Kill an oppressive injunction – pass it on

From The Guardian web site on 12 October 2009:

The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

You can look it up in the parliamentary Order Book online, Questions for Oral or Written Answer beginning on Tuesday 13 October 2009, no. 61:

Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.

Here is the background from the Guardian, and here is the same story covered by BBC Newsnight. These two defied Trafigura’s attempts to suppress the truth.

Updates: This is a link to the so-called Minton Report about the toxicity of the waste that was apparently dumped in Ivory Coast by contractors hired by Trafigura. It appears to be this information that Trafigura does not want people to know, but it is now in the public domain.

Petition to Number 10 here.

Carter-Ruck backed down.

Fake medicine and AIDS denial are ‘charitable’

[BPSDB] Richard Wilson wrote this about a registered charity that is actively promoting AIDS denial.

This reminded me that, last year, I wrote to the same Charity Commission to complain about Frontline Homeopathy, which collects funds to promote homeopathy as “as an effective, low cost primary health care system” in developing countries. I got this reply. The Commission’s criterion is ‘charitable’, which apparently has nothing to do with ‘true’ or ‘effective’.

Thank you for your request.

The Commission’s policy on registering charities who pursue practices which constitute alternative and complimentary medicine was made following our Decision on the application for registered charity status from the National Federation of Spiritual Healers. Please see the link below for more details (you may need to scroll down to see the specific case and our findings).

www.charitycommission.gov.uk/tcc/issueguidesum.asp

I trust you will find this useful.

Perhaps this is matter for another campaign by bloggers?

Beware the spinal trap

Image via Wikipedia

[BPSDB] Along with many other blogs and magazines, I am reproducing, below, Simon Singh’s article on chiropractic, which led to his being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association. The full story can be found here. The point of the publication is to show support for Singh in his fighting the libel case. Please sign the statement at Sense About Science, if you haven’t already done so.

It is true, as Singh writes below, that chiropractors make claims for treatments for which there is little or no evidence of their effectiveness, but there are definite risks associated with chiropractic.

Beware the spinal trap

Some practitioners claim it is a cure-all, but the research suggests chiropractic therapy has mixed results – and can even be lethal, says Simon Singh.

You might be surprised to know that the founder of chiropractic therapy, Daniel David Palmer, wrote that “99% of all diseases are caused by displaced vertebrae”. In the 1860s, Palmer began to develop his theory that the spine was involved in almost every illness because the spinal cord connects the brain to the rest of the body. Therefore any misalignment could cause a problem in distant parts of the body.

In fact, Palmer’s first chiropractic intervention supposedly cured a man who had been profoundly deaf for 17 years. His second treatment was equally strange, because he claimed that he treated a patient with heart trouble by correcting a displaced vertebra.

You might think that modern chiropractors restrict themselves to treating back problems, but in fact some still possess quite wacky ideas. The fundamentalists argue that they can cure anything, including helping treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying – even though there is not a jot of evidence.

I can confidently label these assertions as utter nonsense because I have co-authored a book about alternative medicine with the world’s first professor of complementary medicine, Edzard Ernst. He learned chiropractic techniques himself and used them as a doctor. This is when he began to see the need for some critical evaluation. Among other projects, he examined the evidence from 70 trials exploring the benefits of chiropractic therapy in conditions unrelated to the back. He found no evidence to suggest that chiropractors could treat any such conditions.

But what about chiropractic in the context of treating back problems? Manipulating the spine can cure some problems, but results are mixed. To be fair, conventional approaches, such as physiotherapy, also struggle to treat back problems with any consistency. Nevertheless, conventional therapy is still preferable because of the serious dangers associated with chiropractic.

In 2001, a systematic review of five studies revealed that roughly half of all chiropractic patients experience temporary adverse effects, such as pain, numbness, stiffness, dizziness and headaches. These are relatively minor effects, but the frequency is very high, and this has to be weighed against the limited benefit offered by chiropractors.

More worryingly, the hallmark technique of the chiropractor, known as high-velocity, low-amplitude thrust, carries much more significant risks. This involves pushing joints beyond their natural range of motion by applying a short, sharp force. Although this is a safe procedure for most patients, others can suffer dislocations and fractures.

Worse still, manipulation of the neck can damage the vertebral arteries, which supply blood to the brain. So-called vertebral dissection can ultimately cut off the blood supply, which in turn can lead to a stroke and even death. Because there is usually a delay between the vertebral dissection and the blockage of blood to the brain, the link between chiropractic and strokes went unnoticed for many years. Recently, however, it has been possible to identify cases where spinal manipulation has certainly been the cause of vertebral dissection.

Laurie Mathiason was a 20-year-old Canadian waitress who visited a chiropractor 21 times between 1997 and 1998 to relieve her low-back pain. On her penultimate visit she complained of stiffness in her neck. That evening she began dropping plates at the restaurant, so she returned to the chiropractor. As the chiropractor manipulated her neck, Mathiason began to cry, her eyes started to roll, she foamed at the mouth and her body began to convulse. She was rushed to hospital, slipped into a coma and died three days later. At the inquest, the coroner declared: “Laurie died of a ruptured vertebral artery, which occurred in association with a chiropractic manipulation of the neck.”

This case is not unique. In Canada alone there have been several other women who have died after receiving chiropractic therapy, and Edzard Ernst has identified about 700 cases of serious complications among the medical literature. This should be a major concern for health officials, particularly as under-reporting will mean that the actual number of cases is much higher.

If spinal manipulation were a drug with such serious adverse effects and so little demonstrable benefit, then it would almost certainly have been taken off the market.

Simon Singh is a science writer in London and the co-author, with Edzard Ernst, of Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial. This is an edited version of an article published in The Guardian for which Singh is being personally sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association.

Update: The above article was modified by removing the words complained of by the BCA. However, the BCA has published these words itself , so you can form your own opinion on whether the original article could damage the reputation of the BCA or not.

How people are manipulated by sleazy lies

[BPSDB] Contrary to what many people believe, the camera and its still image always lie. Our visual perception of the world depends on a jerky series of images that the brain interprets as continual motion. This is especially important as we interpret other people’s faces, which are expressive through their unending mobility.

Stop that motion through the mechanism of a photograph, and we are left with something, motionless, flat and two-dimensional, that we cannot help but try to interpret as if it were part of the moving three-dimensional world. Wise people realise that they are being deceived and deliberately try to treat the impression with scepticism derived from their knowledge of the world and the weaknesses of the human eye and brain. But these weaknesses are easily exploited by the unscrupulous when the people viewing the picture are unwary. I have seen pictures taken of audience members at political party conferences showing fleeting facial expressions that are then “interpreted” to make implications about the relationship between the listener and the speaker.

A spectacular illustration of this manipulation is a recent still from a video taken of President Barack Obama, reported here by Angry Mob and discussed by the MSNBC reporters in the embedded video. Observe how fast the steps of the action take place, and how the moving scene leaves no room for the misinterpretation that seems almost obvious from the still. It is not just that the photo completely deceives us about the situation, but that the still was clearly selected from the original video to give a false interpretation.

The human brain is prone to cognitive errors, not only in interpreting visual information, but in processing other kinds of data too. It is noteworthy that the kind of sources actively promoting this lie are the kind that are likely to use other cognitive errors in order to promote denial of the existence of man-made global warming, a phenomenon firmly established by scientific research. Some of this manipulation is undoubtedly deliberate, but in most cases the misinformation is passed on by people who themselves are willingly and unsceptically manipulated, because it agrees with what they want to believe.

Welsh Marches Humanist Group

There is now a new web site for the well-established Welsh Marches Humanist group. This covers adjacent parts of Shropshire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and mid-Wales, around Ludlow, Leominster and Hereford.

Hart and Armstrong: God on high

[BPSDB] One response to the ‘new atheists’ like Richard Dawkins is to retreat up a mountain. There you are surrounded by fluffy, intangible ideas, and a silence where you can experience the ‘Unnameable’ who can never be understood, far from the people like  ’strident adolescents’ who actually want to try to understand things. (Why is it when people assert their non-belief they are always called ‘aggressive’?)

That’s the mental picture I get from this review by Christopher Hart of what appears to be a pretty missable book by Karen Armstrong.

The trouble is, up in the solitude and rarefied air on the mountain-top, where neither believers nor sceptics can reach you and bring some criticism to bear on your thoughts, you start to imagine things.

You start to imagine that something about which you have written around twenty books can only be appreciated through ‘a graceful acceptance of mystery and “unknowing”’. You create a myth that the root of religion lies beyond ‘beyond human language’, ignoring the fact that its roots lie in attempts to communicate with forces and things (as well as dead real people) that affected everyday life but were conceived of as having consciousness and intentionality.

You rely for your evidence on the abstruse writings of church fathers, who  engaged in what was really an intellectual exercise at one remove from religion as it was practised. Without any sense of irony, you accuse atheists of claiming absolute knowledge and ‘pronounc[ing] with finality on pretty much everything’. This is despite the fact that Dawkins has always emphasised that science, although it gives us real knowledge, always contains tentative areas (why else do scientific research?) and that he for one would be open to discovering that God exists, given evidence.

You leave most believers at the foot of the mountain, because their faith is based (at least for the Abrahamic religions) on texts that emphasise the personality of God, his very human-like qualities ands his interventions in the world. For most believers, it is likely that their understanding of God is even more personal than that of the leaders of their organised religions.

The  top of the mountain seems to be  a realm where everything is made of mirages, appearing upside-down. Perhaps the case has been made that the experience is very enjoyable, but certainly no case seems to be made for anything recognisable as God to someone with their feet on the ground, believer or non-believer.

Rational or Irrational, or neither?

[BPSDB] [An edited version of a contribution to the Critical Cafe, supposedly a forum for discussing issues related to Karl Popper's critical rationalism (in fact, occasionally it is). I was alleged, by another contributor, to believe that people are "irrational". This person himself, If I understand correctly, holds the position - which underlies much of economic theory - that people are "rational" agents pursuing their own self-interest. This short essay is an attempt to clarify my own position.]

I take ‘rational’ to refer to the use of the best available information (including techniques, reasoning etc.) in achieving an aim, solving a problem or acquiring what one needs or desires. ‘Irrational’ presumably would involve not choosing to do this, and it’s hard to understand why anyone would behave in this way.

One could, of course, rationally act on false information that one believes to be correct, perhaps using a flawed argument, and so come to an unfortunate result.  Many errors are the result of cognitive illusions, such as flawed interpretation of probabilities. These arise from the evolved structure of our minds, applied to situations for which evolution has not prepared us. Rationality would involve the application of techniques to overcome these cognitive errors.

Most of what you and I do is entirely out of our conscious control most of the time. This is highly desirable, because if we had to devote mental capacity to rational debate over every single action, we would be immobilised. There are instinctive actions, for example, ducking to avoid a missile, which we have acquired in our evolutionary history because they enabled our survival. These are neither rational nor irrational.

There are skills we may consciously and no doubt rationally develop, such as walking and the playing of a musical instrument, but the actual actions are neither rational nor irrational. There are also preferences that may have no basis in rationality, for example, my preference for coffee in the morning and tea in the afternoon. (Preferences, can of course, be rational too – if I need to save money and I buy supermarket own-brand items because they are cheaper and do the job as well as the branded alternatives.)

There may well be other categories of actions that could not be classed as either rational or irrational.

So most people are not “irrational”, but rational actions must of necessity be a small (even though very significant) part of our lives. So I think it makes no sense to talk of people, or their behaviour, as being rational or irrational. The only meaningful use of the word ‘rational’ is in relation to specific arguments or actions where the aim or problem is well-defined enough to apply reasoning or relevant information to it.

I can see no validity in asserting that all human behaviour, or a defined part of it (as some economists do) is ‘rational’ in some way. You may assert that a particular conscious action or class of actions, by a particular person or all persons, is rational or irrational (if the latter is possible). But this is a hypothesis, subject to all the limitations of conjectural knowledge as Popper described. And, in general, you will never have the inside knowledge to adequately judge the hypothesis.

The chief executives of both Lehmann Brothers and the Royal Bank of Scotland seem to have had the aim of making their middling institutions into big ones of their kind, and they seem to have found the methods to do that.  Does that make them ‘rational’? Both were apparently warned, using sound arguments, that they were leading to likely disaster, and they ignored or disadvantaged the persons making the warnings. Does that therefore make the CEOs ‘irrational’? It seems to me that it is worthwhile to try to understand the processes that let up to the failures, but would trying to interpret the actions as ‘rational’ or ‘irrational’ add anything to our understanding? I doubt it.

Update 22 July 2009: Heresy Corner, writing about the UK government’s policy on the DNA database, illustrates how this is not merely a philosophical debate. The DNA database policy is founded on an ideological position that criminal behaviour must be a ‘rational’ decision. It also shows that ‘neoliberalism’ is not necessarily about individual freedom from government control.

Not in my recycling

(Personally, I think wheelie bins are a great invention – rodent-proof and easy to move around.)

“Deep Waters Trust” out of its depth

[BPSDB] You might think that if creationists want to criticise the theory of evolution by natural selection, as understood and used by the overwhelming majority of biologists, then they would try to understand the theory. Especially as the series of meetings in Shrewsbury, Darwin’s birthplace, was billed as “an assessment of the evidence for design which has emerged through the advances in science since publication of his [Darwin's] On the Origin of Species in 1859″.

I have already commented on the fact that there didn’t appear to be any books explaining evolution on the bookstall at the Meyer meeting. Perhaps the organisers were afraid that if they understood evolution they may come to be convinced by it.

That the Shrewsbury Deep Waters Trust misunderstands the theory is clear from the press release put out before the meeting. Obviously, to understand the theory properly, and how it agrees with the evidence, you need to read a lot more than I can write here.

1. Because we are based in his birthplace we see a need for a different approach to Darwin from the extreme positions of devotion and hostility that are commonly adopted: while we don”t accept the conclusions of modern neo-Darwinians about evolution we respect Charles Darwin himself – both for his theory of Natural Selection and for his honesty in acknowledging the possibility that evolution might be proved false. There is evidence in his writings and those of his contemporaries that shows where he believed his theories were in need of confirmation by future research.

Scientists are not “devoted” to Darwin, although admittedly there appears to be a lot of hostility to him in some quarters. The commemoration honours a great scientist – but scientist is the word.  All scientists expect that their theories (if important) will be tested and questioned in the future. This questioning and testing is called “research”. In the case of Darwin’s theory – evolution by natural selection – the theory was vitally important and had implications over a wide range of science.  It could have been disproved by discoveries, not only in natural history and paleontology (the study of fossils) but also by discoveries in geology and astronomy and even physics. And, especially, by discoveries in the new science of genetics which was just beginning, unknown to Darwin, during his lifetime.

All this evidence has tested the theory to the maximum, and it has survived, improved, since Darwin’s day. It’s the only theory that matches the vast amount of evidence that has been collected. And it is still being tested.

2. Christians believe that God, not random mutations, is responsible for the design that underlies the world we live in. Particular recent evidence of design of which Darwin was not aware is in DNA – the genetic code: it is a language, containing information that controls the formation and operation of cells. It exists independently of the material from which the cells are made.

It may come as a surprise to the Deep Waters Trust that evolutionary scientists, even the most atheistic ones, do not believe that “random mutations” are responsible for design, or the appearance of design, in living organisms. Darwin’s insight was the selection of particular organisms by the environment – those that reproduce most successfully in the environment – enabling their genetic material to persist and become predominant. This is called “natural selection”. Darwin knew nothing about the genetic mechanism, of course, but the fact that it is consistent with evolution in all respects is one of the successes of Darwin’s theory.

3. Evolution involves progress “up” the evolutionary tree, each step requiring the addition of information to the genetic code.

No, it doesn’t! This is a serious misunderstanding. Evolution is about adaptation, not progress. The outcome of evolution, as it has happened, is that there are some complex organisms (a few of which think they rule the world), but simple organisms are just as evolved. Think of the bacteria – they live and exist much as the earliest of their kind, but they have evolved to live in all sorts of ecological niches.  There is possibly a larger mass of bacteria on the planet than of all other organisms put together. And loss of function is common in evolution – think of flightless birds.

Random processes do not produce meaningful information. Some Christians believe God used evolution to bring about his purposes, producing more complex designs progressively by stages. Others believe the DNA evidence is better interpreted as demonstrating a gradual loss of information as species change through Natural Selection. (Loss of genetic information produces greater variety in sub-species, but not the ability to change from a simpler species into a more complex one.) The ancestors of today’s species would have been fewer, more elaborate, forms containing all the genetic information from which present day life has descended.

Creationists abuse the idea of “information” and “complexity” (which seem to be interchangeable to them) by using the words in different ways so that you think they are talking about the same thing when, really, they are changing the meaning as they go along. In fact, there does not seem to be any generally accepted definition of either “information” and “complexity” that applies in understanding evolution. Dr Stephen Meyer, in his lecture, used the Shannon definition of information (as was clear from the slides he displayed). This definition specifically relates to understanding the transmission of information down a predefined communications channel. What relationship it has to evolution needs to be demonstrated. Dr Meyer’s use of it seemed to be mainly to give an apparently scientific appearance to a non-scientific argument.

4. The debate is sometimes portrayed in terms of a conflict between science and religion, where science suggests that life has evolved as a result of random processes, while religion claims God has brought it about deliberately.

Some believe both these views can be held at the same time; others that they are mutually exclusive, and that only with “blind” faith – faith despite evidence to the contrary – can one claim that both are true. We believe there is a third position that needs to be explored: the possibility that the scientific evidence is best interpreted as confirming design, not randomness.

No, as I said before, no scientific theory holds that life evolved purely as a result of random processes. That makes a difference.

To make ID (or creationism) scientific, what you have to do is show that it makes specific predictions about the evidence (fossils, genetic makeup of species, or whatever) that are different from (the real) theory of evolution by natural selection. And then show that the actual evidence agrees with ID (or creationism) and not with evolutionary theory. This is the challenge to the Discovery Institute or anyone else. And ID and creationism have always failed this challenge.

5. We believe there is not one debate but two: one debate about interpretations of the scientific evidence – what has come to be known as Intelligent Design versus random processes – and another between two faith positions: an originally good world which has been in decline as a consequence of human wrongdoing, or an originally simple and amoral world which has been evolving into something more complex and better.

These are both false dichotomies – a logical error. Are there really only two possible positions in each argument? I can think  of many positions in each case. I won’t bore you with mine, except to say that my position is emphatically not a “faith” position, as I would change it if any convincing contrary evidence was presented.

Stephen Meyer’s book

Dr Meyer’s book has now been published. I shall not be buying a copy, as his lecture suggested that there was nothing in it that is both significantly new and interesting. Other people, better qualified than I am to do so, will no doubt be reviewing it in time, and I shall look forward to reading their reviews.

Dr Meyer’s main theme in the lecture was a bit like the following argument. Suppose he had claimed that it was impossible to create a baby, because it is highly improbable that all the chemical components of a baby could come together in the right combinations.  We would surely argue that he is wrong, because babies are not made by the process of assembling all the chemicals at once. In fact, a baby is assembled slowly by processes in which the baby’s genes interact with his environment (including the mother’s womb and the outside environment). Similarly, the evolved biosphere is a product of continual processes of interaction between the organisms’ genetic materials and their environments.

Update

The Deep Waters Trust seems to have gone into hibernation since the event. There is no sign of the recordings promised from the February event. The aims of the charity are given as “The advancement of education in the public arena of the relationship of belief in a creator god based on the Holy Bible and scientific discovery, philosophy, theory and investigation”.

See also

Creationism in Darwin’s birthplace

Not quite so honest to Darwin (or anyone else)

More about Stephen Meyer’s lecture on Intelligent Design

Other creationists who crashed the Darwin party

Follow-up to Homeopathy Awareness Week

[BPSDB] There was no follow-up to the letter published prominently in the Guardian on 13 June 2009, on which I have commented before. I have followed this up with a letter to the paper’s Readers’ Editor. I actually wrote on two different issues, so this is an extract from the letter.

On Saturday 13 June you published prominently a letter from three physicians (Dr Lewith et al). This consisted of an unfounded claim (see http://apgaylard.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/false-positives/) about evidence for the effectiveness of homeopathy, in which the signatories appear to have a direct financial interest.

I expect that there were many letters (including my own) in rebuttal of this claim, but none appeared in the paper. It appears to me that homeopaths and their supporters get an easy ride in the paper (outside of Dr Ben Goldacre’s columns) despite the fact that it is to medicine pretty much what astrology is to astronomy.

For information, this is the public information on the involvement of the three signatories with homeopathy:

Dr George Lewith

Dr Michael Dixon

Dr Peter Fisher

They all use the weasel word “integrative” or “integrated”, which has come  to be a warning sign for serious bullshit whenever it is associated with the word “medicine”. Homeopathy is fake medicine. It imitates the protocols and procedures of medicine (but not necessarily the ethics), while the theory behind it, and the remedies themselves, are as empty of real content as the magic in the Harry Potter books.