Prostitution is popular in France, that doesn't mean it's right.

The House of Commons Science and Technology Sub-Committee today met for an evidence check on homeopathy. This was done over two sessions in which panels of scientists and homeopaths were brought in to answer questions of evidence for the committee.

The first panel was made up of Prof Jayne Lawrence (Royal Pharmaceutical Society), Robert Wilson (British Association of Homeopathic Manufacturers), Paul Bennett (Boots the chemist), Tracey Brown (Sense About Science) and Dr Ben Goldacre (Bad Science blogger/columnist).

The second panel was made up of Dr Peter Fisher (London Homeopathic Hospital), Prof Edzard Ernst (Peninsula Medical School), Dr James Thallon (NHS West Kent), and Dr Robert Mathie (British Homeopathic Association).

The whole session can be watched here, and the Guardian's Ian Sample live blogged the whole thing here.

This is a good session chaired by a committee who are clearly adequately sceptical of homeopathy's evidence of efficacy. There are a few interesting points where the pro-homeopathy panel members are held against the ropes and forced to give rather telling, squirmy non-answers to the committee's questions.

Phil Willis, who chaired the meeting, was responsible for some particularly excellent moments, such as answering Robert Wilson's point that homeopathy is an old tradition and popular in France with the point that so is prostitution but that doesn't make it right. Even better was his incredulous response to Wilson's argument that if they didn't work people wouldn't keep buying them with, "that wasn't a serious comment was it?"

It's well worth watching the video and it's heartening to know that at least there are people in the Commons who value evidence and take a sceptical view of alternative medicine and that they don't all lobby the government to have lunar effects taken into account.

However, the important question, I'm sure, will soon be whether the probable future Conservative government shares this committee's interest in evidence.

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Update: Read Ben Goldacre's review of events here.

The Science of Scams

Magician and sceptic, Derren Brown has recently taken part in an online project about the ways that apparently paranormal feats can be reproduced in believable looking ways. In each of the seven episodes of The Science of Scams, a different paranormal skill is demonstrated and then explained in terms of the scientific principals behind it. The topics discussed include ghost sightings, telekinesis and psychic readings among others. All the videos are well put together and are certainly worth watching.

The first video in the series is below:

Ray Comfort "not an expert on evolution" shock!

USNews has been holding a written debate between Ray Comfort and Eugenie Scott on the subject of Comfort's decision to distribute a version of Darwin's Origin of Species with a self-penned creationist introduction. Comfort's first statement is here and was followed by Eugenie Scott's first rebuttal here. Comfort replies here and finally Scott comes back again here.

It's not a huge surprise to anyone who has followed some of Ray Comfort's writing and media appearances that he uses both his statements to trot out the same oft-refuted creationist arguments that he brings to every debate. It's also not a huge surprise that Eugenie Scott knocks back those arguments with huge skill and clarity of thought, especially in her final statement, which is excellent.

Ray Comfort's second statement was so full of unintelligible non-arguments that it was impressive even for him, so I thought I'd have a little go through it as well.

Scott quoted a famous geneticist, who said, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." I would like to drop one word, so that the quote is true. It should read, "Nothing in biology makes sense in the light of evolution." For example, evolution has no explanation as to why and how around 1.4 million species of animals evolved as male and female. No one even goes near explaining how and why each species managed to reproduce (during the millions of years the female was supposedly evolving to maturity) without the right reproductive machinery.

The bizarre strawman argument that evolution implies that a single male and a single female of each species must have evolved at the same time by coincidence is one of his absolute favourite arguments. It's even in the foreword of his laughable (but pun-tastically titled) You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence but you Can't Make him Think (available with Look Inside on Amazon).

This argument is borne out of an incredible misunderstanding of how evolution works. In Comfortian evolution, a species, let's say a horse, will spontaneously decide to undergo evolution with the specific end goal of becoming another species, let's say a giraffe. In the time intermediate between being a horse and a giraffe, this species becomes a freakish chimera beast and also apparently stops engaging in sexual reproduction. Eventually, one of these asexual girorses (or hiraffes?) will give birth to a male giraffe, signifying the male line's attainment of the pre-ordained finish line. However, this single male giraffe must wait around hoping that a compatible female giraffe will be born to another hiraffe within its lifetime.

If this mechanism were even tangentially like Darwinian evolution, I would agree that the chances of a male and female of the new species co-evolving at the same time would be astronomically small and Comfort would have a valid point. Unfortunately, however, never has a concept been so badly misunderstood.

In fact evolution works at the population level. The immediate evolutionary ancestor to a giraffe would have been something very very like a giraffe, almost imperceptibly different. Each of these incredibly giraffe-like pre-giraffes would have been reproductively compatible with the giraffes that followed them and the pre-pre-giraffes that preceded them, which would themselves have been very much like a giraffe.

At no point would there been a single male or female unable to mate with other members of the population at large because Darwinian evolution occurs at the population, rather than individual, level gradually and over a very long time. So Comfort's argument is meaningless.

Nor does any evolutionary believer adequately address the fact that all those 1.4 million species managed to evolve into maturity together in our lifetime.
Nothing we have in creation is half evolved. The cow has a working udder to make drinkable milk. The bee has working apparatus to make edible honey. We don't find a half-evolved cow or bee. None of the 1.4 million species on the Earth has half an eye. All have the necessary functioning equipment, from the brain, to the teeth, to the eye, to limbs, to reproductive necessities. Everything that we see in creation is in full working order—from the sun, to the mixture of the air, to the seasons, to fruit trees and vegetables, to the animal kingdom—from the tiny ant right up to the massive elephant.

This assertion comes from a similar position of ignorance. Evolution is a gradual, directionless and blind process. The evolutionary predecessors of the bee were not working towards one day becoming modern bees. Rather, modern bees just happen to have been the outcome of the effects of natural selection on those predecessors through history.

The same is true of humans, although this can be difficult for people to reconcile with the natural and reasonable desire to believe that we are somehow special and sit apart from all other creatures. The truth is that humans are as we are largely because of chance and if any number of factors in our evolutionary past had been different, we would be different now - perhaps in noticeable and significant ways or perhaps not.

Every species represented on Earth today is equally evolutionarily suited to life. If it were not, it would go extinct. This has been true at every point in the history of the planet. Evolution is still going on today and many of today's extant species may be the transitional species of another age.

Maybe in a hundred thousand years, there will be a new flying insect on the planet, let's call it a penk, the ancestor of which will have been our familiar honey bee. No doubt a Ray Comfort of the day will snort scornfully at the idea that that penk evolved because he cannot be shown evidence of a half penk but only other similar insects. The point is that each of those links in the chain that bind the bee to the penk would have been themselves no less a complete and functioning creature than those at the arbitrarily selected beginning and end points of that journey.

Towards the end of the paragraph, Ray moves away from animals and brings the sun and the atmosphere into the argument, stating that if these had not been exactly as they are now, life would not have been possible. But this is a logically confused argument. If the sun had not formed, we would not exist. But the fact that it did and we do does not imply that it had a creator.

If the sun or the atmosphere had formed differently, life might still have existed, but in a different form, just as if any other factor in our evolutionary history had been different. If the atmosphere contained different elements, or different proportions of the same elements, life as we know it would not exist, but other life might. And if any of that life had reached the sort of intelligence that humans hold now, there would probably be another Ray Comfort using exactly the same argument.

A lot of creationist misunderstandings of evolution and cosmology stem from the belief that humanity is special and so any explanatory system must set the existence of humankind as an end goal. This is not the case. Humans are no more special than chimpanzees, rabbits, sponges and viruses. Our existence in our present form is the chance outcome, neither fortuitous nor otherwise, of a blind non-random natural selection process applied over hundreds of millions of years.

Scott continues, "There are more specimens of 'Ardi' (the newly described Ardipithecus ramidus) than there are of Tyrannosaurus . . . We and modern chimpanzees shared a common ancestor millions of years ago . . . ." But that's another evolutionary "Oops!" if you believe the learned scientists on the Discovery Channel. In a recent two-hour documentary about Ardi, the scientists said, "Ever since Darwin, we have bought into the idea that humans evolved from ancient chimplike creatures. That's because modern chimps seemed to share a lot of anatomy and modern behavior with humans. So the idea that we evolved from something like chimps seemed to make sense. But now, the discovery of Ardipithecus shows that this idea is totally and completely wrong." Did you hear what they said? This idea that we evolved from ancient chimplike creatures is totally and completely wrong.

This demonstrates a common creationist tactic: to jump on any disagreement about relatively minor scientific details as a major failing of the whole theory. The actual contention of the Discovery Channel documentary, as I understand it, was that the common ancestor shared by humans and chimps was not as much like a modern chimp as previously thought. However it certainly did not call into question the well established fact that we and chimps did share a common ancestor.

Plus, I believe the convention in science is to get your information from a source slightly more academically weighty than a TV documentary, even a two-hour one.

I am aware that it is the learning process of evolutionary "science" to continually discover itself to be wrong. So there can never be a time when believers can claim they have the truth. This is just as well, because each new and believed hypothesis, like the crazy fashions of a superficial teenager, is in time discarded in favor of the new.

Actually, to discover mistakes and adapt accordingly is a feature of all science and is actually one of its greatest strengths. Imagine if astronomy had stopped with Ptolomy's model of the solar system because science was not interested in changing to get closer to the truth. Or if nobody had bothered to work on the concept of alternating current because direct current was already in place.

However, the foundational fact of evolution and the theory of natural selection is not in doubt because no reason has ever been given to doubt it. It is only the details and the fine print that undergo revision when new evidence gives reason.

After addressing my arguments from the portion of the Introduction she doesn't want students to read, Scott says, "More fossils will provide more details, but this outline of human evolution is not in serious doubt among scientists." Hear her own words: "More fossils will provide more details." In other words, they still don't have the undisputed fossils. That's what Darwin lamented 150 years ago! He said that when a skeptic "may ask in vain, 'Where are the numberless transitional links?' " Darwin's answer was that the missing links "may lie buried under the ocean." They are still buried somewhere, 150 years later. Scott said that "human evolution isn't in serious doubt among scientists." But I say, it should be.

Finally, after all this foreplay, Comfort has made his way to every creationist's favourite argument - that there are no transitional fossils. Creationists' dismissal of the plethora of transitional forms that have been discovered comes from their bizarre mischaracterisation of the theory of evolution itself, as discussed above. Comfort's belief that any extant species must be linked to its ancestors by a lineage of bizarre chimeras like the crocoduck leads to the incorrect expectation that there should be fossils discovered that document these odd, twisted creatures of his imaginings.

We have numerous transitional fossils, but they all look too disappointingly normal and, superficially at least, too much like other extant animals to satisfy the expectations of the twisted, straw-filled version of evolution held up by creationists.

There is also the problem, when asking why we don't have numberless fossils, that for an animal to fossilise is pretty rare. A quite specific and unlikely set of circumstances lead to a dead animal fossilising, so only a tiny percentage of the animals that have ever lived have done so. Nevertheless, despite the necessarily patchy nature of the fossil record, it is full enough to be useful and to inform our understanding of our planet's past.

She also says, "There are splendid fossils of dinosaurs that have feathers and of whales that have legs—and even feet." But she doesn't give me any details of such splendor. Where are they?

In answer to this, I can do no better than to quote Eugenie Scott's own reply:

Comfort complains that I didn't provide enough detail in my brief essay about those fossil whales. You want a list of fossil whales showing the transitional features marking the evolutionary transition from land animal to marine, such as changes in the ears, nostrils, and limbs? Indohyus, Icthyolestes, Pakicetus, Nalacetus, Remingtonocetus, Ambulocetus . . . . Never mind. Start here, for a nontechnical review by a team of whale paleontologists.

Ray Comfort concludes:

There are so many gaps and holes in the theory of evolution that you could drive a fleet of a thousand fully laden 18-wheelers through them. The irony is that I can see them, and I'm not an expert on the subject of evolution. So, what does that say about the theory's experts, whoever they are? It says (as a wise man once said) that man will believe anything . . . as long as it's not in the Bible.

The declaration that he is "not an expert on the subject of evolution" is the first thing he has said that I agree with and perhaps he should consider whether perhaps it is his understanding, rather than the subject itself, that has the gaps and the holes.

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Update: The National Centre for Science Education (NCSE) has an excellent page up refuting point by point Ray Comfort's introduction.

He Works in Magisterious Ways

One area in which the so-called "new atheists" differ from what I can only assume are called "old atheists" is in their views on the possibility of harmonious co-existence between religion and science. Dawkins, Hitchens and Myers, while acknowledging that religious people can understand science and scientists can believe in God, see religious faith as either contradictory or, at worst, obstructive to good science. However, most moderate religious people, and a good number of atheists and agnostics, see no incompatibility between the two systems.


The most famous defence of the accomodationist position was made by Stephen Jay Gould in his definition of science and religion as "non-overlapping magisteria". Science is the realm of the observable, the empirical and the testable, he claimed; religion is the domain of that which is beyond human experience. Many people, in my experience, sum this position up in something like the statement that science deals with the 'how' while religion deals with the 'why' (like answer 'B' on this page); scientists may be able to tell us how the Earth came to be formed and how life evolved on it, but it is to the clergy that questions about the meaning of that life ought to be addressed.


I disagree. The 'how' and the 'why' defence is an easy maxim to rattle off in lieu of an agrument, but does it really mean anything at all? Does science helpfully limit itself to the dry mechanistic explanations? And does religion respectfully keep clear of them, only to shuffle out when someone asks a more metaphysical question? Of course not.


The Bible is full of explanations of how things work and how things happened - from the beginning of the Earth to its end. How many of these explanations you may wish to write off as poetically pregnant metaphors will be decided by the particular strain of the religion you most identify with. However, with even the most modern and woolly tea-and-biscuit fuelled reading of the Bible, it is a stretch to imply that the Good Book completely steers clear of physical and biological explanations or politely holds its tongue when any other 'how' question is raised.


Similarly, it is only a uselessly simplistic characterisation that would suggest that science limits itself to the 'how' questions. The rapidly evolving and endlessly enlightening fields of psychology, neurology and genetics have given us myriad insights into 'why' questions that mere decades ago would have been left entirely to theologians and philosophers. In fact science is even able to study the 'why' of religion itself (search Pubmed for 'religion' and 'brain' for examples).


Of course it is possible for scientists to be religious or for religious people to believe in evolution or the big bang. However, this is not proof that they are mutually compatible worldviews so much as further evidence of humans' ability to hold multiple incongruous viewpoints while coping with the resulting cognitive dissonance.


The cornerstone of science is scepticism of that for which there is no evidence. This is the reason scientists make hypotheses based on observations and then try to test those hypotheses to see whether they hold true after exhaustive efforts to falsify them. Any christian scientist (by which I mean a scientist who is religious, not a follower of Mary Baker Eddy) must either admit that they hold some parts of their life out of reach of the light of their scientific scepticism or tie themselves up in confusing knots of attempted justification and theological gymnastics.


The cornerstone of religion is faith in that for which there is no evidence, and it is for this reason that I see it as fundamentally incompatible with science. A christian (or muslim or jew etc.) who wishes to maintain their faith must approach certain questions without the genuine openmindedness that ideal science calls for.


Once again, I acknowledge that some scientists are religious and some religious people are scientists and I do not think it would be helpful to force polarisation on such people and make them choose one or the other. However, both worldviews cannot be held in one mind without the necessary compromise of one or both.


The religious scientist must protect his faith from the requisite questioning tools of his trade. The scientifically-literate believer must moderate the will, power and scope of their god so as not to to tread on the toes of what rational discovery has given us. Inconvenient as it may be, these are two almost entirely overlapping magisteria, both of which claim powers of explanation and enlightenment.

Homeopathic A&E

Mitchell and Webb (of BBC's Peep Show) show us what would happen if alternative medicine really were embraced by the mainstream.

A Few Videos

Here are a few videos I've seen recently that I think are worth being passed on.

NASA's LRO launch


This is from a webcam aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter which launch a couple of days ago. This really is an awe-inspiring video, and it's incredible to see just how far up it goes in the six minutes of the video.
Having been born on the 80s, by which time the 1969 moon landing was just another piece of history, I find it interesting to wonder just how incredible it must have seemed at the time to see mankind make it's first steps to another body in the solar system.
Even if a manned mission to Mars launched in our lifetimes, I doubt it will be as much of a landmark as the moon landing was at the time. So it's a shame that, like all history, time has devalued its importance in the collective minds of those born since the 70s.

Colliding Particles


Part 4 of the brilliant Colliding Particles series of videos about CERN's work at the LHC. These videos are both informative and artful. Even though my knowledge and understanding of particle physics and of CERN's work could be politely described as woefully lacking, these videos manage to remain constantly fascinating, perhaps due to the humour and humanity with which they approach the subjects.

What would Jesus not do?


NonStampCollector has made a ton of brilliant videos. He excels in finding areas of Christianity whose lack of logic makes them worthy of intense ridicule, and then goes about delivering that ridicule expertly.
I think that humour and satire are probably among the greatest weapons sceptics and atheists have in fighting silly beliefs. I like to think that every time Eddie Izzard, Ricky Gervais or Tim Minchin mercilessly mock a certain stupid inconsistency of Christianity, for example, a few comedy fans who had previously been on the fence might lose just a little bit more grip on their belief.

Instruction Manual for Life


This nice and oddly haunting conceit aptly demonstrates the divisive nature of organised religion.

Opeth - Coil (live)


And for something comepletely different, a beautiful song by Opeth. When the vocals come in on the second verse, it gives me shivers.
To get the full power of the song, though, you need to listen to it in the context of the album where it is followed by the bludgeoningly heavy opening of Heir Apparent.

My Back Hurts - Poke Me with Toothpicks!

thelondonpaper, the only newspaper I read regularly, and one which I am generally willing to defend as being relatively thoughtful and intelligent, especially for a free publication, has joined the bandwagon for proclaiming that acupuncture works based on a recent study.

Apart from a few commendable nods toward scepticism, and a fence sitting conclusion that "the jury's still out", the overall tone of the article was, in my opinion, weighted in favour of the position that acupuncture is at least worth a try. In fact it ends with an entirely useless "case study":

There was only one thing for it. We sent our promotions manager Sarah Cox to an acupuncturist to relieve her chronic back pain...

Which, in turn, concludes:

My scepticism gave way to belief

My back and shoulders seemed looser. The dull ache had eased. I’ll definitely do another session.

Don't get me wrong, this was by no means the worst reporting of the Cherken et al. study (I still love ya, thelondonpaper, with all your wacky joined up lowercase letters!), but it would still give the impression to someone unaware of the science that it is worth shelling out money ("A one-hour session with Steve Kippax costs £80", the article helpfully informs us) for a treatment with no really compelling evidence.

Perhaps I should explain what this study actually said and how this, and most other papers, got it wrong.

The study randomised 638 adults with lower back pain into 4 groups: individualised acupuncture (an acupuncturist chooses the pin points based on a consultation), standardized acupuncture (pin points are chosen from text book positions corresponding to the teachings of traditional chinese medicine), simulated acupuncture (a placebo which uses non-penetrating toothpicks, but looks and feels the same to the patient and practitioner), or no acupuncture. All subjects continued to receive any standard care as well as the treatment associated with their group.

Placebo controlled trials like this are designed to test one thing: does this modality work better than placebo. If it does, it is good evidence that it is a worthwhile treatment with a real medical effect. If it performs as well as placebo, then its effects can be put down to those of placebo itself, and the null hypothesis can be accepted.

In this case, the two acupuncture groups scored remarkably similarly to the placebo acupuncture group. All of these performed better than the group that received no acupuncture, as would be expected.

What this shows is that acupuncture, individualized or standardised, performs no better than placebo, and this study can therefore be seen as evidence against its efficacy.

However, this is not the conclusion that the authors arrived at when they stated:

Although acupuncture was found effective for chronic low back pain,
tailoring needling sites to each patient and penetration of the skin appear to be unimportant in eliciting therapeutic benefits.

"Penetration of the skin appear(s) to be unimportant"!? In acupuncture!? Acupuncture - the therapy entirely charactrised by penetration of the skin with needles?

What they're saying is, because placebo acupuncture (poking with toothpicks, need I remind you) is as good as actual acupuncture, this must have therapeutic effect too!

This is exactly like trialling a new heart disease pill against a placebo sugar pill and then, on finding that they offer the same level of benefit, stating that sugar must actually have clinically useful effects for heart disease aswell!

This is not the proper conclusion of this trial! The proper conclusion is that acupuncture performs no better than placebo, and therefore can be assumed to be offering nothing but placebo benefit.

This doesn't mean that the placebo effect can't be quite impressive. It certainly can be. The placebo effect is an incredibly interesting, subtle and potentially powerful effect. The more invasive and extravagent the treatment, the greater the placebo effect. And acupuncture is up there for invasiveness and extravagance. And it's quite expensive, which always helps.

That's all this study shows that acupuncture is: placebo. To claim anything else of it is to speak above the level of evidence given.

So, this is the letter I've sent to thelondonpaper's letters page:

I'd like to point out the recent study you mentioned yesterday does not show that acupuncture "is good for your back". The study was designed to test whether there was any benefit of real acupuncture over placebo acupuncture (using not-penetrative tooth-picks, unbeknownst to the patient). It found that there was not. Any benefit observed owing to the acupuncture conditions was entirely explainable by the placebo effect of a novel and theatrically invasive intervention. To claim that because receiving acupuncture fared as well as being poked with tooth picks shows that both have clinical benefit is a misinterpretation of the evidence.
Tim, London

By the way, the quote I used ("is good for your back") was in the print version, but isn't in the online version, linked to above.

Professor Regan's Ice Bucket

I was impressed by the aims of a new BBC2 series called Professor Regan's Pharmacy. The idea is that Lesley Regan, clinical professor of surgery at Imperial College London, assesses a number of products that appear in pharmacies. She then grants those that meet her standards of evidence a position in her own (presumably hypothetical) pharmacy.

The second episode aired last Thursday at 9 and is available to watch here, at least for the moment. I assume there'll be another one on tonight.

This last episode was specifically about medicines. In general it was very good, and it's extremely commendable that the BBC would give over an hour of their peak slot to a show that promotes evidence based medicine and spreads the word that homeopathy is rubbish. Incredible, unlike many shows about science, when assessing these claims, they actually showed people reading papers and looking at tables of numbers rather than just standing in a white coat fiddling with test tubes.

However, I did find myself getting annoyed at a few things in the show. Like all programmes with even the most tangential relation to science, they performed their own small 'experiment' to demonstrate some of the findings they were talking about. And just like all programmes that do this, the experiment was entirely useless, when it could very easily have been a lot better.

The experiment was done in order to demonstrate the finding that name-brand painkillers have been found to be more effective at managing pain than cheaper generic brands. This is a fascinating bit of research that demonstrates the power of the placebo effect by showing the additional benefit afforded a flashier looking product over its medicinally identical but less well packaged equivalent.

They did this by getting 5 rugby players to see how long they could hold their hand in a bucket of ice, first after having taken what they thought was Nurofen, and second, after having had what they though was some own-brand ibuprofen. Their 'study' gave the expected result: that they could endure the cold for longer after they'd had what appeared to be a branded painkiller (it turned out they had taken the same pills both times).

However, their study really didn't show anything. For a start, they had a meaninglessly tiny sample, but more importantly, they each went through the two conditions in the same order. By the time they put their hands in the ice the second time, their hands probably still hurt from the first time, so of course they wouldn't last as long. There are many other more subtle order effects too. For example, in the first trial, they might have tried harder, at least partly out of a desire to beat the other subjects. The second time, there would be less of that feeling of competition and resolution.

I understand that certain concessions have to be made to make a programme watchable - nobody would sit through an hour of scientists sitting around designing a counterbalancing method to properly randomise their conditions or a 6-part series that consists entirely of watching people punching endless numbers into SPSS. However, this 'experiment' could have been made about 100% better if they'd just got another 5 subjects and got them to do the two conditions the other way around. Obviously it's not a study that would have been published in the Lancet, but at least the results could have been slightly meaningful. As it is, all they showed is that if you put your hand in a load of ice twice, you'll probably keep it there longer the first time.

In a way, the fact they bolstered their message with a meaningless bit of filler about some rugby players and a bucket of ice is irrelevant - the actual research that they were supporting already exists, they were just illustrating it. But I don't see the point of scrimping on that last little bit of detail that would have made it so much more useful. Especially given that the central idea of the show is that evidence and the scientific method is important.

More Bad Science

If you have already read Ben Goldacre's book, Bad Science, head over to his blog where he has posted up a whole new chapter that wasn't in the first edition. Obviously, if you haven't already read it, get it and do.

The reason for the chapter's exclusion from the first pressing is that its subject is Matthias Rath, a vitamin pill pseudo-scientist whose marketing of a multi-vitamin 'cure for AIDS' in South Africa has had demonstrable and unequivocally tragic effects. At the time of the book's original publication, legal proceedings were going ahead for a libel case that Rath had brought against Ben Goldacre personally, and against the Guardian, for criticising his practices in his column.

Now that the case has been dropped, signalling a great win for common sense, free speech and science, Goldacre has been able to publish his true thoughts on the situation. As he points out, after preparations for legal proceedings, "I now know more about Matthias Rath than almost any other person alive". And this chapters demonstrates that.

This should be read by anyone who asks what's the harm of a little bit of alternative medicine or herbal quackery.

Academic Freedom

I mentioned, in a post a little while ago, the debate around so-called "academic freedom". This is the new tactic that the creationist and intelligent design movements are using to try to sneak their own brands of faith-based dogma into the science classrooms of America, since previous attempts have failed.

Steven Novella has posted a very thorough and clear article on the subject on Skepticblog. I would urge anyone to go and read it, as it sums up this potentially worrying situation in more detail than I could.

Do Scientists Dream of Black Sheep?

Recently Tom Harkin, a US senator who founded the National Center of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), proclaimed that the Center had failed at one of its aims:

One of the purposes of this center was to investigate and validate alternative approaches. Quite frankly, I must say publicly that it has fallen short. I think quite frankly that in this center and in the office previously before it, most of its focus has been on disproving things rather than seeking out and approving.

Now, this statement betrays a very fundamental lack of understanding of the most basic tenets of science. The idea of science is to try to falsify things. By complaining that this is what has been done, Harkin is displaying the true dishonest reasons for the Center's existence.

This is a complaint that can be heard a lot among pseudo-scientists or paranormal practitioners. In a documentary shown on Channel 5 last year, Derek Ogilvie, the Baby Psychic, made a similar complaint after failing a test set up by James Randi (with a protocol to which he had unreservedly agreed beforehand, I might add). Ogilvie laments, "these tests are built for people to fail," as though he is revealing the methods of a crooked coconut shy.

Of course the truth is he is right. All scientific tests are built to be failed, because it is by these tests that something can be learnt. Science isn't designed to confirm whatever beliefs or biases are previously held by the tester, it is designed to find out whether a hypothesis is true; whether it conforms to reality. If a hypothesis fails a test that was designed to be failed, then it can't have been true. Whereas if a hypothesis passes a test you already knew it would pass, you have learnt nothing.

Allow me to illustrate this with a parable. Imagine two men go for a walk. One of them is a sceptical scientist, let's call him Karl (after Karl Popper). The other is a homeopath, let's call him Tom (after Mr. Harkin).

Our two men both see a white sheep in a field (for some reason, neither has seen a sheep before, but let's not worry about why that might be). Having seen this sheep, both of them formulate a sheep-based hypothesis - that all sheep are white - and they both decide to go their separate ways to test this.

Tom, our alternative medicine practitioner, wanders around looking for other white sheep, and with each one feels more confident about his position. He knows where he can find more white sheep, so he goes and looks at those, and by doing so further bolsters up his position in his mind.

Karl, on the other hand, heads off to unknown places looking around with genuine curiosity to see if there are any examples of sheep that are not white. Though he may see many white sheep, he keeps in mind that every new example he sees does not tell him anything new. He already knows white sheep exist, so seeing another white sheep means nothing. Eventually, he comes across a field wherein a black sheep quietly grazes.

Karl has disproved his hypothesis. Not all sheep are white. He now knows more than Tom. While Tom is confidently giving talks on his theory and backing himself up with hundreds of examples of white sheep, Karl has discovered that his original hypothesis was not true. He is now able to ditch it and come up with a new hypothesis that better matches reality, and start testing that.

By setting out to falsify their hypotheses, rather than confirm them, scientists are able to learn more about the world. Creationists, CAM proponents and pseudo-scientists look for confirming evidence and ignore or reject any evidence that contradicts their position. In this way, they leave themselves in the dark about the truth.