Psychic Readings are True

Alun Science 1 Comment , , , ,

Yes, it’s a delib­er­ately sceptic-baiting title. The plan is: it winds people up, they point out how I’m wrong and I learn something.

Psychic advert

I fore­see you are about to lose some money. Photo by Timothy Krause.

I’ve not com­pletely mad though. Obvi­ously not all psychic read­ings are true. It would take an enorm­ous tal­ent to ignore real­ity that has shown many read­ings to be false or fraud­u­lent. If I could do that I’d have a golden future in polit­ics. No, I’m only arguing the true ones are true.

Even that sounds odd. By defin­i­tion the true read­ings are true. Isn’t it a bit dif­fi­cult to believe that any read­ings are true if, like me, you don’t believe in psychic powers? Surely that’s going to need a weaselly approach to ‘truth’? I prefer to say simple, but you can call weasel in the com­ment box below if you like.

The idea has been form­ing since I went on an Applied Cold Read­ing course. Applied Cold Read­ing works best if you can get things wrong, but some­times it hap­pens that you fail to get things wrong.* String a few of these fails together and your sub­ject is stunned by how much you got right. Now you and I know that we were aim­ing for misses, but to your sub­ject that doesn’t mat­ter. You were right. That’s what she knows. The fact that you were right by acci­dent or chance is irrel­ev­ant. You were right.

And now you’re in trouble because she’ll expect you to keep being right. But that’s your prob­lem.
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Use cutting edge homeopathic hangover cures this New Year and party like it’s 1810

Alun Featured, Politics, Science 1 Comment , , ,

“When one con­siders that Wagner’s father died of typhoid just six months after the future composer’s birth, it is no exag­ger­a­tion to say that it is likely that Richard Wagner’s con­tri­bu­tion to music would not have occurred without the homeo­pathic treat­ment he received.”

This is an exer­cise in stat­ing the obvi­ous but, like a lot of homeo­pathy, it’s so obvi­ous that it’s eas­ily over­looked. I’ve spot­ted what seems to be a flaw in pro­fes­sional homeo­pathy. Now a lot of people will point out that homeo­pathy is utter non­sense because the doses are so diluted that you wouldn’t find a molecule of act­ive ingredi­ent, even if you had enough homeo­pathic medi­cine to fill replace the oceans of the world. Some people think the implaus­ib­il­ity of extreme dilu­tion mat­ters. These are the kind of people who think that just because an idea is demon­strably false, that means it isn’t true, I’d like to ignore them for now. Let’s say, for the sake of argu­ment, homeo­pathy does work. I’m keep­ing an open mind. I don’t know why or how it works, I’ll just accept that it does for the moment. Why would I want to do that?

Well, it’s because Dana Ull­man has put up an amaz­ing art­icle at the Huff­ing­ton Post: 19th Cen­tury Musical Geni­uses Who Loved Homeo­pathy. At first I wasn’t sure what expert­ise 19th cen­tury musical geni­uses had when deal­ing with 21st cen­tury med­ical claims. The idea made about as much sense to me as ‘Renais­sance Sculptors and their insights into Quantum Mech­an­ics’. It didn’t help that Dana Ull­man was a bit too effus­ive in his writ­ing. The claim “…[I]t is no exag­ger­a­tion to say that it is likely that Richard Wagner’s con­tri­bu­tion to music would not have occurred without the homeo­pathic treat­ment he received,” set me thinking.

Typhoid is a nasty dis­ease, but I’ll admit I don’t know how nasty. So I looked it up.

Left untreated the mor­tal­ity rate for Typhoid is 12–30% for an untreated ill­ness. If you believe in homeo­pathy then it may have cured Wag­ner, but the sur­vival rate is high enough that it’s likely he would have sur­vived any­way. Wagner’s sur­vival doesn’t con­tra­dict the pos­sib­il­ity homeo­pathy works, but that’s not so emphatic as Ullman’s claim. Sur­vival rates are con­sid­er­ably bet­ter with treat­ment. In Chicago dur­ing the Typhoid epi­demic of 1891, the mor­tal­ity rate peaked at almost 0.2% of the pop­u­la­tion. It might not sound a lot, but it’s a major pub­lic health haz­ard. It means there’s a good chance someone in your neigh­bour­hood could die of it. Still, if the same could be said of Wag­ner, then a 99.8% chance of sur­viv­ing typhoid by luck hardly makes homeo­pathy the likely cause. So what were Wagner’s chances?

Typhoid is spread by a bac­terium, which you can fight — if you have a the­ory of germs. Germ the­ory didn’t really start till the mid 1800s. In the 1840s Ignaz Sem­mel­weis reduced the num­ber of deaths asso­ci­ated with child­birth by get­ting to doc­tors to wash their hands between per­form­ing autop­sies and deliv­er­ing babies. Dur­ing the chol­era out­break of 1854 in Lon­don. John Snow was able to show how the dis­ease was trans­mit­ted from an infec­ted pump. In the 1860s Pas­teur developed germ the­ory by examin­ing, among other things, the fer­ment­a­tion pro­cess of wine. You can’t apply mod­ern sur­vival rates to Wagner’s time, because medi­cines and know­ledge have improved since then. Wag­ner had typhoid in 1839, before any­one knew about germs. That would sug­gest a higher mor­tal­ity rate was likely, closer to 20% than 2%, but it’s still an exag­ger­a­tion to say that homeo­pathy was likely to have saved Wagner’s life. It’s pos­sible that neither homeo­pathy nor medi­cine was much help at the time.

This is what makes Ullman’s claims inter­est­ing. He pulls evid­ence from a very dif­fer­ent era in the his­tory of medi­cine into a mod­ern con­text. That doesn’t work for medicine.

Sci­ence has rad­ic­ally altered since Wagner’s time. If Sem­mel­weis or Snow were brought into 2009, their know­ledge wouldn’t be of much use to medi­cine. They’d have to relearn medi­cine because there’s been an improve­ment in treat­ment with anti­bi­ot­ics, anti-virals and hygiene. There are iden­ti­fi­able mech­an­isms for the trans­mis­sion of bac­teria and a large num­ber of meth­ods for identi­fy­ing if they’re present and what type they are.

Steven John­son talks about John Snow and the Ghost Map of London.

In con­trast Samuel Hahne­mann, the inventor of homeo­pathy, would have no trouble set­ting him­self up as a homeo­path, Homeo­pathy still has no effect­ive mech­an­ism. Some people chunter on about nan­odoses, oth­ers quantum effects and oth­ers still memory of water but none has been demon­strated with any suc­cess. This doesn’t mat­ter if homeo­pathy works, but the sting is that no homeo­pathic treat­ments are demon­strably bet­ter than their suc­cessors. If homeo­pathy works, you’re still stuck with 1800s tech­no­logy. The treat­ments and meth­ods pro­posed by Hahne­mann in the early 1800s remain just as effect­ive as mod­ern treatments.

That’s why Wag­ner mat­ters. Whatever treat­ment Wag­ner got is still state of the art tech­no­logy as far as homeo­pathy goes. It’s like medi­cine never got fur­ther than leeches. In fact that leech at the top of the page is pos­it­ively hi-tech as leeches were still used to an extent into the late 1800s. When one con­siders that Dana Ull­man is pulling 19th cen­tury anec­dotes to sup­port mod­ern homeo­pathy, it is no exag­ger­a­tion to say that it is likely that he’s point­ing out that homeo­pathy is no bet­ter now that it was then.

Thank­fully this is a simple post to refute. All a homeo­path would have to do is show a reli­able study demon­strat­ing mod­ern homeo­pathic medi­cines for treat­ing Typhoid are bet­ter than those used by Dr Prutzer, the homeo­path who treated Wagner.

Astrology in the Infinite Monkey Cage

Alun Science 2 Comments , ,

A comedian and a physicist monkeying about.

A comedian and a phys­i­cist mon­key­ing about.

The Infin­ite Mon­key Cage tackled astro­logy this week, amongst other things. Ben Miller vis­ited to Jonathan Cainer, astro­lo­ger extraordin­aire, to see how astro­logy works. This seems to have come as a shock to Prof. Brian Cox who doesn’t think that it works. Ben Miller, who was ABD in Phys­ics, argued it did work. For Ben math­em­at­ics and phys­ical mod­els are rep­res­ent­a­tions of real­ity which are not strictly ‘true’. Astro­logy is also a model for under­stand­ing real­ity, so it wouldn’t have to be ‘true’ either. It’s a way of organ­ising inform­a­tion and com­ing to a con­clu­sion which works for many people. It depends on how you define ‘works’.

A phys­ical model works. With a phys­ical model you can put people in a rocket, fill it with fuel, find a launch win­dow and land people on the Moon. A phys­ical model can tell you when the rocket will land and at what speed. It’ll also tell you if there’s any chance the people will be able to return to Earth, or if they’ll be spend­ing the rest of their lives on the Moon. You can argue that Astro­logy works too. It can tell you “Today is a good day to travel, though you may not end up where you expec­ted!” Even if they are both mod­els, that doesn’t make both mod­els equally useful.

If you want to say how some­thing works, then you have to say what it is that is work­ing, and what is the out­put you will are seek­ing. I think Astro­logy works. But it doesn’t work for any reason to do with the stars or plan­ets. Here’s why I think the con­nect­ing the mech­an­ism with heav­enly bod­ies is misleading.

In 1781 Her­schel dis­covered Uranus. That was great, but it was soon clear there was a prob­lem. In the mid-nineteenth cen­tury it was clear that another planet lay bey­ond Uranus and it was pos­sible to use math­em­at­ics to pre­dict where it should be. It’s a big achieve­ment, because Nep­tune was found by study­ing one body. But if we take astro­logy ser­i­ously then it should be far easier to astro­lo­gic­ally dis­cover planets.

For astro­logy it’s not just the pos­i­tions in the zodiac that mat­ter, it’s also the way plan­ets inter­act with other plan­ets. So it should have been pos­sible to dis­cover Sedna, not just by see­ing what sign it was in, but also noti­cing that odd things hap­pen when Jupiter or Venus were trine to a point where no known planet exis­ted or when the Sun was in oppos­i­tion to this mys­tery point. This is a reas­on­able thing to look for because, after Pluto was found, it was claimed that it was astro­lo­gic­ally observ­able. Indeed Pluto’s influ­ence is said to be so strong that des­pite the astro­nomers revis­ing their opin­ion, Pluto remains an astro­lo­gical planet. That means it should be pos­sible to astro­lo­gic­ally dis­cover plan­ets as the influ­ence known plan­ets should briefly alter as they go past a mys­tery point on a reg­u­lar basis.

If you’ve down­loaded the pod­cast you could quite reas­on­ably say I’m being unfair here. Indeed Jonathan Cainer says there’s plenty of explan­a­tions for astro­logy and he doesn’t believe any of them, and rejects the notion of cause and effect. Fair enough but there must be some observ­able cor­rel­a­tion else the whole thing is mean­ing­less in its own terms. And sure enough after reject­ing cause and effect Jonathan Cainer puts for­ward an explan­a­tion which depends on exactly that. He talks about clocks and how people uni­ver­sally respond to things at cer­tain times like stop­ping work at five o’clock. This falls apart if you stop to think about it? Why do people stop work at five?

You can come up with lots of reas­ons. Some are prox­im­ate, like “I stop get­ting paid at five o’clock.” Some are sys­temic like, “The eco­nomy is based on the diurnal cycle as ori­gin­ally used in agri­cul­ture and so it’s most effi­cient to deploy work­ers at that time.” They could be bio­lo­gical, “After five people get pro­gress­ively more tired so it’s best to have them work dur­ing day­light.” There are many answers, but there is no big inef­fable mys­tery. No one sits in the city at five and won­ders, “Why is it that so many people are leav­ing their offices? Per­haps it’s a mys­tery bey­ond that humans can­not answer within four dimen­sional space-time.”

The way astro­logy works is via cold read­ing, which may be inten­tional or acci­dental. Ben Miller men­tioned Jonathan Cainer intu­it­ing inform­a­tion, which sounds like cold read­ing in action. I don’t mean that in a sneery way. Some people say that cold read­ing is just a mat­ter of telling people what they want to hear. That’s true. And being a gour­met chef is just a mat­ter of cook­ing things for the right length of time. If you’re ser­i­ously inter­ested in cold read­ing then I’d recom­mend Ian Row­land’s book on the sub­ject. It’s amaz­ingly bril­liant and astro­logy is one of the examples he uses, at least in the edi­tion I have. The ritual and pro­ced­ure of astro­logy provides a scene for cold read­ing to oper­ate in. It’s not about wildly guess­ing the truth. Talk­ing through the horo­scope provides a scaf­fold for the sub­ject to build her own nar­rat­ive over.

That sounds sus­pi­ciously like decep­tion, but I don’t think there’s much inten­tion­ally dis­hon­est about it a lot of the time. While the cor­rel­a­tions may be spuri­ous, they’re not arbit­rary. Ser­i­ous astro­lo­gers will spend a long while learn­ing the tech­niques and tra­di­tions of the sub­ject. It may have no effect, indeed there seems to fairly reg­u­lar and some­times quite funny debunk­ings of astro­logy, but they may believe it them­selves. Suc­cess is meas­ured in terms of num­bers of cli­ents so there’s a rein­force­ment for per­form­ance. You could say the same about a doc­tor in private prac­tice, but there is the extra ele­ment of mor­tal­ity rates. I don’t know any astro­lo­gers who quiz their cli­ents to determ­ine their suc­cess rates.

Even so I don’t know any­one who argues that the daily horo­scopes in news­pa­pers are any­thing other than rub­bish. That’s why I’m not sure I agree with Brian Cox when he says astro­logy is a ‘slip­pery slope’ to other forms of pseudos­cience. Unlike homeo­pathy or chiro­practic I don’t think there is so much con­fu­sion of astro­logy with sci­ence. The giveaway is Ben Miller’s descrip­tion of Jonathan Cainer’s place as the ‘most purple’ room he’s been in. If you were vis­it­ing an astro­lo­ger, what would you expect to find? Me, I’d expect some purple along with a crys­tal ball, crys­tal chan­deliers and just plain crys­tals around the place. I’d expect some occult signs includ­ing at least one pen­ta­gram and a cres­cent moon. There’d be eth­nic drapes, a north Amer­ican dream­catcher and a small statue of an Indian god. Either Ganesh, or one of the ones with lots of arms. I’d accept there’d be a com­puter, but oth­er­wise I’d be expect­ing a lot of stuff that you would not find in a lab.

I think this could make astro­logy help­ful, From the file marked I’ve no evid­ence for this — but I’m going to say it any­way, you could argue that astro­logy helps as part of an intel­lec­tual hygiene hypo­thesis. If astro­logy provides a help­ful eas­ily iden­ti­fi­able pseudos­cience, does expos­ure to it help build up res­ist­ance to other pseudos­cientific ideas? It wouldn’t be a simple thing to test. You’d expect people who accept astro­logy to also believe in homeo­pathy, chiro­practic and past life regres­sion. Also you’d expect them to have come into con­tact with astro­logy first, as it’s the most pub­lic pseudos­cience, so that would be con­sist­ent with the slip­pery slope argu­ment. That means look­ing at astro­lo­gers wouldn’t be a lot of help. What you’d need to see is if astro­logy turns many more people off, and if asso­ci­ation with astro­logy increases or dimin­ishes the cred­ib­il­ity of another pseudos­cience. That sounds like a ser­i­ous media stud­ies / anthro­po­logy pro­ject which would require a lot of effort.

I’ll admit my opin­ion of astro­logy tends to be tidal. It could be a bit more pos­it­ive tomor­row, or a lot more neg­at­ive. The more mys­tic it gets the closer it is to a spir­itual belief sys­tem rather than a sci­ence. I don’t feel the urge to stand out­side Buddhist temples yelling about the lack of evid­ence for trans­mi­gra­tion of souls, and I don’t see astro­logy as a major prob­lem either. The belief isn’t based on demon­strable evid­ence, but what you feel.

I think the fail­ure to tackle belief was really the only slip up in the epis­ode. A psy­cho­lo­gist or anthro­po­lo­gist could have added more to the dis­cus­sion, par­tic­u­larly a chro­no­psy­cho­lo­gist. Des­pite that I’m really enjoy­ing the series. Between this and It’s Only a The­ory there’s been some enter­tain­ing sci­ence sneak­ing onto the BBC recently. Now all it needs is a weekly sci-tech news pro­gramme about what the world will be like tomorrow.

The latest edi­tion of the Infin­ite Mon­key Cage should be avail­able to every­one as a pod­cast. See the programme’s homepage for more details.

There seems to be some confusion about what science journalism is

Alun Politics No Comments ,

This will be the last cli­mate change post of the year. The reason it’s going up is because while I was writ­ing tomorrow’s entry. my RSS box pinged with this blog post from Ed Dar­rell, which is well worth read­ing. It’s a simple illus­tra­tion of the use of double standards.

Recently I com­men­ted on the report­ing of a paper I’d put out. In par­tic­u­lar the reporter had talked to some people who I think are mis­taken about temple ori­ent­a­tions. I don’t think they’re stu­pid, incom­pet­ent or cor­rupt, simply mis­taken and I think the paper I pub­lished showed this. To save you going back here’s the rel­ev­ant quote:

I’m really pleased with the way Mark Hende­r­son has writ­ten this up. It’s not his job to preach my won­der­ful­ness, it’s to report on how this research fits in with other research. Get­ting the quotes from Efro­syni Bout­si­kas was bril­liant because it shows there’s cur­rently two mod­els which come to oppos­ite con­clu­sions. As we both pub­lish more those mod­els will get fleshed out and adapt. Which one will be accep­ted? Hers? Mine? Some kind of hybrid, or even neither? It’s not just about get­ting the right answer. At the moment we might not even agree on what the right answer will look like.

Rather than just take my word for it, even though he had a copy of my paper, Mark Hende­r­son went to a couple of other people for their opin­ions. That’s journ­al­ism. It never occurred to me to com­plain about that. In fact I think it’s a bet­ter story because of it.

Now here’s an exer­cise in con­trasts. There was a paper on cli­mate change and this was being her­al­ded by Marc Mor­ano. Rather than simply accept­ing it the reporter, Seth Boren­stein, asked an expert on the other side of the fence for an opin­ion. Accord­ing to loud global warm­ing insert your plural noun of choice this is uneth­ical. The mind boggles. The pres­ence of a death threat in the hacked emails doesn’t sur­prise me. As well as ser­i­ous cri­ti­cism the work of the CRU would have attrac­ted all kinds of nut­ters like a giant idiot mag­net — and the emails show this. I’d be sur­prised if no one at the LHC had received a death threat because that will fas­cin­ate weirdoes too. That’s not going to mean every­one who dis­agrees with find­ings pub­lished by sci­ent­ists at the LHC is a freak.

But the idea that someone would com­plain for sci­ent­ists to be invest­ig­ated, and then com­plain about invest­ig­at­ive report­ing is non­sensical. When you’re build­ing your case on hacked emails and con­spir­acy it seems over the edge of lun­acy. The AP story is hardly a glow­ing endorse­ment of the CRU. There’s a clique of people angrily demand­ing without irony or self-awareness that the rules that apply to sci­ent­ists should not apply to them.

Ed Dar­rell has the details. His blog is well worth fol­low­ing any­way as there’s a steady stream of thought­ful posts on his­tory, the envir­on­ment or the mar­vels of Texas.

Science is interesting. If you don’t like it, it’s your problem not mine.

Alun Politics, Science 4 Comments , ,

Statistics
I’ll admit not every­one is inter­ested in the world around them.

Here’s a site I like, The Hall of Ma’at. I don’t read it as much as I’d like because my read­ing tends to be RSS based. Still, it means that when I do remem­ber to visit their forum there’s plenty of inter­est­ing stuff. I’ve just learned about The Chocol­ate Hills. As well as being fas­cin­at­ing geo­logy, that thread also includes a bit of mock­ery. It’s an inter­est­ing place. They’ll have vis­it­ors who have found the exact ali­ens which built the pyr­am­ids every so often, and they’ll listen. On the other hand I don’t see them com­prom­ising on the need for evid­ence. If you’re wrong or mak­ing stuff up, you will know about it.

The founder, Kat Reese, is an inter­est­ing per­son. She con­trib­uted a chapter to the book Archae­olo­gical Fantas­ies. Not all of Mem­oirs of a True Believer is vis­ible at Google Books, but cer­tainly there’s enough. She puts her­self under the micro­scope and tells of her move­ment from altern­at­ive his­tor­ical beliefs to more main­stream archae­ology. One of the key dif­fer­ences she sees between pop­u­lar altern­at­ive archae­ology authors and the aca­dem­ics is that the altern­at­ive authors see this as a polit­ical debate. It’s not about the science.

Claims about the past are about people, so they’re often polit­ical. How­ever, so to are claims in other pseudos­ciences. You get pro­nounce­ments on health policy from the many and var­ied quacks shun evid­ence as a means for determ­in­ing med­ical care. I’ve recently seen people com­plain­ing about the LCROSS impact on the Moon who care deeply and pas­sion­ately, though not quite to the extent that they vis­ited NASA’s site on the LCROSS to find out what the mis­sion is about. NASA’s research on the effects of the LCROSS impact is a prob­lem if you don’t know any­thing about lunar geo­logy but you want to argue against them. You could learn, but that’s time con­sum­ing. It’s much easier to argue that NASA simply don’t know any­thing about the Moon. This is about stand­ing up to author­ity which, along the way, means tak­ing down Science.

Now, here’s the head-spinning bit.

When Deepak Chopra makes his appeals to send him more money he doesn’t do it because of mys­tic ooki­ness. He does it based on appeals to quantum phys­ics. I’m using the word ‘based’ in a com­pletely incor­rect sense there. Chiro­pract­ors get stroppy about being next to other New Age prac­ti­tion­ers. Homeo­paths don’t refer to them­selves as magi­cians. They give each other degrees and not just any degrees but BScs. Oh yes, the days when sci­ent­ist could visit the lav­at­or­ies in the Arts block and smugly write “Arts degrees, please take one,” next to the toi­let paper dis­penser are over. If there’s so much oppos­i­tion to sci­entific reas­on­ing, why do cranks make their claims in pseudo-scientific lan­guage?

Even Ken Ham, the man who pushes the line that the Bible is inerr­ant, pro­motes his sci­ence cre­den­tials on Answers in Gen­esis. He’s got a Bachelor’s degree from QIT. Why on earth would you need a sci­ence degree if you say the answers can all be found through Bib­lical study? The answer is import­ant for sci­ence communication.

People love science.

It’s recog­nised as one of the best meth­ods for learn­ing about the world around you. A lot of people find the world around them quite inter­est­ing. Added to that is test­ing of ideas and abil­ity to weed out bad ideas that makes sci­ence attract­ive. When nutri­tion­ists are push­ing their pill sup­ple­ments they’re not inter­ested in ‘another way of know­ing’. They’re eager to equate them­selves with sci­ence because that makes their work fact. When people want to belittle evol­u­tion, they don’t refer to evolution’s sci­ence base. Instead evol­u­tion is a reli­gion or a faith pos­i­tion. It sug­gests to me that polit­ical groups are aware gods can­not com­pete with sci­ence as explan­a­tions for a lot of the pub­lic. If faith was as import­ant as it’s cracked up to be then call­ing evol­u­tion a reli­gion wouldn’t be a put-down. Sim­il­arly global warm­ing den­iers don’t say that sci­ence can­not be used to exam­ine cli­mate change. Instead they say vari­ous argu­ments are aren’t sci­entific. Very few people dis­miss an argu­ment by call­ing it sci­entific because even, if you don’t like it, sci­ence has a repu­ta­tion for work­ing out what is true.

That’s why I think expli­citly tag­ging polit­ics onto sci­ence could detract in some way from the sci­entific mes­sage. In Kat Reese’s chapter she’s open that what worked for her was the emphasis on veri­fi­able facts, and the dif­fer­ence in method between the sci­entific and the pseudo-scientific archae­olo­gists. It’s a great selling point. If that’s the case ped­dling reli­gion as con­trib­ut­ing to or being a part­ner in sci­entific find­ings is not only dis­hon­est, but also con­fus­ing the pub­lic about what sci­ence is. Reli­gion can cer­tainly be an inspir­a­tion, but so can the works of Shakespeare and no-one argues that Shakespeare is an essen­tial part­ner in ques­tions about the universe.

That doesn’t make advocacy wrong. Janet Stem­wedel put it much bet­ter than me in say­ing sci­ent­ists (and aca­dem­ics as a whole) are not all after the same thing.. That might include lob­by­ing for a more eco­lo­gic­ally respons­ible pos­i­tion or against reli­gion infringing human rights. But these are polit­ical aims. Mooney and Kirshen­baum are appeal­ing for people who have dif­fer­ent polit­ical view to them to talk about some­thing else. The fact they don’t see why this might be a prob­lem shows a wor­ry­ing lack of aware­ness of soci­ety. Per­son­ally I’m not inter­ested in whether you believe in a god or not. I def­in­itely don’t feel any respons­ib­il­ity to (de-?)convert people. I already have enough respons­ib­il­it­ies. My interest starts when someone claims their beliefs limit what I can do without any jus­ti­fic­a­tion other than a vague feel­ing. That is also polit­ics rather than science.

So what can you do for sci­ence com­mu­nic­a­tion? I think It can be helped by people shar­ing tac­tics, but the requires accept­ing the diversity of sci­ent­ists or pub­lic. It could be help­ful to share what works and what doesn’t in dif­fer­ent con­texts. On the other hand if you insist your polit­ical beliefs are in fact a com­ment on sci­ence, you’ll end up with a self-destructive row which does no-one any good.

That’s my attempt to start mov­ing to some­thing pos­it­ive. I don’t think someone’s a fail­ure just because they don’t appeal to every­one. If the long tail means any­thing we should be shar­ing and cel­eb­rat­ing all the small suc­cesses as well as the a-list. Except me, if I am a suc­cess, because whenever I get a traffic spike I always think, “Bloody hell, what have I gone and said now?”

Speculations on the sex of the Moon

Alun Politics, Science, The Past 1 Comment , , , , , , ,

I may be busy, but not too busy to point and laugh. You’ve prob­ably seen this story in the Exam­iner about the Japan­ese crash­ing an orbiter into the Moon. If you haven’t then it’s Satya Har­vey com­plain­ing that sci­ent­ists will be pen­et­rat­ing a female moon without first ask­ing her per­mis­sion. Lots of people have found it a remark­able pub­lic dis­play of ignor­ance. In fact she’s elev­ated ignor­ance to an art form, because she is also clearly unaware that, in Japan­ese myth­o­logy, the Moon is male and the Sun is female.

If you live in the West you might think that makes the Japan­ese freaks. I’ve got a book, The Moon: Myth and Image by Jules Cash­ford, which picks up on this. The Second World War alli­ance between Ger­many and Japan was blamed (only in part I hope) on the two nations both per­ceiv­ing the Moon as male. She found Laurens van der Post on one of his off-days writ­ing: “…[S]ome omin­ous per­versity of the abori­ginal urgings of both Ger­mans and Japan­ese, was rendered into a fixed and immut­able mas­culin­ity.” If you’re keen to sample some per­versity then you may not need to travel that far. Cash­ford also has an incom­plete list of cul­tures with male lunar deit­ies which includes, Ainu, Anato­li­ans, Armeni­ans, South­ern Ara­bi­ans, Aus­tralian Abori­gines, Balts, Basques, Canaan­ites, Eski­mos, Finns, Ger­mans, Geor­gi­ans, Green­land­ers, Hindus, Hittites, Hur­ri­ans, Japan­ese, Lithuani­ans, Melane­sians, Mon­go­li­ans, Per­sians, Phrygi­ans, Poles, New Guineans, North Amer­ican Indi­ans of Brit­ish Columbia, the Machiv­anaga of Peru, Scand­inavi­ans, Slavs and Tar­tars. With the Moon being a rock, and the Sun a nuc­lear implo­sion there’s no reason to assume the genders have to be fixed one way or the other.

If you’re after a more adven­ter­ous myth­o­logy you don’t even need the Sun and Moon to be oppos­ite genders. For example the Bororo of South Amer­ica have the Sun and Moon as twin broth­ers who ascen­ded from the Earth. A male Sun and Moon myth­o­logy might be use­ful if you want to have a cos­mic example of Men going out and doing stuff while women… umm… don’t. If you want some­thing more soph­ist­ic­ated, the Aztecs and the Egyp­tians saw the Moon as male or female or both as the mood took them.

In fact it’s the female Moon which may be odder than a male Moon. If you want oppos­ite genders for the two bod­ies, a female Sun might make more sense because it drives life. The reason the Sun is male in astro­logy (and I assume Ms. Har­vey means spe­cific­ally Graeco-Roman Astro­logy) is because it was asso­ci­ated with Apollo in reli­gion. Thanks to the Roman Empire that’s the basis for Astro­logy which sur­vived in the West. Indian Astro­logy is some­what dif­fer­ent. Where does that leave the Sun’s role as a life-force? The Greeks saw the male as the source of life. The womb was where you depos­ited the seed to grow, the credit for the fin­ished product belonged to the man. Did that belief come from the same root as a male Sun? I wouldn’t know; it’s pos­sible one caused the other. In any event it would seem reas­on­able to ask how the gender of celes­tial bod­ies affected the way people saw the universe.

It’s the fact that sci­ent­ists see the Moon as gen­der­less that helps open up new ways of look­ing at the uni­verse. We can ask new ques­tions, find new answers and dis­cover new mys­ter­ies which we couldn’t even just fifty years ago. In con­trast Satya Har­vey offers a narrow-minded and blinkered view of the moon which cas­u­ally dis­misses any­thing which doesn’t fit her own pre­con­cep­tions. A uni­verse where women are tied to 2000 year old gender roles seems a claus­tro­phobic little place. If a Japan­ese probe can help smash a way out of that, I’m all for it.

And while I’m at it, I’ll crow­bar a link into Steven Renshaw’s page on Japan­ese Astro­nomy.

Another Petition

Alun Politics, Science No Comments , ,

This time in sup­port of Simon Singh.

I thought quite a bit before put­ting this up. While I sup­port Simon Singh, I have doubts about Sense About Sci­ence. Sense About Sci­ence is loosely con­nec­ted with Spiked Online through Liv­ing Marx­ism, which seems to think Chris­topher Mon­ck­ton is a cred­ible speaker on cli­mate change. The cli­mate change debate is one of the major sources of pseudos­cientific non­sense on the web, so it’s dis­ap­point­ing that Sense About Sci­ence has so little on the topic. In the end I signed because Jack of Kent is ask­ing for sig­na­tures. It was a big help that George Mon­biot and Nick Cohen, who are aware of the his­tory of the group, signed. Even now I’m not com­fort­able with the title of the let­ter, which implies sci­ent­ists might some­how be exempt from laws that apply to every­one else.

This is another reason why I’m wary of sign­ing any­thing that gets passed along by a group. If you want to sign with hon­esty you need to look into exactly what you’re sign­ing. Often there simply isn’t time to do that.

Reburial Redux

Alun Politics, The Past 1 Comment , , ,

Fol­low­ing Yvonne’s com­ment, I’ve uploaded the two pod­casts I recor­ded on Pagan reburial in the UK to Box.net. You should be able to access them at:
http://www.box.net/shared/z5k2bv7ao9
http://www.box.net/shared/sa1ojvzmnl

The reburial of remains issue is live again and it’s inter­est­ing for a couple of reas­ons. One is the eth­ics of study­ing and stor­ing human remains and the claims a reli­gious com­munity can make on the rest of soci­ety. This makes good head­lines. The other requires a bit more thought. Do the concept of the Pagan (or Chris­tian or Muslim) com­munity make sense?

The cur­rent reburial flap is centred around a fringe Pagan group. From the pod­casts you’ll see it’s not a main­stream Pagan pos­i­tion. Yet really what the pub­lic and the news media want from Pagans is simple and daffy ste­reo­type. White robes, long beards, made-up names and lin­eages. We’ll skip point­ing fin­gers at the dresses prom­in­ent Chris­ti­ans wear. The point is what makes a good story are people who play up to the ste­reo­type. Enter CoBDO®.

CoBDO® is/are the the Council(s) of Brit­ish Druid Orders. Back in the day when they were CoBDO® they were, if I under­stand cor­rectly a minor­ity group amongst Pagans. Since then CoBDO® have split from CoBDO West fol­low­ing a fight in a pub. I don’t know if CoBDO West is a registered trade­mark or not if they leg­ally a CoBDO or not. Hence the vague­ness over whether CoBDO is sin­gu­lar or plural. Any­way it’s all a big fight and the Judean People’s Front is hop­ing to stick it to the People’s Front of Judea by grabbing bones from a museum in Ave­bury for burial. Even if Eng­lish Her­it­age do say the bones can be rebur­ied, there’ll be a big fight to be had over whether it should be a CoBDO® or CoBDO West cere­mony which is performed.

This is all a con­cern to the major­ity of Pagans who don’t feel the need to get involved in a big shout­ing match to make a point. By play­ing to the worst ste­reo­types of the media a small group of people is get­ting to define what it means to be Pagan. That’s why I found the two inter­views with Yvonne Abur­row and Emma Restall-Orr inter­est­ing. You have two people from two dif­fer­ent Pagan pos­i­tions both with cri­ti­cisms of this cam­paign. It’s a micro­cosm of a pos­i­tion taken by the media for all reli­gions. Journ­al­ists and politi­cians are quite happy to talk with lead­ers of the Muslim com­munity or the Jew­ish com­munity, but is there a com­munity and who gets to speak for all? Does acced­ing to reli­gious requests mean that the gov­ern­ment will be endors­ing one form of a reli­gion over another?

As for the con­tent of the argu­ment that the bones should be rebur­ied, that’s an argu­ment for tomorrow.

What do the Creationists want with you?

Alun Life, Politics 2 Comments , , , , , , ,

Fundamentalist
’Chris­ti­ans’ show­ing the love. Photo (cc) Jordan Thevenow-Harrison

Ed Dar­rell has set a tough prob­lem. How do you solve the Texan edu­ca­tion crisis? If you haven’t been fol­low­ing this, the Texas Edu­ca­tion Author­ity has forced an employee to resign because she sent round details of a talk debunk­ing Intel­li­gent Design. The TEA has stated it’s neut­ral on whether or not chil­dren should have good edu­ca­tion. It’s the latest round of what, in the­ory, is the argu­ment between Sci­ence and Intel­li­gent Design. It isn’t really. Every­one knows that Intel­li­gent Design is second-rate Cre­ation­ism. How­ever I don’t think the argu­ment is between Sci­ence and Cre­ation­ism either. If it was then the debate would be as dead as phlogiston.

Even the pre­tence of a debate plays into the Cre­ation­ists’ hands. This allows them to frame the argu­ment as Sci­ence against Chris­tian­ity. Yet if you look at the argu­ments it’s clear that this isn’t about Sci­ence. It’s about power. It won’t be power over sci­ent­ists — they’re con­strained by real­ity. It’s power over Chris­ti­ans that’s the issue. Answers in Gen­esis is quite open about this. Cre­ation mat­ters because it’s about evangelism.

That has to be a prob­lem, because it’s not evan­gel­ism to gen­eric Chris­tian­ity. There are no gen­eric Chris­ti­ans. There are Ortho­dox Chris­ti­ans, Cath­ol­ics and vari­ous minor sects. In the case of AiG it’s evan­gel­ism for a very spe­cific fun­da­ment­al­ist form of Chris­tian­ity. They state:

The 66 books of the Bible are the writ­ten Word of God. The Bible is divinely inspired and inerr­ant through­out. Its asser­tions are fac­tu­ally true in all the ori­ginal auto­graphs. It is the supreme author­ity in everything it teaches.

Yes, accord­ing AiG, the Sun doesn’t cause day­light and could come out at night if God thought it would be use­ful. There’s a lot said about the inerr­ancy of the Bible. Sadly there’s noth­ing about the fal­lib­il­ity of those who read it. Now you may be infal­lible and know the mind of God. Con­grat­u­la­tions if this is the case, but it makes you part of a minor­ity. A few minutes con­ver­sa­tion will reveal that most other people don’t have the clar­ity of under­stand­ing that you do.

Indeed, a lot of Chris­ti­ans accept they don’t have all the answers. Most of the com­mit­ted Chris­ti­ans I’ve met are as hon­est, decent and char­it­able as any­one else. Their reac­tion to the uni­verse is one of awe and humil­ity rather than cer­tainty. I think they make a mis­take nam­ing that awe ‘God’, but they seem to con­sider the mind of God unknow­able. When Cre­ation­ists take the label ‘Chris­ti­ans’ for them­selves they pre­sume to speak on behalf of these people. That reveals amaz­ing arrog­ance, but they have it in good sup­ply.

So how do you debate these people? I strongly sus­pect you can’t debate them with sci­entific or his­tor­ical facts. You can’t debate them using basic logic. They’ve been immunised.

The way I would choose to debate this is to tackle what the cre­ation­ists plan to do if they win. See the place Sherri Shep­herd makes for people who think dates in BC refer to the time before Christ? That is the same space she has for people who don’t share her spe­cific off­shoot of Chris­tian­ity. Will tran­sub­stan­ti­ation be taught as fact in Chem­istry? It has exactly the same amount of evid­ence as Cre­ation­ism, so if not why not? It’s not a frivol­ous ques­tion. What Cath­ol­ics call Christ’s blood, the sec­u­lar law of Ire­land calls alco­hol, and it could lead to drink-driving. It’s not just a gen­eric God that’s being put into classes, exactly whose God is it? What role will this God have in the local gov­ern­ment and in the law?

The Cre­ation­ists know exactly what role their God will have in Texas. They know how they plan to deal with any­one who doesn’t share their view of God. The real debate is about who will be allowed to ques­tion Author­ity in Texas. There’s noth­ing spe­cial about sci­ent­ists, it just hap­pens that they’re at the top of the list as their jobs are based on ques­tion­ing Author­ity. The best response for sci­ent­ists to cre­ation­ists is to make clear that sci­entific debate is impossible because cre­ation­ists have noth­ing to debate with.

Des­pite the claims of cre­ation­ists and the wishes of some athe­ists, Dar­win didn’t prove that God didn’t exist, but what he did do was show that God was not neces­sary to explain the vari­ety of life. That opens up a lot of ques­tions. Dar­win showed that everything could be ques­tioned, includ­ing the reas­ons for the exist­ence of everything liv­ing. He showed that the world was not static and there was no neces­sity to believe in a world where the places of rich and poor were divinely ordained. Des­pite the recent attempts of an actor front­ing a titanic ‘exposé’ of evol­u­tion to smear him, he opposed slavery. His work has polit­ical implic­a­tions. It requires a ques­tion­ing atti­tude, and that’s not accept­able to people who don’t want to be ques­tioned. That’s why they offer noth­ing to ques­tion and that’s why they want to encour­age chil­dren to know when to stop ask­ing awk­ward questions.

If you know what the Cre­ation­ists want with you, you’ll know why Dar­win matters.

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