Invent Your Own History of New Zealand

Ancient Phoenicians in New Zealand? A recent book makes the claim, but the evidence doesn’t bear scrutiny.

Ross Wiseman’s book, New Zealand’s Hidden Past (Discovery Press, 2001), is his personal analysis of over 100 inscribed rock drawings on Mount Tauhara near Taupo. He claims they are evidence that Phoenicians from the Mediterranean lived beside Lake Taupo before the Taupo eruption, dated around AD 200. He declares confidently that 2000 years ago there were nine Phoenician settlements spread around New Zealand from Northland to Otago comprising at least 1000 people whose forebears arrived around 600 BC in a fleet of about 10 square-rigged ships. They built pyramid-styled houses and hunted moa with bows and curved throwing sticks. They established a centre at sacred Mount Tauhara and had a charismatic leader called Ishmun (the name of a Phoenician god).

Wiseman extrapolates all this detail and more from the Tauhara rock drawings and similar drawings at other sites around New Zealand. Notable amongst the drawings are detailed maps of the world and New Zealand which he argues must be dated before the Taupo eruption.

These are extraordinary claims. We would be entitled to insist on a bit more hard evidence than a collection of peculiar rock drawings. In the large corpus of New Zealand archaeological evidence from hundreds of excavations over the past century or more we could expect to find some hint of such a significant group of inhabitants. Where are their dwelling sites, bones, artifacts, tools, food rubbish middens and other paraphernalia of domestic life? Where are the site-specific radiocarbon dates? And where are their present-day descendants with the appropriate genealogical traditions? So far, no carbon dates from archaeological sites have identified human habitation in New Zealand older than about 1000 years.

Sixth century BC Phoenicians had metal tools, coins and a written language with an alphabet similar to that of classical Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic. We could expect such people to leave easily identifiable linguistic inscriptions associated with their art and practices, and easily identifiable settlement sites with abundant artifacts including metal and its related technology. Maybe we have just not found them yet. If we do find them it will be very exciting. But a collection of enigmatic rock markings is not enough.

How has Wiseman arrived at these elaborate conclusions? You don’t have to look far into his book to find the answer: a vivid imagination, heavy doses of fanciful speculation, flawed methodology and argumentation, and careless, amateurish procedures masquer-ading as careful science. On detailed scrutiny his case falls apart.

For a start, he dates the rock drawings by a method he invented himself from his own dubious theory of the erosion rate of Rangitaiki ignimbrite (the type of rock in which the drawings are inscribed). After having two geology academics tell him that such a method would be too difficult he forged ahead anyway.

Interestingly, he obtained an age of 2000 years for the rock drawings, but only by misplacing a decimal point in the crucial calculation. This aside, his dating method is intriguing for its naivety. He took silicon moulds of the cut depths of two examples of rock markings. One was a less distinct specimen found on a ridge exposed to the weather; the other was a more clearly defined example found under an overhang protected from the weather. Wiseman carefully measured the difference between the cut depths of the two samples at 3mm and assumed this difference to be due to the erosion rate of ignimbrite from weathering since the cuts were made.

Unquantifiable Variables

The unquantifiable variables in this comparison are obvious at a glance, not the least being the whim of the carver at the time he determined the cut depths. Then there is the question of whether protection under an overhang is a guarantee of zero weathering. Then there is the question of whether the two samples were inscribed by the same artist at the same era. It is crucial to establish this independently, otherwise the argument is circular. The date of the drawings is what you are trying to establish, so you can’t assume both samples were made at the same date and then derive a date from that assumption.

He then determined an average erosion rate of ignimbrite over 30 million years to be 450 metres. He determined this figure by a geological argument I found incomprehensible, involving changes in the height of the volcanic plateau over 30 million years. Then, when he applied the figure he bungled the arithmetic. He concluded, “If it takes 30 million years to erode 450 metres of average hardness rock, this is equivalent to an erosion rate of 1.5 mm per 1000 years.” I’m afraid not. The arithmetic yields 15 mm per 1000 years. Either Wiseman didn’t check his maths, or he has incorporated some factor he didn’t tell us about.

When he applied the figure of 1.5mm per 1000 years to the 3mm difference between the cut depths of his two samples he got an age of 2000 years for the drawings. If he had applied the correct figure of 15mm per 1000 years he would have got an age of 200 years.

Although this is amusing, the dating method was so crude that it could not have produced an indicative age in any case.

He then presented evidence that he claims corroborates the 2000-year-old age. He identified a rock drawing which he deemed had been buried under the Taupo eruption ash layer and exposed by a slip in the 1970s. This led him to the conclusion that this drawing must have been done before the Taupo eruption. His analysis of the strata comes from the exposed sides of the slip, not from the location of the rock drawing in the centre of the slip, so the stratigraphy cannot be applied to the rock drawing. Also, he offers no evidence to rule out the possibility that the rock drawing may have been covered by more recent slips subsequent to the Taupo eruption and prior to the 1970s slip. In an erosion-prone area we could expect slips to occur more than once in 1800 years.

In support of his dating he also cites Dr Richard Holdaway’s 2000-year-old carbon dates for rat bones found in Nelson and the causal link between the presence of rats and human visits. Although Holdaway’s carbon dates are important, they are not site-specific to the Taupo rock drawings and so can’t be linked to them. Even if humans visited New Zealand 2000 years ago to bring the rats, no conclusions can be drawn from this about the age of the Taupo drawings.

More Supporting Evidence

Another piece of evidence Wiseman offers to support his theory is a marking found on a rock at Whakaipo Bay about 15km west of Mount Tauhara and reproduced in his book as a line drawing. He declares that it is an “exact” drawing of the seven stars of the constellation Ursa Minor (the Little Bear) commonly called the Little Dipper. “Each star has been incised as a deep circular hollow in the rock, with a small mound remaining at the centre,” he tells us.

Since this constellation is only visible in the northern hemisphere, Wiseman takes this marking to be evidence that the rock carver had knowledge of northern hemisphere stars. This would only be remarkable if it can be shown that the drawing predates already known visits to New Zealand by people from the northern hemisphere, and Wiseman has certainly not demonstrated that.

Correspondence Exaggerated

In any case, a cursory comparison of the drawing with actual star configurations reveals that Wiseman’s claim of “exact” correspondence is an exaggeration stemming from his own excitement. The rock marking can only be described as a very rough rendition of this constellation at any time in the last 3000 years. By joining the points in different ways I could also produce rough renditions of the Southern Cross-Pointers group and the Pleiades. Both these groups are visible from the southern hemisphere and both contain seven stars. You could probably find other approximations if you looked — star configurations are arbitrary and in the eye of the beholder. It seems not to have occurred to Wiseman that, in the absence of additional clues, the drawing might not represent stars at all.

We could dismiss Wiseman’s theory on the spurious dating alone, but there are other glaring flaws in his work. The material presented in his book consists of reproductions of the rock markings from silicon moulds, selective chalking, “enhanced” photographs, and third-generation scanned copies. Such practices clearly risk accidental contamination or modification of the evidence, or simple misinterpretation. He admits that some of the field work was done by his young children unsupervised.

I have not yet seen the Tauhara drawings for myself, but I was able to check the “Pakanae” map of New Zealand. This is a key ingredient in his case because the map includes Lake Taupo configured in a shape Wiseman believes is close to its shape before the Taupo eruption and therefore evidence that the map originated before that time. This map is reproduced in his book as a line drawing. He says it is to be found etched on a large stone hauled from the Hokianga Harbour in the 1950s. This stone now stands at Pakanae Marae as a memorial to Kupe.

The Stone Examined

Recently I examined the surface of this stone carefully and found that the only obvious engravings on it are initials carved in very recent times. On one side there are some natural raised humps on the surface which, with imagination, might be interpreted as a very rough shape of the North Island, or probably any other random shape you wanted to see in it (a hat or a boot?). The rock is covered in lichens which either help or hinder your search depending on what you are looking for. I could see nothing which could possibly yield the detailed shape in the drawing in Wiseman’s book, and certainly nothing which could justify the detailed conclusions he drew from it.

This looks to me like a classic case of a vivid imagination at work assigning great precision to something that is essentially impressionistic and therefore inherently imprecise. My experience in checking just this one item of Wiseman’s evidence makes me very cautious about accepting his other evidence at face value. Much of his analysis of the drawings displays this tendency to attribute precision to images which, in many cases, were obviously little more than artistic doodling and never intended to be definitive. On Wiseman’s own admission, the lack of clarity of some of the images makes it difficult to distinguish between natural and artificial marks. Yet there are several cases where he reads extraordinary symbolism and detail into the slightest scratch.

Another case in point is the map of the world reproduced as line drawings in his book and featured on the book’s cover in the form of a photo (“slightly highlighted,” as he puts it) of the actual Tauhara rock marking. In fact, the line highlighting on the photo is so dominant that the rock marking itself can’t be seen and therefore can’t be evaluated. His 9-year-old daughter had done the chalking unsupervised, and he didn’t notice the map himself until he later examined the photos of the chalking job.

A Convoluted Scenario

Putting these problems aside, let us assume that some artist drew a rough map of the world on this rock, and let us assume that Wiseman’s rendition of it in his book is faithful to the original. It is unmistakably a map of the continents of the world as we know them today. The inaccuracies are of the sort that I could create myself if I tried to do a freehand drawing of the world’s continents from memory.

Wiseman’s interpretation of this map is a convoluted scenario which dates it around AD 100 and attributes it to an artist descended from a group of Phoenician seafarers who sailed from the Mediterranean to New Zealand in the seventh century BC and eventually settled at Lake Taupo. He attributes the map’s accuracy to the assumption that the Phoenicians in the centuries before Christ were familiar with the entire map of the world because of their global trading and exploration voyages. The map includes, we should note, Antarctica and the Arctic coast of Canada, but excludes Britain, Scandinavia and the arctic coast of Russia and Siberia. Wiseman’s frantic attempt to make these facts fit his theory expresses awe at the Phoenician’s amazing knowledge of the world, oddly combined with the conclusion that they did not know about Britain! Did he consider the possibility that the artist just didn’t finish the drawing? Apparently not.

Another Explanation

The more obvious and prosaic scenario seems to have escaped Wiseman, namely, that the map’s detail virtually guarantees that it was drawn by a moderately well educated person in the last 200 years, or maybe even within the last 100 years by a person with a primary school education. A well known rule of thumb in this kind of inquiry is that if there is a choice between a complex and a simple explanation, the simple one is the more likely.

Wiseman often prefers the far-fetched version, and it gets him into difficulties. One drawing (which he dates before the Taupo eruption of course) seems to depict fallen trees, which he takes to be the flattened forests caused by the Taupo eruption. In fact, the content of the drawing is so ill-defined that you could read almost anything into it. Wiseman’s analysis is that, because the drawing was done before the Taupo eruption, it foresaw the Taupo eruption. Now hang on a minute. Here we have Wiseman arguing that because his dating of the drawing can’t be wrong the artist must have foreseen the Taupo eruption. Would not a drawing depicting an event be conclusive evidence that it was drawn after the event? Not for Wiseman it seems. Such contrived manipulation of the evidence to fit a strongly held theory, especially by resort to the paranormal, is grossly unscientific. But Wiseman dug himself into this quagmire by allowing his preconceived ideas to dictate his findings, and by reading detail into the rock markings that is simply not there.

Geometrical Shapes

Wiseman makes much of the geometrical shapes he finds in many of the rock drawings and reads extraordinary symbolism into them — a diamond symbolises life, a trapezium death, a circle materiality. He uses two such drawings to construct an abstruse symbolism depicting an ancient theory of the universe to support his theory of Phoenician origins. In these two drawings he identifies two-dimensional representations of cubes, dodecahedrons, a stellated dodecahedron and an icosahedron (the latter term he confusingly interchanges with the term stellated icosahedron). He concludes that the drawings “indicate that the Phoenicians knew of the existence of all 10 regular polyhedra and the symbolism behind them”, and that their knowledge in this field preempted western knowledge by more than 2000 years.

This sounds very impressive but is mathematically and historically garbled. A regular polyhedron (solid) is defined as one that has identical (congruent) regular polygons forming its faces and has all its polyhedral angles congruent. There are only five possible regular convex polyhedra: the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron. Euclid defined them, Plato knew of them, and the Pythagoreans and probably all the early Middle Eastern mathematicians knew of at least three of them. The so-called stellated dodecahedron and stellated icosahedron are really examples of concave regular polyhedra.

As for the two drawings which feature these figures, on Wiseman’s own admission they are not well defined. The copy in his book of the figure he identifies as a stellated dodecahedron could as easily be identified as a stellated pentagon (a two-dimensional plane figure). The figure he identifies as an icosahedron (possibly he means a stellated icosahedron) can only be described as a confusing jumble of irregular triangles and other shapes from which it would be reckless to conclude anything. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Wiseman has constructed a complicated historical theory from a few casual geometric doodlings by someone who took pleasure in artistic creativity with no mathematical pretensions at all.

There can be no denying that the Tauhara rock drawings are tantalising, and it would be nice to know who made them. Although Wiseman is prone to fanciful interpretation of the slightest scratch, broad interpretation of some of the drawings is possible. One is a convincing line sketch of activities during a moa hunt. The moa is easy to identify, and the stick-figure hunters with spears certainly seem to be ambushing it. Moa feature unambiguously in several of the drawings, which cannot be surprising because archaeological excavations have produced evidence of moa hunters, dated about 600 years ago, in the lower layers of Whakamoenga Cave about 13km west of Mount Tauhara. Wiseman ignores this rather conspicuous clue about who might have made the moa drawings.

Sailing Vessels

Three drawings feature clear sketches of sailing vessels with yardarm or boom rigging. Wiseman seems to read more detail into these than is reasonable. There is certainly no imperative that they depict 2000-year-old Phoenician ship design as he argues. They are typical of the rough impressionistic sketches a school child might do on the back of an exercise book with no intention to be accurate. They could have been done at any time in the last 1000 years by anyone familiar with Polynesian craft, or within the last 200 years by anyone familiar with European craft. Artists often create a unique stylised version of an object applying artistic licence by economising on the detail or embellishing it.

Another example features a line drawing of a house which is not difficult to see as a high-walled, hip-roofed bungalow on wooden piles complete with a square window. Taken with the human and animal figures in the drawing it is possible to see the whole image as a New Zealand colonial farmyard scene. To Wiseman it is the Ishmun family home of AD 100 with a “new improved design of dwelling”. He even identifies which member of the family each stick figure represents, identifies one of the trees as a fruit tree, identifies a rectangular shape as a storage box, and identifies the animal as a milking goat.

Contrary to Wiseman’s assumption, it is entirely possible that the drawings on Mount Tauhara were not all done in the same era. Some may be 600 years old, and some may be only 50 years old – we probably won’t ever know for certain. Successive generations of humans may well have left their marks on the same group of suitable rocks. Humans are well known for following trends, fads, or a catchy idea. I have been known to scratch a cryptic image on a mountaintop myself.

Lateral Thinkers

Wiseman sees himself as part of a growing brigade of “lateral thinking amateur researchers” breaking through the barrier of the blinkered orthodox view of New Zealand history to reveal “the truth”. He complains that the media and mainstream academics invariably try to suppress anomalous “discoveries” such as his.

I find this ironical. I made a cursory analysis of media coverage of these fringe theories over the past 10 years and found they get at least as much coverage as orthodox theory. It is not an exaggeration to say that the media is hungry for sensation and pounces on a good mystery. They will especially jump at the chance to publicise maverick researchers challenging orthodox theory, and they especially love conspiracy theories claiming that mainstream science has suppressed scientific information. Expert refutations are often relegated to brief addenda, or reluctantly presented later with less prominence, because they are perceived as boring.

A classic case was the media frenzy about the Kaimanawa stone wall in 1996. (It needs to be repeated that geologists confidently declared it to be a natural rock formation, but the credulous still believe it is man made).

Wiseman was completely free to make his self-published book available to the world through book shops and libraries without restriction and without any prior critical assessment or expert evaluation.

Even if the book is total fantasy the citizens are free to read it uncritically and swallow it whole if they want to, and many will. What more could Wiseman ask for? If the book is scientifically substandard, he can’t be surprised if mainstream researchers don’t want to waste time dialoguing with him.

Probabilities and Certainties

Theorists such as Wiseman seem to have little understanding of how science works. Much science relies on probabilities rather than certainties with conclusions expressed as confidence levels based on the abundance of the evidence. Archaeological investigations can never give full coverage to all the possibilities and must be done by prioritising representative samples or targeting highly suggestive clues based on current knowledge and known patterns.

The current corpus of evidence of human settlement in New Zealand is already substantial enough to be indicative to high confidence levels. We are talking here of a body of evidence from hundreds of excavations, hundreds of carbon dates and thousands of artifacts.

Of course, the discovery of revolutionary new evidence is always possible. Wiseman is obviously convinced that archaeologists have not looked in the right place to find the evidence that would prove his theory. Maybe so. But the archaeologists are the most competent people to assess that. Every archaeologist would love to be the first to find evidence of 2000-year-old human habitation in New Zealand. I don’t think Wiseman’s book will help them much.

It is difficult to find any scientifically redeeming features in this book. But speculation is socially acceptable if it is not claimed to be anything else. Wiseman claims to have made “the most significant archaeological discovery in New Zealand history.” Time will tell about that. Richard Holdaway’s rat bone datings indicate that humans made at least casual, itinerant or accidental visits to New Zealand 2000 years ago.

But it is much more likely that such visitors were from the Pacific Islands than from Europe, given the well-documented facts that these islands were only about 20 days sailing time from New Zealand and were inhabited by accomplished seafarers 2000 years ago. And we could not rule out the possibility that humans actually settled here 2000 years ago (by “settled” I mean dwelt and bred successive generations). But no hard evidence exists for this at present. Wiseman’s book does not constitute such evidence. It is little more than pseudoscientific credulity, and a blind alley that will mislead many gullible readers.

Wide-ranging Review a Valuable Update

PSEUDOSCIENCE AND THE PARANORMAL, by Terrence Hines. 2nd edition, Prometheus. ISBN 1-57392-979-4.

This book thoroughly demolishes the pretence that laboratory experiments in ESP have produced statistical evidence for the phenomenon’s reality. But like almost all writers on the subject, Hines treats telepathic communication and precognition as merely alternative forms of the same thing. ESP does not exist. But telepathy conceivably could exist, if there was a “fifth force” explain it, whereas precognition would require that information travel backward in time — an absurdity that can be refuted by the reductio ad absurdum it would produce.

In discussing the Alice-in-Wonderland rationalization of parapsychologists for the impossibility of obtaining positive results of ESP tests under conditions that rule out non-ESP explanations, namely, that “psi is shy,” Hines classifies the rationalisation as just one more non-falsifiable (and therefore unscientific) hypothesis, as indeed it is. But he might have made his point better by asking: If one force of nature, ESP, can feel insulted and refuse to manifest itself in the presence of a skeptic, how come magnetism does not refuse to do so? How come the nuclear forces are not shy? How come gravity is not shy? How come only psi is shy?

Hines’ several pages on how cold readings are accomplished are sufficiently detailed to satisfy all but the incurably gullible that the psychic scam relies on the Barnum dictum that there is a sucker born every minute. And in debunking perhaps the most widely believed claims of psychic prophecy, he shows that a passage by Nostradamus widely interpreted as a foretelling of the rise and fall of Napoleon could equally well be applied to Ferdinand II, Adolf Hitler, or any European ruler whose governance was less than beneficial.

Hines is himself not free of belief in pseudoscience. He authenticates the reality of hypnotism. According to Robert Baker, in They Call it Hypnosis, “Hypnotism does not exist, has not existed in the past, and will not exist in the future.” Hines has, however, withdrawn his endorsement of multiple personality disorder and acupuncture, mentioned favorably in his 1992 edition.

He also continues to authenticate the claim that victims of Tourette’s syndrome who engage in “uncontrolled swearing and use of racial and ethnic epithets” (p. 84) are not consciously playacting. The only reason Tourette swearing is viewed as involuntary is that the patients say so. I am not going to accuse Hines of gullibility. Ninety percent of his book proves that he is not. It is the psychotherapists who diagnosed (actually invented) imaginary illnesses who are gullible.

Hines’ chapter on psychoanalysis should be mandatory reading for all persons who still believe that Freud’s imbecilic fantasy differs in any way from spilling one’s guts to a bartender or a taxi driver. He ends the chapter with a debunking of hundreds of incompatible procedures lumped together as “humanistic psychology”, describing them as “all couched in layers of vacuous psychobabble and containing considerable amounts of pseudoscience”. Right on!

Hines catalogues an abundance of evidence that polygraphs are no more effective as lie detectors than tossing a coin, heads for Truth and tails for Lie. In an experiment conducted by the TV program 60 Minutes in 1986 (p. 430): “Several polygraph firms were called by CBS and told that there had been a theft…. In fact there had been no theft and all the ‘suspects’ knew that they were taking part in an experiment. Each polygraph operator was given a hint that one particular suspect was the leading suspect, but the hint concerned a different employee for each operator. The operators in each case identified the ‘leading suspect’ as the guilty party. Not one operator failed to make this incorrect judgment.”

Hokum Locum

Another Alternative to Evidence Based Medicine

Vehemence based medicine: The substitution of volume for evidence is an effective technique for brow-beating your more timorous colleagues and for convincing relatives of your ability. New Zealand Medical Journal Vol 113 No 1122 p479

Chiropractic

This pseudoscience is now being advertised on television. In the same way that acupuncture can be easily learned during a one-hour lecture, anyone can learn how to make the spine go “click”. Many lay people have discovered this for themselves. Four or more years of training are unnecessary when a modality has no scientific basis. You only need to learn how to produce a pleasing noise from the spine without harming the patient. Osteopaths extend this effect to include the joints. If you pull firmly on your fingers you get the same effect, often a dramatic crack. Various theories have been proposed for this such as air bubbles, but I have noticed that large joints frequently produce all sorts of noises when they are being examined. When the neck is forcibly manipulated in this way there is a real risk of serious injury to major arteries in the neck. The shearing forces cause a tear in the arterial wall (a “dissection”) and this interruption to the blood supply to the brain can cause a stroke. If you have a sore neck and simply wait for it to get better you are not exposed to this risk. I used to do a lot of spinal manipulation but gave it up because patients started coming back all the time to have their spine “put back in”. I had unwittingly stumbled upon the secret of chiropractic! This became very tiresome and I stopped the practice after giving myself a nasty fright when a patient fainted and I thought I had killed her. Chiropractors talk about “adjustments” and this is the source of their income – adjustments to their bank accounts. Once the patient is convinced of the need for frequent adjustments, the chiropractor has a regular patient for life. For a detailed view of the pseudoscience of chiropractic visit www.quackwatch.com.

For a review of serious adverse effects of chiropractic refer Ernst E. Medical Journal of Australia 2002; 176: 376-380

Good Health

I have forwarded a copy of this publication to the editor. It is an advertising supplement for alternative medicine. Good Health employs a resident naturopath, Lani Lopez, complete with a Kentucky fried medicine qualification – N.D. Dip J. Herb. We learn that Mandy Smith owes everything to a diet rich in pond scum (spirulina aka blue/green algae). Auckland-based readers will be delighted to know that NZQA loans and allowances are available if they wish to obtain such qualifications from Wellpark College of Natural Therapies. Refer www.wellpark.co.nz, although their website was down when I visited. I was particularly taken with an article on joints with metaphors such as “creaking hinges and rusty joints.” My left knee has osteoarthritis and I learned that “essential oils, Clove, Frankincense, and Cajuput oil penetrate deeply into swollen areas and support normal joint articulation.” The only problem with that claim is that human skin is actually impervious to such treatments as it is a very effective barrier. However, I had a biomechanical brainwave. Why not insert grease nipples over troublesome joints and use a modified grease gun to pump the “two main natural ingredients Glucosamine and Chondroitin” directly into the joint? The next time I take the car for an oil change and grease I’ll have my knee done as well, and if that fails there’s always…

Doctor Levine’s Patented Power Knee Strap

There must be plenty of money in this product as it has recently featured in several half-page advertisements. It is claimed the strap provides relief from arthritis and chronic knee pain. The strap costs $24.95 and is designed to sit just beneath the kneecap. Dr Levine is described as a “nationally famous physician and former head of orthopaedic surgery at one of New York’s leading hospitals.” I decided to check these claims and the website of the American Medical Association (www.ama-assn.org) had a search engine by doctor’s name. This confirmed the existence of Dr Jack Levine. The website also had a statement of the ethical standards for the AMA members and it appears that this advertising is a breach of Article 2. I emailed the AMA pointing this out and will report back, assuming they bother to reply. The strap is obviously a placebo. It might work if it was tightly placed around the upper thigh where it could cut off the circulation, compress the nerves and produce a pleasing numbness – a sensation that frequently comes over me when I am confronted with American consumerism.

Slimming the easy way

A 44-year-old woman was referred to hospital with anxiety symptoms, weight loss and hypertension after taking a Chinese herbal remedy for weight loss. Her doctor was obviously suspicious about the composition of this preparation because it had actually worked. These preparations are normally useless. The initial suspicion was that the herbal remedy contained ephedrine (“Ma Huang”), which is a dangerous but commonly used preparation. Gas chromatography revealed, however, that the herbal preparation was adulterated with fenfluramine, a potent and dangerous amphetamine derivative. One can only agree with the author of the report: “stringent regulation of traditional medicines, at least to the standards of conventional practice, is urgently needed”. British Medical Journal Vol 324 16 March 2002 p679

Recovered Memory

This contemptible pseudo-science is still blighting lives all around the world despite being condemned by most authoritative Psychiatric Colleges. Psychologists at the University of Otago have found that children can only explain early childhood events using the language they knew at the time. The researchers are quoted: “If you take our data to their logical conclusion, then one implication would be that we need to express scepticism about very early verbal memories that are recovered during the course of therapy”.

The merciless badgering of self-deluded therapists is a process very similar to “facilitated communication”. This is where the “facilitator” guides a handicapped person’s fingers on a keyboard to produce written communication, which the person is incapable of when unaided. This is of course a complete delusion and we have experimental psychologists to thank for exposing this nonsense which should not be either encouraged nor funded by ACC.

Article Published in US Psychological Science-reported in Sunday Star Times 28 Jul 2002

Forum

Children & Quackery

It is hard to be sure what Mike Houlding is on about in his rather opaque letter but I gather that he is lumping the use of clairvoyants, homoeopathic remedies and ADHD under some collective rubric of quackery.

He seems to be some kind of medical practitioner in which case he should have received or known about the Ministry of Health’s publication on ADHD – its diagnosis and treatment published in August last year (available on the web under MOH publications). This publication, which is an evidential distillate of knowledge in the area shows first of all, that ADHD is a bona fide medical taxon that requires the same kind of professional diagnosis as does any other disorder in medicine and second, that its treatment with methylphenidate (which he calls Ritalin despite the fact that Pharmac no longer pays for that brand name) has more support in terms of efficacy and safety than many other treatments in medicine. The publication also sets out the standards by which this treatment is to be used and its effect monitored.

I take strong exception to his comment lumping the diagnosis and stimulant treatment of ADHD as “institutionalized child abuse”. This does little credit to the 40 years systematic research in the disorder and the care with which most medical specialists in paediatrics and child psychiatry in NZ take with children so affected.

If Houlding is a medical professional, then he needs to take some time properly to inform himself about this topic than shooting from the hip without the benefit of any intervening cognition.

JS Werry, Emeritus Professor, Child and Youth Psychiatrist

Global Warming

Pious thoughts from wise fools, by P J O’Rourke

Mom says, “Global warming or no global warming, it’s still winter. Wear a hat.”

Robin Capper

Two Views of the World Trade Centre Attack

  1. From Editorial in ‘Skeptical Inquirer’ Jan/Feb, 2002.
    Brian Farha, a professor of education at Oklahoma City University and member of CSICOP’s astrology sub-committee, wrote to me to propose we run a Forum column with this introduction: “Following are detailed summaries of documented psychic predictions-to this author’s knowledge-regarding the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on America.” That would be followed by a blank page.

  2. From the newsletter of the American Society for Psychical Research, December, 2001.
    Through our website, we have initiated a survey of pre-cognitive experiences specifically related to the terrorist attack.

Submitted without comment by Bernard Howard.

Not quite hot off the press

Three or four years ago Ralph Marinelli, a researcher at the Rudolf Steiner Research Institute in Michigan, made a great discovery. The heart is not a pump. Blood is self-propulsive, energised by the primary force of cosmic levity it is self-levitating. Scientists have been confused by mis-understanding the concept of centrifugal force. The research institute is very concerned that this major development in physiology has been almost totally ignored. If anybody can channel William Harvey [1578-1657] it would be very interesting to get his comments.
Jim Ring

Memoirs of a Psychic Researcher

University days are a great time to explore new directions. But sometimes you may end up a long way from where you thought you were going.

Back in 1969 I was a fresh-faced first year student at Auckland University. I had come there to bathe in the fountain of wisdom. I wanted to understand the deep mysteries of life, and learn how to think logically. Oh, and maybe learn how to speak Spanish fluently – you had to learn a language anyway, in those days, in order to get a BA. No real thoughts about how that might earn me a living – no big deal either in those days, as you were considered employable in a variety of professions with a BA. I did have an idea of eventually becoming really wise, and setting up in private practice as a clinical psychologist – I had heard of Freud and was yet to be disillusioned about his approach.

The first big event at Uni was “orientation”. In 1969, (maybe still today?) each society splashed out (pun intended) on wine and cheese evenings, to attract new members. I guess a portion of each new member’s funds were stashed away for next year’s wine and cheese. Anyway, I attended about a dozen wine and cheeses and joined one club. That club offered to sort out some of the deepest mysteries – it was the Psychic Research Club. I still feel a wee frisson at the memory: those wonderful youthful yearnings for secret knowledge, the suggestion that the world had so many wonderful properties waiting for my eager and well- trained mind to discover. Even if these psychic possibilities were all bunkum, I and my new-found friends decided that we would then have a new and interesting phenomenon to investigate, ie why do so many believe? In those hippy happy days (and I was already calling myself a hippy), the idea that there were no real psychic phenomena was rather novel. Many believed in Uri Geller’s psychic powers, and those guys at Duke University had apparently scientifically proved the existence of telepathy using specially designed cards in controlled experiments.

Our own investigations

Well, our motto was that we kept an open mind. We had not come to any definite conclusions, so, in true scientific fashion, we decided to carry out our own investigations.

I remember we did think that there were academics who seemed to be closed minded in rejecting psychic phenomena. Of course, they were also spoilsports – we had great fun going out on field trips to check out ghosts, and talking to eccentric colour therapists, “crystallologists”, people who had had prescient dreams, and the like. The focus of our studies, however, was to try to replicate the only possible scientific proof we had come across, the Duke university studies, which were published in the seriously academic-looking Journal of Parapsychology.

Spoilsports

I recall that barely had we begun our serious work, when along came a couple of real spoil-sports from the Psychology Department. Professor Barry Kirkwood (now running a bed and breakfast on Waiheke Island I hear) gave a special talk – or it may have been a debate – on the validity of the Duke experiments, and a few other matters. He pointed out, I recall, a very serious methodological flaw. That is, the academics (in those days quite a few psychic experiments were conducted at universities) had admitted that psychic abilities could only be proved to manifest at some times and not others. Many attempts at replication (and to cut a long story short, also our own) failed. What factors turned “Psi” (the term for that ability) on and off were unknown. This problem is a classic one, and still slows down our scientific progress. The buggers, you see, only published their “successful” results, when probability calculations would “prove” Psi (telepathy, etc) was the most likely explanation. On the days the subjects failed – well, that was just an off-day: Psi had gone away, so those results were thrown in the rubbish bin. Thanks to Prof Kirkwood, we kept all our results, and learnt quite a lot about what randomly generated results look like, how to do statistical analysis, and what are appropriate, acceptable p (probability) values to prove anything scientifically.

I seem to remember that my friend Brian Whitworth, who was our president, got excellent marks for the statistics section of psychology.

In the end, as my now rather ancient memory goes, we tired of talking to “Psychics”. I remember Brian saying something about what nutters some of them were. They certainly never seemed to come up with anything definite that could be investigated scientifically. Then the other spoilsport in the Psych Department, David Marks (and another colleague, Richard Kammann) happened to be in a restaurant or bar next to Uri Geller. (I guess it was planned). Anyway, he heard first hand what Uri really thought of his fans – or should that be suckers. About that time, a jeweller I think it was, appeared on TV and de-monstrated how Uri’s “psychic concentration of energy” – or whatever he called it – was effective in re-starting watches that had stopped. (You have to remember that back in those days, most of us wore wind-up watches.) Apparently, when you followed Uri’s instructions of holding the watch in your hand, the oil thinned with the heat, freeing up the mechanism – for a while at least!

Finally, as I recall, we wound up our society, “for lack of evidence”, and had a final extra big wine and cheese party. Marks and Kammann published the landmark Psychology of the Psychic, which (to me at least) convincingly explained how so many otherwise sane people come to believe in psychic phenomena. I didn’t see Brian again after we graduated, although he did attend my (first) wedding, which occurred about seven months after I managed to get my girlfriend pregnant. It is a shame I didn’t listen to good old Prof Kirkwood earlier, and start tuning in to the actual processes and effects of the real world!

I went on to training college (now known as Colleges of Education), where I was paid a wage to study, and only briefly (and much later) became a trainee clinical psychologist. I was very disillusioned and disappointed with that profession, but that’s another story. For a while, I worked as a professional entertainer, as singer, guitarist, and magician with psychic abilities! I gave up the psychic act after a while, when I realized that the magician’s code of not spoiling the fun by revealing your tricks was incompatible with my newly acquired distaste for seeing people refuse to relinquish their belief that I was psychic – no matter how many times I denied it.

Newsfront

Blairs ‘rebirthed’

Tony Blair and Cherie took part in a ‘rebirthing ritual’ during a holiday in Mexico, says the Dominion (17 December). They were guided through the ritual while dipping in a Mayan steam bath. At least they were clean.

Psychic fails (as do we all)

It must be said that mystic powers called in to help find missing Christchurch teenager Ellon Oved have been a flop. Psychic Kathy Bartlett joined the search effort near a lake, carrying a board and examining the ‘aura’ of the area, the Dominion reports on December 5. However, the Eagle helicopter with heat-detecting equipment also failed to locate the 14 year old…

Reptiles have all the fun

Forget Tiger Woods, several hundred people paid $40 a head to attend a day-long session with visiting conspiracy theorist David Icke. He also gave an evening lecture at Victoria University, says the Sunday Star Times (November 4). A former British Green Party spokesman, Icke has raised eyebrows a few times – in 1991 during a BBC interview he proclaimed himself the son of God. But wait, there’s more. His theory has it that these reptilian shape shifters invaded Earth thousands of years ago, interbreeding with humans and forming a power elite. Explains a lot when you think about it.

Yet more Yeti furballs

A group of British explorers claim to have found irrefutable proof of a ‘yeti-like’ creature on an Indonesian island. The Evening Post (31 October) says the team discovered a footprint and hair samples of a primate which has long lived in the mythology of tribes-people in Western Sumatra. A cast of the footprint and strands of coarse hair are being sent to Oxford University and Australia’s University of Canberra for verification. Haven’t heard anything yet… The same team are off this year to the Gobi Desert in search of the Mongolian Death Worm – a metre-long snake which is reputed to kill a person with one look.

Hairy stars

Reporter Mary Jane Boland and her 4-month-old puppy Max consulted pet astrologer Helen Hope in Australia, for the Evening Post (6 October). Hope has written two books about pet astrology – Starcats and Stardogs which were released here on September 27. No-one, the former New Zealander says, has declared her books rubbish and they are selling well in Australia and rights have just been sold to the US and Britain. She also works on people and countries and predicted that, because of the position of Uranus, things will improve for Air New Zealand. I’m sure the Government will be relieved to hear this. Over the last few months we were to have ‘redefined’ ourselves to the world as well. (That must have slipped past me.) So what came of the canine reading? Well, Max is a classic Gemini, is very intelligent but always in need of constructive discipline. And he’s very special. I wonder what she’d say about my psychotic border collie.

Team gets divine help

A struggling English soccer team turned to religion by asking the local bishop to carry out an exorcism at the club’s grounds, says the Evening Post (9 November). The bishop performed the exorcism to remove all evil spirits from Oxford United’s Kassam stadium. It seems that a band of gypsies were moved on from the site and may have cursed it. Since the exorcism, it is said the team’s fortunes have improved, and they drew their most recent game.

Nessie to star?

Fans of Nessie who hope to catch a glimpse of the legendary creature might now be in luck, says the Evening Post (3 November.) A moving webcam is now filming the murky depths of the Scottish Lake, 230m deep. Head of the project, Adrian Shine, said the lake had more fresh water than the whole of England and Wales – “There is room for a few mysteries, although we’re not expecting to bump into Nessie.” The webcam joins two other cameras observing the exploration of Britain’s biggest lake. Check it out: www.visitlochness.org

But is it art?

Michael Jackson’s good friend Uri Geller is upset at being censored – Sony Music removed religious words and symbols from a picture he drew for Jackson’s new album. The words God, Jerusalem, USA and Angel 2000 were all removed. Geller drew the black and white illustration on a napkin in Jackson’s hotel room. The picture features the heads of a man and woman, the pyramids, a UFO and symbols representing love, peace and hope. Maybe he should have stuck to spoons.

False Claims Thrive on Internet

The Misinformation Age has arrived at last

How many times in the last month were you conned or approached by a con? Maybe this con took the form of a weight loss product described in an ad in the newspaper. Perhaps it was a too-good-to-be-true TV infomercial that claimed to be backed by science. Or maybe it was a testimonial from a friend.

Even if you didn’t take the bait, it seems that the more often you hear or see something that isn’t true, the more likely you are to believe it eventually. This is especially so when claims are partial truths couched in scientific jargon.

The Internet is loaded with this type of misinformation. In just a matter of days, contemporary urban legends and outright hoaxes are broadcast all over the world.

These legends are part of a type of folklore that claims to be true. They may be harmless, containing stories that describe humorous scenarios, but many report terrifying happenings.

Many of these hoaxes are broadcast over email among friends and acquaintances. They frequently have a sinister or threatening side to them. You want to pass on this information to those you care about. Of course, these things always happened to someone other than the concerned friend passing it along.

Food is the topic of many hoaxes. Here are a few weve come across the last month:

“Costa Rica bananas have been infected with a flesh-eating bacteria. The FDA has been reluctant to issue a country-wide warning because of fear of a nationwide panic.”

This is completely untrue as is indicated on the Center for Disease Control Web site: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/banana.htm.

“Aspartame is the cause of lupus, multiple sclerosis, memory loss, Desert Storm health problems, and obesity.”

These claims, said to have been presented at a Conference of the American College of Physicians are untrue. There are hundreds of websites on this topic, making it nearly impossible to discern fact from fiction. The most reliable source we could find was Arnold Dias, a respected investigative reporter who actually contacted all of the claimed sources (http://www.abcnews.com).

“The Mayo Clinic has a weight reducing diet that has been formulated to alter your metabolism so that you literally burn fat. You can lose 20 pounds of fat in two weeks.”

Untrue. The fact that there is no Mayo Clinic Diet is indicated on the Mayo Clinic Web site at http://www.mayohealth.org/mayo/9806/htm/mayodiet.htm.

This legend has been around for decades. The most common version is a very low calorie diet which contains lots of grapefruit, eggs, meat, fish, chicken, spinach, tomatoes, celery and carrots. You will lose weight quickly but most of it is water and muscle, not fat.

Today, we encounter tremendous amounts of information. Because of the difficulty in discerning fact from fiction among the info-overload, there is a strong human tendency to just believe what sounds good.

The next time that you think you’re not being given the straight scoop or maybe just want some entertainment, check out http://www.urbanlegends.about.com, a website dedicated to clearing up hoaxes.

Hokum Locum

Re-birthing Finale

A Colorado colour therapist was jailed for 16 years after being found guilty of causing the death of a 16 year old girl. It must have been quite traumatic for the jury who watched a videotape of the session in which the girl begged for air and screamed that she was dying”. What we need in New Zealand are equally tough laws that protect children from acts of omission, particularly where children are denied safe and effective medical treatment in favour of ludicrous quackery. (Dominion June 20th, Hokum Locum #59)

Weight-loss scam

The diet business is worth a lot of money and the latest scam has been to persuade people to part with up to $300 for a three month supply of plasters containing a seaweed extract guaranteed to “lose between two and four kilograms a week”. This degree of weight loss is not only unsafe but extremely unlikely as there is no possible mechanism for it.

I have been on a self-imposed diet which involves modest restriction of food intake and a modest increase in exercise and I have lost 7 Kg over a four month period. This is within dietitian’s guidelines that recommend no more than 500g weight loss per week. It has been easy and not involved spending any money.

It appears that all I need is a beard, a website and a catchy title for my diet (suggestions please) and hordes of gullible New Zealanders will pay me vast sums of money. The secret is to give no guarantees and avoid breaches of Consumer laws.

Dog-boy?

An enduring urban myth has been tales of children being raised by animals. The latest such story by credulous journalists appeared in the Dominion 20 June 2001. The 10 year old was alleged to have lived in a cave with wild dogs and suckled from one of the females. However, a Police spokesperson put an appropriate spoke in this suggestion by stating “we can’t tell whether he had been suckled or not.”

This story will now enter popular mythology along with all the other stories that have been repeated since the days of Romulus and Remus, two Roman orphans who were fed by flying pigs.

True lies

This is the title of an article appearing in New Scientist 7 April 2001. Experimental Psychologists found that 30% of a group of children recalled “uncomfortable touching” episodes which had not happened to them but were mentioned in a story scenario. Their recall accuracy was even worse when they were asked questions that required a yes/no answer.

This was the problem in the Christchurch Civic Creche case where faulty interviewing techniques were used by people (the new witchfinders) who had a particular belief structure and looked for evidence to prove their loony theories (aided by a loony complainant). In the process they ruined the lives of a group of children and their caregivers, and contrived to send Peter Ellis to prison. The Judicial review was laughable but carried out with the same careful examination of evidence as would have been accorded a claim of alien abduction.

The Australasian Journal of Integrative Medicine

I have forwarded my copy of Vol. 1 No. 1 to the Editor. It could become a valuable archival item in our reference collection.

I am not going to bother analyzing the content but one thing that bothers me is the array of recognized training for pseudo-scientific rubbish. Various Medical Colleges award re-accreditation points for courses on homeopathy, acupuncture and herbal medicine. It seems that as long as a training process has been set up it doesn’t matter about the content. Skeptics have already successfully attacked a proposal in New Zealand for a BSc in Naturopathy.

The overall method of practising alternative medicine is to spend about an hour with patients taking a detailed history which in itself is a form of psychotherapy and engenders a very powerful placebo effect. You then throw in a gimmick such as herbs, acupuncture, or homeopathy to add the “magic” which produces a grateful patient who “feels” better.

When skeptical investigators test all of these things by controlling for the placebo effect, they find no change in objective measurements of health parameters.

More on Buteyko Breathing technique (BBT)

This is a belief that asthma can be treated by deliberate shallow breathing which raises carbon dioxide levels in the lung. The respiratory rate is closely controlled by CO2 levels. When you hold your breath, CO2 levels rise and eventually you are forced to take a breath. If you deliberately over-breathe then CO2 is “blown off” and this causes people to feel dizzy and peculiar (hyperventilation).

Professor Buteyko believes that the fundamental cause of asthma is hyperventilation and his method is aimed at getting patients to deliberately hypoventilate. Several studies have been done and one would obviously expect to find raised levels of CO2 in people practising BBT. There was none.

Patients practising BBT felt better but there was no change in their use of asthma medication.

BBT produces a classic placebo effect which is what one would expect since the cause of asthma is known to be inflammatory changes in the airways of the lung.

Advertisements

I thought it would be interesting to review what’s on offer from the Sunday News on July 1st.

“Stop snoring or your money back”….not a good claim to make when it’s very hard to see how a “natural blend of enzymes and herbs” can possibly stop snoring. This preparation is marketed as “Dr Harris Snore Tablets”. Shouldn’t that be “anti-snore?”

Clive Clinics have been around for decades and their itinerant trichologists are promising assistance through hair analysis which “can indicate vitamin, mineral or toxic problems…” It is claimed that “your parents are the reason for your baldness” but there may be “treatments that block the genetic messages…”

The words and language in this advertisement illustrate how the promoters incorporate scientific advances into their sales pitch. The before and after photographs are great and I recommend readers check out the website <www.cliveclinics.com>

Dr Archer’s FATBUSTERS is a good example of the classic weight loss promotion. Using a new dietary supplement “more than 25 000 Nz’ers have lost weight!” The pills “soak up fat from food and stop fat being absorbed into the body…Just eat your usual meals”. This is an irresistible formula for the obese – an eating cure! Although there are two ‘before’ photographs of “Tania” and “Mike” there are no ‘after’ pictures. Could this mean that the product failed to work? Curious readers should call 0800-78-2000 to find out.

Anti-Science Backlash

Some of you may recall Mike plugging the following two books at the conference. Both are concerned with the anti-science backlash, promulgated mostly by the academic left in the USA: post-modernism, relativism, radical feminist critiques of science, ethnocentric science, and so on. It’s a movement that’s beginning to assert itself here, and we should be informed.

Continue reading

Therapeutic Folie-a-Deux

Folie-a-deux can be defined as a paranoid disorder in which the same delusion is shared by two (or more) persons. The delusion is thought to be transmitted from a dominant but paranoid person to his or her dependent intimate(s), and the latter may recover “normal” reality testing after separation from the former.

To my mind the interesting essential of this situation is that the sharing of a belief bonds and comforts its adherents; this feature may be obvious even where the belief is shared by many and would not ordinarily be regarded as delusional. For example, picture a church congregation reciting its creed in unison.

The Comfort of Shared Belief

What is the nature of the comfort so provided? In our prototypical, pathological case, where the belief is a persecutory delusion, the acceptance of the belief by a “significant other” signifies to “the beleaguered one” that he has found an ally or a protector; contrariwise, skepticism creates the kind of anxiety that would be felt by a small child who hears a robber entering his bedroom, but can’t convince a nearby parent to come to the rescue.

The delusional belief can thus function as a probe with which to test the love, loyalty and ready courage of the other. Where the belief is less persecutory (e.g., belief in God), the sharing of it is at least friendly, like sharing a meal; and the belief may seem to be validated by the numbers subscribing to it.

In either case, if a newcomer to the “church” demands evidence, he either misses the symbolic point, or is being deliberately obtuse and distinctly unfriendly. Those of us who are skeptics at heart will hesitate at the church door, having in the past experienced conflict between that social pressure and its opposite, a desire to be the maverick whose superior science will expose the error of the herd.

Or, if we were doctors, thought we had joined another sort of church, whose members sing in unison, credo in unum deum, Reality; and otherwise have to agree only on the means for finding it (the scientific method).

As doctors, we still take a great deal on trust in our human relationship with patients, and find warmth in that relationship that is cemented, without our consciously considering it, by mutual and traditional assumptions (for example about the nature of the roles each is to play). Generally, we assume the patient is trying to be honest, and certainly don’t demand proof for every detail of the history.

By being credulous in that way, we become the parent who will keep the robber, Death, at bay. Sometimes we come running even when we think the robber is imaginary. And after all, how can one be sure? In a case of suspected child abuse, better to call Social Services after a minimal reality check. “Time may be of the essence.” “Better to be safe than sorry.”

Yet there are many situations in which the credulous posture becomes problematic. The simplest of these is when the patient has been identified as “delusional”, which means that the doctor has decided in her heart that she does not believe, does not stand on common ground with her patient in regard to the delusional idea and does not wish to.

In the interests of the alliance, or out of empathy, she may still search for the grain of truth on which they can agree. Might she even disguise her belief for strategic purposes? Perhaps, after all, her patient is repeating in this doctor-patient relationship a childhood experience of being unable to summon a parent in the moment of terror.

Believing the Fantastic: The Problem

An especially muddled situation depending on credulity in the therapist-patient alliance has been the proliferation in recent years of therapies for victims of fantastic post-traumatic syndromes.

For example hypnotherapies for people who have been contacted, abducted or violated by extraterrestrials, or who have suffered trauma in a previous existence. I assume the reader shares my automatic scepticism regarding these trauma and their treatments. In any case, do we need to concern ourselves with this phenomenon beyond perhaps noting it as an interesting example of folie-a-deux?

But if such is their church, and it comforts them, why not leave them to it? Are not all the communicants consenting adults? The phenomenon is spreading. Abduction stories are becoming epidemic and are gaining more credibility in the media.

Another example, which has been closer to home for psychiatry, is the “growth industry” of treatments and conferences pertaining to multiple personality disorder and Satanic ritual abuse.

I say “closer to home” because, according to the sociologist Jeffrey S. Victor, fifty psychiatrists (and two hundred other professionals) attended the conference on ritual abuse he describes in his article, and two-thirds of the audience at one lecture raised their hands when asked if they had treated Satanic ritual abuse. Most seemed to assume that the survivor stories were literally true and that often such abuse had been the etiology of a multiple personality disorder in the surviving adult.

Admittedly such a conference will concentrate believers, but in my everyday work for a large health plan I too have had occasion to discuss Satanic ritual abuse with credulous therapists and to interview patients who presented typical survivor stories.

The contents of a typical ritual abuse story by now are familiar to many readers: perverse sexual activities occurred at length, repeatedly over the years, between Satanic perpetrators and the child protagonist, embellished with black robes and candles and laboured misuse of Christian symbols; the child was forced to take an active role in the murder of another child; blood was drunk or babies were dismembered and eaten; babies were being bred by the cult for the purpose of ritual sacrifice. Satan himself might appear on the scene.

In day-care cases, the lack of disinterested witnesses is explained by improbable transportation of children to a hidden site (by plane, by tunnels etc.), reminiscent of the “night flight” aspect of witchcraft hysteria. Enthusiasts for the theory hold that such abuse is widespread, for example that fifty thousand ritual sacrifices occur yearly, or that Satanic cults comprise a world-wide multi-generational conspiracy.

According to Kenneth Lanning, in charge of an FBI unit investigating Satanic cult crimes, “We now have hundreds of victims alleging that thousands of offenders are murdering tens of thousands of people, and there is little or no corroborative evidence, from a law-enforcement perspective”.

As therapists, should we care one way or the other about corroborative evidence? Is it not in the nature of an empathic therapeutic alliance to enter into the spirit of the patient’s experience? Is it not in the nature of the therapeutic process to deal evenhandedly with material drawn from fantasy and reality alike? And when it seems that numbers of professionals are unduly impressed by such stories, perhaps it is only their empathy at work; instinctively recognising that there is no better way of forging an alliance with the patient than to endorse the patient’s view of reality.

Yet, I am concerned that in pursuing this course, the therapist can lose track of how much sacrifice of her own intellectual autonomy is being made on behalf of the therapeutic relationship. Taken to an extreme, this kind of empathy ultimately places the therapist in the position of the dependent partner in a folie-a-deux.

There are other possible formulations of the problem I am addressing. Some ritual-abuse patients may be diagnostically closer to having a factitious disorder than to having paranoia, in which case the involved therapists might be regarded as the susceptible targets of a fraud. For example, I interviewed one patient who had obtained disability income on the basis of her post-Satanic multiple-personality disorder, while working with a therapist who had accepted this history without corroboration.

In the case of an adult who identifies cryptic signs of ritual abuse in a child and then applies for treatment or legal action, I see a parallel with the parent enacting a Munchhausen-by-proxy (in which the child is presented for treatment of an odd physical illness which has been fabricated or induced by the parent). In both cases, the parent usually appears especially devoted and concerned for the welfare of her child and compels the admiration of physicians and others involved, until the true situation is uncovered.

What factors beside empathy may have paralysed our capacity to doubt?

Obligatory belief

We all realise the harm that can result from not taking a sexual abuse story seriously, particularly when it comes from a child. We now practice in a state of heightened vigilance to prevent such abuse, interrupt it, or treat its post-traumatic stress disorder. We bend over backwards to correct Freud’s under-estimate of the true incidence of incest.

As a result, many of us have come to feel embarrassed to question any aspect of any story involving sexual abuse, no matter how truly fantastic. Even in the privacy of our own minds, it can seem that belief is obligatory. And when it comes to voicing doubts out loud, we anticipate a consensus to the contrary, or arguments ad hominem that charge our scepticism to our squeamishness, denial or insensitivity.

And here let me make a personal value explicit: that belief ideally rests on evidence that convinces, and that scepticism is a healthy, or at very least, a permissible first response to someone else’s novel hypothesis, especially when that hypothesis involves the supernatural or challenges common sense.

Mass Hysteria

A third formulation to explain therapist credulity is favoured by Jeffrey Victor and other sceptical sociologists. They suggest that the Satanic ritual abuse phenomenon is an example of mass hysteria (a.k.a. moral panic), in which therapists, patients, clergymen, police and others become involved according to individual vulnerability and social context. They support this theory by an analysis of the manner in which the Satanic cult rumours are spread, and by amassing the cases in which no evidence could ever be found to demonstrate a reality behind the rumour.

The content of ritual-abuse stories also lends support to this explanation. For example, some women who seek “deprogramming” claim to have been practicing witches under the domination of Satan. Their scenario of an indulgence followed by repudiation is an exact duplication of that sequence in the behaviour of the children at the core of the seventeenth century witchcraft hysteria in Salem Village in Massachusetts. Beliefs about blood-drinking, baby-sacrifice, perverse intercourse with demons etc were also all represented in such earlier hysterias.

In the three hundred years of European witchcraft hysteria, ending not long after the Salem outbreak, 200,000 innocent men and women were murdered as witches. The hysteria was supported by the establishment, partly because the estates of wealthy “witches” could be confiscated by the court after they had been executed.

It is hard to imagine that three hundred years later, there is any danger of the whole social structure becoming caught up in teh hysteria in the way that it was in those times. It is alarming that part of the contemporary legend is a belief that individual modern cults are part of an ancient conspiracy, whose goal is to “create international chaos in order to allow Satan to take over the world.”

While believers in this theory may never succeed in creating the kind of panic that leads to sanctioned executions, “an unjustified crusade against those perceived as satanists could result in wasted resources, unwarranted damage to reputations, and disruption of civil liberties,” as Kenneth Lanning wrote in 1990. It has happened. Thousands of families in the United States have been needlessly disrupted, even if one can speculate that in some cases distancing the family might have been part of the patient’s agenda.

Causes of Mass Hysteria

The phrase “mass hysteria” describes a social phenomenon not necessarily restricted to people who individually suffer from histrionic or paranoid disorders. Other factors thought to contribute to vulnerability include gender (more often female) and pre-existing social ties. In the case of the Satanic cult hysteria, the “pre-existing social ties” exist within certain sub-groups of the mental-health professional communities. And the law-enforcement contingent at the seminars shares a fundamentalist Christian perspective:

“The most notable circular among cult-crime investigators, File 18 Newsletter, follows a Christian world-view in which police officers who claim to separate their religious views from their professional duties nevertheless maintain that salvation through Jesus Christ is the only sure antidote to Satanic involvement, whether criminal or noncriminal, and point out that no police officer can honourably and properly do his or her duty without reference to Christian standards.”

Many of the participating therapists also share this context.

Modern “local panics” about satanic cults “have almost all occurred in economically declining small towns and rural areas of the country”. Similarly, an analysis of the economic and political factors favouring hysteria can be made on the basis of the location on the Salem map, in 1692, of the homes of the accusers, the accused and their defenders.

It is interesting to speculate about other social causes of such hysteria. One possibility is that many people are interpreting the AIDS epidemic as God’s punishment for sexual wrongdoing, especially as it occurred concurrently with increasing public awareness of the reality of incest. A subgroup of these people may have been conditioned, by religious upbringing or personal history, to deal with anxiety about forbidden impulses through projection and splitting, and the real existence of Satanic cults provided the seed crystal for a conspiracy theory.

Similarly to a conversion symptom, the hysteria also provides the opportunity for disguised expression of sexual and aggressive interests, as the participants can discuss the details of abductions and orgies while claiming to be traumatised or outraged.

Relationship to Real Sexual Abuse

This brings me to the question of just what relationship the Satanic ritual-abuse hysteria bears to real instances of physical and sexual child abuse.

Obviously it can be viewed as a simple imitation of a true abuse situation, which appears cruder or gaudier than the original, as natural imitations generally do. Like the larger and more brightly spotted eggs of the cuckoo, the ritual-abuse story is a winner in the contest for nurturing behaviour.

In some cases, professionals involved in the hysteria have had personal knowledge of real cases of child pornography, incest, physical abuse, neglect, or those rare instances where the sexual molestation of a child was associated with Satanic embellishments (such perhaps was the case of Frank and Iliana Fuster, described by Roland Summit and others). Their subsequent participation in mass hysteria could be viewed as a manifestation of professional shell-shock.

In the New York Times of March 3, 1991, there was a description of a case in which a couple abandoned an infant to death by starvation because of their participation in an extended crack orgy. Three years ago I was involved in a similar case (the mother had been my patient). When her crime was discovered, incredulous friends attributed it to her having been kidnapped by a Satanic cult, which forced her to kill her baby.

This colourful explanation eased vicarious guilt (mine included, at the moments I was tempted to believe it) and extracted a drop of pleasurable drama from what was, in stark reality, an unmitigated horror.

The Satanic ritual-abuse hysteria could well be, in part, the product of that amazing ability of the human mind to transmute pain into pleasure. If so, I can understand why its adherents would be tenacious. Supposing them to have had childhoods studded by such painful episodes, one can hardly begrudge them the soothing balm and spangly entertainment of hysteria; of fictionising and dramatising their trauma at the moment of its emergence into publicity. At one remove, I am doing something similar as I now write.

Let me look a little more closely, though, at the nature of the relief provided to the ritual-abuse patient. It could go like this: if Satan and all his minions ravished her or her child, she was really not to blame. Never mind if mental health professionals had been trying to tell her that for years; when it comes to ground-in guilt, nothing gets it out like a home-made remedy.

How can it hurt to let the patient go on feeling that we validate this version of her story? In some cases that might seem the best course, or is the only alliance the patient will allow. But leaving aside the potential division of a family, within the patient herself, the split is left unhealed. Somewhere deep in her heart, she could still be wondering whether Satan, penis and all, is not a piece of herself, torn like Adam from her own chest.

And to get at that question, she will have to tell the real story — more homely, sad, or embarrassing. It might be a real incest story, but more likely it will be the story of a puritanical childhood, which — as in Marion Starkey’s Salem — allowed exitement only via tales of sin and punishment.

Secondary Gain

And what of the patients who, though now in no great distress, instinctively exploit a mass hysteria? What treatment will divert them from a life of disability under a factitious personality disorder or post-Satanic stress syndrome?

Thigpen and Cleckley, the authors of The Three Faces of Eve, believe that full-blown multiple-personality is extremely rare. Most patients seeking the diagnosis are histrionic personalities with a capacity for some dissociation, and a desire to promote that capacity “to … gain attention, or maintain an acceptable self-image, or accrue financial gain, or even escape responsibility for actions.” Multiple personality is almost unknown in England, where sensational biographical accounts of such patients are less available.

Fahy et al suggest treating multiple personality and lesser degrees of dissociation as symptoms of personality disorder. “It is our contention that sanctioning the dissociative behaviour, by concentrating on symptoms or encouraging symptomatic behaviour, may lead to reinforcement and entrenchment of the relevant symptom.” (The same argument applies to preoccupation with the ritual-abuse story.)

In a personal communication, Bessel VanDerKolk reframed the “attention-getting” motive I have here attributed to the multiple-personality or ritual-abuse patient. He takes a therapist’s sense that a patient is exhibiting or “getting off on trauma”, to be a marker for the presence of narcissistic issues in that patient, such as would derive from a childhood that was lacking the minimum essential mirroring from the parents. The resulting hunger to feel important to someone is appropriately gratified by an outraged therapist, even if the trauma is mislabelled by both therapist and patient.

There is a lively dialogue on the subject of therapist scepticism regarding multiple personality in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. I wonder if professionals polarise over endorsing this diagnosis because of personal values regarding responsibility vs. dependency.

Physicians tend to be responsible, counterdependent stoics; as such we face a continual choice between envying the apparent ability of the dissociative patient to escape accountability, or merging with this patient in order to enjoy vicariously the gratifications he seems to achieve in that way. It is possible to shift between the two positions, but most will have a tendency toward one or the other.

Iatrogenic Contributions to Mass Hysteria

We must finally confront the fourth, and least palatable form in which therapist particiption has contributed to mass hysteria: case-finding therapists have been playing a role analogous to the witch-finders of earlier hysterias.

Of course then, the witches were not so much found as created, often by quite deliberate fraud with an obvious profit motive; I had presumed the therapist motivation to be more complicated, including for example the understandable pleasure of sharing the limelight falling on such a case.

An article on Satanic ritual abuse in the April, 1992 issue of The Psychiatric Times describes a case of a therapist who allegedly pressured her patient into telling the ritual abuse story. The patient explained, “It was never just enough to tell her that my grandmother had abused and tortured me. It always needed to be worse.”

This was a harbinger of the flood of false-memory retractions now appearing in the United States. Such zealous therapists would be the dominant partners of the folies-a-deux, the parents in a Munchausen-by-proxy, and the driving force behind hysteria. The past year’s work of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation would suggest that numbers of recanting accusers feel they had been pressured by their therapists in just this way.

The profit motive must now be taken more seriously. It is not necessarily unethical to pursue a specialty which meets the need of fashion, even if one does so with the covert through, “there’s money to be made from this”. Consider for example a hypnotist who decides that because of new anti-smoking laws, a smoking-cessation practice is likely to succeed. It is perfectly possible that he is sincere and zealous about this practice which also happens to be profitable. Yet, if somehow it turned out that hypnotism were more harmful than cigarettes, we would begin to wonder just how long the practitioner might have secretly stilled the doubts now shared by all.

Education or Tolerance?

It will not be possible to eradicate this type of mass hysteria, which has such a strong appeal and is so nearly adaptive for so many. Indeed, a fifth and final reframe for the phenomenon was suggested to me by the anthropologist Sherrill Mulhern (director of the Laboratoire des Rumeurs, des Mythes du Futur et des Sectes at the University of Paris). She believes that the satanic-abuse survivors and their convert therapists comprise an American possession cult.

Labeling mass hysteria in this way, reminds us of the adaptive and comforting aspects of religion, and blames no one (not parent, nor patient, nor therapist) for a phenomenon that springs from some widespread cultural source.

Yet (along with Ms. Mulhern) I remain concerned about the dangerous and counter-therapeutic aspects of cultic religions, in which vulnerable individuals may feel too much pressure to conform and to renounce family ties that might still have been a net positive resource.

And I feel bewildered to walk into my scientific church and find a significant portion of the congregation busily sacrificing a scapegoat on the altar.

Part of our role as doctors is to educate. We can make an effort to enlighten those of our colleagues who are treating factitious and conversion disorders without recognising them as such, and to come to the aid of those who sense the symptomatic nature of the story-telling but are confused as to what “empathy” requires in that situation.

Empathy need not disable the therapist’s observing ego, nor its faculty of critical thought. That is what generates the full list of diagnostic hypotheses and assesses the quality of the evidence available for choosing between them, so our empathy will be attuned to the real source of pain in a particular patient.

Institutionally, we can make more conscious choices about limiting clinical resources such as hospitalisations, especially where the relevant symptom is fully ego-syntonic or factitious. And finally, I think we need to examine the role played by ritual-abuse conferences, courses or therapies in feeding hysteria or proselytising for a new religion.

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.