Col’s Rational World

The Quack Prince

Good old Prince Charles has done it again – he’s offering quack detox products from his all-organic range of foods. And, as anyone who has done any research will readily tell you – detox products are, basically, total quackery.

Here’s the BBC News coverage, with comments by Edzard Ernst, joint author of the excellent “Trick or Treatment”, together with journalist Simon Singh. I can heartily recommend reading that book  in addition to Ben Goldacre’s “Bad Science”, which follows a similar theme.

The concept of a ‘detox’ product is a seductive one – everyone wants to get rid of the nasty things in their bodies which are causing them to function at less than optimum performance. But of couse that’s a bad picture for two reasons:  (1) the overwhelming proportion of people have no problem whatsoever with ‘toxins’ and (2) even if they did, these detox products don’t measurably affect the levels of any toxic substances in the blood whatsoever.

That’s Professor Ernst’s point – most quack medicine is trivially easy to test, and people do test it, and the treeatments fail every well-designed test they face. Some procedures, such as acupuncture, are very difficult to test, but even that is being tested to some degree now. To claim that a treatment hasn’t been disproved is irrelevant, as there are an infinite number of such treatments – we must instead insist that any product making a testable claim has that claim verified.  But of course, if we did, then detox firms would go out of business. And that would make people angry because, after all, detox works, doesn’t it? 

And there’s the heart of the problem – too many people get their medical opinions from the Daily Mail, and resent the fact that scientists are trying to disprove treatments in which the general public strongly believes. And, unfortunately, emotion usually wins.

More cash for science!

Woo! Finally the government does something right:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7924765.stm

Now all they need to do is to start listening to what these scientists tell them, and we’ll be fine.

I was having a discussion with some colleagues yesterday about the role public funding should play in Universities. Does it make sense for public money to go on teaching people a History of Byzantine Golf Course Management when there’s only a fixed amount of money to go around, and plenty of people who want to train as doctors, vets, engineers and other useful professions? I don’t think it’s a right for anyone to study anything they want at University for free. Nowadays, if you want to learn a subject then you can do so very easily in the comfort of your own home with a few books and the Internet. So does it make sense to be spending huge chunks of public money subsidising useless degrees which are, let’s face it, basically very long parties?

I’m not sure how much I agree with that viewpoint, though I probably lean towards it. Many won’t, of course. Universities should be teaching people to be useful in society – which means teaching them skills that will be valuable. I guess the argument simply comes to how much we, as a country, collectively value the arts.  Are market forces enough to ensure that the relevant courses get prioritised and subsidised whereas the unwanted ones fall by the wayside?

Brains may be 300 million years old…

…and some poeple still haven’t worked out how to use them!

http://www.livescience.com/animals/090302-oldest-brain-fossil.html

Yes, would you belive that a fossilised brain dating back 300 million years has been discovered in a dig in Kansas. Which is, as many of you will know, a part of the world where many people still believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old. Which means that this find is, in the belief of a good fraction of the population of the state in which it was found, 50,000 times older than the Earth.

It doesn’t take a genius, or even an iniopterygian, to see the flaw in their argument.

A Formula for Happiness

I came across this video of a talk by Dan Gilbert at the TED Conference.  His talk, called “Exploring the Frontiers of Happiness”, examines the way in which human beings estimate their own happiness and, more importantly, what would cause it. He also covers topics such as “Why newspapers give you a highly skewed view of the world.”  There’s at least two really good practical questions that this video raises.

Firstly, why is it that the human mind seems poorly adapted to move us towards those things that will ultimately cause us to be happy? Well, I guess that’s an easy one – the human mind only makes sense when seen through the light of evolution. Anyone claiming that the brain is a result of intelligent design is going to have to explain why it’s so bad at understanding the world around us. Sure, the human brain achieves many incredibly difficult tasks very well indeed, but when it comes to understanding simple probability; overcoming addictions; dealing with situations of extreme stress, fear or emotional intensity; estimating very large numbers, or times and distances outside the span of normal human experience; or making those most important decisions in our lives… all of these times the brain seems uniquely poorly adapted to the task.

Secondly, how can we get a fair view of what is going on in the world? How can we deal with the fact that the media is feeding us information that is not representative of the real world? And worse than that, our brain is not particularly good at dealing with the information it receives, either. 

What would a newspaper look like if it gave space proportionately to the real impact of a story? I wonder if we could learn to find that as interesting as the current, sensationalist newspapers?

So the human brain is a wonderful device – not because it is perfect, but because it is not and, like so many other aspects of life, we can learn a lot more from the weaknesses than the successes.

Responding to Creationist Requests

PZ Myers has posted a wonderful example of exactly how to reply to a
creationist when they ask you for a public forum to discuss their
Intelligent Design nonsense.

Part of me is still slightly annoyed that we’re having to give these sad
delusionals even the time required to craft a well-worded email – I wish
it were possible to get the world to understand just how insane their
theory is and just how miniscule is their actual impact on scientific
thought. I wish it were possible to get people to realise that the
reason why scientists don’t bother responding to these nutjobs is
because there simply isn’t any controversy at all.

So, how can we paraphrase Prof. Gotelli’s response? I love his argument,
and I had a thought about what I would write in a similar situation. I
think it’s pretty similar, but perhaps slightly more indirect in its
overpowering sarcasm

“I have received with gratitude your request for a public seminar on the
branch of creationism known as “Intelligent Design”. Not being
acquainted with the theology or ancient history of the Bronze Age to
which your theory refers, I admit that I am somewhat puzzled by your
request for me to address this particular topic. It is, therefore, with
a heavy heart that I decline your kind request. However, I hope the
following overview of my own personal area of research, that of
evolutionary science, might help you with your enqiries in this area.

Science is a process whereby hypotheses are tested using empirical
methods, many of which require a great deal of time, skill and knowledge
to perform. Though science education is a very important task for the
future prosperity of this and every nation, the actual process by which
cutting-edge scientific discoveries are made is, sadly, not amenable to
a public discussion – especially in front of a non-expert audience. The
frontiers of scientific research are being continually debated by
professional scientists; they apply months, or even years, of their
time, together with knowledge that they may have accumulated over
decades, to problems which would often mean nothing to those without
such painstakingly-acquired expert knowedge. The proposition that such a
process could be ‘debated’ in any useful sense, it should be readily
obvious, demonstrates a misunderstanding of how science works. Science
does not discover new theories in the same way that democratic processes
drive Western politics; the truth of a statement is not determined by
the number of people who support it, no matter how loudly, emotively or
wittily they present their beliefs. On the contrary, truths are
uncovered by those individuals, often few and softly spoken, who propose
a hypothesis which can be supported by carefully collected empirical
data, coherent theoretical models and rigorous logical analysis.

In contrast to the world of public debates, popular literature,
Internet-based discussions and the public media, disagreements within
the scientific community, of which there are certainly many, are
resolved largely through the medium of peer-reviewed journals. This is
necessary in order to ensure some standard of rigorous proof for the
discoveries that we add to the body of scientific knowledge. The
criteria for publishing in such journals are usually very strict, and
the most prestigious are often reserved for the most important or
strikingly impressive discoveries. In that regard, any evidence
disproving the conventional scientific view of evolution would certainly
qualify for publication in such locations, as it would overturn more
than a century of voluminous, cast-iron evidence to the contrary. Along
with the Nobel prize(s) that you would certainly receive for such a
monumentous discovery – the large monetary rewards for which would
certainly help you to expand your institute enormously – you could
assure yourself of a permanent and undeniable place in the annals of
history alongside the greatest minds that our species has ever produced.
As a tip from one inquisitive researcher to another, a good introduction
to such a paper might begin with an explanation as to why so many
hundreds of thousands of highly educated and intelligent people have
all, over the course of the last century or so, failed to establish what
you claim to be so undeniably straightforward. This contribution alone
would certainly prove invaluable to the field of human psychology.

If you truly believe, as I suspect you must, that scientific theories
about the origin and evolution of life are so trivially flawed that they
can be shown to be so to an audience of laypeople in a handful of
minutes, then you should have no problem whatsoever providing rigorous
proof of this claim in a submission to any of the most prestigious
journals in the world of science. This would be a spectacular
opportunity for all concerned; It would boost the public image of any
such journal immeasurably to be involved with such a game-changing
discovery. I would certainly welcome such a paper myself, as the
fascinating insights that it would reveal would assure me and all of my
colleagues working in the field of evolutionary science an enormous
funding boost for many years to come.  The work required in revisiting
and rewriting all the theories of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries in
the subjects of archaeology, biology, chemistry, genetics, geology,
physics and zoology would keep us happily and rewardingly employed for
the rest of our professional lives.

I wish you all the best in your endeavours, and hope to meet you in an
academic conference at some point in the near future. I look forward
very much to the renewed excitement in science that your discoveries
will certainly bring.

Yours,
A. Scientist”

Pwned?

Happy Darwin Day!

Today, as I’m sure you know, marks a very important anniversary – the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin – a man responsible for one of the greatest paradigm shifts in the entire history of science.

How can I possibly do justice to Darwin’s contribution to science? I thought about writing a long monologue on how important his legacy has been, and how staggering the theory he created truly is. Then I thought maybe I should write a list of the reasons why I love this whole area of research so much, and why it excites me more than any other. But you’ll have read that same gushing tribute a hundred times over the last week, and you’re probably sick and tired of it. So I thought I’d do something a little different.

Instead, I’m going to destroy one particular complaint that I often hear levelled against Darwinian evolution; namely, that it makes humanity seem somehow less special and, therefore, that it is a depressing way to think about our place in the Universe. I think the most effective refutation I can give to this dismal view of the theory I love, is by printing the full epilogue to my book, “The Polished Savage” – a tome I decided to name after a comment of Charles Darwin himself. I truly hope you enjoy it.

History is full of epic tales of underdogs who have fought to overcome incredible odds.  For thousands of years, the greatest writers and poets have written passionately about the downtrodden hero, pushed around by his enemies, who eventually builds up the strength to confront those same abusers and win.  I personally think that the most inspiring story for anyone to read is that of the tiny species of rodent, 65 million years ago, whose descendants today include many of the most powerful animals on planet Earth.

Next time you feel threatened by the success of those around you, or you have to deal with hardship and great personal tests, just think about that puny creature, rather like a shrew.  Let’s call it a shree for no particular reason other than that two is followed by three, and it rhymes.  Think about that tiny shree, darting amongst the undergrowth, hiding from predators, never sure when, or if, its next meal would come.

 For much of its evolutionary story, that species of shree was hunted by vicious, eagle-eyed reptiles – dedicated killing machines whose only aim in life was to seek out the shree’s kind and devour them.  But the shrees survived that.  Then a rock the size of a city slammed into the planet, and wiped out virtually everything that lived.  For months, those shrees were scorched, frozen and asphyxiated, but they managed to pull through.  Then they were starved and poisoned, but they fought on undaunted.  When all about them were losing their heads and going extinct, those shrees clung on, holding tightly to that last shred of hope because it was all they had.

 They didn’t know it, but the reason why the shrees existed at all was that their ancestors were all winners.  Thousands of long-forgotten species had survived against all the odds and passed on the genetic secrets of their success through the ages.  Those same secrets taught of how to overcome all manner of hardships that the shrees would encounter in their brief and arduous existence.  They taught the shrees how to avoid danger; how to run, to swim, to forage for food; how to find a suitable mate; how to breed and create the fittest offspring; how to learn about their environment and how to adapt it to their own requirements.

 This pattern of greatness was not passed down through books or tablets of stone, but rather through four simple letters – chemicals – repeated over and over again in a seemingly endless ribbon of knowledge, tightly coiled inside each and every one of the trillions of cells in every single shree.  An invaluable corpus of wisdom gathered over the aeons from every struggle, every hardship, and every victory that life on Earth had known.  It was a formidable guide and it led those shrees down a path that would ensure the success of their lineage for millions of years to come.

Before long the Earth would recover from global devastation, and those tiny creatures would find themselves living in a world completely different to the one their ancestors had known.  There were still a great many struggles ahead, but that one species persevered and, against all the odds and thanks to its ancient success code, it flourished.  As they multiplied, the descendants of those timid creatures diversified and evolved to fill all the niches they could find.

 A mere 65 million years have passed since that time, together with a myriad of untold struggles that our ancestors managed to overcome.  Today the descendants of those once timid shrees are the most powerful beings on Earth.  You and I are amongst those proud creatures; brothers, sisters and cousins to the greatest minds in history – Einstein, Newton, Mendel, Darwin and Wallace – they all shared our own exact genetic code to an extraordinary level of precision.  The genetic difference between every human being who is, or ever has been alive on this Earth, is but a miniscule fraction of that great, evolved tome that sits within every cell in our bodies. It is our greatest success secret and every single one of us has been given this same, invaluable gift.

 We, as a species, have achieved countless inspiring successes.  We no longer suffer predation; we have cured many deadly diseases; we build insulated homes to protect ourselves from the environment; we have developed the technology to travel around the globe, even soaring through the air and far into outer space; we have visited other worlds; we have harnessed the power of the atom; we have developed language, culture, art, literature and music; we form complex, loving relationships; we laugh, sing and dance; we have learned to ask questions; we seek to improve ourselves.  Perhaps most importantly, we are now beginning to understand exactly what we are, and what it is that makes us human; that makes us so precious and unique.

Our lives will never be free from hardships, nor should we want them to be because we are not supposed to live a mediocre existence, without toil or achievement.  What makes us great – that very essence of humankind – is taking on life’s difficulties with courage, and conquering them.  What makes us more deeply happy than anything else in the world is the unique sense of growth that comes from mastering our own minds and bodies, and seizing control of our unique destiny.

 So, when you next face great difficulties or when the pressure of your daily challenges seems insurmountable, then perhaps you should pause for a moment and examine your own family tree.  There, if you look hard enough, you will find all the inspiration you will ever need.

Britain in the grip of stupidity epidemic

The mind boggles. The “Rescuing Darwin Survey” was, IMHO, extraordinarily poor in its design; but that’s only a tiny excuse for what is a colossal failure of education, the press, and, frankly, the national intelligence. 33% of adults in the survey believed that young Earth creationism was either definitely or probably true. Which means that approximately one third of people in this country are magnificently stupid or totally brainwashed (or both).

Education ministers should be resigning over this kind of failure. It is simply not acceptable for people in a 21st century, educated, first world country to believe in provably nonsensical Bronze Age mythology.

My major complaint with the survey design, incidentally, was the aggression of the questions. The only scientific option that it gave was that Darwinism totally refutes religion and makes belief in religion absurd – which, of course, it does not. The sensible scientific opinion is that scientific evolution removes one of the greatest arguments for religion, and, in combination with several other discoveries about life, the Universe (and everything) makes it not only intellectually defensible to be an atheist, but intellectually preferable. However, placing this false dichotomy at the heart of a survey aimed at estimating the public’s mistrust of science is irrational and misleading. If I were answering that survey, I couldn’t, in good conscience, answer affirmatively on that question.
Anyway, after all this disturbing news, as if to rub salt in the wounds, it turns out that we’re also suffering inflated levels of measles in this country, too.

Apparently, according to the BBC,  the uptake of the triple MMR vaccine is down at 84.5% for the first dose and 77.98% for the (vital) second dose. If it were the adults themselves suffering from measles then I’d just say “let them suffer from their stupidity, and hopefully this will all blow over”, but unfortunately it isn’t as simple as that – parents are choosing to ignore medical advice, and forego a critical and totally safe medical procedure which is proven to reduce the risk of their child, and those with whom s/he comes into contact, catching a potentially life-threatening disease. Parents are making a decision that may kill their child, with no justification whatsoever. Parents like that should have their children removed from their care and placed in homes with families who are responsible enough to look after them properly.

I think it’s time we realised that a child isn’t a possession that parents can choose to treat however they like – it’s not a car or a house – a child is a living, breathing human being, and a parent is in a position of care over that child. If they act irresponsibility, then the need to ensure the welfare of the child should immediately trump any meagre claim that a parent should have due to their genetic and historical relationship.

Fun with Fraud Ratings

Those of you who have been following for a while will remember my previous work on fraud ratings. Remember that a fraud rating is not claiming that a person is a fraud, lest I get sued: it is simply a measure of what proportion of Internet pages that mention that person also mention the word fraud. My hypothesis is that this is a fairly good measure of the global sentiment against a certain figure. In previous posts on this topic I’ve explained why I think that this isn’t probably quite as inaccurate as you might suspect.

Anyway, I haven’t updated you for a while, so I thought I’d quickly post the latest results.

Fraud Rating Graph

First of all, ignore the spikes. After an initial burst of excitement, I’ve decided that these are just Google search count artefacts.  However, even if we ignore the spikes, there are several trends that become apparent. Fitting a trendline to all four graphs (with the spikes removed by linear interpolation) gives the following results:

John Edward : A ~15% increase between July and October, then a sudden drop by a factor of ten around the end of October. Looking at the numbers, the drop is caused by a massive increase in the number of pages, not a decrease in the number of fraud hits. Reason? I have no idea. Probably a change in Google rather than in the Internet.

James van Praagh : Since July 2008, an increase of roughly 100% in his fraud rating.

Sylvia Browne : Since July 2008, an increase of roughly 40% in her fraud rating.

Uri Geller : His fraud rating has remained approximately flat.

So this shows us something very interesting. Firstly, the world is beginning to realise that so-called psychic mediums are just cold-reading charlatans. And secondly, it’s telling us that nobody cares about Uri Geller. Which is pretty much what we always suspected.

Seriously folks, 100% in one year for James van Praagh? That’s a great advance. It reinforces what I’m beginning to believe more strongly every day – that 2009 is going to be the first year in which reason and rationality take centre stage worldwide.

So happy…

“My administration will not deny facts. We will be guided by them.”

Barack Obama, today, speaking about the American nation’s response to the energy needs of teh 21st century.

I’m so happy. Which is weird because he’s just saying what any rational human being would say. But it’s been so many long years with a delusional chimpanzee in charge that I think we’d all forgotten just what a good, decent, intelligent President could achieve.

I truly hope this is a sign of things to come – that the people of the world will see what good things can be achieved by an evidence-based, rational leadership, and will demand nothing less in future.

Texas Science standards

Texas has finally updated its high school science standards. The fierce debate has bizarrely centred around the use of incredibly fine points of language in the infamous clause 3A, which, in its previous incarnation, allowed Creationists to wriggle their fallacious nonsense into science lessons.  The previous wording was the following:

(3) Scientific processes. The student uses critical thinking and scientific problem solving to make informed decisions. The student is expected to:

(A) analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information;

The problem here was the use of the term “strengths and weaknesses” which would be a reasonable inclusion if people could be trusted to deal reasonably with it – but instead it allowed creationists to get their own ideas of ‘weaknesses’ into the classroom. Unfortunately, the person who gets to decide what the weaknesses are was not well-enough defined.

However, the new wording is far better:

(3) Scientific processes. The student uses critical thinking, scientific reasoning and problem solving to make informed decisions. The student is expected to:

(A) analyze and evaluate scientific explanations, using empirical evidence, logical reasoning, and experimental and observational testing;

The best bit about this new wording is that it uses the creationists’ own trick on them. They love using language that ‘nobody could possibly object to’, and then using this to weasel their nonsense past the censors. However, scientists here have cleverly used the same tactic to replace the old language with the new, in a way that nobody could possibly object to either. Here’s the best bit – it means exactly the same as the old wording, only without the loophole. It stresses the fact that scientific explanations are based on evidence, not on anecdote, guesswork, intuition or wishful thinking.

I posted about this before, when I was concerned about the issue of ‘questioning science’. Questioning is the main force driving science forward, but it’s clear that there’s a certain format by which science must be questioned that allows it to improve. It’s great if someone – anyone – questions science, but it’s equally important that the people answering those questions know what they are talking about, and the questions are based on evidence. And, in the case of the school classrooms, most teachers simply don’t have anywhere near enough knowledge to demolish the creationist nonsense in the way that it should be demolished – and, worse still, a scarily large number of them actually support that same nonsense.

It’s difficult to say, but sometimes science just has to be dictated from above – from the frontlines, as it were – and this new legislation helps teachers to support all that is good about scientific analysis, but without the insinuation that science is susceptible to criticism from a brainwashed 12-year old.