Avoiding the trap of belief-dependant realism

The Believing Brain: how we construct beliefs and reinforce them as truths by Michael Shermer. Times books, New York. 386pp. ISBN 978-0-8050-9125-0. Reviewed by Martin Wallace.

Aa a member of NZ Skeptics I have become increasingly aware of the huge and ever-growing list of unsubstantiated beliefs in our society, including religion, alternative medicine, alien abductions, ESP, flying saucers, vaccination refusal, and so on and on. Why are there so many of them and their adherents, and so few of us skeptics?

In his new book Michael Shermer sets out the reasons for this situation. It is our believing brains, evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago, that are responsible. Belief without evidence is a salutary behaviour when facing a trembling bush behind which a predator may be lurking. Don’t wait for evidence – just go! Survival is selected for by belief.

Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine in the US, writes a regular column in Scientific American, and is an adjunct professor at Claremont Graduate University. He lives in Calfornia.

In this book he explores beliefs in many fields, and how we select data after forming the beliefs, to reinforce them. He describes how deeply inherent is our desire to detect patterns in our sensory information, and the evidence from neurophysiology and behavioural genetics which shows how and where this occurs. Religion for example exists in all cultures and can be called “a universal”.

Dr Shermer explores the history of empiricism and the extraordinary prescience of Francis Bacon (c 1620) in his recognition of those human behaviours which inhibit the determination of reality, and the need for a new approach.

He makes a strong argument for the teaching of scientific method in our schools as well as teaching the nature of the world revealed by that process. It is the unwillingness to apply that method which has resulted in the perseverance of our plethora of beliefs. We are not endowed by evolution with that aptitude, which after all is only 400 years old. We have to learn it.

Unsubstantiated beliefs have been part of our nature for a million years. This is why there are so many of them, and why they are so widespread. Shermer writes: “Science is the only hope we have of avoiding the trap of belief-dependant realism. It is the best tool ever devised to determine: does belief equate with reality?”

The prologue is available on Shermer’s web page (www.michaelshermer.com) and gives some idea of what lies within. There are liberal notes for each chapter and a comprehensive index.

I would recommend this book to anyone, sceptic or not, who wishes to better understand our human nature.

Martin Wallace is a retired physician who is resuming his education in literature, natural history, and in trying to understand human behaviour.

Deconstructing Sex Abuse Industry Claims

ACC’s best-practice guidelines for identifying cases of sexual abuse are not credible.

Twenty years ago, New Zealand had a mere handful of people who claimed to be ‘counsellors’. Now they number in their thousands. The phrase, “victims were offered counselling”, has become commonplace, yet the only practical intervention they can make is to talk.

How did we suddenly produce so many wise folk who can provide counselling and therapy to so many? Is counselling science-based or evidence-free ideology? What did we do before we had counsellors?

Despite lofty claims of being trained health professionals, counselling is not registered under the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act 2003. Nor is it regulated by Government or any public process. It requires no specific or mandatory training, public examination, knowledge or skills. Selling counselling services to the public can be done by anyone, without control or accountability, much like psychics, spirit guides and mediums.

My particular concern here is sex abuse counselling, the industry it spawned and the part ACC plays. An ACC press release of 16 October 2009 advised that “[b]y law, ACC can only accept sensitive claims from those diagnosed with a mental injury resulting from the sexual abuse they’ve suffered.” There are two parts to this; firstly, sexual abuse must have occurred, and secondly, it caused a mental injury.

A Sexual Abuse Syndrome?

Do sexually assaulted people exhibit predictable behavioural characteristics that can accurately be profiled? The term ‘syndrome’ is defined in the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as a “group of symptoms or pathological signs which consistently occur together, especially with an (originally) unknown cause”. There is yet no reliable scientific evidence that sexual abuse is a cause of any specific psychiatric, psychological or behavioural condition. Reactions to sexual abuse are generally idiosyncratic and therefore unpredictable.

The existence of a sexual abuse syndrome would mean the “(originally( unknown cause” could be determined from client behaviour alone. Police would have a field day! No such syndrome has yet been identified, making it impossible to properly conclude from client behaviour alone whether a sexual abuse event was experienced.

Science – and evidence-based diagnosis – should always precede treatment decisions and methods. To ensure correct treatment is given to sexual abuse victims, it is also necessary to define what behaviours are not indicative of sexual abuse, but that has not been achieved. If the possibility of sexual crimes arise, then it is essential to find the facts from other forms of evidence.

Counselling

A recent president of the NZ Association of Counsellors declared that counsellors are not ideologically driven people – they are trained health professionals with high ethical standards who are not required to investigate crimes. Sexual abuse is a serious crime. But counsellors lack the skills, resources or authority to conduct external investigation of client claims.

To help it survive and grow, the industry created ideological myths and beliefs about abuse, amongst others, the fantasies of recovered memories, multiple personality disorder and satanic ritual abuse, and then invented scores of ‘counselling modalities’ to treat the claimed effects.

Counsellors believe that sexual abuse can be detected, confirmed or diagnosed from client behaviour.They created extensive lists of ‘effects’ and believe that clients presenting with a ‘cluster’of these ‘effects’ must have been sexually abused. In reality, the causes of those ‘effects’ are myriad. Test it for yourself – how many causes of (eg) ‘depression’ can you name?

The three glaring flaws in most sex abuse counselling cases are a lack of credible evidence that the client was in fact sexually abused, inability of counsellors to separate the effects of sexual abuse (if any) from the effects of other trauma in the client’s life, and a penchant to make treatment decisions on the basis that inevitable detrimental consequences arise from sexual abuse.

To them, allegations of abuse are proof of abuse, but absent externally corroborated evidence or other reliable markers of sexual abuse, a counsellor cannot know whether a client was in fact abused.

ACC’s Best-Practice Guidelines

There is much misguided and ill-informed thinking underscoring this vexed topic, as shown by ACC’s document Sexual Abuse and Mental Injury: Practice Guidelines for Aotearoa New Zealand, March 2008 (generally called the Massey Guidelines(.

It was developed for ACC by a research team from Massey University’s School of Psychology (Turitea Campus( and purports to describe best-practice guidelines for professionals from all disciplines providing therapeutic services to people who have experienced sexual abuse.

ACC’s October 2009 press release said, “[t]hese guidelines represent a significant landmark in the treatment of mental injury resulting from sexual abuse, because they’re developed by New Zealanders for New Zealanders; are evidence-based; and the product of four years’ extensive research and consultation.”

The Massey Guidelines declare that over 700 effects of sexual abuse have been identified, which are believed by counsellors to be reliable indicators of sexual abuse. The document states :

“No single effect can be seen as a trustworthy indicator of sexual abuse. Since effects never occur in isolation, it is useful to consider them in terms of what effects are more likely to co-occur.”

‘Effects’ present as ‘clusters’. If ‘pairs of effects’ had been specified, it would mean sets of two. However, the term ‘clusters’ means a group of three or more.

How skilled would counsellors need to be, to be able to determine retrospectively from ‘clusters of effects’ whether the client experienced sexual abuse? A reliable test would be to calculate the permutations to establish how big the task might be.

In the Massey Guidelines, no required order of choice of any single ‘effect’ is evident, and repeatability of any item is allowed (for example,’depression’ could appear in none, any, many or all clusters(. Under these conditions, the permutation formula to calculate the number of clusters is nPr, where n = 700 and r = 3, 4, 5…x, depending on how many effects make up a ‘cluster’.

Suppose any four effects are simultaneously presented as a cluster, then r = 4. The number of different ‘clusters’ able to be presented by a single client, and which the counsellor must be able to recognise, is therefore 7004 raised to the power of 4. That is, 238,047,385,800 possible clusters.

Full knowledge and awareness of that vast number of clusters is beyond ordinary human capacity. Counsellors would also need the ability, resources and authority to externally investigate each cluster and its individual components to ensure – before making treatment decisions – that the sole causewas in fact sexual abuse and not some other event or trauma in the client’s life.

The Guidelines say that for practical purposes in writing the document, the number of effects was conveniently reduced to 200! The number of possible clusters is consequently reduced. With just 200 effects presented in random clusters of four, a mere 1,552,438,800 clusters could exist.

Belief in the utility and reliability of these ‘clusters’ allows counsellors to assert that virtually any human behaviour is caused directly by sexual abuse, and conveniently removes the need for any other form of evidence of abuse.

Debate about the sex abuse industry is one about belief vs evidence. ACC supports the quaint notion of 700 ‘effects’ and believes mental injury is caused by sexual abuse which can be diagnosed from client behaviour alone. But no syndrome yet exists. Besides, counsellors and ACC fail to demand testable evidence of claimed sexual abuse.

I conclude the sex abuse industry is an ideological house of cards, based on myth, assumption and belief, and that ACC and sex abuse counsellors fail to meet legislative obligations. Moreover, every sexual abuse claim submitted to ACC without proper evidence of abuse and mental injury, constitutes a case of improperly using a document to obtain money, services and/or advantage.

Gordon Waugh is a retired Air Force officer with over 30 years of electronics engineering experience. He was a foundation and executive member of Casualties Of Sexual Allegations (COSA), a national organisation dedicated to helping men and their families damaged by false allegations of sexual abuse.

Orthodoxy? – Revisiting the Cartwright Report (Part 2)

NZ Skeptic issues 96, 97 and 98 contained articles presenting different viewpoints on the ‘Unfortunate Experiment’ at National Women’s Hospital and its aftermath. Wellington registered nurse and NZ Skeptics treasurer Michelle Coffey continues the discussion in this web-only special.

When I wrote my original article (NZ Skeptic 97), it was written with the intention that it could stand alone as a more thorough discussion of the findings of the Cartwright Report and later research. This was because there were a number of important issues raised as a result of the report which have been almost lost in the debate, many of them systemic ones. While I’m sure that readers interested enough can source the relevant material and judge for themselves, in Skeptic 98, Linda Bryder has responded and the statements made merit a response to clarify several points. I referenced the Bryder’s book for a complete review of the topic, but did not address it in the original article as while it does deal with aspects of the ‘Unfortunate Experiment’ the book ultimately fails to provide any complete assessment of the matter due to the book omitting to investigate key figures such as McIndoe or dealing with the health care system (in particular it’s politics) as opposed to social movements.

1. “There was no medical certainty about the proportion of cases of CIS…”

None of the references support the contention that there was no medical certainty about the proportion of CIS cases that would advance to invasion, and in any case proportion of cases isn’t the point – it’s whether CIS was considered to be a precursor of invasive cancer. This appears to be the case. In the Cartwright Report1 (p23) a compilation of studies was introduced into evidence giving figures that indicate over time, a significant proportion would progress to invasion.

The 1976 Editorial2 cited is discussing screening and states “The report faces up to the problems which still cause fierce controversy – those of the natural progression and regression of early lesions, the discrepancy between total [CIS] cases and the combined number of number of clinical invasive cases, and the incidence and mortality rates.” The Walden Report3 it is referring to states unequivocally that “The significance of [CIS] as a precursor of invasive disease has been recognised for more than 3 decades. Several series of patients, followed for months or years, have demonstrated progression from [CIS] to invasive disease at rates ranging from 25 to 70%.” The issue of where earlier dysplastic changes fit appears to be where any “controversy” laid rather than the concept of progression from pre-invasive lesion to invasion. The report placed these earlier changes a decade or so prior to invasive disease as a precursor state stating “the concept that progressive degrees of cervical dysplasia are part of the natural history of neoplastic disease of the cervix now seems firm.” This is relevant to developing a screening programme given that there is a window of many years in which the condition could be detected and treated. Ostor4 in his statement “The ultimate fate of patients with CIN is the most controversial issue facing investigators interested in cervical neoplasia.” is discussing similar issues to that discussed in the Walden report which is relevant in terms of assessing the relevance of findings and being able to predict the behaviour of these ‘atypias’. Most studies ended at the point of CIS. Ostor looked at not only progression to invasion but the likelihood of regression, persistence and progression to CIN3 (11% in the case of CIN1) with the conclusion that the probability of invasion increases with severity of dysplasia, but there is potential for regression which reflects on therapy.

One man’s dysplasia is another man’s carcinoma #40;notably without insertions to influence the reader to place a particular meaning on it) is a statement that crops up frequently. One issue is the correlation between cytology and histological confirmation, while this wasn’t perfect it was generally agreed that smears could reliably indicate an existing lesion. Histological confirmation was required, but there could be a lack of agreement between pathologists and laboratories on the histological criteria meaning that the precise differentiation between dysplasia and CIS varied. These uncertainties don’t seem to have impacted on the confidence of pathologists regarding screening for cervical malignancies and grading of a lesion was seen by surgical pathologists as more a statement of probability of progression which had limited applicability in clinical management as noted in Löwy’s history5. The precise definition didn’t matter as much as understanding that it was the same disease that was being managed. This is nothing other than a fairly typical debate as biology and medicine rarely, if ever, give certainties.

1. ” Coffey cites 1958 ” official policy… to show this.”

It’s important to note for clarity that there could be variation in policies in other areas but what is more critical in this case was policy at NWH, the hospital where Green practised which set the standard of care. Policies at NWH evolved over a period of time. In 1955 the formation of a cancer team to which all cases of carcinoma of the cervix were to be referred to for treatment was unanimously supported. Over the next ten years, policies regarding the diagnosis and treatment of CIS and invasive cancer were regularly reviewed. This wasn’t just agreed to at a meeting of “…only nine senior consultants…”the decision was made a formal meeting of the Hospital Medical Committee, with a majority which indicates that the committee was happy with the level of evidence for the policy. The clear majority and evolving policy don’t seem to fit too well with the narrative that there was considerable medical uncertainty and controversy about CIS and its progression.

2. “Professor Barbara Heslop explained this more appropriately…”

Heslop’s6 article is one to which I referred to in writing my article as I found some aspects of it informative. However, it is based in the opinions of the author so it’s unsafe to use this article to make certain statements about Green. Heslop considers that Green was doing research but seeks to place this in context stating “Herb Green aimed to ‘prove’ his hypothesis by carefully observing that dysplasia did not lead to cancer…Unfortunately, the proposed methodology was equally appropriate for showing dysplasia did lead to cancer. Paradoxically, and I am sure unintentionally, he ended up demonstrating…more convincingly than had been done before, the transition of dysplasia to cancer.” It was demonstrable that Green considered his work as a study initiated to test a theory and his 1974 paper said (p65) “This…represents the nearest approach yet to the classical method of deciding such an issue as the change or not of a disease from one state to another – the randomised controlled trial. It has not been randomised and it is not well controlled but it has at least been prospective…”

While Baker may have had the presumption that the therapeutic relationship would predominate, little suggests this happening in the case of Green. Whether he knew about such things as falsifiability, Green set out to prove his ‘dormant cancer’ idea despite indications early on that following such patients was unsafe (such as three cases of invasive disease in patients followed with positive cytology occurring by 1969). If the therapeutic relationship was predominant, those cases should have prompted reconsideration of the hypothesis; instead they were reclassified and removed from the study.

3. The 1966 management protocol was to “extend” conservative treatment…”

What seems to be being said here is that under 35 doesn’t mean that, but that it means older patients can be included as well. It should mean what it says as this was a safeguard intended to protect patients which Green then breached. When aging occurs, physiological changes mean it is more difficult to view areas of abnormality and Green and his colleagues were aware of this and the additional risks. The report (p37) stated “As a woman gets older, the squamocolumnar junction is more likely to lie in the endocervical canal and therefore be invisible to the colposcopist.” This means that it can’t be determined whether lesions extending further are suspicious and it was impossible to get a sample without a cone biopsy. Older women were more likely to have unsuspected invasive carcinoma. The use of words like treat is misleading as the intention was not to extend conservative treatment, but to monitor women with positive cytology to fulfil the aim of the proposal. As an example the proposal stipulated punch biopsies and used the word treat and treated (p 21 “four have been treated by punch biopsy alone.”) however this was regarded as a diagnostic procedure. The only way a punch biopsy could be a ‘treatment’ is if somehow by accident or design, the biopsy managed to obliterate a small lesion.

4. “Coffey presents this as a negative outcome, as if it was unnecessary outcome for the women.”

It was. There is a difference between ongoing monitoring which often can be done at primary care level and repeated attendances at a hospital over many years for multiple tests and interventions. Patient 4M (p44) was first admitted in 1970 with abnormal smears. In between 1970 and 1983 she had 38 appointments and six biopsies (wedge, ring, cone, surface) were performed with two occasions being histologically incomplete. A review of patient notes (p42) showed many women had more than one cone biopsy and in some cases up to six. Testimony showed that doing this more than twice was not considered unless under exceptional circumstances and doing this procedure could have effects such as stenosis or haemorrhage and make later evaluation difficult. Bonham testified that this was a dangerous practice and with the third or fourth conisation, it was probably a greater risk than hysterectomy.

Nothing in medicine is benign, and there are obligations to treat patients ethically. This includes minimising as far as possible unnecessary medical procedures as there are a number of risks entailed every time intervention is made. In a condition as treatable as CIS that could have been simply excised that means that over a period of time many women had a number of procedures that were unnecessary and posed excess risk to them that still left them with positive cytology resulting in risk of progression with its own complications. The associated disruption, pain and discomfort of these multiple interventions shouldn’t be trivialised.

5. Regarding the infant vaginal swabs, a press release by Judge Cartwright’s counsel stated “Mothers were told of the tests.”

Any kind of consent would have sufficed. Judge Cartwright stated (p141) “&#8230 there was no provision made to comply with the fundamental requirement that children are not included in research with the consent of their guardians.” This was not a test but a trial and was non-therapeutic research that held no benefit for the infant. Green quickly realised after 200 babies had undergone the procedure that it was a waste of time and lost interest in the study without communicating this to the nursing staff leading to over 2000 babies being subjected to an unnecessary and potentially harmful vaginal vault smear for the purposes of research without the consent of their parent or guardian.

With randomisation of Green’s 1972 “R series” radiotherapy and hysterectomy trial it is difficult to see that it conformed to international practice. Randomisation is aimed at preventing systematic differences between groups and preventing bias but in this case, the selection criteria were made in advance but there was no allocation of patients prior to anaesthesia, grading and decision on surgical treatment so no concealment. Enrolment could have been influenced by biases such as the need to enrol sufficient patients into the study along with the potential for further bias to be added with the use of coin tossing. The patients were not given any opportunity to consent, and were mislead about the treatment decision. Testimony on p170 states “Dr Green and myself and others discussed this question of informing women in the trial about it when it was initiated in 1972. We decided in the end not to tell patients about the trial. We told them they would be examined under anaesthetic when the most appropriate mode of treatment would be decided and then we would proceed accordingly.”

I can contrast this lack of any kind of consent from the parents or “R series” patients with the oral consent obtained by Sir Liley for his intra-uterine infusions where he sufficiently informed the patient of the possible risks and that the treatment was experimental. His case study published in 19637 states “the patient and her husband were an intelligent couple, and the prognosis for the foetus, the possibility and uncertainty of intrauterine transfusion, and the potential hazards to the mother were fully explained to and discussed with them.” This was not the case with Green and his research projects, as no real attempt was made to provide any kind of informed consent.

6. “Despite writing this, Coffey herself makes it clear that the two groups…had nothing to do with the two groups whose records Green analysed.”

This is an assertion and no reason is given as to why you state this. As such, there is nothing there to counter other than to say they had everything to do with those groups. McIndoe et al8 was retrospective while Green’s research was prospective, which made a difference in how the study was conducted but they were measuring the same thing as Green’s 1974 paper (p65) describes: “This series of 750 cases of in situ cervical cancer, and the following of 96 of them with positive cytology for at least two years…” The McIndoe paper was also a comparison of two groups of women, one with normal follow-up cytology and one without and was the final paper that Green never wrote that completed follow-up on the patients that were the subjects of his study. In my discussion, I highlighted the summary in the paper of patients who were included in the punch biopsy special series and that alone should make it clear the relationship between the “special series” and the study. I’m sure if Green could have asserted the same he would have, but couldn’t. The report didn’t rest on this paper alone but reviewed 1200 patient files and 226 were used as exhibits.

7. “Cartwright accepted this as “accurately reflect[ing] the findings of the 1984 McIndoe paper.”

Except Judge Cartwright did not. This is selective quotation that distorts the statements in the report and falls short of what you would expect from an historian whom you would expect to take care to fairly represent the context and statements in documents. The statement is from Ch4 “Expressions of Concern” where the article is addressed as it was the subject of public comment and had prompted the Hospital Board to request an inquiry. This put the article under scrutiny and criticism by some witnesses. Under the title “Was the magazine article accurate?” It is stated that the manuscript was submitted and editorial changes explained but there were some errors in the article that was finally published. This section states:

1.Significant editorial changes: The matter of accuracy was raised firstly by the authors themselves. In her evidence Sandra Coney drew attention to two editing changes which she considered substantially altered the meaning of sentences in the magazine article.

a. “Twelve of the total number of women had died from invasive cancer as had four, or 0.5%, of the group-one women, and eight, or 6% of the group-two women who had limited or no treatment.”

In the original manuscript the authors had written: “Twelve of the total number of women died from invasive carcinoma. Four (0.5%) of the Group-one women, and eight (6%) of the Group-two women who had limited or no treatment. Thus women in the limited treatment group were twelve times more likely to die as the fully treated group.”

I accept that the unedited material more accurately reflects the findings of the 1984 McIndoe paper. The edited version is not accurate.

It’s clear when looked in context that the statement was sourced from the original manuscript of the article and those words cannot be attributed to Cartwright. Cartwright is accepting that the original manuscript more accurately reflected the findings of the paper and is being misquoted to say something else. It is of note that in Bryder9 p33 that this statement is used to say “Cartwright too suggested differential treatment. In her report she quoted Coney and Bunkle’s statement that: ‘Twelve of the total number of women died from invasive carcinoma… [etc]” Cartwright accepted that this accurately reflected the findings of the 1984 McIndoe paper.” This statement is again used misleading to say something other than what it actually says and is being used inconsistently.

8.“How had they “returned to negative cytology”

McIndoe did not say treatment did not enter the study. The citation in Bryder used to reference this says only “The detailed management of patients is not under consideration in this paper…” The paper looks at the initial management and in some cases more detailed management of patients as Bryder would be aware. Here, it does become evident that there were differences, for instance in group 1 cone biopsies excision was incomplete in 24%, but in group 2, 74% were incomplete with the difference likely to be largely due to management where complete excision is not a necessity. The paper states “…any examination of the natural history of CIS of the cervix must depend on a representative, though incomplete, biopsy specimen on which to base the initial diagnosis. Thereafter, meticulous long-term follow-up of all patients using techniques such as clinical examination, cytology, and colposcopy, and if indicated biopsy, is required.” The paper detailed some limitations, such as small biopsies or possibly trauma eradicating lesions, or inadequate biopsies missing abnormalities. So in answer to that question, it was because initial management in group 1 patients either intentionally or unintentionally was adequate in treating the lesion and restoring them to negative cytology. Of this group only 0.7% had recurrence of CIS. In group 2, follow-up showed continuing positive cytology after initial management either by limited biopsy or incomplete treatment which was ideal for studying the natural history of CIS as set out in the 1966 proposal.

9. “Coffey refers to the 1986 paper…as critical of conservative treatment…”

This paper10 was only briefly mentioned before moving on with discussion of McIndoe et al as there was insufficient space to deal with it in detail. Here long term follow-up of vulvar carcinoma shows that of 31 patients managed by surgical excision, there were 4 recurrences and one developed a vulvar carcinoma 17 years later. 4 women managed only by biopsy progressed to invasion in 2-8 years and one additional patient managed with incomplete excision after a lengthy period of observation progressed to invasion. The paper demonstrated that untreated lesions have significant invasive potential. This approach was an extension of Green’s study of CIS of the cervix, and in this case a biopsy cannot be considered treatment at all. While the authors were advocating conservative treatment this was excision of the lesion not biopsies or incomplete excision.

10.“Would a modern gynaecologist agree with this assessment?”

The relevant sentence is presented as a statement, but it omits a significant portion of the sentence which is “This needs to be explained, as those figures strongly suggest the progression of CIS to invasion when it is and was a totally curable lesion.” Gynaecologists would accept the statement that CIS is a curable lesion which can be readily treated with a variety of local destructive methods with complete removal of the lesion and reversion to negative cytology which then prevents the risk of the lesion progressing. In the quoted statement McIndoe et al is referring to group 1 patients, whose cytology had returned to normal. It states “However, contrary to what would be expected, of the 139 group 1 patients with incomplete excision of the original lesion, only five (3.5%) later developed invasive carcinoma. Thus whether or not the lesion is completely excised does not appear to influence the possibility of invasion occurring subsequently.” In this case it didn’t, the rate of recurrence was unexpectedly small probably due to the initial intervention influencing the condition.

Treatment of a diagnosed lesion is then conflated with cervical cancer at a population level in asking for an explanation of why cervical cancer hasn’t been completely eliminated. In an ideal world this might be possible, but in the real world there are a number of difficulties to be faced in ensuring the entire population at risk is screened and treated if necessary. Green’s conclusion was that screening was not effective, however the conclusion was unjustified. The report discusses this on page 56 and crucially treatment needs to improve the prognosis as if subsequent cases are not adequately treated there is little value in screening in the first place. Also, if screening is done in low risk cases and high risk populations are missed, that means screening will be limited in being able to affect morbidity and mortality. In McIndoe et al, the age-standardised incidence of invasive carcinoma in group 2 was 1141/100,000 compared with 18.2/100,000 in the general population in 1975. This has since dropped considerably.

11. “As stated above, group 1 and group 2 had a similar range of treatments…”

My statements stand on this matter that “this ignores that while many women were treated with various procedures, there was evidence of continuing disease, demonstrating that the intervention was inadequate. This was not followed up, posing a high risk of development of invasive disease.” To prove that CIS is not a premalignant disease necessitated the area is sampled for diagnosis, but done in a way that left the lesion available for further study. In some cases there was no treatment, for instance the punch biopsy series which only used a diagnostic method. The criteria included that “the colpscopically-significant area is large enough not to be completely excised by the diagnostic punch biopsy.” The intention was to leave the lesion as undisturbed as possible. The use of cone biopsy is covered in q 5 and 9 as this could also be diagnostic. Of the hysterectomy series, only 4 out of 25 had the procedure for CIS so the procedure was done but not often specifically for CIS. Either way, women were left with positive cytology which put them at risk.

12. ” The methodology of the 2008 paper has been questioned by Sandercock and Burls…”

I would be embarrassed to cite this letter11 as an example of “questioning”. Every paper is flawed to a degree but this isn’t the right criticism to make. They cite a secondary source and claim this explains what they say is a problem with McIndoe et al – “He points out that, not only were the two group retrospectively divided on the basis of persistent abnormal cytology during follow-up and not prospectively as experimental groups for the comparison of different treatment strategies…” They misread the letter12 which does not appear to state anything regarding type of study and apparently draw from Overton’s misleading statement that “…Green and other senior NWH clinicians endorsed policy changes in dysplasia management. Younger women were to be continuously monitored, by repeat smears, colposcopy, lesser biopsies and appropriate more major surgery if evidence of early cancer.” which omits mention of Green’s role and his published studies. Sandercock and Burls then make an erroneous conclusion that McIndoe’s research should have been prospective and be following different treatments without realising that prospective research had already been done by Green. They cannot have read McIndoe et al despite citing the paper otherwise they would have seen the paper outlined the 1966 proposal. A few minutes reading would have shown the difference in between the statements which if they were honestly critiquing the study they should have checked.

Sandercock and Burls then claim a similar “problem” with McCredie et al even though they are aware it was retrospective. This might be correct to say for prospective studies that ask a question and look forward such as Green’s as this type of study should assess outcomes relative to interventions but retrospective studies are meant to pose a question and then look back. McIndoe et al looked at the question of outcomes for patients with CIS with the patient groups defined by presence of positive or negative cytology which categorised according to the risk they had persistent disease. McCredie13 takes this a step further with the approach being to look at the question of outcomes for patient groups classified by management that was adequate or inadequate. There is no problem with this approach; the problem lies with Sandercock and Burls.

13. “…It should be noted a study on outcomes cannot make such pronouncements…”

It can however tell a story, one that is further strengthened by understanding what the author is trying to achieve. Papers are meant to be considered in the light of all the evidence and that includes context. McCredie et al shows half the cancers in women initially managed with punch/wedge biopsy were diagnosed within 5 years of a finding of CIN3. It can be judged objectively there that merely doing a diagnostic procedure in patients with CIN3 leads to a high risk of developing cancer in a relatively short period of time, while the context shows up much more and shows the unethical nature of the original research which meant they were managed in that manner.

14. “Yet Green’s achievement was to encourage an openness to look at the evidence.”

Which story is it that is being referred to? The one where there is a controversy in medicine? If so, he wasn’t the spirited free-thinker he is being cast as. If it is the one where Green was the controversial one, willing to question modern medicine then the controversy wasn’t in medicine. If he is going to be cast as Galileo type of figure, persecuted for his heresy, the critical point is that Galileo was proven correct. So where are his papers? Even his supporters never present his papers to support their claims. Their resort is to complain about everything else.

Green’s ‘achievement’ was the reverse. On p108 of the report, in an Auckland Star article in 1972 it was reported that “Professor Green asserted that a woman with a positive cervical smear showing what is called [CIS] is no more likely to develop invasive or malignant cancer of the cervix than any other woman of the same age. In other words, in situ cancer is not a forerunner of invasive cancer, and the smear test is over-rated.” There is no shift in attitude over time, despite that over the years, much more would have been studied on the matter and medical practice would have changed. Green’s set views were taught, leading to Registrars and other staff being under the impression that screening for cancer precursors was a waste of time. Apparently he kept an Ogden Nash quotation on his blackboard for many years saying “My mind is made up – don’t confuse me with the facts”. None of this shows any willingness to debate the evidence; on the contrary when faced with evidence of patients with invasive cancer that he had originally diagnosed with CIS though not a trained pathologist, he reclassified them and excluded them from the study. They did not fit, so he changed the evidence to suit his theory. True scepticism is not about holding an idea or defending a position but about being open to the evidence and being willing to examine it and change if necessary. Hitting on the hard edges of scientific debate is a tough experience but it serves no one if the record is distorted to hold an untenable position and legitimate questioning of this is taken to be persecution instead of honestly examining whether the position is, in fact, a correct one to hold.

References

  1. “The Cartwright Report”: http://www.nsu.govt.nz/current-nsu-programmes/3233.asp
  2. “Screening for cervical cancer” 1976: BMJ 659-60
  3. The Walden Report: June 5, 1976: CMA Journal Vol. 114 1003-1012
  4. Ostor, AG 1993: Intern. J. Gyn. Path. 12, 2, 186-92
  5. Lowy, I July 2010 Historia, Ciencias, Saude – Manguinhos V. 17, supl. 1, 53-67
  6. Heslop, B 2004: NZMJ 117,1199
  7. Liley, A.W. 2 November 1963: BMJ Vol 2, Issue 5365 1107-1108
  8. McIndoe, WA; McLean, MR; Jones, RW; Mullins, PR 1984: Obstet Gynecol. 64, 4, 454.
  9. Bryder, L 2009: A history of the ‘Unfortunate Experiment’ at National Women’s Hospital, Auckland University Press, Auckland
  10. Jones, RW; McLean, MR; 1986: Obstet Gynecol. 68, 4, 499-503.
  11. Sandercock, J. Burls, A. 2010, NZMJ 123, 1320
  12. Overton, G.H. 2010, NZMJ 123, 1319
  13. McCredie, M. 2010, NZMJ 123, 1321

The vertical limit for randomised trials

Alison Campbell considers the evidence for the efficacy of parachutes.

Recently a teacher sent me a paper titled: ‘Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials‘ (Smith and Pell, 2003, BMJ 327: 1459-1460). I have to say I chuckled when I read this – a common charge levelled against current medical practice by the alternative health lobby is that many medical techniques haven’t been subjected to randomised controlled trials (with the corollary that it’s thus unfair to demand evidence from such trials on alternative practices).

The authors state they conducted a literature search of some of the major science sources, using the search words ‘parachute’ and ‘trial’. However (and unsurprisingly), they found no randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of parachute use. Smith and Pell begin their discussion with the following inspired statement:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a medical intervention justified by observational data must be in want of verification through a randomised controlled trial.”

Many medical interventions probably fall into this category – for example, I doubt that surgery for severe appendicitis has ever been subjected to such a trial. That’s not to say that, where appropriate (and in the case of appendicitis it almost certainly isn’t!) such trials shouldn’t be performed. As Smith and Pell point out, hormone therapy for post-menopausal women seemed – on the basis of observational studies – to convey a number of health benefits. But RCTs showed that hormone replacement therapy actually increased the risk of ischaemic heart disease.

As the authors say, RCTs avoid a major weakness of observational studies: that of bias (eg selection bias and reporting bias). They note that individuals jumping from aircraft without the help of a parachute are likely to have a high prevalence of pre-existing psychiatric morbidity (ie they are probably not in their right minds when they jump. You have got to love this paper!). So any study of parachute use could well be subject to selection bias, in that those using them are likely to have fewer psychiatric problems than those who don’t. Smith and Pell also put forward the possibility that enforced parachute use is simply a case of mass medicalisation of the population by out-of-control doctors – or worse, by evil multinational corporations. (These are, of course, charges frequently levelled at the medical world, eg by those who are against interventions such as vaccination.)

This little gem of a paper contains some valuable lessons on the nature of science (and more particularly, science-based medicine). And it should be read by anyone who doubts that scientists have both creativity and a good sense of humour.

Econonics as a Science

Economics has been called the Dismal Science. But to what extent are economics scientific, and economists scientists? This article is based on a presentation to the NZ Skeptics 2009 conference in Wellington, 26 September.

I want to reflect on the extent to which economics is a science and the extent to which it is not. In doing this I come from the approach of someone who was trained a scientist, who continues to think of himself as one, and who is heavily influenced by the philosophy of Karl Popper. I suppose that makes me a sceptic.

The point about sceptics is that they continually test the theories they hold against the facts, and try to improve them. As such, they are what Thomas Kuhn called revolutionaries, challenging and replacing the conventional wisdom. I am going to address some of these false gods directly. Perhaps you hold some dear. Please understand I am just applying the standards of scientific scepticism to them as you would expect to be applied elsewhere.

Popper points out that even though you know your theories will be replaced by better ones, hold on to the best you have until a better one comes along. I will give some examples where scientific economics has held – even still holds – theories knowing their weaknesses, and where we may make progress in the not too distant future – one hopes.

Popper said the most important Platonic dialogue is The Apology in which Socrates reflects on the Delphic Oracle’s utterance that he is the wisest of men. He concludes that he is only wise because he knows how ignorant he is. As Isaac Newton described himself, he was ‘only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.’

Newton also said ‘If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.’ Science is the accumulation of wisdom. We would do well to recall and understand the giants of our science before we claim some particular insight. Some of the greatest minds of the last two hundred years were economists – some were scientists.

I want to begin by contrasting the subtlety of economics and the crudity of its critics. A couple of examples will illustrate my point.

I am frequently told that economists believe that per capita Gross Domestic Product is the measure of welfare of a nation. That is a strange claim since every economist knows that the more relevant measure is Net National Income. GDP includes depreciation and measures the income of a region, not of the people who belong to the region. Some of the profits of the region go to investors outside it.

Such things are overlooked by the critics, but even more extraordinarily, they only rehash what economists have always known. I do mean ‘always’. The creator of the statistical base out of which GDP comes was Simon Kuznets who wrote in his original report in 1934: “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income”. But you won’t find him quoted in the standard critiques of GDP, nor John Kenneth Galbraith who wrote an elegant chapter decrying its use as a measure of welfare in his Affluent Society some 50 years ago.

I am not denying that some people use GDP as the measure of welfare, or that GDP is an economists’ measure. My point is that properly trained economists use it for other purposes – the purposes for which it was designed.

You might say, why in the last 75 years have economists not constructed a better measure of welfare? The short answer is that we have tried, and we have not been able to develop a satisfactory one.

Today there is another attempt by a committee led by Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, two other giants of the profession. What I found interesting is that they have concluded there is no single measure of economic welfare, and are looking for a number of indicators. Which rather undermines all the critics who have their own single measure which they claim is better than GDP. There is no unique single measure of a nation’s welfare. Had there been, economists would have developed it – around 74 years ago. One must never assume that the best economists are as stupid as their critics.

A couple of caveats – I shall be referring to annual market activity, and when I make comparisons through time I shall be referring to volume GDP, that is production adjusted for the change in prices. Incidentally, GDP was originally derived for tracking unemployment. Today we know that it is not a very good short run indicator for this purpose, that economic activity and unemployment track differently. So even if the activity contraction has ended we may expect rising unemployment for a while yet.

My second illustration is that I am often told that economics depends upon unlimited economic growth. That cannot be true since many giants of the economics profession – Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter, for instance – were stagnationists who expected economic growth to come to an end; Keynes wrote of the ‘euthanasia of the rentier’. What he meant, and others thought too, was that as capital was accumulated, the return on capital would fall, until there would be no incentive to invest, and economic growth would stop. This is a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics. As Paul Samuelson has pointed out, economics is grounded in those laws – without them there would be no trade-offs, a fundamental notion of economics.

The difficulty with this stagnationist approach was that per capita incomes in the rich world quadrupled in the 180 years between Ricardo and Schumpeter. You can set up auxiliary hypotheses to explain the inconsistency but in the 1950s, as the data became available, it became evident that a theory of economic growth dominated by pure capital accumulation was inconsistent with the facts.

We now know, following a famous 1956 paper by Bob Solow, that what he called ‘technical change’ adds to economic growth. By technical change he meant “a shorthand expression for any kind of shift in the production function. Thus slowdowns, speedups, improvements in the education of the labour force, and all sorts of things will appear as ‘technical change’.”

The story of how the scientific community has misinterpreted this economic research for its own political purposes belongs to another occasion. The point to be made here is that it is simply not true that economics says that economic growth is necessary. When there is no more technical change, the growth may stop but there will still be a role for economics.

Were the critics a little more subtle, they could instead argue that the current economic system is dependent upon economic growth. The technical mechanism is that the true profit rate is close to the growth rate; so no growth, no profits. When growth exhausts itself the nature of the economic system would change. If you want to pursue the implications of that you might read Malthus, Ricardo, Marx, Keynes and Schumpeter.

So there are two kinds of economics. One is what competent economists do, and the other is articulated by the politicians, journalists and business people who have misunderstood professional economics, often for self-serving ends. This self-serving is the key reason why this misrepresentation dominates the public discourse. Why bother to get it right if ignorance supports one’s ends? It is the scientist who pursues getting it right as an end in itself.

I was taken by a history of Lysenko whose pseudo-science, which confused phenotype with genotype, was imposed for political ends to the detriment of Soviet Agriculture. What struck me was that a large proportion – perhaps 95 percent – of the Soviet biological profession simply accepted the faulty paradigm. Of the remainder, about half got on with doing proper science and the other half ended up in Siberian concentration camps – or worse. But that so many Soviet biologists got it desperately wrong does not prove that biology is not a science.

I’d like to think there would be a higher proportion of the economics profession who could see the fallacies in an imposed economics paradigm, and certainly fewer of us end up in concentration camps. One day there will be a very interesting analysis of how so many economists were misled into thinking the macroeconomics which has led to the current crisis had so much validity. But not all did, and economics can claim that it is being corrected by the facts. Notice that I am distinguishing between what economics is and what economists – and others such as business people, journalists and politicians – think. If you use a definition that economics is what economists do, then deciding whether economics is a science becomes a question of whether economists are scientists, an empirical question.

Probably all the giants of economics were scientists in the sense that they practised a scientific method which Popper would recognise. When we look at shorter members of the profession – even those who were followers of the giants – we observe another way of pursuing economics.

A distinction

To make the division clear, I shall contrast sceptics with the believers. Sceptics are the scientists who are continually testing the hypotheses they hold against alternative hypotheses. For them knowledge is tentative but it also progresses as it replaces existing hypotheses with better ones – typically as a result of an encounter with facts.

On the other side are the believers, who hold a known truth which is invulnerable to challenge. Facts do not challenge their truths, or cause them to be replaced with better ones. Rather the task is to explain the facts within the framework of belief; if necessary they will ignore inconvenient facts.

Consider the belief in the policies which we call Rogernomics, and which are more widely known as ‘neo-conservative economics’. They were applied in New Zealand between 1985 and 1993, and the Rogernomics believers conclude they worked because their theory says so. As it happens the economic growth rate for New Zealand did not speed up under Rogernomics. Indeed per capita GDP stagnated from 1985 to 1993, so it was the same in 1995 as it been eight years earlier. It was in that period that we got badly behind Australia.

I should like to tell you how Rogernomes explain this stagnation since they said their theory promised economic growth. I’d really like to know, since I have a theory which explains why the stagnation happened and I would like to test it against alternative theories. Unfortunately the Rogernomes simply ignore the fact of stagnation. I know of no case of any of them mentioning it, let alone giving any account of why it happened contrary to their theory and promises.

You will detect here the frustration of a scientist. I get better theories by comparing mine with others using the facts that test them. But how can I do that if they ignore the facts?

There is also a policy issue here. It is hard not to conclude that Rogernomics and its Ruthanasia successor failed. There is currently a committee to consider how we might speed up economic growth and catch up with Australia in GDP per capita terms. At least three of its five members were Rogernomes. It will be interesting to see to what extent they address the failure of the policies they advocated in the 1980s and 1990s.

Another group you need to be wary of is those who are paid by their employers to represent their business interest. While they do a good job, sometimes they reflect the firm’s or sector’s interests.

More fundamentally, as Galbraith pointed out, we are the slaves of the conventional wisdom which is a mix of what Keynes called the thinkings of ‘defunct economists’, our aspirations which are not always based on reality, and the theories which support the hegemony of the dominant interest groups of a society. Recession over?

While I was meditating on such things, journalists announced the ‘recession was officially over’ because GDP increased 0.1 percent between the March 09 and the June 09 quarter.

What gave the journalists the authority to claim that the recession was officially over? There is no official definition of a recession in New Zealand; there is not even a standard one. The journalists probably did not have the foggiest idea of what economists mean by a ‘recession’, other than they knew it was a bad thing. The number which led to these pronouncements was a minuscule plus 0.1 percent of GDP, but equally it could have been presented as minus 0.2 percent of GDP per capita. Moreover, there is a margin of error for any figure the Government Statistician reports, and the quarter by quarter GDP change is subject to a large one. They are also subject to revision – five of the eight quarters of the last two years were revised with the new announcement. The average growth rate in the last decade’s boom was about 0.9 percent a quarter. So the June quarter outcome was not only that output per head was falling, but since economic capacity is continuing to grow so that the underutilised capacity was increasing in the quarter. Bad news for the unemployed and putative unemployed.

We sceptics cannot be sure, but don’t be surprised if the hoopla seems silly in a year’s time. As the Minister of Finance said: “Tough times are still ahead”. Probably. My assessment is that there are very tough times still ahead of us.

My irritation arises, not only because of the poor quality of so much of the commentary, but because it sets the tone for the public. I am likely to be deluged in the next few weeks by sentiments of ‘hooray the recession is over and things are getting better’, followed up a little later by ‘you economists misled us, things have not improved that much’.

So we face confusing stories. Much of economics may be scientific but many economists are not, and in any case most of the public learn their economics from those who could not possibly be considered professional economists.

As one last attempt to convince you that economics is a science – and like all sciences complex and subtle – let me look at three areas where economics is progressing. Note how in each case the evolution is due to a dialogue between theory and fact, and how like all scientists I make no apology if the current theory is to be replaced by a better one, albeit one which stands on the shoulder of the old one.

Economic Behaviour

First there is the theory of individual economic behaviour. For a long time economists have held, in an increasingly rigorous form, the notion of rational economic man – Homo economicus. He – he is always male – takes all that is known into consideration and pursues his own self-interest by maximising his utility which reflects only his welfare and does not vary through time. A little introspection suggests that we don’t actually do this; the theory held on for the simple scientific reason that there was not a better one to replace it. When we use it for policy purposes, many of us make ad hoc adjustments to bring H. economicus closer to actual behaviour.

Recently some economists have been looking at the psychological literature to obtain insights into human behaviour. Among my heroes are Richard Thaler, Matthew Rabin and Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who received the Nobel prize in economics in 2002.

While economics does not yet have a rigorous theory, it is certainly making progress. Economics evolves. I admit there is a lot of resistance to behavioural economics. It includes those who are comfortable with the old paradigm and don’t want to learn anything new. (Keynes remarked we rarely learn anything fundamental after the age of 30.) It also includes those with a political agenda who think that behavioural economics justifies the state over-ruling individual preferences (it doesn’t). So, Lysenko-like, their politics overrules science. Meanwhile you will find increasing application of the theory; the Kiwi saver scheme was influenced by Thalerian principles, although hardly anyone mentioned it.

Happiness and Material Consumption

My second example illustrates that economics, like other sciences, can have an anomaly which has yet to be resolved. Two hundred years ago, Jeremy Bentham said the more you consumed the happier you were. That has been a central assumption in economics ever since. But is it true?

We have only had the data to test the proposition in recent years. The most important involves asking whether people are happy and comparing their responses with their incomes, after controlling for other variables. There is some research which indicates that the subjective responses are consistent with objective data, but of course the area is treacherous.

When we pull together the available evidence we find that a rise in average material consumption in poorer societies seems to be associated with rising average happiness. However that does not seem to apply to affluent societies. The best example from the longest data series is that levels of consumption have doubled in the United States over the last 60 years, but there has been no rise in average happiness there.

Even so, while rising average incomes do not increase happiness over time, those with higher incomes at any point in time are happier than those with lower incomes. But not that much happier. Some work Ryan You and I have done shows that the happiness score goes up from 8.1 to 8.3 when annual income rises from $20,000 to $120,000 – by 0.2 points on a 0 to 10 scale. In contrast happiness falls by 0.5 points if an employed person becomes unemployed, which suggests that a job is far more important for happiness than the income it generates. Even more dramatically, the happiness of a married woman who becomes separated falls 0.6 points on average and the man who moves from married to separated falls 1.2 points.

So income is not as important in determining happiness as a range of other – not economic – things. Insofar as income is important, it seems to be because it demonstrates one is higher up the pecking order, rather than the additional material consumption it generates. What this all means is unclear. It’s an anomaly. Probably the best source if you are interested in the subject is Richard Layard’s book Happiness, although I don’t agree with everything he says.

The Global Financial Crisis

There is a major row going on in economics which has been precipitated by the Global Financial Crisis. The disagreement has long been there but new facts and new events have exposed it.

Following the Great Depression of the 1930s, Keynes wrote his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which became the basis for what we know as the Keynesian paradigm of how the macro-economy works. By the 1960s it was challenged by monetarism (the expression was not invented until 1968) which evolved to a point where it is said the founders such as Milton Friedman would no longer recognise it. This alternative paradigm (there is quite a lot of the Keynesian apparatus in monetarism) became dominant for policy purposes at the US Federal Reserve and in the popular press and business community, but not in the academy which divided between – in the jargon – ‘saltwater economists’ who were Keynesians (generally) working in American universities on the east and west coasts and ‘fresh water’ ones who were anti-Keynesians usually working in inland American universities.

In the academy this was all good competitive fun, with lashings of rhetoric – and some personal abuse. In the policy domain there was an uneasy truce. The arrival of the Global Financial Crisis has now turned the truce into open public war. Think of the disagreement over whether light was a wave or a particle – but shift it to the twenty-first century with its greater and instantaneous public communication and of a more immediate policy concern.

I’ve tried to put the argument fairly, but I don’t want to seem to be sitting on the fence. Briefly my position is I am with the Keynesians, although I have doubts about American Keynesianism which is too influenced by the peculiarities of the US government arrangements. Moreover I don’t think the Americans have thought enough about the particularities of their economy, whose currency is also the international means of exchange.

You may be surprised that I should be a Keynesian given that Keynes published his book almost three-quarters of a century ago, about the same time as Bohr’s complementarity, Heisenberg’s uncertainty, and Pauli’s exclusion principles and Schrodinger’s equation. They all remain in the foundations of quantum mechanics but the subject has evolved. So has economics.

So let me finish with the cryptic remark that I reckon that progress will not just happen with the Global Financial Crisis testing the two paradigms. There will have to be a new theoretical innovation based upon some previously unavailable empirical data. I speculate that it will be the incorporation of balance sheets into Keynesianism. Keynes knew about them, but there was not enough material to incorporate them into his account – except crudely.

However there is a bigger lesson here. Paradigmatic battles are not resolved as easily in the social sciences as they are in the natural sciences – although none of them has lasted as long as the one about the nature of light. It is worth recalling Planck’s law:

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

That may be true in physics. It is even more so in the social sciences.

Conclusion

There is a strongly scientific element in much of economics and many economists are scientists. Regrettably, many of those who use economics do not do so in a scientific way, which is why it is right to be sceptical about what you are told are economic truths. But that does not mean that none exist.

Brian Easton is an independent scholar especially interested in New Zealand. His writings and research are primarily concerned with its economics, history, politics, sociology and culture.

Science as a human endeavour

If students are to pursue careers in science, they need to be able to see themselves in that role. One way to encourage this may be through the telling of stories. This article is based on a presentation to the 2008 NZ Skeptics Conference in Hamilton.

New Zealand’s new science curriculum asks us to develop students’ ability to think critically. As a science educator I think that’s about the most important skill we can give them: the ability to assess the huge amount of information that’s put in front of them from all sorts of sources. We also need to recognise that the ideas and processes students are hearing about have come to us through the activities of people – it’s people who develop science understanding. Science changes over time, as people’s ideas change. It’s fluid, it’s done by people, and it’s a human endeavour.

This puts science in an interesting position. It has its own norms, and its own culture, but it’s embedded in the wider culture as well. Those norms of science include its history. I find it sad that many of my students have no idea of where the big ideas in science came from. They don’t know what the people who were developing those ideas were like.

The new curriculum document recognises that the nature of science is an important strand in the curriculum, because it is what gives science its context, and lets students see science as a human endeavour. They’re going to learn what science is, and how scientists do science. They will become acquainted with the idea that scientists’ ideas change as they’re given new information; that science is valuable for society. And students are going to learn how it’s communicated.

Our future prosperity depends on students continuing to enter careers in the sciences. Richard Meylan, a senior adviser at the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology, said to me recently that somewhere between the end of year 13 and that two-month break before they go to university, we seem to be losing them. The universities are tending to see a drop in the number of students who have picked science as something that they want to continue in. Students don’t seem to see it as a viable career option, and there are many reasons for that.

We need more scientists, we need scientifically-literate politicians, and we need a community that understands science: how science is done, how science is relevant; one that sees science and scientists as being an integral part of the community. But how are we going to get there? What sorts of things can we do that are going to make young people want to carry on in science? Students often don’t choose science – how are we going to change that?

One of the reasons, perhaps, is that they often don’t see themselves as scientists. We did a bit of research on this at Waikato University last year, asking what would encourage our first-year students to continue as scientists. And what they were saying was, “Well, a lot of the time I don’t see myself as a scientist.” We asked, what would make a difference? The response: “Seeing that my lecturers are people.” People first, scientists second.

When I googled ‘scientist’ I had to go through eight or nine pages of results before finding something that looks like my own idea of a scientist. (‘Woman scientist’ is a bit better!) Almost all the guys have moustaches, they’ve all got glasses, all the women are square-shaped. Students don’t see themselves in this. We need them (and the rest of the community!) to see science as something that ordinary people do.

Now, what sorts of things are those ordinary people doing? They’re thinking; they’re speculating, they’re saying ‘what if?’ They’re thinking creatively: science is a creative process and at its best involves imagination and creativity. Scientists make mistakes! Most of the time we’re wrong but that doesn’t make good journal articles; usually no-one publishes negative results. So you just hear about the ‘correct’ stuff. Scientists persist when challenged, when things aren’t always working well.

Science stories

One way of fostering students’ engagement with science, and seeing themselves in it, is to tell them stories, to give them a feeling of how science operates. Brian Greene, a science communicator and physicist in the US, says:

I view science as one of the most dramatic narratives our species can tell. The story of our search to understand the Universe and ourselves. When that search is conveyed using the power of story – the story of discovery – we can all feel part of the journey.

So I’m going to tell you stories. And I’m going to tell stories about old, largely dead, people because one of my passions at the moment is the history of science. A lot of science’s big ideas have a history that stretches back 3-400 years. But they’re just as important today, and I think that an understanding of the scientists who came up with those ideas is also important today.

I think it’s important that kids recognise that a lot of scientists are a bit quirky. But then, everyone’s a bit quirky – we’re all different. One example of someone ‘a bit different’ is Richard Feynman. Famous for his discoveries in the nanotech field, he was a polymath: a brilliant scientist with interests in a whole range of areas – biology, art, anthropology, lock-picking, bongo-drumming. He was into everything. He also had a very quirky sense of humour. He was a brilliant scientist and a gifted teacher, and he showed that from an early age. His sister Joan has a story about when she was three, and Feynman was nine or so. He’d been reading a bit of psychology and knew about conditioning, so he’d say to Joan: “Here’s a sum: 2 plus 1 more makes what?” And she’s bouncing up and down with excitement. If she got the answer right, he’d give her a treat. The Feynman children weren’t allowed lollies for treats, so he let her pull his hair till it hurt (or, at least, he behaved as if it did!), and that was her reward for getting her sums right.

Making mistakes

We get it wrong a lot of the time. Even the people we hold up as these amazing icons – they get it wrong. Galileo thought the tides were caused by the Earth’s movement. At the time, no-one had developed the concept of gravity. How could something as far away as the Moon possibly affect the Earth? We look back at people in the past and we think, how could they be so thick? But,in the context of their time, what they were doing was perfectly reasonable.

Louis Pasteur, the ‘father of microbiology’, held things up for years by insisting that fermentation was due to some ‘vital process’ it wasn’t chemical. He got it wrong.

And one of my personal heroes, Charles Darwin, got it completely wrong about how inheritance worked. He was convinced that inheritance worked by blending. When Darwin published The Origin of Species, in 1859, Mendel’ s work on inheritance hadn’ t been published. It was published in Darwin’s lifetime – Mendel’s ideas would have made a huge difference to Darwin’s understanding of how inheritance worked – part of the mechanism for evolution that he didn’t have. But he never read Mendel’s paper.

Scientists do come into conflict with various aspects of society. Galileo had huge issues with the Church. He laid out his understanding of what Copernicus had already said: the Universe was not geocentric, it didn’t go round the Earth. The Church model was that the Universe was very strongly geocentric: everything went round us. Galileo was accused of heresy, and shown the various instruments of torture; for pulling out his thumbnails and squashing his feet. He did recant, and he was kept under house arrest until his death. And the Church officially apologised to him in 1992. A long-running conflict indeed.

And there’s conflict with prevailing cultural expectations. Beatrice Tinsley was an absolutely amazing woman; a New Zealander who has been called a world leader in modern cosmology, and one of the most creative and significant theoreticians in modern astronomy. She went to the US to do her PhD in 1964, and finished it in 1966. Beatrice published extensively, and received international awards, but she found the deck stacked against her at the University of Texas, where she worked. She was asked if she’d design and set up a new astronomy department, which she did. The university duly opened applications for the new Head of Department. Beatrice applied. They didn’t even respond to her letter. So she left Texas. (Yale did appreciate her, and appointed her Professor of Astronomy.) A couple of years later she found she had a malignant melanoma, and was dead by the age of 42. The issue for Beatrice was a conflict between societal expectations and the area where she was working: women didn’t do physics.

Science versus societal ‘knowledge’

Raymond Dart was an English zoologist who worked at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. He was widely known among the locals for his fondness for fossils; you could trundle down to Prof Dart’s house, bring him a lovely bit of bone, and he’d pay you quite well. One day in 1924 the workers at Taung quarry found a beautiful little skull – a face, a lower jaw, and a cast of the brain – in real life it would sit in the palm of your hand. Dart was getting ready for a wedding when the quarry workers arrived, and he was so excited by this find that when his wife came in to drag him off to be best man, he still didn’t have his cuffs and his collar on and there was dust all over his good black clothes. He was absolutely rapt.

Dart looked at this fossil and saw in it something of ourselves. He saw it as an early human ancestor. The jaw is like ours, it has a parabolic shape, and the face is more vertical -relatively speaking – than in an ape. He described it, under the name Australopithecus africanus, as being in our own lineage and went off to a major scientific meeting, expecting a certain amount of interest in what he’d discovered. What he got was a fair bit of doubt, and some ridicule. How could he be so foolish? It was surely an ape.

By 1924 evolution was pretty much an accepted fact in the scientific community. But there was a particular model of what that meant. In some ways this built on the earlier, non-evolutionary concept of the Great Chain of Being. They also had a model that tended to view the epitome of evolutionary progress as white European males. It followed from this that humans had evolved in Europe, because that’s where all the ‘best’ people came from. Black Africans were sometimes placed as a separate species, and were regarded as being lower down the chain.

Yet here was Dart saying he’d found a human ancestor in Africa. This would mean the ancestor must have been black – which didn’t fit that world-view. It’s a racist view, but that reflected the general attitudes of society at the time, and the scientists proposing that view were embedded in that society just as much as we are embedded in ours today.

Another difficulty for Dart had to do with prevailing ideas about how humans had evolved. By the 1920s Neanderthal man was quite well known. Neanderthals have the biggest brains of all the human lineage – a much bigger brain than we have. And the perception was that one of the features that defined humans, apart from tool use, was a big brain. It followed from this that the big brain had evolved quite early. Dart was saying that Australopithecus was a hominin, but Australopithecus as an adult would have had a brain size of around 400cc. We have a brain size of around 1400cc. Australopithecus didn’t fit the prevailing paradigm. The big brain had to come first; everybody knew that.

And belief in that particular paradigm – accepted by scientists and non-scientists alike – helps to explain why something like Piltdown man lasted so long. Over the period 1911-1915 an English solicitor, Charles Dawson, ‘discovered’ the remains of what appeared to be a very early human indeed in a quarry at Piltdown. There were tools (including a bone ‘cricket bat’), a skull cap, and a lower jaw, which looked very old. The bones were quite thick, and heavily stained. This was seized upon with joy by at least some anatomists because the remains fitted in with that prevailing model: old bones of a big-brained human ancestor.

People began to express doubts about this fossil quite early on, and these doubts grew as more hominin remains were confirmed in Africa and Asia. But it wasn’t completely unmasked as a fake until the early 1950s. The skull looked modern because it was a modern (well, mediaeval) skull that had been stained to make it look really old. The jaw was that of an orangutan, with the teeth filed so that they looked more human and the jaw articulation and symphysis (the join between right and left halves) missing. When people saw these remains in the light of new knowledge, they probably thought, how could I have been so thick? But in 1914 Piltdown fitted with the prevailing model; no-one expected it to look otherwise. And I would point out that it was scientists who ultimately exposed the fraud. And scientists who re-wrote the books accordingly.

Thinking creatively

The next story is about Barry Marshall, Robin Warren, and the Nobel Prize they received in 2005. (These guys aren’t dead yet!) Here’s the citation:

[The 2005] Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, who with tenacity and a prepared mind challenged prevailing dogmas. By using technologies generally available… they made an irrefutable case that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is causing disease.

The prevailing dogma had been that if you had a gastric or duodenal ulcer, you were a type A stress-ridden personality. The high degree of stress in your life was linked to the generation of excess gastric juices and these ate a hole in your gut. Marshall and Warren noticed that this bacterium was present in every preparation from patients’ guts that they looked at. They collected more data, and found that in every patient they looked at, H. pylori was present in the diseased tissue. One of them got a test-tube full of H. pylori broth and drank it. He got gastritis: inflammation of the stomach lining and a precursor to a gastric ulcer. He took antibiotics, and was cured. The pair treated their patients with antibiotics and their ulcers cleared up.

Because they were creative, and courageous, they changed the existing paradigm. And this is important – you can overturn prevailing paradigms, you can change things. But in order to do that you have to have evidence, and a mechanism. Enough evidence, a solid explanatory mechanism, and people will accept what you say.

Which was a problem for Ignaz Semmelweiss. He had evidence, alright, but he lacked a mechanism. Semmelweiss worked in the Vienna General Hospital, where he was in charge of two maternity wards. Women would reputedly beg on their knees not to be admitted to Ward 1, where the mortality rate from puerperal fever was about 20 percent. In Ward 2, mortality was three or four percent. What caused the difference? In Ward 2 the women were looked after exclusively by midwives. In Ward 1, it was the doctors. What else were they doctors doing? They were doing autopsies in the morgue. And they would come from the morgue to the maternity ward, with their blood-spattered ties, and I hate to think what they had on their hands. Then they would do internal examinations on the women. Small wonder so many women died. Semmelweiss felt that the doctors’ actions were causing this spread of disease and said he wanted them to wash their hands before touching any of the women on his ward. Despite their affronted reactions he persisted, and he kept data. When those doctors washed their hands before doing their examinations, mortality rates dropped to around three percent.

The trouble was that no-one knew how puerperal fever was being transmitted. They had this idea that disease was spread by miasmas – ‘bad airs’ – and although the germ theory of disease was gaining a bit of traction the idea that disease could be spread by the doctors’ clothes or on their hands still didn’t fit the prevailing dogma. Semmelweiss wasn’t particularly popular – he’d gone against the hospital hierarchy, and he’d done it in quite an abrasive way, so when he applied for a more senior position, he didn’t get it, and left the hospital soon after. He was in the unfortunate position of having data, but no mechanism, and the change in the prevailing mindset had to wait for the conclusive demonstration by Koch and Pasteur that it was single-celled organisms that actually caused disease.

Collaboration and connectedness

Scientists are part of society. They collaborate with each other, are connected to each other, and are connected to the wider world. Although there have been some really weird people that weren’t. Take Henry Cavendish – the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge is named after him. He was a true eccentric. He did an enormous amount of science but published very little, and was quite reclusive – Cavendish just didn’t like talking with people. If you wanted to find out what he thought, you’d sidle up next to him at a meeting and ask the air, I wonder what Cavendish would think about so-and-so. If you were lucky, a disembodied voice over your shoulder would tell you what Cavendish thought. If you were unlucky, he’d flee the room.

But most scientists collaborate with each other. Even Newton, who was notoriously bad-tempered and unpleasant to people whom he regarded as less than his equal, recognised the importance of that collaboration. He wrote: “If I have seen further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” Mind you, he may well have been making a veiled insult to Robert Hooke, to whom he was writing: Hooke was rather short.

What about Darwin? Was he an isolated person, or a connected genius? We know that Darwin spent much of the later years of his life in his study at Downe. He had that amazing trip round the world on the Beagle, then after a couple of years in London he retreated to Downe with his wife and growing family, and spent hours in his study every day. He’d go out and pace the ‘sandwalk’ – a path out in the back garden – come back, and write a bit more. Darwin spent eight years of that time producing a definitive work on barnacles, and he didn’t do it alone. He wrote an enormous number of letters to barnacle specialists, and to other scientists asking to use work that they’d done, or to use their specimens to further the work he was doing.

He was also connected to a less high-flying world: he was into pigeons. This grew from his interest in artificial selection and its power to change, over a short period of time, various features in a species. So he wrote to pigeon fanciers. And the pigeon fanciers would write back. These were often in a lower social class and various family and friends may well have been a bit concerned that he spent so much time speaking to ‘those people’ about pigeons. And Darwin had a deep concern for society as well. He was strongly anti-slavery, and he put a lot of time (and money) into supporting the local working-class people in Downe. He was still going in to London to meet with his colleagues, men like Lyell and Hooker, who advised him when Alfred Wallace wrote to him concerning a new theory of natural selection. Now there’s an example of connectedness for you, and the impact of other people’s thought on your own! It was Wallace who kicked Darwin into action, and led to him publishing the Origin of Species.

That’s enough stories. I’m going to finish with another quote from Brian Greene:

Science is the greatest of all adventure stories, one that’s been unfolding for thousands of years as we have sought to understand ourselves and our surroundings. Science needs to be taught to the young and communicated to the mature in a manner that captures this drama. We must embark on a cultural shift that places science in its rightful place alongside music, art and literature as an indispensable part of what makes life worth living.
Science lets us see the wonder and the beauty of the stars, and inspires us to reach them.

Get Your Facts Straight

A couple of months ago we were visiting my brother, and got talking about a friend of his, who had enrolled in a counselling course. It turned out that the course had come to be dominated by some rather staunch Maori elements, and my brother’s friend, as one of only two non-Maori on the course, was embroiled in a dispute in which racial lines were very clearly drawn. But he was confident he had ammunition which would knock the course leaders off their perch, in the form of a book, Ancient Celtic New Zealand (see Feature Article). This purported to show that Europeans had in fact colonised this country thousands of years ago, and had established a thriving neolithic culture, until they were displaced by Maori early in the last millennium.

Whatever position one takes on New Zealand’s so-called race debate, it is essential it is based on sound history. There is of course room for disagreement on the interpretation of events, and the weight that should be accorded to each, which is why the debate exists at all. But claims of ancient Celts in New Zealand fly in the face of almost two centuries of scholarship, and can only confuse the issue. Yet such beliefs appear to be quite widespread; there is currently a variation on this theme being championed in the Letters page of one of Hamilton’s weekly newspapers.

A similar situation applies in the arguments surrounding immunisation, which have flared up again in the wake of the meningococcal vaccination programme. Though it probably puts me in a minority among Skeptics, I have to admit to reservations about vaccinating very young children against a whole host of diseases, while acknowledging vaccination does have a valuable role to play in disease prevention. This is not the place to go into my reasons, but they have very little to do with the arguments promoted by the anti-immunisation lobby, who generally show a very poor understanding of science. Some still cling to the ideas of Antoine Béchamp, a contemporary of Pasteur, who believed the basic unit of life was something called a microzyma. All living cells are associations of microzymas, he said, and they remain imperishable after the death of the organism; disease is due to imbalances in the vital forces of the host, while the bacteria we mistakenly believe to be pathogenic have been formed by microzymas to rebuild dead or diseased tissue. Again, there can be no reasonable debate if one side remains stuck in the 19th century.

Almost time for the conference again. Hopefully by now you’ll have received your registration form in the mail; if not, there’s another form with this issue, and the latest information on what looks a very interesting and enjoyable line-up of speakers and events.

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Have Your Say

Environmental issues have played an increasing role in skeptical subject matter over recent years, ranging from calls for biodynamic possum peppering earning Jeanette Fitzsimons the Bent Spoon last year, to skepticism about global warming, from pooh-poohing of environmental impacts on taniwha habitat to wondering just how much paranoia and hypochondria is at the root of the health issues of moth-ridden Aucklanders in the infamous spray zone.

That’s why I was pleased to be able to invite Bruce Taylor from the Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment to speak at the conference, as I was aware of their attempt to encourage feedback on the role science should — must! — play in environmental decision-making.

There were certainly some strong feelings expressed, most notably concerning the impression that government organisations appear to bow before political correctness and potential vote-pandering, rather than sticking to scientific facts when making environmental decisions. Having read the document, I had been surprised by just how strong the support was for science at the heart of such decision-making.

As a group, we are very conscious of those times when credible scientific evidence is also all too easily cast aside in favour of a consultative culture — look at the amount of time spent pandering to the Steiner lobby with their proposals re going after painted apple moth, or Jeanette Fitzsimons with her silly support for possum peppering (a stand which made some of the more scientifically literate Greens cringe, but which I suspect was taken for political reasons).

Important as it is to consult, to hear other views, and to take into account factors outside that of the technical or scientific, it’s also important not to waste time and energy and resources on the patently incredible, particularly in an area as important as environmental policy or protection.

If I say cosmic astral influences can be used to control possums, is that equally valid to, say, the evidence for supporting 1080 or fertility controls? I’m confident that the Skeptics as a group would give a resounding “no” and argue that part of the responsibility our public servants and elected representatives have is to protect us, our country, our lives and our wallets from these subjective views where they clash with reality.

Yes, science can identify issues and areas of knowledge (and non- knowledge), but ultimately we are making political and social decisions. And we have a chance to flag why we think science needs to be a part of that process and how we can get better public engagement with decision-making that it recognises the importance of the underpinning of good science.

What should trouble us is the public indifference to science, and that this indifference and, in some cases, outright hostility, is a result not of ignorance but of a sense of powerlessness.

Some social scientists are now arguing that instead of public education programs aimed at boosting science literacy per se, we should be more concerned with public engagement strategies that get citizens directly involved in science policy-making.

Research has shown that knowledge, trust, efficacy, and deliberation are all closely related. Enhanced knowledge of politics leads to an increased belief among individuals that they can make a difference in politics, and also leads to increased trust in political institutions. Deliberating or discussing politics with others enhances knowledge, and, more vitally, gets people involved.

When members of the public take part in discussions that make them feel they can influence real decisions, lack of scientific knowledge is not necessarily a problem. In many countries around the world, consensus conferences, citizens’ juries, deliberative polls, and hui have all been used to give people a feeling that they will be listened to, as well as told what’s what scientifically.

And these efforts have indicated that people involved in such discussions quickly become adept at quizzing experts, mastering a brief, asking questions and unmasking political assumptions masquerading as scientific conclusions. It’s often very small-scale — in the tens, rather than the thousands, of people involved, but it’s a start.

I know, I’m an optimist, but I think that most of us are in the belief that we can make rational, informed decisions. Or, at the very least, recognise when we are being irrational. Maybe what we should be demanding are announcements which take this tack:

“Yes, this is an irrational decision and we are making it irrationally because we want to, in the face of what evidence we have because the loudest voices say we should do it this way.”

That at least would be intellectually honest and ethical!

Someone at the conference asked what the level of response had been to the report and I think I wasn’t the only one surprised to hear that the majority (over 80% I think) had come from the scientific community. Assumptions that the process would have been captured by the vocal political environmental lobby were unfounded… so let’s test those other assumptions.

I urge you to read Bruce’s piece (Page 3, this issue), better yet take a look at the report (available at: http://www.pce.govt.nz/reports/allreports/1_877274_09_7.shtml)

See what you think, and let Bruce know.

In Defense of Intelligent Design

In New Zealand Skeptic No. 64, Warwick Don critiqued Ian Wishart’s article Walking with Beasts, published in Investigate, June 2002. This is Wishart’s response.

Having just read Warwick Don’s critique of my article on Intelligent Design in your winter edition, I wonder if I might offer some observations.

Firstly, there is some fudging on the use of the word “Creationist” that needs clearing up if this issue is going to be intelligently debated by anyone. As I pointed out right at the start of my article in Investigate, the use of the word “Creationist” in that article primarily referred to people who believe there is evidence of intelligent design in the natural world. Belief that the Universe was created does not, of itself, require that one subscribes to the Biblical or any other version of creation. Cosmologist Stephen Hawking published a paper this year postulating the existence of a deistic creator, yet one would hardly call Hawking a “Creationist” in the way Warwick bandies the term around.

To discuss the scientific evidence for and against the existence of intelligent design in the universe is not, of itself, to become embroiled in a theological debate. It is more analogous to a naturalist finding indentations on a forest track and debating whether they are natural ground undulations or footprints. This is a perfectly legitimate scientific exercise.

Warwick talks of a need to avoid discussion of the bigger picture when he says, “…the undoubted problems associated with the origin of the universe or with the origin of the very first life forms on this planet are irrelevant as far as organic evolution is concerned.”

With respect, I submit Warwick’s approach is fundamentally flawed, and here’s why: The distinctions we humans draw between the different scientific disciplines are artificial. We have made the delineation that says biology is a complete science, physics is a separate science, chemistry is a separate science and so on. In the real world, all the sciences are ingredients of the others.

To approach the study of organic evolution as though the rest of it has no bearing is akin to a group of biologists locking themselves in a biosphere forever and never opening the door to the wider world, never daring to question how the organisms in the biosphere actually got there. Without knowing the “how” of it, the organisms could, for all they know, have spontaneously generated (chemical evolution), been introduced from outside (alien seeding) or been miraculously created on the sixth day! The point is, whatever the origin, biologists locked into this mindset will never find the answer because they refuse to look for it.

With respect, that’s taking good honest skepticism way beyond the rational and into the Three Wise Monkeys territory.

Warwick is concerned that opening the door to intelligent design in schools means opening the door to exam papers quoting Genesis and Job. Not so, and again this confusion arises from a failure to drill down to the absolute core of the argument. Sure, intelligent design science can be used to support Biblical creationism, but as Warwick correctly points out there is a “distinction between acceptance of evolution [intelligent design] and non-scientific implications derived from it.”

In his own critique, Warwick cites further examples that unwittingly display the current problems of evolutionary theory: after having a go at my skepticism on ancient whales, he firstly supports the ancient whale trail I was doubtful of then adds “Incidentally, based on new fossil evidence, the mantle of whale ancestor has shifted from the mesonychids (alluded to above) to a related group, the artiodactyls, and more specifically to the hippopotami.”

Which is it? Mesonychids or hippopotami? Trying to nail alleged fossil ancestors to support the theory of evolution is like trying to pin the tail on a donkey moving at very high speed. After 150 years we’re all still arguing about whether Archaeopteryx is the transitional fossil or not.

Objective skepticism recognises that the best way for the truth to emerge is through vigorous debate and presentation of evidence. Anything less is not skepticism but dogma, similar in form to the anti-science dogma of the Catholic church in the middle ages. As the old evolutionary saying goes: “Two dogmas don’t make a dog, Ma.”

Warwick appeals to Eugenie Scott’s “necessary methodological materialism” as sound philosophical basis for shutting out any evidence that might point to an Intelligent Designer. But who voted and made Eugenie Scott the world’s leading expert on the boundary between science and philosophy? In short, no one.

If an Intelligent Designer does, in fact, exist, but our system of science as proposed by Eugenie Scott is unable to accept this even if said Designer suddenly appeared in the clouds at 3pm one Tuesday and spoke to the entire world in a thundery voice, then our system of scientific inquiry is flawed. “You can’t put God in a test tube” says Scott, therefore you have to ignore it. How exactly can one justify ignoring such an event, where a supernatural entity interacts directly in our space time universe in a way that can be measured? And if one can’t defend the position of ignoring that particular event, on what philosophical or scientific basis do we ignore the evidence pointing towards a Designer at more subtle levels? Surely it becomes a matter of the degree of evidence required before we start dusting off the test tubes and setting a God-trap.

And if it is only a matter of degree, then on what basis can we then justify ignoring even the slightest evidence for the existence of a Designer, if over a period of time the accumulation of slight evidence could lead to irrevocable proof? That would be akin to paleontologists throwing away individual T-Rex bones as useless, and only keeping a complete skeleton if you’re lucky enough to find one.

The intelligent design movement is not asking scientists to become theists, it is merely asking science to follow the evidence wherever it leads, without introducing presumptive biases such as those advocated by Eugenie Scott and Warwick Don. Let scientists do the digging unfettered by religious or anti-religious bias, and let theologians argue over the implications in another arena. In other words, let the facts speak for themselves, whatever they may tell us.

[See Warwick Don’s response]

Warwick Don replies

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

Continue reading

Jeanette Fitzsimons wins Skeptics 2002 Bent Spoon Award

This is the press release (slightly edited) which announced this year’s Bent Spoon Winner. Most of the reports used only a small proportion, and included a quote from Ms Fitzsimons saying that the Skeptics could “do whatever they like with their silly bent spoon”.

Supporting the concept of “etheralised Cosmic-Astral influences” as a means of ridding New Zealand of possums has won Jeanette Fitzsimons the 2002 Bent Spoon Award from the New Zealand Skeptics. The annual award spotlights the dangers of gullibility or a lack of critical thought.

“In an area as vital to New Zealand’s ecological preservation as pest control, it is imperative to ensure that publicly funded control techniques are demonstrably effective,” says Skeptics head Vicki Hyde. “That’s why it was so disappointing to see support from the Greens for biodynamic possum peppering as a valid approach to this problem. Our environment needs champions who can separate wishful thinking from reality – if we could wish possums out of this country, they’d be gone overnight!”

Hyde said she was even more disappointed to find out later that Fitzsimons knew of the scientific testing possum peppering had undergone ten years ago. The tests had clearly demonstrated that biodynamic claims of being able to provide a potent repellent were false.

In peppering, the bodies of unwanted organisms are burnt at a certain time in the lunar cycle. The ashy remains are then watered down to produce a spray said to repel, some claim sterilise, the pest concerned. The dilution is to the point where no actual substance remains other than water, which is where the “vital life-force” and “planetary influences” of biodynamics’ “spiritual science” are said to take over.

A decade ago, the Forest Research Institute was the first organisation in the world to test these claims scientifically and in “a reasonably rigorous fashion”, according to Hyde who studied them at the time. They involved the Biodynamic Farming & Gardening Association, a biodynamic farmer and a homeopathic company, and proponents predicted that the “possums would not go near the treated areas and they would probably be desperate to get out of the cages”. In fact, the possums showed no discernible reaction to the spray.

Hyde says that the Skeptics support the examination of such proposals in case there is some undiscovered, effective strategy that has not been identified, but says that “peppering has already been closely examined and found wanting.”

Hyde is concerned that ten years on, peppering is still being proposed as a means of pest control, in Auckland with regard to painted apple moth and with the Green support for its use against possums.

“We’d hate to see public time and money spent on this when it has the potential to delay or dilute real, demonstrably effective approaches to such crucial areas as pest control. We can’t afford to do that when we’ve got possums chomping through tonnes of native forest every night and killing endangered hatchlings.”

The Skeptics conference, which opened in Christchurch on Friday the 13th of September included a presentation on the biosecurity hazards associated with this form of alternative agriculture.

The conference also saw the presentation of the society’s Bravo Awards, honouring intelligent reporting and critical thinking.

“We were pleased to see Mark Chrysell of the Assignment team actually walk into the forests allegedly silenced by 1080-based pest control and listen to the sounds of our recovering birdlife. His ‘Hello Possums’ documentary was a well-balanced piece which allowed both sides of the 1080 debate a chance to make their points.”

The Skeptics have also applauded:

Lynley Hood, author of “A City Possessed”

“There is no question that sexual abuse of children occurs, but the Christchurch Civic Creche case has always raised big question marks for those familiar with the social context and the similar cases overseas which preceded it. Lynley’s work has served to help clarify what makes this case so different from the unquestioned abuse cases that are found all-too-often in our court pages.”

Noel O’Hare, Listener Health columnist
O’Hare has been a previous Bravo Award winner, and his work cited in this year’s award includes the columns Silent Spring Fever (January 19, 2002) and Get Your Snake Oil here (August 17, 2002)

“Health columnists can be very influential, so it is good to see that Noel continues to present a level-headed view in this important area.”

Diana Wichtel, New Zealand Herald
Wichtel was nominated for her hard-hitting article A Monstrous, Lethal Arrogance (June 15), which described the death of Caleb Moorhead as the result of a “severe intelligence deficiency” on the part of his parents. Moorhead was the child who died as a result of his parents’ extreme form of dietary restrictions followed as part of their religious beliefs.

“We were interested to see her comment ‘No beliefs, religious or other, should be tolerated if they deny any child adequate medical care’, and wish this statement had been made clearly through the media some years earlier with regard to the Liam Williams-Holloway case and others.”

Joe Bennett, Press columnist

“We all need a little humour in our lives, and Joe Bennett’s pieces have often taken a good-natured look at the foibles of Mankind’s beliefs in odd notions. He can be scathing and make you smile at the same time, which is an admirable characteristic.”

Biodynamic Background

In her response to the award, Ms Fitzsimons said that the tests by FRI had been poorly designed and proven nothing. She also claimed that she had not advocated peppering, although the original television item showed her saying that she thought it was worth testing (which suggested that she did not know that it had already been tested).

Here are copies of the emails exchanged at the time of the broadcast earlier this year.

Vicki Hyde to Jeanette Fitzsimons, 29 March 2002

Greetings,

I was startled by your comment on television last night re the lack of scientific testing of possum peppering and how this might be a good approach to possum control for New Zealand — I guess you are not aware that possum peppering has been tested independently and scientifically in the past and found not to work.

So in the interests of ensuring that you have some background in this area — a vital one for New Zealand’s ecology after all — I thought I’d drop you a line so that next time it comes up (as it does every couple of years), you might have a better understanding of the issue.
The Forest Research Institute back in 1991 tested this thoroughly when this approach was proposed for possum control on Rangitoto Island. If I recall correctly, they were given around $40,000 to undertake a full set of tests courtesy of the Animal Health Board.
The tests involved the assistance of the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association, but clearly demonstrated that the peppering solution was no more effective than using plain water. In my role as editor of the NZ Science Monthly at the time, I actually critiqued the FRI methodology, and they were honest and careful enough to repeat their tests more rigorously, with the same non-results, sadly.

I say sadly, because possums are one of the most dangerous threats to our native flora and fauna (humanity being the greatest, of course). It would have been wonderful to have had an effective, safe, cheap means of possum removal or sterilisation, but this was not the case with peppering.

I appreciate that there are many people who claim to have seen peppering work, but their “tests” usually end up being very informal ones, often anecdotal (a friend of a friend said it worked on his property). As far as I am aware, there hasn’t been anything in any peer-reviewed literature since Eason and Hickling did their work for FRI.

There are many people with vested interests in peppering, whether emotional (as is the case of many of the well-intentioned people using it) or commercial (as with companies supplying biodynamic solutions and services). And it sounds like an easy, no-risk fix, which is why I guess it appeals.

It is all too easy to find people who can make a claim, often sincerely, but that doesn’t make them right. After all, millions of people once believed that the Earth was flat! That’s why it is so important to do the tests in as independent and objective a fashion as possible and, ideally, independently repeating “successes” so that we don’t end up fooled by our own errors and illusions. This is the foundation of science, and it serves as a form of consumer protection for the many ideas that are mooted.

I was very pleased to see you mention the importance of doing this but, as noted, surprised that you weren’t aware of the fact that it has been done once already at least. Certainly one might wish for more testing to be absolutely, positively sure, but I’m sure you appreciate the difficulty of getting public funds to repeat results which show that something doesn’t work! And that’s quite apart from the issue of what sort of mechanism would permit the highly diluted ash of an animal scaring or sterilising another animal…

Because of my science connections, not least with heading the Skeptics, I served on Landcare Research’s Possum Bioethics Committee for eight years until it was disbanded. I served alongside representatives from Forest and Bird, the RNZSPCA, tangata whenua, Federated Farmers (and indeed argued strongly for the involvement of environmental groups with the committee).

We all agreed that we wanted to get rid of possums as quickly and effectively (and humanely) as we could. We all recognised that there are very few easy answers in life, particularly when dealing with the full ramifications of pest control in a complex ecological system. That said, we do hold out hopes for some of the approaches being developed, though I suspect that debate will continue as to the right way to go about this.

But the important thing we have to concentrate on is that the possum control approach we choose is one which works – not one we believe will help. Environmental funding in this country is, regrettably, woefully underfunded, so it is vital that we spend those funds on approaches which work and which can be demonstrated to work.

Possum peppering has been demonstrated NOT to work, not at all – about the only way you could deter possums with it is to have a vast amount of the peppering solution (ie water) in a firehose and spray individual possums until they fall off a cliff into the sea! (Not that I am suggesting that that is an effective – or humane – way of dealing with 70 million of the pests… 🙂

It is important that we look at the real merits of each case – and peppering doesn’t have any. 1080 has some merits, with obvious concerns which need addressing, but I think on the whole it is better than doing nothing. I fervently hope the new biologically-based approaches will be much better, though there will be issues to address regarding the involvement of genetic manipulation.

I do hope that you appreciate that any comments re peppering were certainly not off-the-cuff or knee-jerk ones made by those with no understanding of the situation or appreciation of the urgent need to protect our flora and fauna from the ravages of this, and other, introduced pests. As you’d know, it can be hard, in many cases, to get the full details across in the sound-bites which media afford us….

Best regards,
Vicki Hyde

Jeanette Fitzsimons to Vicki Hyde, 2 April 2002

Dear Vicki

Thank you for your message. I am, of course, well aware of the FRI trials. They treated it as a poison and placed it on plastic out of contact with the soil. I’m still puzzled as to why the BD Association went along with this.

When testing the efficacy of something where you don’t understand the mechanism you are working with it is easy to set up a trial that will have no effect. I don’t blame FRI for this – they had little to go on. Most chemical poisons would not work if applied in the wrong way or at the wrong time or in the wrong dilution.

However, it was not in any way a conclusive test. Also, the monitoring was very short term. The fact is a number of farmers are using the technique for weeds, insects and possums and finding some effect. Practising farmers don’t keep doing things that don’t work. The issue is rather just what mechanism are we working with here and how can it be best enhanced and can it be used on a large scale.

The $40,000 spent by FRI is tiny compared with nine years on GE carrots and still nothing to show for it.

What I would like to see is a trial where those who have worked with the method for a decade or more design the experiment and sceptical scientists monitor the results – but over a long enough time to show delayed effects. Not a lot to ask.

If we refused to use technologies where we don’t understand exactly what is going on we’d still be without electricity and anaesthetics – or so my physicist and chemist friends tell me.

Graham Hickling to Jeanette Fitzsimons, cc Vicki Hyde 15 April 2002

Dear Jeanette

I am one of the researchers who undertook the FRI “Possum peppering” trial in the early ’90s. Vicki Hyde and I have been discussing the media coverage of this topic and she has now passed on to me your recent email. I would like to respond briefly to several of the points you made to her.

1) I am, of course, well aware of the FRI trials. They treated it as a poison and placed it on plastic out of contact with the soil.

We were testing for repellent effects. Toxicity effects weren’t being claimed by the biodynamic growers – they believed the “pepper” would be an effective repellent.

There were three trials undertaken – the third of which ran for several weeks under field conditions. In the third trial the pepper was applied directly to the ground, with NO contact with plastic.

The other two trials did involve plastic. As you will be aware, the trials were designed in consultation with senior members of the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association. They never expressed any concern with that aspect of the study when it was being designed. Nor was this issue ever mentioned by those who were advocating that Doc use the technique as an alternative to poison on Rangitoto Island. This highlights the difficulty of designing a trial that addresses all possible future criticisms of it.

[extra comment from Vicki: the painted apple moth biodynamic proponents wanted to put their preparation inside a PVC pipe so it could radiate its repelling energy field — lots of plastic there!]

2) The fact is a number of farmers are using the technique for weeds, insects and possums and finding some effect.

They certainly believe it has an effect. Unfortunately, I am not aware of anyone that has yet demonstrated the effect in a manner that would be robust to the same type of scepticism that you are directing at our trial. I would be as happy as anyone to see such a demonstration.

3) The $40,000 spent by FRI is tiny …what I would like to see is a trial where those who have worked with the method for a decade or more design the experiment and sceptical scientists monitor the results – but over a long enough time to show delayed effects. Not a lot to ask.

A longer term trial would certainly address some of the criticisms of our trial, but would inevitably be expensive. Our pilot trial was funded by the levies that cattle farmers pay when their cattle are sold (ie, Animal Health Board funding). If there had been ANY evidence of a peppering effect, our recommendation would have been to investigate further with longer, more extensive trials.

However, since we found NO sign of an effect we felt it inappropriate to recommend that the taxpayer or farming community pay for further expensive work. Rather, we felt a more appropriate course of action would be for the proponents of peppering to fund further trial work to demonstrate the effect(s) they claim for the method.

4) If we refused to use technologies where we don’t understand exactly what is going on we’d still be without electricity and anaesthetics – or so my physicist and chemist friends tell me.

This issue of “what’s the mechanism?” is very much a red herring. If the pepper repels possums – or sterilises them, or whatever – then that EFFECT should be readily measurable. (If the effect is only a subtle one then it won’t be of much practical use for pest control…).

If someone runs a valid trial that produces convincing evidence for a useful peppering effect then I can assure you that this will spur researchers on to try and figure out the underlying mechanism. (This is what happened with GE research…puzzling effects were evident from early trials, which prompted many subsequent research projects to gradually unravel and develop an understanding of the genetic mechanisms).

Unfortunately, researchers and funding agencies have NOT yet seen convincing evidence that a peppering effect exists. It is therefore unsurprising that they are not currently putting any further effort or funds into researching the mechanisms of how it might work.

If I can be of any assistance to you on this or related matters at a later date please contact me – pest management in New Zealand is a vexing issue that we must all struggle with and I certainly agree that wherever possible we must seek to reduce the application of toxins in the fight against possums.

Yours sincerely,
Graham Hickling
Senior lecturer in Wildlife Management, Lincoln University

Green Around the Gills

Within 12 minutes of the press release being sent out to the email alert list, Vicki Hyde had a response from a senior office-holder in the Green Party expressing concern about the award, but acknowledging that it was deserved! These are his comments on how he saw the debate from within the Green Party.

The subject of possum peppering came up on the Green Party internet “Green Views” list. I was critical of the speech made by leader Jeanette Fitzsimons to the Institute of Engineers suggesting that “alternative forms” of dealing with possums were available, including “possum peppering” which needed more testing to prove its effectiveness.

I stated that there had been testing of this “remedy” some time ago, but it had been found to be ineffective and had to be regarded as more a belief than a science. I was attacked by Meriel Watts (Soil and Health) who demanded that I produce the research results or tell her where she could find them. I was unable to, but later understand that Jeanette Fitzsimons knew what they were all about all along, and had been in contact with Vicki Hyde about them.

On at least two occasions I asked Jeanette (through the list) to respond to the criticisms about her speech and/or provide more information to ordinary members of the Green Party through the list. There was no response whatsoever from Jeanette Fitzsimons. Some members posted details of very critical newspaper editorials – one in the Auckland Herald which was critical about the “occult” view of people in the Green Party (as represented by their apparent belief in possum peppering). They made a comparison to Waikato water having magical Maori qualities and that it shouldn’t be piped to Auckland, in the same breath as the apparent green belief in possum peppering. Another editorial was in, I think, a New Plymouth paper.

Another member gave details about a website that paraded new age stuff, even astrology, and offered to take people’s possum skins, incinerate them, and post the ashes back to them for a fee of $350. Also the site revealed that the theory of possum peppering was devised by Rudolph Steiner in 1923 but that it had never entered the practical realm as a remedy in subsequent years, because people found that it didn’t work.

Some members became quite passionate about defending the practice and in the event, tempers flared and a couple of apologies were issued. Certainly, there was a large amount of polarisation on this issue.

My opinion was, having talked to a number of other people about it, that “belief” in this sort of occult practice was not confined to the Green Party but had adherents in equal proportion to sensible people in most of the political parties. Who can forget the United Future MP who said that Mother Mary protected Wellington churches from earthquake damage and deaths and that they didn’t need insuring?

I had a number of supporters in my stance against possum peppering on the Green Views list, but my main disappointment lay with Jeanette Fitzsimons herself, who found herself unable or unwilling to address the criticism of members over this matter. Also I was disappointed at the reaction of Meriel Watts whose refusal to debate the issue resulted in the inference of her support for possum peppering1, and cast some doubt at the veracity of the worthy things she stands for – including alternatives to pesticide and herbicide treatment, and her worthy support for organic farming (which does have a sound scientific basis), and her anti GE/GM stance.

I have to say that there are many Green Party members who are respected scientists in their own right and do not have any truck with new age stuff and possum peppering in particular.

1Meriel Watts was involved in the proposal to use peppering to eradicate the painted apple moth in Auckland, so her support of peppering does not need to be inferred…