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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Applied Cold Reading

Alun Life, Science 2 Comments , , ,

Book in the snow

The best photo I’ve seen of cold read­ing by SPDP at Flickr.

I took a week­end off to attend a course in Lon­don on Applied Cold Read­ing. The course was given by Ian Row­land, who might be famil­iar to some read­ers as ‘Ian who from where?’, for every­one else he’s the author of The Full Facts Book of Cold Read­ing.

The Full Facts Book is mainly about Cold Read­ing in a psychic con­text. There are lots of people who can tell you how cold read­ing works in a psychic con­text. It relies on Barnum state­ments, state­ments that feel per­sonal but they’re true for every­one. I don’t find that a sat­is­fy­ing explan­a­tion. I get the impres­sion that the Barnum effect works best on gull­ible people. I know a few people who take psych­ics ser­i­ously and they’re all far less gull­ible than me. Another reason it’s a poor explan­a­tion is that there aren’t many people with a father called Brian, with dark hair, who’s miss­ing fin­gers from his left hand.
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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.

A Titanic victory for the skeptics

Alun Science, The Past 12 Comments , , ,

I don’t know about you but I’ve been abso­lutely riv­eted by the recent release of records from a break-in at the White Star line. No really, it’s not just a stream of bilge from people who may not be experts but reckon some­thing. Frankly I can’t get enough of hear­ing about the same claim that one memo by one of the work­ers on the Titanic pro­ject clearly con­firms the ship was ‘unsink­able’. This should finally put to rest the biggest hoax of the 20th cen­tury, that the Titanic sunk in the North Atlantic. Still there’s always someone who isn’t going to find a bit of a memo quoted out-of-context con­vin­cing so it’s worth recap­ping the clear evid­ence that the ‘sink­ing’ of the Titanic is a scam.

1) The data is contradictory

The officers of the Titanic claimed it went down in one piece, yet some pas­sen­gers clearly saw it break up on the sur­face. How could this be? Either the ship broke or it didn’t. Obvi­ously someone for­got to check every­one had their facts straight. If there’s dis­agree­ment on this one point then that’s enough to throw the whole sink­ing into doubt. This piece of evid­ence alone should be enough to con­vince you that the ship didn’t sink and arrived safely at New York, but there’s more.

2) The mod­els don’t work

Sure, phys­i­cists will try and tell you that iron sinks in water. They can even try and claim they can tell you roughly how long it would take for the Titanic to reach the sea bed. But look closely at the details and the mod­els fall apart. Can they explain how the ship is lying the way it is? Can they exactly explain the cor­ro­sion of the hull? The details of the cur­rents through the ship­wreck? The vari­ous mod­els may all agree on the broad pat­tern, but dis­agree­ments over the small details show the entire basis of these mod­els is flawed. If a phys­i­cist says that’s mad, look him in the eye and remind him Grav­ity is only a the­ory.

3) Ice is a nat­ural part of the ocean

Some people will try and tell you that ice­bergs are bad things to have in ship­ping lanes. Really. It’s like they’ve never seen the sea. Ice is what you get in the North Atlantic. It’s per­fectly nat­ural. In fact there’s noth­ing that could pos­sibly be bad about ice. As any chem­ist will tell you ice is H2O. Water is H2O. So really this is all about ‘sci­ent­ists’ find­ing water in the ocean. Pwned!

4) The QE2 crossed the Atlantic without sinking

In fact there’s evid­ence that sev­eral ships have crossed the Atlantic, which mars the claim that ships sink in the ocean. Yes someone will always try and tell you that an entirely dif­fer­ent ship on an entirely dif­fer­ent course will have a dif­fer­ent res­ult. But I deal with facts, not base­less speculation.

5) Nat­ural detritus far out­weighs man-made wreckage

The bot­tom of the sea is a messy place. Whales die there and their skel­et­ons become home for all sorts of stuff. Have you seen a whale? They’re huge, espe­cially the huge ones. Ima­gine one of those pos­sibly killed by one of those stealth CO2 emit­ting vol­ca­noes that no-one’s found yet. Yet amongst all this there’s sup­posed to be a ‘ship­wreck’. Against the vast majesty of nature, isn’t a tiny bit arrog­ant to assume that man could do any­thing notice­able on the sea-bed?

6) There’s nowhere the ‘ice­berg’ could come from

Another thing is that there’s no ice in the Atlantic ocean. This is a fact. As Dr Fox would say it might not be true, but it is a fact. Sure west­ern sci­ent­ists will tell you there’s an ice cap in the north, but this is demon­strably false. Look at the inde­pend­ent evid­ence. A Chinese naval exped­i­tion found no ice at the north pole. No ice cap means no ice­bergs. No ice­bergs means no sinking.

7) Ocean­o­graph­ers need the Titanic to jus­tify their huge grants

You’ve prob­ably never been to an Ocean­o­graphy depart­ment on cam­pus. Have you ever seen a ‘sci­ent­ist’ turn up in a Fer­rari? No? That shows you how well hid­den many of these depart­ments are. They are massively rich from all the fund­ing gouged out of the tax­payer in the form of ‘ship­ping reg­u­la­tions’ because of the sup­posed Titanic sink­ing. What do you think would hap­pen to these depart­ments if it wasn’t for the Titanic? Think they’d spend their time research­ing another inter­est­ing prob­lem? Not a chance. Oceanography=Titanic and that’s that. Don’t for­get all that grant money, it’s money in the pocket. It wouldn’t, for example, be used to fund a research pro­ject with 10 staff and a fur­ther 12 post­grads.

…and if that’s not enough then some of these research­ers into the Titanic who’ve been a bit mean about us in their memos. I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t be put off by a sys­tem­atic politically-motivated cam­paign by a bunch of nut­ters free-market entrepreneurs.

I think that’s all pretty con­clus­ive. You can take these argu­ments, mangle them and denounce any­one who sup­ports the ‘Titanic Sink­ing Swindle’ as a cor­rupt liar who should be up on crim­inal charges. If any­one responds by say­ing your evid­ence is ludicrous or you use long debunked argu­ments then denounce that as an ad hom­inem attack. Fol­low that up with a sage pro­nounce­ment that there’s no place for that kind of smear in science.

Appar­ently not only do you have the right to an opin­ion, you also have the right to be taken ser­i­ously even if you’re mak­ing a career from being ignor­ant, mis­taken or just down­right barking.

The extraordinary research of the BCA

Alun Featured, Politics, Science, The Past 15 Comments , , , ,

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and you think it's a duck, then maybe you're just not being open-minded enough. Photo (cc) RealEstateZebra

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and you think it’s a duck, then maybe you’re just not being open-minded enough. Photo (cc) RealEstateZebra

I sent an email to the Brit­ish Chiro­practic Association’s enquir­ies email account recently.

Dear BCA,

I read with interest that the use of manip­u­la­tion is doc­u­mented ‘as far back as 2700–1500 BC in China and Greece.’ Could you point me to the doc­u­ment­a­tion for Greece? I’m research­ing the use of ancient his­tory in jus­ti­fic­a­tions for com­pli­ment­ary medi­cine and I’m not famil­iar with any such doc­u­ments. It would be help­ful to know about them in my search for other med­ical texts.

Yours,

Alun Salt

I got a reply. There’s not a lot of evidence.

One pos­sib­il­ity is that a fourth cen­tury BC tab­let from Pir­aeus might show chiropractic-style treat­ment. The BCA’s enquiry per­son kindly linked to a page show­ing the tab­let, which you can find lis­ted as Votive relief to Asclepius, Pir­aeus Museum, cata­logue num­ber 405. As for doc­u­ment­a­tion, I’ll quote: “Greek doc­u­ments on manip­u­la­tion from pre-Hippocratic times are more dif­fi­cult — I don’t know of any (but that does not mean that they do not exist).”

This is inter­est­ing because the Brit­ish Chiro­practic Asso­ci­ation have quietly announced the ancient his­tory story of the dec­ade. This even beats the Anti­kythera Mech­an­ism as major news. Here’s the line:

The use of manip­u­la­tion is doc­u­mented as far back as 2700–1500 BC in China and Greece.

I’m not an expert on Chinese writ­ing. I thought there was some nation­al­ist vying with the Egyp­tians as to who had the old­est writ­ing. The books I’ve found give dates of 1200 BC (Bagley 2004, p. 190) or The 14th to 11th cen­tur­ies BC, with a pos­sible pre­de­cessor around the 17th cen­tury BC (Nor­man 1988 p. 58). It would seem that the BCA have access to some pre­vi­ously unknown examples of Chinese writ­ing, but that’s not even half the news.

They also have doc­u­ment­a­tion from Greece in this 2700 BC to 1500 BC band. I don’t know of any 2700 BC writ­ing from Greece, but there’s cer­tainly a script known from around 1800 BC-ish. It’s not actu­ally Greek script. That doesn’t really make an appear­ance till around the 8th cen­tury BC. Earlier than that you have Lin­ear B. Lin­ear B dates from the Mycenaean era. Deci­pher­ing Lin­ear B is one of the great stor­ies in ancient his­tory, the bulk of it was done by the math­em­atician Michael Ventris in the early 1950s. But Lin­ear B dates from the 15th cen­tury BC at the very old­est. That’s the 1400s BC, so it can’t be that the Brit­ish Chiro­practic Asso­ci­ation is refer­ring to. Still older, there’s Lin­ear A.

Lin­ear A is asso­ci­ated with the Minoan civil­isa­tion on Crete. It uses sim­ilar sym­bols to Lin­ear B, but if the sym­bols have the same sounds, then it is a record of a lan­guage unlike any known lan­guage. If you want to be a big name ancient his­tory then you could decipher it. Unless you’re too late, because this is what is so stag­ger­ing about the Brit­ish Chiro­practic Association’s claim. It’s not simply that they may have dis­covered pre­vi­ously unknown writ­ing in China. It’s the fact they’re able to decipher what these ancient texts means. Often early texts are tax records or sim­ilar which only exist in frag­ments. That these unknown texts should describe skilled med­ical treat­ments is stun­ning. Find­ing claims like cas­u­ally announced on the BCA’s web­site is as amaz­ing as dis­cov­er­ing your neigh­bour has built a time machine in her garden shed.

An altern­at­ive, and I hes­it­ate to bring this up because the Brit­ish Chiro­practic Asso­ci­ation are notori­ously liti­gi­ous, is that their claim is non­sense. I’m not say­ing that it is because there are few organ­isa­tions with the repu­ta­tion for upright sci­entific beha­viour enjoyed by the Brit­ish Chiro­practic Asso­ci­ation. But purely hypo­thet­ic­ally, let’s say that these texts didn’t exist. How would those claims get onto the web­site? The only way I could see would be if someone made them up. Now I’ll admit the word bogus is sail­ing into view. Such a claim would not be bogus, under Eng­lish law, because it wouldn’t be inten­tion­ally dis­hon­est. It could be writ­ten by someone entirely indif­fer­ent as to whether or not they were honest.

No, to find a bogus claim, what you’d have to send an email to their organ­isa­tion, say­ing that they’re mak­ing an odd claim, have a reply back say­ing they don’t know of any evid­ence for what they claim and then find they’re still mak­ing the same claim on their webpage. That might be bogus because that would mean they are aware it’s a false claim, but still state it any­way. An exact legal opin­ion on the claim’s bogos­ity could vary depend­ing on how expens­ive your law­yer is.

BUT — we know the BCA don’t make bogus claims, there’s a big court case going on defend­ing their repu­ta­tion. That’s how we know that the BCA must be sit­ting on one of the biggest archae­olo­gical and his­tor­ical stor­ies of the century.

If you’re inter­ested in what is or is not a bogus claim, you might like to search for Simon Singh on Jack of Kent’s web­log.

Ref­er­ences — ISBN links take you to Worldcat.

Bagley, R.W. (2004) ‘Any­ang Writ­ing and the Ori­gin of the Chinese writ­ing sys­tem’ in S.D. Hou­s­ton (editor) The first writ­ing: script inven­tion as his­tory and pro­cess. Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press . pp 190–249. ISBN 0521838614

Nor­man, J. (1988) Chinese. Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press. ISBN 0521296536

Cliopatria Awards 2008: Best Series of Posts

Alun Politics, The Past No Comments , ,

pyramidiot

Here we’re mov­ing out of my depth slightly. I haven’t been fol­low­ing enough blogs that intently to men­tion more than a couple of series of posts.

So instead of a com­pre­hens­ive over­view, I’m going to grab the ‘high­light work that oth­ers might not have seen’ baton and point to Le Site d’Irna as my nom­in­a­tion for Best Series of Posts. I’m nom­in­at­ing with mixed feel­ings, because I’m not really inter­ested in giv­ing the sub­ject any more pub­li­city. So the write-up is oblique to try and avoid a cer­tain phrase and draw­ing in more vis­it­ors who get angry when you rule out alien inter­ven­tion as an explan­a­tion for archae­olo­gical remains, purely due to lack of evid­ence. To a large extent the world is bored. It’s old news. Yet still he keeps dig­ging and des­troy­ing more and more of the irre­place­able past. Irna with her series of posts has kept a chron­icle of what has been going in the Balkans (clue if you don’t know what I’m talk­ing about). It’s a thank­less task, at least for now but I’m entirely ser­i­ous when I say her posts are of his­toric import­ance. This will be valu­able mater­ial when someone wants to talk about the ‘equal valid­ity of dif­fer­ent ways of know­ing.’ It’s the only place I know of where the extra-terrestrial hunt­ing pseudoar­chae­olo­gists have been given carte blanche on a site of archae­olo­gical importance.

The posts are:

It’s a shame she’s had to write them, but she has writ­ten them well and they deserve recognition.

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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