not the distinction between critical and uncritical rationalism discussed in The Open Society and its Enemies ensure that the reasoning process, while at times being tortuous, need not be woolly? This is not a rhetorical question, I’d be very interested in an opinion on this point.

Bill Cooke, Auckland

Of Postal Permits and Other Weighty Matters

Readers who take time to study the face of their Skeptic when it arrives, rather than impatiently tearing open the seal to devour the contents, will have noticed a change with this issue. Gone is the Postage Paid Permit, “Merrilands No. 2”, replaced by a Christchurch number. With this change we let go a bit of our history and the connection with our first Editor.

Keith Lockett saw the first fourteen issues through the press, and, at his local Post Office in New Plymouth, into the mail. Keith died in 1990 (see the obituary in Skeptic 16). Now, Merrilands Post Office is also dead, killed by restructuring, and a new, valid permit has had to be negotiated.

The change is one of label only, not procedure. The Secretary and his long-suffering partner will continue to hand the boxes of newsletters over the counter of their local Postshop. Groaning under a load which is heavier with each issue, we console ourselves with the thought that this reflects a growing membership.

Bernard Howard, Secretary, NZCSICOP

Thoughts on the Longevity of Superstitions

What is it that keeps superstitions going in the face of our increasing knowledge about the world?

There is no easy, let alone absolute, way of telling the difference between a true belief and a false or superstitious one. In order to be able to label a belief a superstition, one would have to be able to define clearly what kind of belief would not be a superstition; or, for that matter, to call something abnormal, one would have to be quite sure what sort of thing would be normal.

However, people are very ready to insist on these distinctions and they tend to do so on the grounds of what seems to me a very mistaken notion. They think that one can distinguish between true and superstitious beliefs in terms of the method by which the beliefs have been arrived at. There is a correct method, it is alleged, and there are incorrect methods. If the correct method is followed, then the belief it leads to must be a true belief. When pressed such people cite “observation” and/or “reason” as the characteristics of a correct method. Both observation and reason are very woolly terms. If one wants to observe, one first has to know what one wants to observe. And then one has to make sure that the observation is not a hallucination, and so forth. There is no finality in “observation”. The method of reason is equally woolly. People differ very widely on what they suppose to be “rational” and in the end it boils down to little more than the invitation: “Be reasonable, think as I do!”

The moment we dismiss the naive notions of observation and/or reason, the notion of “correct” method involves one in a circularity. In order to decide which method would be a correct method of arriving at a true belief about the real world, one would have to know quite a lot as to what that real world is really like. Without such knowledge, there can be no telling what method would be the correct one. But it is precisely our ignorance of that real world and of what it is like that leads us to the search for the correct method.

The history of science provides countless examples of the absence of a correct method. Even a cursory examination of the “method” used by Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Darwin or Einstein will show that they had no real method at all. The most recent and best documented example is the history of the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA.

There was Rosalind Franklin who tried to avoid all adventure and kept making X-ray pictures of DNA, putting her trust in old Francis Bacon, that heaps and heaps of these pictures would ultimately yield knowledge of the molecular structure of the substance X-rayed. And all the while, there were Crick and Watson, wildly speculating and inventing haphazardly and making informed guesses and using Rosalind Franklin’s X-rays merely to confirm or disconfirm their hypotheses.

What makes us think, in the absence of a correct method, that the conclusions of all these people were not superstitions, is the fact that once they had made their discoveries, these discoveries have failed to be falsified. We owe this paramount insight into and understanding of the growth of knowledge to Karl Popper, whose classic book on the subject was first published in Vienna in 1935.

Since there is no correct method, there is no absolute distinction between a true belief and a superstition. At best, we can tell the difference after the discovery or the proposal of a solution has been made. A superstition, after it has been put forward, is either falsified or it is couched in the first place in such a form that nothing whatever could ever falsify it.

A true belief, on the other hand, is, at best, considered true because, although we know what would have to be the case for it to be false, it has so far not yet been falsified. A true belief is only provisionally and hypothetically true and is, for this reason, not absolutely different from a superstition.

Postmodernists

Unfortunately this lack of an absolute difference between superstition and true belief has been exploited by a host of contemporary philosophers — the so-called postmodern or post-structuralist philosophers (Feyerabend, Rorty, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, to mention the most famous ones) — who relish telling us that we might just as well hold any belief we like, that there is no difference at all between superstition and true belief, no difference between science and fiction, and that people who claim their superstitions to be “science” are nothing but arrogant imperialists who use their power to ram their superstitions down their victims’ throats.

These “thinkers” maintain that “science” is nothing but the mythology of Western people. They sum all this up by saying that all beliefs, including those we call scientific beliefs, are social constructions and that their chief purpose is not to understand the world, but to act as ideologies which legitimise the exploitation and oppression of minorities, other races, or, in general, of whatever people we dislike. Bigoted heterosexuals construct beliefs which legitimise the persecution of homosexuals, male chauvinists construct beliefs to validate the oppression of women, and so forth.

In New Zealand we have to be specially wary of these postmodern “thinkers” because if we follow them we will end up believing that there is no difference between the myth of Kupe and the theory of Continental Drift. In the so-called minds of these postmodern “thinkers” the theory of Continental Drift is nothing but a belief employed by Europeans to put down people who believe that the North Island was fished up from the bottom of the ocean by Maui.

In spite of the faddishness of these so-called thinkers, who are now riding on a wave of popular acclaim because they make any group with the weirdest superstitions feel “culturally safe”, there is a very hard way of telling the relative, though never the absolute, difference between a superstition and a true belief. The more a belief coheres with other beliefs, the more scientific it is likely to be. The less it coheres and the more parochial it is, the less scientific it is likely to be.

By this standard, the concept of, for example, “Maori Science” (a course of which is part of the curriculum at Victoria University in Wellington!) is a contradiction in terms. If it is parochially Maori, it can, by definition, not be science; and if it is science, it cannot be specific to Maori. This is not to say that Maori had no science, but such science should be called “science among the Maori” not “Maori Science”. People who think of “Maori Science” ought to be reminded of the genocidal mischief caused in the middle of our century in Europe by the notion of “German (i.e., non-Jewish) Physics”.

A belief which claims to be scientific must always be open to criticism, and can never be shielded from criticism on the grounds that it ought to be respected because it is culturally ensconced in an ethnic group. The real obstacle to the progression of scientific knowledge, therefore, is not the absence of a correct method of finding it, but the demand that certain beliefs ought to be exempt from criticism on the grounds of cultural safety.

Superstitions which are parochial, however, do fulfill a social function. They function as charters of societies and hold those societies together as cooperating units and promote solidarity. This is, of course, more true of tribal or primitive societies than of modern, urban and industrial societies. In primitive societies we get the almost paradoxical situation in which a parochial superstitious belief is socially, though not cognitively, more efficient than a non-parochial, scientific belief.

Social Climate

The reason for this seeming paradox is quite easy to grasp. A society has to have boundaries and exclude lots of people. A parochial superstition is more likely to function well as such an exclusion principle than a more scientific belief which coheres with lots and lots of other beliefs.

A scientific belief can never function as an exclusion and boundary-defining principle. There is only one truth, but there are at least as many false beliefs as there are societies. One society could form itself around the belief that insects have nine legs; another, around the principle that insects have ten legs, and so forth. The society which, on the other hand, consists of people who believe that insects have six legs would include just about everybody. The true belief about insects could never be used as a boundary defining principle.

By the standards of evolution, one would expect that societies based on subscription to false belief would not last long, because they might waste their energy praying for rain rather than digging trenches for irrigation. But here again we come across another seeming paradox. The society based on the belief that rain comes from prayer is likely to be a society with strong social bonds and a good feeling of solidarity. That solidarity will make it more able to fend for itself and to compensate for its lack of true knowledge. It may lack food because prayer does not bring rain, but it will make a solid fighting force which can rob food from other people.

Parochial, false beliefs are not a good adaptation to the environment, but they are obliquely or indirectly adaptive because they are a good cement for the formation of the solidarity of robber gangs which can help themselves to food by other means. Such superstition-based societies have great staying power even though they are not good adaptations to the environment. Hence myths and superstitions are not likely ever to die out. Faith-healing may not be a cure for cancer, but it makes a good support group for cancer patients. Table-rapping may not be a suitable form of communicating with departed spirits, but it does make for conviviality.

For further discussion see two books by Peter Münz: Our Knowledge of the Growth of Knowledge, London, Routledge, 1985; Philosophical Darwinism, London, Routledge, 1993; and the following papers: “Popper’s Contribution to the 20th Century”, New Zealand Science Review, 48, 1991; “What is Postmodern, Anyway?” Philosophy and Literature, 16, 1992; “Anne Salmond’s `Two Worlds’ in Postmodern Fancy Dress”, New Zealand Journal of History, forthcoming, 1994.