Several articles have appeared in the newspapers today containing suggestions that the blog of a British protester (who was part of a group that unfurled Free Tibet flags outside the Olympic stadium) has been altered to read more sympathetically towords the Chinese authorities. The Guardian’s article is here, and the Telegraph’s is here.

The “blog” in question seems in fact to be an account by one of the protesters, Lucy Fairbrother, of a trip she made to Tibet written for the website What About Tibet?. No date is given in the article, but the link to it from the site’s “travel” section says 2004.

The Guardian and the Telegraph both quote Lucy’s “family” as the source of the allegations of blog tampering. The Guardian says

“The posting, A Short Stay in Tibet, begins with a description of life there and turns into a polemic against China, but appears to have been clumsily changed to read more sympathetically. It reads: “I admit that I have been under much influence of militant Free Tibet organisations back home. What China is doing now, and what China HAS done, are so different, and I am angry with myself for not realising the distinction before now.”

Extract from ‘A Short Stay in Tibet’

Her mother, Linda, a TV journalist, said: “This certainly sounds unlike anything Lucy would have written. I saw the original and I certainly have no memory of anything like that figuring in it. It doesn’t sound like her phraseology. She read classics, she writes beautifully and this doesn’t sound at all like her style, quite apart from her sentiments. I would imagine it’s been done today. Students for a Free Tibet have in the past had tampering with their own internal emails.”"

If the Chinese authorities really have tampered with the article, then they have also altered its appearance in  Google’s cache (dated as having been indexed on 4th July, long before the protest took place), and also in the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine, which gives a date of indexing of 19th October 2006. If true, this is evidence of a big conspiracy – the Chinese authorities have agents or sleepers in Google’s offices, and also in those of the organisation that runs the Wayback machine.

My prediction, however, is that somewhere along the line, someone’s got mixed up, and that no alterations have been made. Neither the Guardian nor the Telegraph mentions that they checked the cached versions of the article. I wonder if they did? If it does turn out to be a mistake, will either of them publish a retraction?

In the last century or so, since medical science really got off the ground, one would have been forgiven for thinking that the setting up and funding of homeopathic hospitals by the NHS was the medical establishment’s answer to the perenially nagging question “What shall we do with all our bogus patients?”

In fact, it would be unfair to thus stigmatise the many (genuine) sufferers of chronic and medically inexplicable conditions who are presently finding relief from their ailments at the hands of physicians at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, one of four in the UK funded and run by the NHS. Nevertheless, the fact remains that there is no good evidence that homeopathic remedies work any better than a placebo, as several of the respected (and financially independent) Cochrane reviews of scientific trials will attest. This is putting the Royal London under increasing pressure from a government looking to save funds and from the actions of sceptical GP’s who are referring fewer and fewer patients.

The Daily Mail, a veteran campaigner for the right of the downtrodden middle classes to partake of the nostrum of their choice, has risen magnificently to the challenge. It has published a review of its own, although sadly not as scientific as those offered by the Cochrane collaboration. In fact the Mail’s review addresses the prejudices of its readers rather than the evidence, of which there is none – at least not of the sort that Mail readers want to hear. For the review consists of interviews with ten patients at the hospital, who each describe their condition and the treatments they had before trying homeopathic remedies, and bears fine witness to the fact that the plural of anecdote is not data.

The article leads into the interviews with the words

“… according to the journal Homeopathy, among those receiving these remedies, 60 per cent say their health improved after treatment.”

This statement may be true, but cannot constitute evidence for the effectiveness of homeopathy as a treatment, because no comparison has been done between people receiving homeopathy and people who have received plain water, or sugar pills, or whatever the preparation is for the condition. The ten interviews constitute no evidence at all of the efficacy of homeopathy or any other treatment, not just because they are anecdotes from people with conditions which are known to vary in severity and even get better on their own, but also because they too do not constitute a fair comparison. Here is one of them:

“Samuel began suffering from severe eczema on his lower legs when he was three. Our GP had prescribed diprobase, an emollient and hydrocortisone cream but we felt uneasy about using steroid cream on him at such a young age as it thins the skin.

We’ve been coming here for about a year to see Dr Lenhart who prescribed Five Flower Cream, a moisturiser containing Bach Flower Essences, to rub on in the morning, and calendula (marigold) beeswax ointment in the evening.

Samuel takes a couple of sulphur pills daily for his general condition and twice a week he has anti-allergy pills. He takes flax seed oil and omega-3 oil pills which are also anti-inflammatory and his skin has been wonderful ever since.

Now we come back every three to four months for a check-up. I teach science and I know people such as Professor Richard Dawkins claim that homeopathy doesn’t work. I usually love his work – but from our own experience I have to disagree with him.”

Most alarming is the last paragraph. Surely it is incumbent upon a science teacher to know how science works, yet here we have one who seems to be asserting that his own experience counts as evidence that homeopathy works; or maybe that wasn’t what he was saying, perhaps he was saying that regardless of the evidence he had to disagree with Dawkins because of his own experience. This would be even worse, but perhaps he was just misquoted.

Whatever happened, it doesn’t explain why a person supposedly familiar with the workings of science is not able to check for himself that hydrocortisone only thins the skin if used improperly, or against the advice of one’s doctor; or why a zoologist like Richard Dawkins should know more than any other person about the efficacy or otherwise of homeopathy.

The previous article, written by the author of the quackometer website mentions that at least one homeopath affiliated to the Northampton-based Society of Homeopaths has claimed that homeopathy is efficacious against a number of named diseases like asthma. This appears to violate section 48 of the Society’s own Code of Ethics, (they’re not supposed to advertise , explicitly or implicitly that homeopathy can cure “named diseases”) although there may be some legal argument as to the whether a statement of efficacy is the same as claiming a cure.

Nevertheless, it’s not hard to find practitioners on the membership roll who do make such claims. For example, the claim by homeopath Helen Bewers, at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/nick.bewers/About%20Me.htm
on the “About Me” page of her website that she became interested in homeopathy after her daughter was “treated by a professional homeopath for asthma and successfully cured”?

Would this fall into the category of “advertising [that] expressly or implicitly claims to cure named diseases.”? It’s on the website advertising her practice, albeit not in the main section. Looked at from the perspective of a parent seeking an alternative treatment for an asthmatic child, it’s hard not to conclude that the homeopath is claiming that a cure is possible, and has happened. Where does that place the Society’s enforcement of its Code of Ethics?

After reading an article in the Guardian about the R.E. curriculum in the UK having a distinctly religious bent in this age of secularism, I took a look at the Standards Site, an online arm of the UK’s Education department which contains, among other things, schemes of work for teaching subjects in the National Curriculum, including R.E.

As the article in the Guardian explains, “Kids have a legally protected “entitlement” to religious studies, but there is no control over what is taught.” The scheme of work for religious education, downloadable from here, is a case in point. I got a nasty shock looking at it. Some of the units read as if they were written with the intent of introducing Intelligent Design into schools, and betray distinct traits of U.S. style old-Earth creationism.

The unit designed for teaching to children in their first year of secondary school is entitled “Where do we look for God?”. After a lesson or so on the nature of truth, the unit focuses on the question of whether the natural world can reveal God, and begins with a discussion of the argument from design.

This argument was famously articulated by philosopher William Paley in 1802, though in various forms, it existed much earlier. Paley pointed out that if one were walking along a heath and hit a stone with one’s foot, one would hardly bother to wonder how the stone got there. However, if the object struck had been a watch, the question asked would be very different, because the watch is clearly an object that has been designed, and that implies a designer. It could not have arrived in that location unaided, or by chance. Paley went on to argue that the complexity of the world, and in particular the complexity of living things required an intelligent designer. (i.e. God).

It should not surprise us to find that a scheme of work for RE requires us to look at the argument from design, what should surprise us is the way in which students are being asked to put forward both reasons why it might be true, and reasons why it might not. A “learning outcome” of this section is that the student should “write about the main arguments to prove God’s existence from the design of the world”. Forgive me, but isn’t this assuming that there is a design?

It may be that I am being too hasty, because the next section appears to bring relief: it’s about “problems posed by the argument from design”. Now students have to read material like a report of an earthquake, which shows that the world is not always wonderful and beautiful, and to examine the implications of this for the argument from design. It seems as though evidence for and against the argument are being presented.

Hold on, though. The idea that bad things can happen in it says absolutely nothing about whether the world was designed or not. This is not an argument against design, and although some of the students may realise that a God might allow bad things to happen as part of his mysterious purpose, they will probably not spot this. They are then asked to write down what they think of the argument, but without having been given the tools to critique it properly. Indeed, I think it’s unlikely that the average twelve year old could see the flaws in the argument, given that it’s fooled intelligent minds from Cicero onwards for at least 2000 years.

For a valid criticism of the argument from design we have to get a little philosophical. There are two objections. One is that, since the argument posits something that is designed, this necessarily requires a designer. To put it another way: the mere fact of using the word “design” implies that there was a designer. The argument has assumed what it seeks to prove, and is therefore circular.

The second objection is this: What is it more reasonable to assume: that a complex world just happens to exist, or that a complex creator just happened to exist beforehand to make it?
If we assume the first, then we must look for a mechanism by which the complexity came about. If we assume the second we must look for a mechanism by which the complex creator made the world and also how the (presumably more complex) creator came about. Occam’s razor tells us that it is best not to multiply hypotheses, so we plump for the first assumption unless and until we’re shown to be barking up the wrong tree – well, we do if we’re thinking rationally.

Call me Mr. Churlish, but I don’t think the twelve year olds are going to appreciate this ratiocination. It’s not on the scheme to be covered and it’s far more likely that they’ll just accept some version of the argument from design unless the teacher really knows what he or she is doing. This I doubt, as whoever downloads and uses this scheme of work is not likely to have intact critical faculties, as a glance at the next lesson shows.

This lesson, entitled “Can the universe reveal God” starts off by asking the teacher to use dominoes, or the game “Mousetrap” to illustrate cause and effect, then to introduce the cosmological argument for the existence of God. The argument goes like this:

Everything in nature has a cause, and nothing can cause itself; nor can a chain of causes be of infinite length. Therefore, there must have been a first cause, or Prime Mover – with most religious people taking this to be God.

Again, the problems with this argument are not something I would expect a twelve year old to be able to get at, and once again the scheme is strangely silent as to what the teacher might say to stimulate meaningful criticism of it. The students are asked to say why they think some people would say this doesn’t prove God’s existence, and might get as far as realising that “First Cause” does not necessarily imply God. They are unlikely to be able to get at the main problem with the argument: that the prime mover is somehow uncaused, despite the first premise stating that everything has a cause. To put it another way, the problem is that a series of effects, complex in nature must have been set in motion by a prime mover which was itself simple, and uncaused.

Fortunately, the scheme sidesteps these issues by telling the teacher to get the students to vote on which of the two arguments for the existence of God are the most convincing, and to display the results in a bar chart. Arguments for the non-existence of God don’t get a look in.

The result of learning via these schemes of work these could well be a group of schoolchildren who will have no intellectual defence against the idea of a God. A secularist would then be relying on that hoary mainstay against religious revival: apathy. This is something that will be sorely needed by the time the students reach the third year of secondary school, because the second unit to be taught in this year is “Where did the universe come from?” Of which, more next time, including the ineluctable seepage of creationism into British schools.

Friday’s Guardian carried an article in the “Comment is Free” section by Madeleine Bunting. She writes about Richard Dawkins’ recent debate with John Cornwell on the Today programme for 6th September. Ms Bunting alleges that Dawkins has “repeatedly refused a head-to-head with protagonists such as his Oxford colleague, Professor Alister McGrath”, and implies that this is the first such debate. She goes further, and says that the Today programme snippet shows him

1) “com[ing] over all conciliatory” under Cornwell’s challenge.

2) Making non-existent distinctions, as when she quotes him thus: “I never said religion was a disease, only “a virus”. She goes on to say that “It was a shame we didn’t have time to establish the fine distinction Dawkins was trying to make.” Implying, of course, that there was no such distinction.

The background to this debate is Cornwell’s book, Darwin’s Angel, in which he writes a riposte to Dawkins own God Delusion.

Ms Bunting’s article arouses the Sceptiphreniac’s ire for the usual reasons: blatant misrepresentation of the facts and outright untruths. As usual, the unfortunate recipient is the hapless British Public, who have to have read Dawkins’ works and sought out his debates in order to know that Madeleine Bunting is being less than honest.

Take her early point about Dawkins not debating his critics. I may have been deluding myself that Dawkins interviewed Alistair McGrath as part of his “Root of all Evil” TV series. Clearly this link to a video of said interview is a figment of my imagination. I also seem to recall hearing audio of a lengthy debate with McGrath at the Oxford Festival, but surely a humble blogger like me can’t know better than Ms. Bunting?

What about Dawkins coming “over all conciliatory”? Well, it seems that atheists have been “aggressive” and “shrill” in their attacks on religion, and that Dawkins’ conciliatory tone during the debate was “welcome”. I myself thought that this is how Dawkins always comes across when he speaks in public, but perhaps that’s my subjective opinion. On the other hand, Ms Bunting might think that statements like “There almost certainly is no God” and “religious ideas are outrageous violations of rational thought” are aggressive and shrill. To me they seem no more so than the polemics one encounters on Newsnight, or in the House of Commons.

Finally, the part of her article where Bunting accuses Dawkins of making non-existent distinctions: when Dawkins refers to religion as a virus, he is referring to the way that the ideas of religion propagate from mind to mind, not because they have any truth value, but because they possess characteristics that make people want to believe them and spread them. This is an example of one of Dawkins’ favourite topics, that of the meme, which he introduced in his 1970’s work “The Selfish Gene”.

Expert opinion appears divided as to whether the idea of a meme is a useful concept or not, but anyone who has read Dawkins’ works would know instantly that he was referring to the meme theory of idea dissemination, and could not possibly make the mistake of thinking that Dawkins was talking about religion being a disease. Only someone who was completely unfamiliar with Dawkins’ work could make such an error, with its obvious scope for, albeit unknowingly, setting up a straw man to attack.

Having only got as far in this critique as the third paragraph, I would be disinclined to read more on the very reasonable grounds that Ms Bunting was caricaturing Dawkins’ position in order to attack it.

Durham county council, roundly criticised in the on-line community for conducting a trial on its year 11 students without a control group, has seen its percentage pass rate of 5 A* to C grades at GCSE rise for the fifth year running.

To put you in the picture, Durham CC’s education people took advantage of a deal offered by Omega 3 fish oil supplier Equazen to supply its entire cohort of year 11 pupils with a year’s supply of tablets to see whether GCSE exam performance would be improved. There was just one catch: they didn’t bother to supply a similar number of pupils with dummy capsules, to make sure that any increase seen wasn’t down to something else, like easier exams for instance.

This omission was quite serious because it meant that the results of the exercise could not possibly have any scientific value. A pity, since a properly conducted trial might have provided schools with a badly needed weapon in the fight against falling standards of learning; or if the outcome had been different, might have discouraged Equazen and other pill pushers from indulging in a profligate waste of sardines and pilchards.

Having launched this process in September 2006 with a slew of scientific claims made directly to the media, the Council came under fire for lack of said control group, and hurriedly rebranded the whole sham as an “initiative”. Later on in the year, in an interview with the boss of Equazen, a reporter for Radio 4’s “You and Yours” programme asked the question “If GCSE pass rates go up this year, what will your publicity department say?” Well, naturally he couldn’t say that the publicity department would be proclaiming the efficacy of Omega 3 in boosting brain power, so he chose to answer somewhat evasively.

According to a press release from Durham CC on 23rd August 2007, the percentage of students obtaining at least five A* to C grades rose by more than 3% to over 59%. Missing from the press release, and also absent on the website of Equazen was any mention of the fish oil initiative. I wonder whether they’ve just decided to quietly drop the whole thing. I hope we’ll find out soon, as, according to Equazen’s own figures, they’ll be ten million capsules lighter by now.

Most of the British media covered the study by Anya C. Hurlbert and Yazhu Ling in the journal Current Biology on “Biological components of sex differences in color preference”. As its title suggests, the paper deals with differences between men and women in colour preference, and can be found here, but there are a couple of things that bother me about the reporting of this study.

The first is an ongoing problem: without an academic login, you can’t read more than the paper’s abstract. This means that a layperson wishing to keep abreast of current developments in science cannot look at the actual science, whilst journalists from the national media – like those at the Sun newspaper to pluck an example from thin air – can.

My more perceptive readers might sense the sort of issues that could arise in circumstances like these; where the nation is beholden for its view on scientific matters to a few writers whose primary purpose is not to disseminate hard won evidence and the theories that try to explain it, but to sell copy to a public largely ignorant of how science works: issues to do with arbitrary filtration of data, misrepresentation and so on.

The second issue has to do with the reporting of the study. It seems its authors are evolutionary psychologists, or are dabblers in the waters thereof. This is a marvellous field because you can say whatever seems plausible without being hindered by data that might contradict you. The sort of claims one sees are such as this: “Girls like texting because in the Pleistocene they were the ones who had to communicate efficiently to other females about the gathering, preparation and cooking of food as well as matters such as what the children were doing. Texting is simply the modern outlet for this built-in urge.”

The flaws in this approach only become apparent when one can show that absurd claims can also be made to match the evidence. Ben Goldacre has something to say on the subject here. For my part, it suffices to say that unlike xenobiology, which is a science without a subject, evolutionary psychology is a subject without a science.

In addition to the dangers of evolutionary psychology we also find that the article covering the story in the Times confuses the evidence with the hypothesis. Certainly the title “At last, science discovers why blue is for boys but girls really do prefer pink” leads you to suppose that the researchers have discovered the reason for colour preference. In fact, all they actually found was the existence of a colour preference in the subjects they tested. The researchers hypothesised that “the explanation might date back to humans’ hunter-gatherer days, when women were the primary gatherers and would have benefited from an ability to home in on ripe, red fruits,” but other explanations might also explain the known facts.

In the article itself, the journalist was a little more careful and hedged about his assertions with “may”, “might” or “could”. Nevertheless, the average member of the public is likely to come away from the article thinking the title sums it all up.

I’m all for trying to find out why psychological traits might have evolved in the way they have, but it does seem as though the field is very young, and could benefit from more responsible reporting.

An article in the online version of the Daily Mail reports that two German scientists have succeeded in forcing “light to overcome its own speed limit using the strange phenomenon of quantum tunnelling”. Although the authors do indeed seem to have made this claim: their paper’s title is “Macroscopic violation of special relativity” the Daily Mail fails to point out that an expert in quantum optics was quoted in the New Scientist as saying that in fact the photons did not violate special relativity: it’s apparently a question of interpretation.

The expert, Aephraim Steinberg , gave an alternative explanation of the reported results by way of an analogy. The details aren’t important here, the point is that the Mail article made no mention of it. This is strange because the Mail specifically draws on the New Scientist article as a source for a quote from one of the researchers, so the journalist who wrote it ought to have been aware that there was an opposing view. Perhaps his statement of the fact was removed by a sub-editor wanting to save space.

So where does this leave the woman in the street who’s reading the Daily Mail? It seems she would think that one of the great theories of physics was well on the way to being overturned, bolstering the widely held view that scientific theories are more fluid and uncertain in their nature than they really are.